Sublime

Schleiermacher,

The starting-point of every motive in religion is God and not Man. Man is the instrument and means, God alone is here the goal, the point of departure and the point of arrival, the fountain, from which the waters flow, and at the same time, the ocean into which they finally return.

Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this.

Christian theology is language about the liberating character of God's presence in Jesus Christ as he calls his people into being for freedom in the world.

Luther was an expert in the law of God, and every day he was in terror as he looked in the mirror of the law and examined his life against God’s righteousness. We are not in terror, because we have blocked out the view of God’s righteousness. We judge ourselves on a curve, measuring ourselves against others. We never judge ourselves according to

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

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.

Religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word, and on the grandest scale. They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelation of the soul's nature. From this universal foundation no human soul is cut off.

Martin Buber argued that God is found in relationship. We connect with God by connecting deeply to others—and not just humans, but animals and things in nature as well.