Harvard Theological Review
Harvard Theological Review
Harvard Theological Review
http://journals.cambridge.org/HTR
I first became acquainted with Richard Niebuhr' s scholarship and thought in a German
graduate seminar on Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ernst Troeltsch. Niebuhr's book,
Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, was a required text for the course and was
regarded as the most significant study on Schleiermacher.1 My interest in Karl Rahner's
theology had led me to go to Germany for doctoral studies. Once there, I discovered
that much of what I had admired in Rahner had already been anticipated a century and
a half earlier in Schleiermacher's work. Professor Niebuhr's study on Schleiermacher
was the source of this insight. It influenced my decision later to translate into English
Schleiermacher's On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr. Liicke.2 My topic for this
article, the theological retrieval of the category of religion, is obviously suggested by
Niebuhr's study of Schleiermacher, which sought to overcome the dichotomies asso-
ciated with the category of religion by the then-dominant Neo-orthodoxy. This topic is
also a theme of Niebuhr's ensuing book, Experiential Religion, in which he elaborated
his own constructive account of religion and experience.3 In addition, this topic appro-
priately relates to Niebuhr's activity at Harvard University, where he helped establish
a program of studies in religion within the Committee on the Study of Religion.
I shall begin by showing how religion, which was a contested site in theology
when Richard Niebuhr wrote his book on Schleiermacher, has once again become
controversial, not only in theology, but also in the study of religion. The differences
between then and now will be analyzed in relation to three distinct contestations of
the category of religion within theology and the study of religion. Since
Schleiermacher's theology is often identified as the historical root, if not the cause,
of the problem concerning the category of religion, I then analyze Schleiermacher's
position in regard to these three criticisms. I hope thereby to show not only that
Schleiermacher is not guilty as charged, but also that his theological and
philosophical position offers a way to appropriate the category of religion within
theology and the study of religion. In advancing this systematic claim, I shall inquire
about the relation between the categories of "religion" and "revelation." I shall then
explore the development of an understanding of religion that explicates the
historical particularity and individuality of religion without making the category
either a sui generis one or an exclusive and imperialistic one.
4
Barth's relation to Schleiermacher is much more complex and nuanced; see James O.
Duke and Robert F. Streetman, eds., Barth and Schleiermacher: Beyond the Impasse? (Phila-
delphia: Fortress, 1988).
5
Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, 7.
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 9
being. Niebuhr's retrieval was not just the retrieval of an individual author.
Instead, it involved the retrieval of nineteenth-century Protestant theology with
its important impulses concerning piety, religion, and history.
Second, systematically and conceptually, Niebuhr sought to overcome the very
dichotomies that Neo-orthodoxy had brought into currency, such as those between
religion and revelation, human experience and divine action, natural and revealed
theology, apologetic and Christocentric approaches, and universality and particularity.
Unfortunately, these contrasts still influence the debate and impinge upon the religious
consciousness of many. Because these supposed dichotomies and oppositions
dominated Neo-orthodox theologians, they misunderstood and mis-evaluated
Schleiermacher.
Niebuhr responded by arguing that certain assumed contrasts hindered the
interpretation of Schleiermacher. For example, he observed that we can better
appreciate the role that religion has in Schleiermacher's systematic theology, The
Christian Faith, if we remember "that the antithesis between religion and
revelation, which has become an unquestioned principle of theology in recent years,
is absent from this work and from the thinking of its author." In addition, Niebuhr
notes that "it would never have occurred to Schleiermacher that the category of
religion was in itself compromising of Christianity or that religion as a human
phenomenon stands in radical contradiction to faith mediated through Jesus Christ
and the Spirit of God."6 His own interpretation of Schleiermacher underscored the
"measure of Christ" and the "Christo-morphic" character of Schleiermacher's
theology. The key point of Niebuhr's exposition is the close interconnection
between Schleiermacher's understanding of religion and his understanding of the
faith mediated through Jesus Christ.
Moreover, against the Neo-orthodox attempt to derive the knowledge of God
exclusively from revelation in Jesus Christ, Niebuhr showed how Schleiermacher
developed his understanding of God from diverse sources. In so doing
Schleiermacher stood within a greater and more substantial theological tradition
than his critics. On this point, Niebuhr observes, Schleiermacher is closer to John
Calvin than is Karl Barth.7 Niebuhr also refuted the alleged contrast between
Christian particularity and the general category of religion in Schleiermacher's
work. For as Niebuhr argues,
Schleiermacher's idea of historical consciousness would have forbidden
him to state the relation of Christianity to the other religions from the
standpoint of an idea of universal religion. Whatever may be universally
present in all religions, so far as it is knowable, can be grasped only
'Ibid., 178.
