Religion Within the Limits of History: Schleiermacher and Religion—A Reappraisal

✍ Scribed by Thomas E. Reynolds

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 143 KB
• Volume: 32
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0048-721X
• DOI: 10.1006/reli.2001.0319

✦ Synopsis

This article addresses the often overlooked but acute historical sense behind the theory of human religiousness presented in Friedrich Schleiermacher's influential On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, and highlights its significance for the contemporary discussion regarding the study of religion. Defining religion as a unique and substantive dimension in human experience does not necessarily entail doing violence to historical difference. For Schleiermacher, the religious disposition is dialectically woven into the fabric of historical life, language being its communal medium. Religion never occurs by itself in some pure form but always already exists modified and actualised by cultural-linguistic ways of being in the world. Hence genuine religious plurality is not reducible to some abstract, ahistorical core but rather is confirmed and accounted for by means of an anthropological condition of possibility which renders it intelligible. Schleiermacher's so-called 'subjective turn' opens out ineluctably towards history, substantiating the complex conditionings of historical life rather than ignoring them, as critics of this approach often assume. The article explores the implications of this position as a model for religious studies and argues for a modified version of its basic thrust in light of several postmodern concerns.