reconsidering schleiermacher and the problem of religious diversity: toward a dialectical pluralism

American Academy of Religion

Reconsidering Schleiermacher and the Problem of Religious Diversity: Toward a DialecticalPluralismAuthor(s): Thomas ReynoldsSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 73, No. 1 (Mar., 2005), pp. 151-181Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4139881 .

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Reconsidering Schleiermacher and the Problem of Religious Diversity: Toward a Dialectical Pluralism Thomas Reynolds

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

Thomas Reynolds is an assistant professor of religious studies at St. Norbert College, De Pere, WI 54115-2099.

An early version of this article was presented to the Schleiermacher group at the annual American Academy of Religion meeting in 2002. I am indebted to the participants for their helpful comments and to Terrence Tice for his encouragement.

]ournal of the American Academy of Religion March 2005, Vol. 73, No. 1, pp. 151-181 doi: 10.1093/jaarel/1fi008 @ The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]



152 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

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.

I WISH TO ADVANCE the claim that Schleiermacher's model of human religiousness, when understood as a specifically theological attempt to situate Christian faith in relation to other faith traditions, can contribute to the contemporary discussions surrounding religious pluralism. In both On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers and The Christian Faith Schleiermacher employs a critical hermeneutic that navigates a middle course between two polar extremes, extremes that in familiar parlance might be labeled "universalism" and "particularism."

I employ these two terms to represent general strategies by which religious differences are often thematized and understood. Universalism broadly asserts the existence of a common core within all concrete religious practices and affirmations, a core that is constitutive and that can be perceived and understood as such. On this basis plural traditions share a unifying quality, diverse manifestations of a univocal and foundational "religious" element. Rejecting such a common foundation, particularism asserts the irreducible uniqueness and context specificity of religious practices and affirmations, all human meaning tied to and constituted within distinct social and cultural frameworks of reference. Whereas the former is essentialist, the latter is historicist. Advocates of universalism claim that differences become coherent as such only by being brought into relation with other differences at the level of meta-discourse, which operates as a broader horizon of intelligibility. Advocates of particularism suggest that the quest for a broader horizon of intelligibility is ill conceived, that there is no discourse unconnected to specific historical locations and the specific discursive practices that arise out of those locations. Both approaches claim to be "pluralist," contending against each other that they validate and uphold genuine religious diversity.

Yet both approaches are wrong, false options caught in terminal and debilitating aporias. As universalism tends to totalize, feigning its own objective neutrality in a way that distorts real historical differences, particularism tends to so localize human discourse that it relativizes and fragments historical differences. In a postmodern climate suspicious of claims to universality and celebrative of difference, however, particularism seems to have come into its own. There is real peril here. On the one hand, it can lead to a glorified ethnocentrism that privileges its own self- referential language of identity over and against others. On the other hand, it can yield an ironic flattening out of differences, reducing all to



Reynolds: Schleiermacher and the Problem of Religious Diversity 153

depthless equivalents on a sea where none can claim privilege. In either case, a plurality without substance ensues, a plurality threatened by an indiffer- ence tragically undermining the genuine celebration of differences (see Eagleton: 67; Calhoun: 218-19). Some sense of universality seems required to uphold the real value of particular differences, granting the capacity to discriminate between better and worse forms of human practice. As Charles Taylor concedes, recognizing differences requires a shared "horizon of sig- nificance," a broader context of recognition, which acts as a background to valuative affirmations of one kind or another (1994: 67; see also 1991: 52).

Through a close reading of Schleiermacher, I hope in this article to show how particular and local discourses cannot help but presume assumptions that imply a trans-local and potentially universal horizon of human experience and, conversely, how talk of such a universal horizon cannot help but presume the perspectival vantage point of a particular and conditioned history. My thesis is that Schleiermacher's work, because it is imbued with a deep historical consciousness, indicates an alternative position to universalism and particularism, one that negoti- ates a supplementary relation between both. I shall call this approach a "dialectic pluralism," drawing the term from Anselm Kyongsuk Min (2004: 173-197; 1997). Dialectical pluralism is a model of tensional interplay between the universal and the particular, shaped by a perpetual oscillation back-and-forth between the essential and the historical.' It avoids a "pluralism of identity," that is, a vision of diversity that overplays the universal among differences and thereby reduces them to the same. It also avoids a "pluralism of dispersion" that overplays particularity and thus relativizes and fragments differences. A dialectical pluralism envisions an historical dynamic of solidarity among differences, a common space of vibrant interpenetration and cooperation wherein particular faith traditions mutually fructify one another (2004: 184; 1997: 589, 602). The theoretical infrastructure for this possibility surfaces both in the Speeches and The Christian Faith in three fundamental ways. Rethinking Schleiermacher's position in these three ways, carefully exploring the textual evidence, can help make sense of certain aporias in the contemporary discussion of religious pluralism. The article, accordingly, shall unfold in three basic steps, concluding with the third as a proposal for future constructive work done in a Schleiermacherian vein.

1 Although indebted to Min, the discussion here modifies his vision to my own purposes. Furthermore, although conscious of Schleiermacher's work on "dialectics"-what he called the art of philosophy, the art of conducting a conversation-and the ways it might be employed to support my thesis, I shall focus mainly on the Speeches and The Christian Faith, as these works treat religion most explicitly. For an English translation of his 1811 lectures and notes, see Terrance Tice's translation of the Dialectic (Schleiermacher, 1996a).




First, the category of religion is itself dialectical. Religion, for Schleiermacher, is not some "thing" found in itself but rather a generic capacity that is always already modified concretely, a presupposed universal inseparably woven into the particular textures of historical life and its mediums-community and language. Religion and history exist in a dialectical tension. Many caricatures of Schleiermacher have been based on a misunderstanding of this point.

Second, Schleiermacher's method is dialectical. It trades on an ambiguous but potentially fruitful double-vision that combines historical con- textualism with an ontological analysis of human experience. Although Schleiermacher himself is not altogether clear on this, the end result is a kind of soft-particularism that operates as a confessionally oriented religious pluralism. In my view, this does not contradict but rather fulfills Schleiermacher's specifically theological intent. Thus, his model of human religiousness can be construed as a pluralistic double-vision that sees from "within" the confessional matrix of Christian faith while simultaneously seeing from "beyond" it.

On this basis, third, I shall conclude by arguing that Schleiermacher's program opens up the possibility of envisioning dialectical pluralism as a robust relation between particular differences, their contrasts mutually enriching one another. This means taking a step both with but beyond Schleiermacher. Employing the work of Charles Taylor, I shall argue that the encounter with difference creates criss-crossing points of convergence, and that this enlarges the Christian self-understanding such that it opens up the prospect of a double-visioned language of comparison not unlike Schleiermacher's, both presupposing and producing certain historically circumscribed criteria that empower the critical comparison and evaluation of differences. Such criteria inevitably will function as universals, but they will be messy and provisional universals, the credibility and staying power of which can only be played out on the muddy field of history as particular communities engage one another. And as Min puts it, "Neither elimination of all difference nor affirmation of sheer particularity is possible or desirable in an increasingly interdependent world; the former would lead to totalitarianism, the latter to the conflict of particularisms" (2004: 176; 1997: 589-590). Schleiermacher helps us find a middle ground.

Of course it would be hasty and anachronistic to claim that Schleiermacher himself is a thoroughgoing dialectical pluralist. For there exist obscurities and inconsistencies that render aspects of his position problematic, especially as they relate to his christology. Nevertheless a fresh consideration of Schleiermacher's theology reveals a kind of incipient dialectical pluralism at work that avoids not only the perils of a pluralism of dispersion and a pluralism of identity but also that of Christian "exclusivism"




(which rejects the religious other as false, idolatrous, or at best a well- intended error) and "inclusivism" (which transforms the religious other into a vague reflection of Christianity that either requires the explicit ful- fillment of Christian faith or expresses Christian faith "anonymously").2 By locating the distinct grammar of Christian faith in a relationship of continuity with other faith traditions, Schleiermacher's "double-vision" exposes Christian faith from within to the presence of other faiths, thus opening up the prospect of a trans-local and interreligious web of solidarity.