7
Ibid., 212. See Brian A. Gerrish, Continuuing the Reformation: Essays on Modern Religious
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) for a sustained argument on importance
of Schleiermacher's relation to Calvin for an understanding of Schleiermacher's theology.
10 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
8
Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, 230.
'The term is from W. B. Gallie, "Essentially Contested Concepts," Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 56 (1955-56) 167.
10
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. 1/ 2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956) 284.
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 11
"Karl Barth, Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl (New York: Harper, 1959).
12
For the parallels that Barth's interpretation draws among nineteenth-century theology,
Schleiermacher, and Feuerbach, see Francis Schtissler Fiorenza.'The Response of Barth and
Ritschl to Feuerbach," SR 7 (1978) 149-66.
"Ronald F. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospels as Narrated Promise (Notre
Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1985).
12 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
"George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984) 31.
15
Ibid., 32.
16
Ibid., 120.
17
See William Placher, Unapologetical Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic
Conversation (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1989).
FRANCIS SCHOSSLER FIORENZA 13
"Louis Henry Jordan, Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth (1905; reprinted
Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986) 19.
"See the chapters on Max Miiller and C. P. Tiele in Donald Wiebe, The Politics of Reli-
gious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (New York: St. Martin's,
1998) 9-30 and 31-50.
20
See Hans H. Penner, Impasse and Resolution: A Critique of the Study of Religion (New
York: Peter Lang, 1989) 15-40.
21
Terry F. Godlove, Jr., "The Instability of Religious Belief: Some Reductionistic and
Eliminative Pressures," in Thomas A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan, eds., Religion and
Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences (Leiden:
Brill, 1994) 49. See also idem, "Religious Discourse and First Person Authority," Method and
Theory in the Study of Religion 6 (1994) 147-61.
14 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
"Melissa Raphael, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).
"Benson Saler, Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Na-
tives, and Unbounded Categories (Leiden: Brill, 1993) 102.
"Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958)
xiii. Eliade's emphasis on religion as sui generis has been followed by his student Lawrence
E. Sullivan; see Lawrence E. Sullivan, Icanchu's Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South
American Religions (New York: Macmillan, 1988).
"Robert E. Segal, "Reductionism in the Study of Religion," in Idinopulos and Yonan, eds.,
Religion and Reductionism, 6. See also idem, "In Defense of Reductionism," in JAAR 51(1983)
97-124.
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 15
the affirmation of an "autonomy of methods."26 Donald Wiebe has argued that the
academic study of religion owes its scientific status to the criticism of a
methodology based upon sui generis claims. In his view, "it was precisely because
of the adoption of precisely such a scientific agenda, clearly demarcated from
religio-theological concerns, that the study of religion achieved the academic
legitimation it sought from the university."27 Similar arguments have been made
recently by Hans Penner, Talal Asad, Thomas Lawson, Ivan Strenski, Bernard Salar,
and Russell McCutcheon against the understanding of religion as sui generis and
against an interpretive method that excessively privileges the autonomy of religion
in the name of anti-reductionism or anti-naturalism.28
Indeed, the conception of religion not only as distinct, but also as sui generis,
fails to acknowledge how religious beliefs and myths are intertwined with other
areas of life. Many examples can illustrate this interconnection.29 One in particular
is the Purusha myth. This Hindu creation myth describes creation in relation to
Purusha, who is sacrificed and dismembered and from whom all things, inanimate
as well as living, emerge. However, as Graeme MacQueen and Bruce Lincoln
have demonstrated, this myth also entails an account of the origin of the four-fold
social order, known as the varna system, with its sacred social hierarchy. Whereas
the priestly caste stems from the head of the dismembered Purusha, commoners
stem from the lower torso, and the servants and sociajly excluded groups stem
from the feet. Any interpretation of this myth exclusively as sui generis religious
does not take into account how the social, political, and religious are deeply
intertwined and interrelated. Interpretations of religion need to show what it is
about religion that makes possible such interrelations between religious myth and
the social-political order.30
"Robert F. Brown, "Eliade on Archaic Religion: Some Old and New Criticism," SR 10 (1982) 429-49.
