Sublime

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.

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

The great nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote to defend Christianity to his friends, whom he called “the great cultured despisers.”4 Their antagonism toward the church had become cultural (not spiritual; it was about an aesthetic of pleasure, not an encounter with the transcendent).5

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

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.

The Germans (of course) have a word for it: herzensbildung, training one’s heart to see the full humanity in another.

Based on the incarnation and the consequent development of trinitarian theology, Christianity prepared the way for modern conceptions of freedom, personhood, solidarity and social compassion.