RELIGION IN THE RELIGIONS: SCHLEIERMACHER BETWEEN ESSENCE AND HISTORY

On a surface reading it is easy to see that Schleiermacher rejects both Christian particularity in the form of traditional orthodoxy, with its exclu- sivist appeal to supernatural revelation, and the Enlightenment ideal of a universal rational religion standing over and against specific faith communities. In the Speeches this takes the form of a sustained polemic against those "cultured despisers" who would either reject religion altogether as a matter of senseless fables and outmoded rituals or reduce it to a manageable set of rational metaphysical or moral principles (1996b: 19-23). In The Christian Faith Schleiermacher writes to a different audience-believing Christians. Here he attempts to place Christian theology on a new, rigorously descriptive foothold outside the traditional "house of authority." Both books, however, appropriate Christian faith vis-a-vis the general category of religion. At issue for us in this section is how this category functions. By investigating these works further, we can demonstrate that Schleiermacher employs the notion of religion non-reductively, indeed dialectically, as an anthropological condition of possibility "filled-in" and actualized by the communal, linguistic, and inevitably plural character of historical life.

I

The opening chapters of the Speeches proclaim outright that there is a productive center that makes religion qualitatively distinct in human life, providing religious traditions with their effective power. There is a problem, however, for Schleiermacher suggests that this center never appears in pristine form. It is given only indirectly, mixed with elements conditioned by particular perceptions, such as myths, beliefs, codes of conduct, and rituals (1996b: 12ff.). In order to account for religion, then, Schleiermacher

2 For a succinct run-down on these approaches, see Paul F. Knitter (1995, chap. 2). Recently, Knitter has developed a more subtle typology (2002), but the basic distinctions between positions remain intact.




must isolate and explicate its true genesis, executing a kind of proto- phenomenological suspension or bracketing that disassociates the errone- ous from the essential. Accordingly, he calls the reader to redirect his or her gaze away from the particular thoughts and activities normally associated with the religions and toward an "incomprehensible moment" of immedi- acy in human consciousness (14). Here, religion has an inner intelligibility, an essence, neither derived from nor reducible to rational thoughts about the world, moral obligations, or traditional myths, beliefs, and customs.

In the famous second speech Schleiermacher defines what this essence is. Religion is a way of being in relation to the world through the receptive organs of intuition and feeling (22). It is "the sensibility and taste for the infinite" (23), the manner in which the infinite universe-as a living and encompassing whole-impresses itself immediately upon human subjectivity. But this does not occur merely as one set of intuitions or feelings among others, arising here and there in human experience. Schleiermacher suggests that it is latent in all experience, each finite perception carrying with it an impression of the "unin- terrupted activity" of the universe revealing itself to us "in every moment" (25), the potency of which radiates outward and opens us up to the world (31-32). In this way religion becomes a formative feature of human consciousness, an anthropological condition or existential (to employ Heidegger's term) by which we are disposed toward certain modalities of being concretely embodied in religious traditions. Of itself, religion is indeterminate. For the imprint of the infinite and unconditioned is never experienced as such, as "a" religious experience, but co-presented indirectly in the finite and conditioned objects of experience (25). Religion is for Schleiermacher an inbuilt "capacity of humanity" (10, 106), a generic potency with no definite or "positive" form, no determinate content. It is empty of content because it is an existential structure of experience, the presuppositional possibility for particular religious intuitions and feelings. The category "religion" functions then as a way of delimiting the distinctive grammar of the religions.

Here is precisely where the dialectical nature of the argument in the Speeches emerges. Contrary to what is commonly assumed about his theory of religion, Schleiermacher asserts that no one can be religious in general, and more, that no one can have an unmediated religious experience. Particular religious experiences are neither universally the same nor simply derivatives of some inviolable core experience. Intuition and feeling indicate a revelation of the infinite that is always already linked with an array of definite contents, contents that create specific modifications of what is otherwise only an amorphous structural capacity. In this way the plural and contingent particularities of historical life become con-




crete revelatory vehicles differently actualizing the relation to the infinite. For religion always must fix itself upon one object or another, grasping the whole within individual forms that are potentially infinite in number (27, 89, 97).3 Community and plurality, then, are not devolutions from an originary religious center. Nor are they extraneous appendages. Rather, they are ingredients of the essence of religion (83, 96). Schleiermacher therein effects a notable shift in logic back to those elements-beliefs and customs, thoughts and actions-from which religion should be disassoci- ated. Why? Because the concrete domain of human particularity is the only way religion can be experienced (100). Religion is manifest in the material terms of that which it is not, a potency actualized only in history. The particular and the universal are intertwined, hovering between each other.

The category of religion functions then to mark the condition of possibility for the religions, but historical life is the locale where the mark of the infinite leaves its visible trace, "filling-in" the general intuition of the infinite with determinate content. This dialectic emerges with increasing clarity from the third to the fifth speech. Religion is mediated and culti- vated via social and linguistic means, inexorably embedded in specific horizons of historical influence that modify its character in individual shapes. Each tradition takes a specific intuition of the infinite to be its center and accordingly relates everything to it. And because history conditions differently, there will quite unavoidably be many such intuitions (96). Far from depreciating or hindering religion as dispensable outer husks, myths, beliefs, rituals, and customs serve as genuine mediums for conveying religion within a given socio-linguistic matrix of meaning and value (73, 97). It is noteworthy that Schleiermacher concludes the book by stating, "Thus I have presupposed the multiplicity of religions, and I likewise find them rooted in the essence of religion" (97).

In this Schleiermacher sides with particularity over universality, the fifth and the final speech actually framing the whole argument of the Speeches, requiring the reader to reevaluate all that has come before (see Gerrish 1978: 35-40). Focusing too narrowly on the second speech, Schleiermacher's detractors often miss this key point. The concrete religions are not secondary expressions of an ahistorical mystical core experience. For history is not an accidental addition to religion; it is the effective force setting religion into motion. The substantive hermeneutical move, then, is not from the universal to the particular, from some foundational experience to a derivative expression, but from determinate experiences to

3 Schleiermacher states something similar in his Dialectic: "There is no such thing as an isolated perception of deity. Rather, we perceive the deity only in and with the collective system of perception" (1996a: 31).




their presuppositional features, and back again. The real starting point is historical particularity, the subjective turn to the origins of religion in feeling and intuition being an effort to render coherent religion's power and per- vasiveness as a distinctive way of being oriented toward the world. The end result, however, leaves us with no mere "natural religion of feeling" but returns outward to history, the fifth speech inviting the reader to consider religion only as it is actualized in communal and linguistic shapes. Particu- larity is neither determined in advance nor made subordinate to a formal universality. Rather, there is an inescapable dialectic between the generic and the particular contingencies of historical life.4

II

The Christian Faith, published years later, displays a congruous logical deep structure (Gerrish 1978: 37). Only now Schleiermacher's focus is on attending to the unique way Christian faith becomes doctrinally self- conscious. This is spelled out in the introduction. Here, instead of appealing to metaphysical foundations or to authoritative revelation, Schleiermacher reorients theology toward the experience of religious piety, grounding it specifically in the affections. He states famously, "Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech" (1928: ?15, 76). And insofar as such first-order accounts become rigorously descriptive faith-affirmations suited to didactic goals-that is, able to communicate determinate convictions appropriate for a group's ongoing life together-they become second-order dogmatic statements (?16, 78). Because such statements often arise in fragmented ways, there arises the need for arranging them in a coherent manner rele- vant to a shared historical circumstance. This is the function of dogmatic theology-to systematize "the doctrines prevalent in the Christian Church at a given time" (?19, 88). Thus the theological enterprise origin- ates with the religious affections, and its goal is to explicate the peculiar character of their hold on the Christian community in a certain historical context. But precisely how do the Christian religious affections arise?

