God in the Wasteland

It is the inwardness of experience, he says, that guarantees its authenticity in this expressive and narcissistic culture.

personal identity became increasingly associated not with the narrative of one's inner life but with the projectionof one's public image.

They labor under the illusion that the God they make in the image of the self becomes more real as he more nearly comes to resemble the self, to accommodate its needs and desires.

But the distinction remains at the heart of knowing how to preserve a biblical understanding of God.

we find that we are able to resolve internal conflicts,

Schleiermacher dismissed entirely the vertical dimension of a God outside of experience summoning sinners through biblical revelation to pass beyond themselves into union with God through Christ.

Schleiermacher,

After the 1950s, personal identity became increasingly disengaged from beliefs about character and basic human nature and was associated instead with consciousness - that is to say, with something a good deal more shifting and elusive.

Schleiermacher repudiated objective knowledge of God and then, like the romantics, reached down into his own being to find the grounding for his knowledge of God.30