"Donald Wiebe, "Religious Studies as a Saving Grace? From Goodenough to South
Africa," in Luther Martin, ed., Religious Transformations and Socio-F'olitical Change: Eastern
Europe and Latin America (New York: de Gruyter, 1993) 412-38. See also Donald Wiebe, "The
Failure of Nerve in the Study of Religion," SR 13 (1984) 401-22.
28
Hans H. Penner, Impasse and Resolution: A Critique of the Study of Religion (New York:
Peter Lang, 1989); Talal Asad, "Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,"
Man 18 (1983) 237-59, reprinted in idem, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of
Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1993); E. Thomas Lawson and
Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1990).
29
Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion
and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also the collec-
tion of essays on the study of religion: in idem, ed. The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study
of Religion (New York: Casell, 1999).
30
Graeme MacQueen, "Whose Sacred History? Reflections on Myth and Dominance," SR 17
(1998) 143-57. Bruce Lincoln, Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation
and Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
16 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
"Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (1962; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991).
"Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 17
Thirty years after the publication of the The Meaning and the End of Religion,
Smith has had to draw out further the implications of his view that the category of
religion is unnecessary, misleading, and reifying. The modern notion of religion
is "au fond secularist;" it sets up a dichotomy between religion and what is not
religion.33 He expands the "anti-reifying" polemic of his book beyond religion
and applies it to modern culture as well. He contends that "our whole modern
culture" is "significantly skewed, or even distorted, by our inveterate reifying or
objectivizing of almost everything we thought or think about."34
Interestingly, for both Barth and Smith, religion is theologically inadequate, but
for different reasons. Whereas Barth's critique of religion is based on the primacy
of divine revelation over human experience, Smith's critique of the category is
based on the primacy of the experiential dimension of personal religiosity. Barth
rejects the category of religion because it is too humanistic and anthropocentric,
whereas Smith rejects the category of religion because it focuses too much on the
external rather than on the humanistic and experiential dimension of religion.
"See his address to the American Academy of Religion, "The Modern West in the History of
Religion," JAAR 52 (1984) 3-16.
"Wilfred Cantwell Smith, "Retrospective Thoughts on Tlie Meaning and End of Religion!' in Michel
Despland and Gerard Vallee, eds., Religion in History (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992) 12-22.
"Jonathan Z. Smith, "Religion, Religions, Religious," in Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms
for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 269-84, esp. 284.
"Frits Staal, "The Himalayas and the Fall of Religion," in Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter, ed.,
The Silk Route and the Diamond Path (Los Angeles: Univerisy of California Press, 1982) 38-51.
"David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern
Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).
18 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
Chidester notes the relation between the comparative study of religion and the
European discoveries of the absence of religion in other parts of the world.
Christopher Columbus wrote that the Arawak Indians "do not hold any creed nor are
they idolaters." This view was reinforced by Amerigo Vespuccis's comment that
"they have no church, no religion, and are not idolaters."38 Jacques Le Maire noted
that the people in the Pacific Islands were more like beasts than humans, living
without religion. Likewise, European travelers to Africa reported that the African
venerates fetishes. However, they did not consider such fetishism to be a religion.
William J. Shrewsbury, a Wesleyan missionary, wrote that the indigenous people of
southern Africa lived "without any religion, true or false."39 What is striking is that,
initially, fetishism was regarded as evidence that the indigenous people were without
religion; eventually, it came to be regarded as the beginning of religion.
These denials of religion in certain parts of the world can be attributed to a
diversity of causes, especially the lack of sufficient contact or observation and the
lack of knowledge of local languages and customs. However, Chidester asks whether
European travelers and missionaries had as their horizon a specifically, perhaps
implicitly, Christian definition of religion that prevented them from recognizing
and acknowledging the presence of religion. This alleged absence of religion was
coupled with stereotypes about, for example, indigenous people being less than
human. Chidester points out that after the colonial conquest it was affirmed that
the indigenous people in fact had religion: what was first identified as a lack of
religion (fetishism) became the sign of religion. Now religion, more than race and
ethnicity, provided the content of difference and otherness.
As this discussion has shown, the category of religion stands within the
crossfire of contrasting and diverse criticisms. One side offers a theological
critique of the category of religion. The use of religion is too humanistic and
anthropocentric. It fails to affirm the uniqueness of Christian revelation because
it subsumes the uniqueness of Christian identity within the generic category of
religion. Another side offers a quite different critique. It maintains that demarca-
tions of the specificity of religion lead to a definition of religion as sui generis.