Answering this question means, in the spirit of dogmatic theology, doing an archeological excavation of Christian consciousness. Brian Gerrish defines this as "an attempt to uncover descriptively or phenomenologically the layers of a complex mode of consciousness" (1999: 74; see also Williams; Farley 1997). These layers are not extraneous to but rather presupposed by the determinate facticity of the Christian experience of redemption in

4 For a more elaborate exposition of the Speeches in this regard, see my "Religion Within the Limits of History: Schleiermacher and Religion-A Reappraisal" (Reynolds, 2002).




Christ. And so, as in the Speeches, a momentary bracketing or suspension of Christian particularity is required to lay bare and account for the manner in which Christian religious affections become significant, tethered refer- entially to those broader elements that characterize human being in the world. Schleiermacher thus begins The Christian Faith with an abstractive move, borrowing propositions from ethics (the broader study of history and culture), the philosophy of religion, and apologetics-areas outside the domain of dogmatics proper-in order to direct the reader's gaze to those generic anthropological conditions of possibility by which religious affections become both inwardly constituted and modified in particular by Christian faith. This move provides a general context of recognition for the uniqueness of Christian affections, correlating them with a universal horizon within which they become intelligible as such.

Not surprisingly, the discussion takes the form of an ontological inquiry into the basic composition of human consciousness. Schleiermacher locates the seat of religion neither in knowing nor doing but in feeling (Gefiihl), or immediate self-consciousness (?3, 5). Three basic features of his argument stand out. First, he distinguishes between knowing, doing, and feeling on the continuum of an alternation between "passing-beyond- self" and "abiding-in-self." Whereas knowing and doing direct themselves in different degrees toward what lies outside the self, actively "passing- beyond-self," feeling is not self-initiating at all. Rather, it is a purely receptive organ bearing the imprint or stimulation of something as it is experienced within the self, as an immediate "abiding-in-self' (?3.3, 8).

Second, Schleiermacher deepens his discussion of knowing, doing, and feeling by noting how all are products of the subject's unavoidably reciprocal relation to a field of objects. The nature of this reciprocity yields a duality in self-consciousness, for "every consciousness of self is at the same time consciousness of a variable state of being" (?4.1, 12). Humans are able both to affect and to be affected by others, aware of being relatively free and relatively dependent (?4.2, 13-14). Such an elemental oscillation renders human self-consciousness finite, and it characterizes what Schleiermacher calls the "sensible self-consciousness" (?5.1, 19). We are relational beings in a world inhabited by other persons, becoming individuals only insofar as we both inherit and contribute to a communally comprised stream of historical life stretching out before us (?4.2, 15). Our awareness of self is continually modified and rendered determinate in a web of mutuality, caught up with others in the mode of both receiving and bestowing. History, along with its communal and linguistic mediums, is a structural inevitability governing the way humans are disposed to the world. Understanding this existential condition is crucial for a more complete understanding of Schleiermacher's category of religion.




Third, having set the stage, Schleiermacher suggests that there exists a deeper stratum of consciousness that is presupposed by the horizon of our partial freedoms and dependencies. This is the "highest grade of human self-consciousness" (?5, 18), an immediate self-consciousness of a source outside the finite domain of mutual influences. It does not arise out of human initiative and direction, and therefore is not a kind of knowing or doing. Rather, it has the quality of feeling. The peculiar nature of this feeling, however, is not that of partial freedom or dependency, arising simply from our own spontaneous activity or from the influence of an object given to us (?4.3, 16). It has an unqualified or absolute character, not occurring here and there, but accompanying all our activity, our whole existence, as a consciousness of radical dependence that indicates in itself a complete absence of counter-influence. This is a non-dual level of awareness, a feeling that all relative interplay stems from a sheer facticity-a "whence" that is itself underived and unconditioned-that is irreducible to finite oppositions (?4.4, 16). Herein lies the common element of religion in all its various formations, what Schleiermacher calls "the consciousness of absolute dependence, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation to God" (?4, 12). Religion arises in terms of the way we exist in the world, an aspect of immediate self-consciousness, of feeling. And "God" is that formal term toward which such ultimate receptivity points, the implied objective whence of an inner constitution. Self-consciousness and God-consciousness are interwoven co-determinants. For Schleiermacher, therefore, religion exists at the heart of human nature; it has the status of an existential.

It is clear that Schleiermacher does not see the feeling of absolute dependence as a psychological datum, as simply a religious emotion. It is not even an inchoate, oceanic feeling. For he states that it, strictly speaking, cannot exist in a single moment as such (?4.3, 16). It remains self- identical alongside of all determinate experience, itself indeterminate and thus unavailable, unable to evoke distinguishable moments of experience or deliver any specified content (?5.3-5.4, 21-22). It becomes definite only as it is qualified from the outside, modified by the particular determinations of the sensible self-consciousness in the world of reciprocity (22-23). In this way the feeling of absolute dependence is an abstraction, more an ontological capacity or potential than a universally shared core experience.5 It does not predetermine or control the content of

5 It is then important to observe that Schleiermacher makes his case not simply by asserting that humans have certain experiences marked by certain affections that upon further examination can be deemed "religious." Thus it seems to differ significantly from the approaches of Rudolph Otto or Gerardus Van der Leeuw. Rather, he probes the deep-structures of human experience itself.




actual religious experience in advance but rather "carries" such content, a generic placeholder that remains itself empty and strictly formal until "filled in" and rendered determinate by some socio-linguistic framework of reference.6 Dogmatics, then, cannot simply be unpacked from the feeling of absolute dependence. There is no deductive passage from feeling to expression. The material content of religion depends upon the communal identity-what Schleiermacher calls a "consciousness of kind"-that awakens, specifies, mediates and, in fact, constitutes particular religious affections (?6.2-6.4, 27-29).7

In the final analysis, there is, for Schleiermacher, no such thing as religion in general, only a built-in "tendency" marked by a "general sus- ceptibility" to the influence of a corporate way of actualizing religiosity (?6 Postscript, 30). The effects of history are not accidental additions to a wholly subjective or mystical state of religious consciousness, nor are its varied shapes expressions derived from a prereflective and immediate experience. The individual-subjective (feeling) and the communal- historical (language) exist jointly as correlates, each modifying the other. Schleiermacher's so-called "subjective turn" is at the same time a turn to history, for the subject is always already constituted by historical processes. In fact, he suggests that the real "essence" of a particular religious tradition is not the feeling of absolute dependence but rather the designate socio-linguistic content that modifies the feeling of absolute dependence in a peculiar way (?10, 44). This is why it is a mistake to say that the religions are reducible to a singular genus. It overlooks the dialectical back- and-forth movement between the abstract universal and the concrete particular, conflating them.

The dialectical character of Schleiermacher's understanding of religion thus plays out in a tension between formal structure and material content. The formal is an abstraction from the concrete that seeks to render coherent the latter by (1) connecting it to broader features of human being in the world, building a framework for (2) identifying and placing different religions in a comparative relationship to one another, and accordingly (3) locating the distinctiveness of Christian faith.8 Thus, as

6 Schleiermacher himself uses the language of "filling-in" to speak of the way the main text of The Christian Faith qualifies the generic character of the Introduction (1981: 57).

7 Thus Schleiermacher paradoxically has more in common with George Lindbeck's "cultural- linguistic" approach than with the "experiential-expressive" approach with which Lindbeck wrongly associates him. See the review article by Brian Gerrish (1988) that takes on Lindbeck's appraisal of Schleiermacher. See also Farley (1997: 11, n. 4) and Fiorenza.

