Reconsidering Schleiermacher and the Problem of Religious Diversity: Toward a Dialectical Pluralism
St. Norbert College, De Pere, WI 54115-2099
This article examines the theological implications of Schleiermacher’s theory of religion in the Speeches and The Christian Faith, highlighting its contemporary promise for making sense of religious diversity. Religion, for Schleiermacher, is neither the result of an ahistorical core experience that is everywhere the same nor the result of particular cultural-historical experiences that are everywhere different. Rather, religion is a dialectical phenomenon, a kind of affective existential potentiality built into human nature that only appears as already modified in various communal and linguistic shapes. This view represents a fruitful negotiation between universalism and particularism. And it has distinct methodological implications: as a Christian, Schleiermacher interprets religion via a double-visioned strategy that is both mediated by redemption in Christ and opened up to diversity. Employing the work of Charles Taylor, the article concludes by suggesting that such an approach, with supplementation, remains viable in today’s religiously plural world.