God in the Wasteland

Schleiermacher,

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.

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.

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

but he went on to propose that this knowledge is grounded in religious rather than moral experience.

This is not an entirely modern discovery. John Calvin begins his theology with the assertion that wisdom in religious matters consists in perceiving the interconnectedness of self-knowledge and the knowledge of God.

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

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

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