8 In this we have the first three sections of the introduction to The Christian Faith: 1) propositions borrowed from ethics, ??1-6; 2) propositions borrowed from the philosophy of religion, ??7-10; 3) propositions borrowed from apologetics, ?? 11-14.




Robert Williams notes, "the methodological task is to show not only that the generic features have concrete realization and instantiation, but that they undergo modification in such actualization" (13; see Farley 1997: 21). The abstract is never more than the concrete, but quite the reverse; the actual is substantively "more" than its formal constituents. For religion is in fact historical, the play of irreducibly singular corporate inscriptions grafting themselves in one way or another onto the fabric of a shared human nature that is capable of undergoing such modification.9 Although the introduction to The Christian Faith does indeed draw a kind of universalizing map articulating that common element in all religions, this element is dialectically conceived, an existential potency only actualized efficaciously within particular forms of life.

An example of this point is found in the very nature of Christianity. For the specifically Christian affections arise not from the feeling of absolute dependence but as the determinants of a distinct communal-linguistic horizon of experience. Indeed, the character of Christian faith is distinguished from other faiths in that in it "everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth" (?11, 52). The real beginning point for Christian theology is the experience of redemption, and this is communicated through a corporate form of life, the existence of which is the effect of Christ's saving influence (?11.4, 57). The religious peculiarity of Christian experience comes from the language of the Christian community, "since Christian piety never arises independently and of itself in an individual, but only out of the communion and in the communion" (?24.4, 106), and more, because "within the Christian communion, there can be no religious experience which does not involve a relation to Christ" (?32.1, 132).1o One cannot simply unravel the prereflective secrets of the universal feeling of absolute dependence and find inside the particular Christian experience. The historical dimension has priority over the universal.

Yet neither is the experience of redemption an alien intrusion coming to us from outside the domain of experience, an arbitrary imposition doing violence to the integrity of human existence (see Farley 1997: 21-22). Human reality has an inherent capacity for relation to God, an openness toward God, though it is also true that this openness can only be recognized as it becomes filled with designate content through the mediums of historical life. Schleiermacher uses the term "original revelation" to

9 Schleiermacher states the point in this way: "For every man has in him all that another man has, but it is all differently determined" (?10.3, 47).

'0 See also ?14, 68: "There is no other way of obtaining participation in the Christian communion than through faith in Jesus as the Redeemer."




describe the feeling of absolute dependence as an inner relation to God (?4.4, 17-18), but this functions as an abstraction, for the character of actual revelation for Christians stems from the redeeming influence of Christ." Accordingly, relation with God is not simply an individual but also a communal affair, mediated by formulas connected to corporate expressions of the experience of salvation in Christ. God-consciousness is only actual as it becomes articulate in the shape of the doctrine of God, as a consciousness of being caught up and identified with the historical influence of Christ (?32.1, 131-132).12 As expressions of Christian piety, dogmatic affirmations stand independent from any determination by speculation or philosophy. Theology is Christian self-description.

III

Therefore, whereas both the Speeches and The Christian Faith exhibit a move from the abstract to the concrete, the universal to the particular, the real starting point is the concrete and particular. Schleiermacher's hermeneutic reads backward from the historical to its presupposed conditions of possibility in human reality. And this reading backward, far from reducing all religions to a foundationalist core demonstrable in universal terms, allows Schleiermacher to account for and validate genuine particularity and its unavoidable plurality, "locating" their differences within the wider schematization of a critical onto-anthropology.13 Regarding the relation of the formal character of the introduction to the more empirical character of the main text of The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher writes in his letters to Licke that the introduction functions not as a foundation grounding what comes after but as an entry way rendering it coherent, specifying the distinct place of Christianity on the human landscape (1981: 57, 76, 78).

Schleiermacher thus provides a context of recognition for religious differences that avoids reducing them to second-hand expressions of

" Schleiermacher states that "the idea of revelation signifies the originality of the fact which lies at the foundation of a religious communion, in the sense that this fact, as conditioning the individual content of the religious emotions which are found in the communion, cannot itself in turn be explained by the historical chain which precedes it" (?10 Postscript, 50). For a further exploration of the notion of revelation in Schleiermacher, see Wyman.

12 Thus after the introductory section to The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher proceeds toward the concrete, discussing the less abstract doctrines of creation, providence and God's attributes in part 1, moving toward the fully concrete consciousness of sin and grace in part 2.

13 Schleiermacher indeed states in the strongest of terms that he does not intend to "prove the truth or necessity of Christianity," presuming that his readers are already Christians (? 11.5, 59-60). Rather his goal is to place dogmatics outside both the supernaturalistic appeal to authority and Enlightenment rationalism.




some homogeneous subjective experience, not only making room for the authentically religious element in non-Christian traditions, opening up the possibility of comparisons, but also enabling the theologian to show how the Christian affections are correlative to the basic structures of human existence. Without the universal, the particular becomes incoherent as such; without the particular, the universal is indeterminate and empty. For Schleiermacher, the universal and the particular dialectically suggest each other, and in the end, history is the real playing field upon which religion emerges and lives as heterogenous actualizations of a general human potency. The Speeches and The Christian Faith testify to this: Christian faith is itself irreducibly particular, a communal event marked by the redemptive historical effect of Jesus of Nazareth; yet it demon- strates a referential tie to broader provinces of human experience, presuming generic "religion" as a kind of placeholder designating a horizon of existence not incongruous with other faith traditions.

THE DIALECTIC OF HISTORICITY: SCHLEIERMACHER'S DOUBLE-VISIONED SENSE OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY

We have seen that despite the way he structures the Speeches and The Christian Faith-the flow of the text moving from the abstract to the concrete-Schleiermacher's hermeneutic actually moves in the reverse order, beginning with the concrete particular and opening up to the abstract universal. This has radical implications. Universality, for Schleiermacher, is no mere disembedded abstraction; rather, it functions essentially as a presuppositional infrastructure from which "differences" can be rendered intelligible as alternative possibilities correlative to a human condition assumed by all.

I wish now to push the discussion further by highlighting a hermeneutical dialectic that ensues from the above discussion, one that follows from Schleiermacher's acute sense of historical consciousness but about which he himself was less than clear-namely, the idea that the universal, function- ing precisely as a presuppositional infrastructure, is itself always already circumscribed by history, a perspectival construction marking the influence of a determinate, traditioned form of life. Stated simply, it amounts to the idea that the universal can be thought only from the local vantage point of the particular. For finite historicity saturates all human endeavors, includ- ing any investigation into the onto-anthropological conditions of religion. The inquirer cannot survey religious plurality from above history, from a neutral position, for she or he carries along an inherited interpretive framework mediated by a communal-linguistic orientation to the world.

Admittedly, this is a rather postmodern way of framing the issue, and following it through here means taking the risk of some interpretive




liberties in my reading of Schleiermacher. But I do not see the point as something of which Schleiermacher was entirely unaware. The logic of the Speeches and The Christian Faith exemplify it. Schleiermacher sees the religions from within a conditioned history, but a history whose distinctness can be illustrated vis-A-vis elements that other histories share as well. The acknowledgment of human historicity does not automatically undermine all attempts to articulate a trans-local horizon of coherence. To the contrary, it expresses the dialectical character of religion. Schleier- macher's program thus opens out to what I shall call a "double-visioned" hermeneutic of religious pluralism, providing the groundwork for a confessional approach best described as a "soft-particularism."

I

In the Speeches, for example, Schleiermacher concludes by suggesting that his readers must themselves become religious in one particular communal form or another if they are genuinely to understand religion (1996b: 113). For there is no such thing as pure religion floating above historical particularity. This is sensible enough. But he then makes a surprising and audacious move: he defends Christianity as the most fully actualized religion, as religion "raised to a higher power" (116). Why? Because it is polemically self-critical, non-prejudicial, and open to multiple religious forms, Jesus exemplifying the nature of the finite straining with the infinite universe in search of "higher" historical mediation (117-124). Suddenly, Christianity becomes the controlling example of what "religion" is when actualized in history, the most deeply infused with the power of religion. Although not absolute-for Schleiermacher adds that there may come a time when even Christian faith will be surpassed-Christianity is for the time being superior (122). Given this final turn in the argument of the Speeches, have we not encountered a serious problem rendering suspect Schleiermacher's entire argument? Is the analysis guilty of being colored by a Christian bias that all along has read a distinctly theological vision into a generic account of religion? If so, does this not obscure his universalizing move by making it derivative and confessional in nature and, even more, lead to a distorted sense of non-Christian traditions?

I suggest both "yes" and "no." One dangerous ramification of an affir- mative answer is latent imperialism, which assimilates the religious "other" as a perverted projection of Schleiermacher's own religious self. In this way, arguing for religion as a universal dimension of human life masks what really is all along a particular agenda. Yet we must be careful. Prioritizing historical particularity and interpretive context-in good postmodern fashion-makes it understandable that a self-consciously religious person




would naturally view his or her own tradition in a positive light. Perhaps then Schleiermacher's argument that Christianity is the highest modification of religion does not finally contradict his historical sense, but rather is an expression of it. As Richard Niebuhr notes: "Whatever may be universally present in all religions, so far as it is knowable, can be grasped only through an understanding of the full historical identity of the particular religious faith that gives concrete form to the inquirer's own self- consciousness" (230). The conditioned religiosity of the Christian-or for that matter the Muslim or Hindu-is going to make inevitable a certain interpretive slant, a prejudice. For as Schleiermacher concedes, all religious discourse and practice are conditioned by a particular vantage point, rendered determinate by a peculiar way of grasping the infinite in the finite.

In a way that foreshadows Gadamer's notion of effective history (Gadamer: 541ff.), Schleiermacher in effect considers other religious intuitions from within the framework of his own uniquely determined religious consciousness as a Christian, using an ontological analysis of human experience to locate this perspective-and others similarly shaped-as a particular region on the general landscape of human existence (Niebuhr: 233). This perspectivism, however, does not simply beg the question. Granting the contextualizing effects of "history" does not undercut talk of generic religion but indeed balances it and keeps it from becoming purely abstract. Although the universal can be thought only from the vantage point of historical contingencies, Schleiermacher seems to hint that there are good reasons for seeking to locate one's own religious particularity on a trans- local horizon of meaning that-at least in principle-includes all humans: namely, to eschew supernaturalism, fideistic exclusivism, and overall incre- dulity and unintelligibility. This is why, in fairness to Schleiermacher, I think it appropriate to use the qualified term soft-particularism. For the particular qua particular is finally incoherent. Some broader context of recognition is required to identify the particular as such, that is, as distinct among other possibilities. This becomes especially necessary if one is speaking to "cultured despisers" of religion. In Schleiermacher's sense, then, the category of religion becomes a guiding hermeneutic or way of reading certain distinct and enduring features of human life on the broader map of history. Exploring further The Christian Faith will help make this point clearer.

II

The Christian Faith is much more nuanced than the Speeches in its affirmation of historical particularity. This is the result of Schleiermacher's deliberate twofold claim that (1) the starting point of theology is the actual experience of redemption, what Edward Farley calls the "facticity of




redemption" (1997: 20, 25; see also 1996: 19-21), and that, as a consequence, (2) every datum of the Christian self-consciousness has an intrinsic correlation with the person of Jesus. All Christian language-and hence, theology itself-reflects determinate modifications of the affections by the work of Christ. Schleiermacher designates such "work" redemptive insofar as it efficaciously introduces and consistently sustains God-consciousness within the course of a life previously characterized by "God-forgetfulness" (1928: ?11.2, 54-55).14 We can already see the dialectic at work.

Prioritizing the facticity of redemption opens out quite naturally into a christology, but one from below, from history. Because the entirety of the Christian communal life proceeds from the redemptive activity of Jesus, Schleiermacher argues by implication that Jesus' original productivity must be bound up with an exemplary (vorbildliche) and ideal (Urbildlichkeit) dignity as redeemer (?93.1-2, 377-80). He states that "The Redeemer, then, is like all men in virtue of the identity of human nature, but distinguished from them all by the constant potency of His God-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in Him" (?94, 385). Jesus as the Christ is both the exemplar (Vorbild) of humanity in his sinless perfection as a human being, that is, in his unswerving God- consciousness, and the historical occasion through which the "whence" of absolute dependency discloses itself as an original image or archetype (Urbild). Put simply, Jesus is both the "second Adam" and the "Son of God." It is his sinless perfection that yields redemption (?88, 361), but only insofar as this activity is grounded in the exclusive personal dignity of Jesus as the ideal source of redemption, stemming from the being of God in him (?100.2, 426). As Christians experience it, his activity and his person are inseparably one; hence, the traditional language of "God-incarnate" (?92.1- 3, 374-76).'~ For Christians, Jesus is the revelation of God in human history, the historical origin of the Christian experience of redemption.

The deep historical consciousness at work here emerges with great subtlety in Schleiermacher's description of how the experience of redemption occurs. The only way Jesus' redemptive presence becomes

14 Interpreted in traditional categories, redemption is a regenerating and sanctifying communication of grace (fellowship with God) which liberates human beings from sin (alienation from God) and draws them into a corporate life designated by a common spirit (the communion of the Holy Spirit), See ?63, 262. The antithesis between sin and grace comprise the two primary aspects of the second part of The Christian Faith, grace implying both the doctrines of regeneration (9?107ff., 478ff.) and sanctification (??1l10ff., 505ff.). The drawing of persons into communion-that is, church-is denoted by the doctrines of election (??117ff., 536ff.) and its subsidiary, predestination (??119ff., 546ff.); and the animating sustenance of communion is expressed by the doctrine of the "communication of the Holy Spirit" (99121ff., 560ff.).

15 In this manner Schleiermacher divided his discussion of Christ into two doctrines: the person of Christ (??93ff., 377ff.) and the work of Christ (??100ff., 425ff.).




effective in history is by the linguistic communicability of his God- consciousness, which, impressing itself upon human affections, sweeps them up into the power of his God-consciousness and thereby establishes the distinctly corporate life of Christian faith (?88, 361; ?100, 425).16 Language then becomes the vehicle of the Holy Spirit, drawing together and animating the historical life of the church as the common spirit of Christ (??121-25, 560-81). The essence of Christianity must be seen in this light, having both an origin (related to the redemptive work and redeeming person of Christ) and an historical continuity (related to the ongoing communicative power of the Holy Spirit), the basis of each lying in an efficacious communal-linguistic orientation. Accordingly, Schleiermacher can say, "From the beginning Christianity has proved to be a language-forming principle" (1981: 81).17 Christian faith may have its seat in the affections, but it is the product of language, which is the instrument of historical life.

Because Christ is not present immediately but is mediated linguisti- cally, Christian faith is throughout historical, subject to the conditions of time and place. Redemption itself is continually appropriated within the purview of a present historical situation that is itself mediated through an ever-becoming communal tradition, extending backward into the past. The data of theological reflection are thus always mobile, caught up in flux, and never can be finalized with ultimate veracity or infallibility. Doctrines gain their status when descriptive definiteness is achieved in a certain temporal instance. The one essential constant, however, is this: in the Christian religious consciousness there is no state of consciousness, no conception of divine attributes or modes of action, no utterance regarding the constitution of the world, which is not already informed by the redemption accomplished through Jesus of Nazareth (?30, 125). The formal does not lead to the concrete but vice versa. As a descriptive enterprise, theology begins as already caught up in history-that is, with the Christian affections set forth in speech-and subsequently traces itself

16 Because of this, Schleiermacher gives the preached word a central role: "The whole work of the Redeemer Himself was conditioned by the communicability of His self-consciousness by means of speech, and similarly Christianity has always and everywhere spread itself solely by preaching" (?15.2, 77). In preaching, Jesus did not simply offer a body of knowledge, nor did he just morally admonish; rather, he imparted the unique affectional state of his person, which was the existence of God in him. "For faith only comes by preaching, and preaching always goes back to Christ's commission and is therefore derived from Him. And as in Christ Himself everything proceeds from the Divine within Him, so also does this communication, which becomes in everyone the power of the new life, a power not different in each, but the same in all" (?121.2, 564).

17 Schleiermacher's lectures on hermeneutics corroborate the point I am making here: "Christianity has created language. From its very beginning it has been a potentiating linguistic spirit, and it still is" (1977: ?51, 50).




backward toward its formal and presupposed conditions, which are themselves already modified. The entire hermeneutic is Christocentric, or in Richard Niebuhr's term, "Christomorphic," shaped by the redemptive effect of Jesus of Nazareth (210-214).18 Historical consciousness would seem to dictate as much.

Given this, Schleiermacher's own religious self-consciousness comes to the fore. He admits he is writingfor Christians and that this determines the nature of his book: "Everything we say in this place is relative to Dog- matics, and Dogmatics is only for Christians" (?11.5, 59-60). He thus seeks not to "prove the truth or necessity of Christianity" but assumes that his readers are already Christian and marked uniquely by the influence of Christ (?11.5, 60). These are strong statements. Although it is true that they are written in the context of Schleiermacher's discussion of the essence of Christianity, I am inclined to agree with Bruce McCormack's concession that, "since the establishment of that peculiar essence is the goal of the entire first chapter, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that what is said here applies to the whole" (2002: 156). The agenda of The Chris- tian Faith is framed by an historical, language-bound relation to Christ. The particular Christian experience of redemption, therefore, should not only be seen as the starting point for Christian theology. It is the starting point for any and all inquiries into other religions, even generic religion itself. Methodologically speaking, this is why Schleiermacher regarded the introduction as an abstraction, not the foundation for dogmatics, but an "entry way" that places dogmatics on a structural continuum of continuity with other religions, rendering coherent the experience of redemption for Christians (see 1981: 55-60, 76-80). And if it is true that no one can be religious in general, that religion is always already caught up in history, then it is noteworthy that Schleiermacher himself writes as a self- conscious religious person, a Christian communally informed by the redemption accomplished in Christ and thereby infused with a particular way of being conscious of God. He is no neutral observer simply reading data off the world. Schleiermacher's basic hermeneutical framework is that of a Christian.

I think it is then fair to say that the "speculative" character of the introduction and the "empirical" character of the main text of The Chris- tian Faith are corresponding aspects of a programmatic dialectic that, to use Francis Clooney's phrase, "reads the world in Christ" (1990). This helps to explain those propositions in the introduction borrowed from

18 Niebuhr argues for this term because Christ is not the absolute focus of theology but more the historical occasion. It is the religious consciousness that is the proper object of theology, and insofar as redemption through Christ is its principal feature, Schleiermacher's view is Christ-centered.




the Philosophy of Religion and Apologetics, which direct themselves toward confirming Christianity as the highest and most complete form of religious consciousness. Schleiermacher places the religions in relationship with each other not as equals but on a developmental scale-fetishism or idolatry, polytheism and monotheism-that corresponds structurally with three generic levels of self-consciousness-the animal or confused and diluted, the sensible, with its duality, and the immediate self-consciousness of absolute dependence, which is characterized by unity (1928: ?8.1-4, 34-39). Though Judaism and Islam are monotheistic, they are incomplete in that they, respectively, show a lingering fetishism and polytheism.19 For Schleiermacher, only Christianity is "the most perfect of the most highly developed forms of religion" (?9.4, 38).

Even more, Schleiermacher depicts Christian faith as the providen- tially understood force behind human history as a whole, Christ distinguished from all humans as the universal redeemer of all humankind (?11.4, 58).20 As the Christian communion develops, "redemption is being ever more completely realized in time, and the Holy Spirit is thus pervading the whole ever more perfectly" (?129.2, 595). Schleiermacher at one point goes so far as to say that "all other religious fellowships are destined to lose themselves in Christianity," and in this, "the common spirit of the Christian Church would be the common spirit of the human race," which is the same thing as the "Kingdom of God in its widest compass" (?121.3, 564-565). The work of Christ is thus normative for all human beings, history being a growing conformity with Christ (see Pauck: 70-71). Such a claim goes quite a bit further than the Speeches, which only beckoned the cultured despisers to consider Christianity as the best present option among many. The Christian Faith assumes outright the conviction that Schleiermacher expected every Christian to possess inherently, namely, "the exclusive superiority of Christianity" (?7.3, 33). Although the generic religious consciousness is originally treated as an inner presupposition of the historical fact of redemption through Jesus, it is now, through Christian eyes, revaluated as a prefigu- ration of redemption, clouded by sin and in need of grace (?11.1-4, 52-59; ?66-69, 271-281; see also Niebuhr: 196ff.).

19 Schleiermacher also subdivides each stage into species, either of the "aesthetic" type, which subordinates the moral to the natural and highlights human passivity, or the "teleological" type, which subordinates the natural to the moral and highlights human activity (?9.1-2, 39-44). Again, concerning these species, Schleiermacher prefers the teleological, finding Judaism a less perfect form of the teleological and Islam an expression of the aesthetic.

20 " ... He alone is destined gradually to quicken the whole human race into life. Anyone who does not take Christ in this universal way as divine revelation cannot desire that Christianity should be an enduring phenomenon" (?13.1, 63-64).




Although on the surface this hardly seems the stuff of a "pluralist" perspective, it plays out a certain logic that should cause us to pause before we simply dismiss it. Clearly, Schleiermacher's own peculiar stance as a Christian, modified by the redemption accomplished through Christ, shapes his Philosophy of Religions and Apologetics. Portraying Christianity as the highest religion then should not be seen as contradicting Schleiermacher's historical sense; it is rather the inevitable expression of it. He is making reality claims based in the facticity of redemption. The universal is an abstraction from the particular but is tainted by its own position in history. In effect, as Richard Niebuhr notes, Schleiermacher regards other forms of religious consciousness through the lenses of his own determined religious consciousness, using speculation to meet empirically and historically derived ends (233). Christian faith is neither dependent on nor reducible to some abstract universal, neither the "representation" of true religion nor the "expression" of a prethematic core experience. It depends upon Christ.

At the same time, however, neither is there an absolute difference between Christian and non-Christian religions, a relation of true to false. The universal functions here as a way to locate the particular on the broader plain of existence from the vantage point of the particular. Schleiermacher does not regard the religions as incommensurate and self-enclosed historical monads, each utterly relative to its own context. Yet he recognizes the limitations of talking about the universal. For instance, the Philosophy of Religion can establish no generic necessity for recognizing a particular historical fact as redemptive. This can only come from the arena of history, which is why he concedes that a non-Christian, whereas perhaps able to recognize the peculiar essence of Christianity, will not automatically be compelled to accept its truth (?11.5, 59). Although Schleiermacher did not follow out the implications of such an assertion, in principle, a Buddhist would view the religions through the determinateness of his or her experience of the Buddha's dharma. There is here no pretension of universality in the foundationalist sense. For, if historically conscious, universality can only come from recognizing in other religions a similar but differently actualized feeling of absolute dependence, one already granted in the self-consciousness of the inquirer (see Niebuhr: 232-237). In The Christian Faith the universal functions as a vehicle of clarification for a specifically Christian theology.

III

Schleiermacher's program in both the Speeches and The Christian Faith thus evidences a thoroughgoing hermeneutical dialectic, the nature of which is double-visioned. On the one hand, it opens out toward all




religions, but, on the other, it does so confessionally, Christianly. This double-visioned hermeneutic informs the apologetic nature of his writing. It sees "beyond" Christian faith but does so from "within" Christian faith, within the relational horizon of a particular history. Schleiermacher illus- trates that taking historical consciousness to heart means that one can never begin from or arrive at the purely abstract and universal. Only as a condition of possibility can the generic be discerned, and even then, it is elusive as such, an "empty" placeholder intimated only provisionally and indirectly, never wholly present. For any notion of generic universality becomes modified and therefore obscured as soon as one begins to talk about it. The universal can only be described via abstraction from the testimonial locale of a particular community of faith and its language of self-description. The "sensibility and taste for the infinite" or the "feeling of absolute dependence" exceed the boundaries of language as onto- anthropological structures, but they are in each case described and appraised in a specific language of religious actualization that is oriented toward a specific purpose. This is the only way to talk about religion as such-from the perspective of one of its modifications, in this case, Christian faith.

This is why it is crucial to situate the category "religion" within the theological heft of Schleiermacher's project. Religion is a theological category. But this is not the end of the story, requiring us to give up the search for a trans-local way of reading the world and the place of Christianity in it. Neither does it automatically entail the self-absorbed violence of pro- jecting one's own biases and prejudices onto other forms of experience. Particularity does not hold us utterly captive.

CONCLUSION: TOWARD A SCHEIERMACHERIAN DIALECTICAL PLURALISM

If it is true that history is not an accidental addition to human self- consciousness but rather the condition for its determinacy, and if it is true that history is a playing field that includes multiple communities of self-descriptive determinacy, then it must be admitted that there is no a priori reason that human communities should be closed circles of language trapped in their own local horizons of meaning. History is an open field of direct engagement between differences, differences that modify each other. Schleiermacher admits as much. There is no solitary community of discourse insulated from the experience of other communities and their modes of discourse. Rather there are criss-crossing and polyphonic shapes of human meaning and practice that are given together, perhaps in the same local space, but most assuredly in the




broader context of our world-a world that in Schleiermacher's time had only begun to become so vastly and delicately interconnected as it is today. Given this, it would make sense that a Christian would seek theo- logically to come to terms with the fact of plurality, constructing a broader context of recognition that might locate his or her tradition in the context of the many, and more, do so as a way to articulate better the distinct character, relevance and credibility of Christianity.

For Schleiermacher, the universal functions as a way to bring coherence to the fact of many particulars, putting differences together on a shared landscape so they might be seen internally related to one another. Differences then are not incommensurate, like billiard balls randomly bouncing off one another, each enclosed in its respective communal-linguistic world. They exhibit enduring historical features and cross-cultural patterns that suggest the possibility of a comparative infrastructure, their differences manifested in a way capable of being read as context-bound signals of a basic human capacity. Although it is true that historical consciousness relativizes all communal differences in the sense that every meaning and practice is relative to a certain local field reference, a more authentic pluralism requires these differences to be recognized as meaningful, as somehow related to one another on a larger horizon of intelligibility that accounts for incongruities among local fields of reference. Thus it is that Schleiermacher sought to make explicit the existential condition in human nature for the possibility of the religions. And thus it is that, on this basis and from within a communal-linguistic framework, Schleiermacher made certain pro- nouncements regarding the relationship of the Christian self-description to other self-descriptions existing outside its immediate domain of influence. Interpretive judgments then emerge, raising certain historically determined and normative standards to the position of universality. The world of religious difference is always "read" in a certain way.

Accordingly, it is a mistake to place Schleiermacher in the same camp as authors like Wilfred Cantwell Smith and John Hick, who also seek to uncover the universal dimension behind all faith traditions, but do so in a foundationalist way that privileges what is essentially an ahistorical mode of experience or orientation. This kind of "pluralist" move ends up neutralizing the diversity it aims to account for (see Heim: chap. 1-2). It is, however, equally a mistake to see Schleiermacher as a good post-liberal in the vein of George Lindbeck, for whom religions are intratextual languages whose particularity "absorbs the world" (see Lindbeck: 32-42, 118). Although Schleier- macher might agree that language informs concrete experiences according to the narrative shape of a particular tradition, the coherence of that tradition and its language is not entirely self-defining but intimates broader elements




on the human spectrum that connect or correlate outwardly with other domains of discursive practice. Christian faith does not simply absorb the world; it plays out within a world, indeed a world shared with non-Christian faiths that make claims of their own. One cannot simply unpack the world's religions and find vague intimations of Christianity inside, as tends to be the case among those who espouse an "inclusivist" position.

Granting the priority of historical particularity does not give license to unchecked ideologizing, where nothing outside the sway of a narrative or interpretive scheme exercises any control on its own self-description.2' Some kind of inter-textual qualification seems necessary to grant the capacity for self-reflexivity and critique, enabling a community to recognize its own distinctness as well as its limits and liabilities. Religious commitment need not, and should not, mean that we get nowhere beyond ourselves when confronting differences. Religious narcissism and ethnocentrism do not win the day.

Here the work of Charles Taylor can be helpful. Like Schleiermacher, but employing categories gleaned from the philosophy of language since Wittgenstein, Taylor argues that human endeavors only become significant within the localized purview of what he calls an "interlocutional framework of orientation." Participation in one such framework or another is unavoidable, for experience requires an interpretive vocabulary, making frameworks an inescapable "transcendental condition" for grasping the meaning of anything at all (1989: 26-28, 36-39; see also 2002: 27-29). In this respect Taylor confirms the thesis of Lindbeck. There is no neutral and objective language whereby human reality can be known. Frameworks set the "forms and standards of intelligibility" for a community (Taylor 1995: 149). But acknowledging this, for Taylor, does not enclose linguistic communities in on themselves. Frameworks are always porous, open-ended, subject to change and remaking, products of the reciprocities of historical life and therefore messy and never unidirec- tional or infallible. How so? They are capable of being altered and enlarged by meeting the foreign, whose strangeness and difference challenge the limits of a framework's horizon of intelligibility. In the attempt to account for the unfamiliar, the frontiers of a community's home understanding are pushed outward and put into question, as new ways of articulating things perhaps only implicit before form a new context for self-description. We see the different from our position but in a way that stretches open our position. For Taylor, this "is why other-understanding

21 See the now classic, if not somewhat problematic, critique of Lindbeck by James Gustafson (1985). More recently, Gustafson furthers his argument against postliberalism in An Examined Faith: The Grace of Self-Doubt (2004). See also the more balanced criticisms by Paul Knitter (2002: 224-229).




changes self-understanding" (1995: 149). But what ensures us against "inclusivism," against merely absorbing the difference of the other into our framework?

Taylor probes further and argues that all other-understanding is comparative. We make the strange familiar and intelligible through our own home understanding, but not by merely whitewashing its difference. Rather, we understand an other by the force of its contrast, which makes an impression on us. Modified in some sense by its otherness, we seek quite naturally to identify and articulate the difference between an other's understanding and ours, "thereby ceasing in this respect just to read [it] through our home understanding," but allowing it to "stand apart" on its own (1995: 150). In making this contrast, our framework of understanding grows by entertaining new possibilities, thus creating a broader language of comparison. Such a language is (what I have called) "double-visioned" in that it enables us to consider the meanings and values of both cultures in terms of a similar or shared background cluster of possibilities. Taylor states this nicely in the following way:

[I]t will almost always be the case that the adequate language in which we can understand another society is not our language of understanding, or theirs, but rather what one could call a language of perspicuous contrast. This would be a language in which we could formulate both their way of life and ours as alternative possibilities in relation to some human constants at work in both. It would be a language in which the possible human variations would be so formulated that both our form of life and theirs could be perspicuously described as alternative such variations (1985: 125).

For Taylor, the intuition of contrast is primary, but it leads to a real conversation between two worlds in which, he suggests, drawing from Gadamer, there is a "fusion of horizons" (see 1985: 126; 1995: 148ff.). This is not an escaping of horizons, for the result is always tied to someone's point of view, but an enlarging process bringing both worlds into question, empowering the identification of similarities-in-differences via a language of contrasts, making understanding possible (see 1995: 151). Such a language of contrasts cannot help but to make general or universal claims about "human constants at work" among differences, constants that become ingredients in a now larger comparative framework for making connections with what was formerly unfamiliar. The catch, however, is that any and all comparative claims are subject to revision as new encounters with differences continually alter our self-understanding.

Taylor's analysis brings a certain measure of clarity to the double- visioned nature of Schleiermacher's religious hermeneutic. Schleiermacher's




appeal to a common anthropological condition of possibility for the religions is one way of taking seriously the encounter with religious differences. It neither reduces differences to an ahistorical foundation that feigns descriptive neutrality nor reduces them to utterly incommensurate products of historical time and place. His approach is exemplary in that it shows us that portraying Christian faith on a continuum with other non-Christian faiths need not require an abstract universalism. Rather, it can produc- tively ensue from the vantage point of a particular tradition, a tradition seeking self-understanding not despite but in light of religious differences. Developing a cross-cultural vocabulary by which other faith traditions can be recognized and accounted for in the end serves Christian faith itself, deepening its own identity against a trans-local backdrop of intelligibility. Accordingly, the introduction to The Christian Faith functions as a broader comparative language of contrasts, locating Christian faith among others from the perspective of a Christian challenged by the religious other.

To be sure, there is no guarantee against ethnocentrism. Schleiermacher seems to capitulate to such by absolutizing history in the person of Christ, an act that appears to compromise his historical consciousness. Of course, one can counter by saying that this is only proper, for the modified consciousness of the Christian person is quite naturally going to see itself, the world, and God, in terms of the activity of Jesus as the redeemer. But Schleiermacher takes this logic further by appealing to an absolute break in history, his Johannine brand of christology assuming the actual existence of God in the person of Jesus. Although his is indeed a christology from below, Schleiermacher in the end appeals to a supra- historical archetype, a miracle.22 This is his way of holding in tension the fact that Christians are historical beings and yet beings who experience redemption.23 But it yields an inconsistency, introducing into history what

22 Christ is "the supernatural becoming natural," a fact that requires positing on the one side an "initial divine activity which is supernatural, but at the same time a vital human receptivity in virtue of which alone that supernatural can become a natural fact of history" (1928: ?89.4, 365). Schleiermacher further states: "Hence, if the man Jesus was really ideal, or if the ideal became historical and actual in Him-the one expression means the same as the other-in order to establish a new corporate life within the old and out of it, then certainly He must have entered into the corporate life of sinfulness, but He cannot have come out of it, but must be recognized in it as a miraculous fact (eine wunderbare Erscheinung) ... " (?93.3, 380-381).

23 It is interesting to note that Karl Barth, despite his animosity toward Schleiermacher, had a certain kinship with the latter's Christocentrism. But whereas Schleiermacher saw human religiosity as a presupposition for his christology, Barth denies any precedent for the coming of Christ. Barth truly absolutizes history in the form of an Urgeschichte that plays itself out in history despite human beings. It is a positivity of revelation, one that comes utterly from the outside. Hence, there is no dialectic between the generic and the material, for the material salvation-event of Christ defines all else. Yet this construal may just be one radical path that began with Schleiermacher's own inconsistency in treating history.




seems to be an arbitrary supernatural causality tantamount to fideism. The relativities of history leave no room for absolutes. And Schleiermacher never adequately resolves this problem.24

It is not possible to jump from the facticity of redemption to an absolute history without undoing the double-visioned groundwork for theological claims, and more, without undermining the constructive potential for a genuinely pluralist vision. Thus, although Schleiermacher's program suggests a dialectical way in between universalism and particularism, it remains ambiguous. It could be argued that the facticity of redemption does not have to imply an absolute origin but rather a relative origin marked by certain transformative qualities that are themselves historically circumscribed. A more adequate and revisionist christology is called for, one based in an inter-textual, indeed inter-religious, language of contrasts.25 Speaking generally, I would argue that any theological language of contrasts must open itself up to being falsified and/or trans- formed by other religious self-understandings, and this means submit- ting itself rigorously to the ongoing test of conversation.26 Although it makes certain reality claims, an account of the religions remains open- ended, presented credibly and cogently, but constantly re-valuating itself in the throes of an inter-religious dialogue. The success of a vision then does not rest on its absolute origin, rather on its cross-cultural pro- ficiency, its illustrative power and its capacity for self-criticism and revision. In this way, our horizons are perpetually enlarged, thus eschewing the ever-present temptation of ethnocentric self-enclosure.

In the end, a double-visioned approach to Christian identity compels us to think the possibility of a universal horizon of community-building reciprocity. This potentially universal horizon, in its ideal form, takes the shape of a dialectical pluralism, a pluralism of particular differences in relation, of contrasts in connection. If we grant Schleiermacher's dialectical category of religion, each particular community of discourse already intimates such a trans-local and universal horizon in its own identity and, in so doing, is ideally open to all others. Dialectical pluralism in this final sense is nothing other than a robust and dynamic sharing among differences. It neither begins with the concordance of universality nor stops with the discordance of particularity. Rather, it envisions the possibility

24 Ernst Troeltsch later tried to address this issue (see Wyman). See also Sarah Coakley's excellent monograph, Christ without Absolutes.

25 In my estimation, the "spirit christology" of Roger Haight goes a long way in this direction. 26 To a certain degree Schleiermacher's Dialectic makes the point, thinking itself arising out of

contrast, conflict and ongoing conversation that results (see 1996a: 6-7, 43-44, 65). Gordan Kaufman makes the point explicit, asserting that an ongoing conversational dialectic is fundamental to interreligious collaboration in the search for a common truth (196-202).




of a discordant concordance, a vigorous solidarity among differences produced in the dynamism of historical life (Min 1997: 588-590). The play of contrasts involves correlation and the possibility of criss-crossing and intersecting points of convergence, even though these intersecting points of convergence and their subsequent world-horizons are the provisional and unstable result of comparative vocabularies.

Some discourse of sharing is essential for a constructive dwelling- together, a discourse that seeks to preserve itself against the double threats of ethnocentric domination and relativistic diffusion. And yet such discourse must remain vigorously conscious of its own finitude, reflexive and willing to risk itself in meeting the call of the other-that is, if it is to remain authentically dialogical and evade falling into the non- dialectical and totalizing logic of monological identity (see Taylor 1985: 130). In this way we can make normative judgments that adjudicate between those differences that empower human flourishing and those that do not. Dialectical pluralism does not therefore grant a preemptive status of favor to every call of the other simply because of its otherness, reducing all local positions to depthless equivalence. A genuinely mutual conversation both presupposes and produces certain criteria for the critical comparison and evaluation of the differences that emerge in it. For, truly, all differences are not the "same," equally endowed with the capacity to make a difference.

It is my contention that Schleiermacher tilts us in the direction of this kind of dialectical pluralism. His unique way of grappling with issues that are still very much alive merits attention as a helpful resource for constructive theology. May the dialogue continue.

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reconsidering schleiermacher and the problem of religious diversity: toward a dialectical pluralism

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