Such a definition establishes protective boundaries. It privileges religion by re-
garding causal and functional analysis of religion as reductive. This critique
suggests that the sui generis category involves the surreptitious import of theo-
logical privileges into the academic study of religion. And still a third side
criticizes the development and use of the category of religion within the modern
West. It questions whether this category is an abstract reification or whether its
application or non-application to those outside reveals the residues of a
Christian and Western imperialism.
38
Ibid., 11.
"Ibid., 12-13.
FRANCIS SCHOSSLER FIORENZA 19
criticisms of the category of religion constitute a dilemma for scholars. If one interprets
distinctiveness as an isolated autonomy, then one overlooks the concrete, theoretical,
and practical role of religion in society. If one underscores the social-political origins
and consequences of religion, then one may fail to grasp the distinctiveness of
religious belief and practices. Is there a way to sail past the Scylla and Charybdis of the
alternative approaches without crashing into either one?
Third, the contestation of religion as an abstract product of Western rationalization
and its colonization of life and culture raises an important question not only for theol-
ogy, but also for the study of religion: how do we study religion in ways that do not
substitute or privilege our own categories and thereby misunderstand and devalue the
beliefs and practices of other cultures, past and present?
4Z
See also The Christian Faith, § 6.2.
"Ibid., § 4.4, translation modified.
"For a criticism of those interpretations that do not take sufficiently into account the centrality
that the quesiton of individuation plays in Schleiermacher's interpretation of Christianity, see
Markus Schroder, Die kritische Identitdt des neuzeillichen Christentums: Schleiermachers
Wesenbestimmung der christlichen Religion (Tubingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1996), 48-55.
"Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, § 10.
22 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
elation.46 The second is Judith Butler's term "excrescence of logic," which she
uses to express the paradox of agency that is indeed agency and yet subordinate to
power.47 The human subject is not a subject apart from being determined by the
structures of power; the human subject is not a subject, except within the cross
determination of social and cultural history. The question is: how can the human
person be an instrument of agency and at the same time be subject to social,
cultural, and political conditioning? The "subject is neither fully determined by
power nor fully determining power."48 There is a surpassing, transcending, and
going-beyond surplus of human agency within historical and cultural subjectivity.
In a similar way, there is a revelation in and through religion.
"See, for example, Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 30,1.1. For an exposition, see the section
"Offenbarung durch Ekstase," in Wolfgang Weiland, Offenbarung bei Augustinus (Mainz: Matthias-
Griinewald, 1978) 94-99.
47
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1997).
48
Ibid., 17.
"Compare Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/ 2, 344 with idem, Church Dogmatics, IV/ 3 (Edinburgh:
T. & T . Clark, 1961) 38-164.
50
Karl Rahner, "Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions," Theological Investigations (New
York: Seabury, 1966) 5: 5-34. "Anonymous Christianity and the Missionary Task of the Church,"
Theological Investigations (New York: Seabury,1974) 12:161-78, and "The One Christ and the
Universality of Salvation," Theological Investigations (New York: Seabury, 1979) 16: 199-224.
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 23
5l
Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion
and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 60.
24 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
59
My own translation from Schleiermacher, Schleiermachers Werke, Vol. 2: Entwiirfe zu
einem System der Sittenlehre, 99-100.
60
See Gunther Scholz, Ethik und Hermeneutik. Schleiermachers Grundlegung der
Geisteswissenschaften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995) 78—79.
"See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik, in Heinz Kimmerle, ed., Abhandlungen der
Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse (Heidelberg:
C. Winter, 1959); See the English translation, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 27
Criticism and Other Writings, (ed. Andrew Bowie; New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998). See Paul Ricoeur, "Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics," Monist 66 (1977) 181-97; and
Yong Huang, "The Father of Modern Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Age: A Reinterpretation
of Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics," Philosophy Today (1996) 251-62.
"See Francis Schilssler Fiorenza, "Schleiermacher and the Construction of a Contemporary
Roman Catholic Foundational Theology," HTR 89 (1996) 175-94; and idem, "History and
Hermeneutics," in James Livingston and Francis Schiissler Fiorenza, Modern Christian Thought,
Vol. 2: The Twentieth Century (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999) 341-85.
"Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, § 6, postscript.
"Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings.
28 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
Categorical Abstraction
First, it is important to note that the charge of "categorical abstraction" raises a
problem that Schleiermacher himself observed. As Richard Niebuhr noted:
By the nature of the case, Schleiermacher believed, as soon as this
articulation of feeling is reduced to philosophical categories, the level of
meaning has been transposed to a new plane upon which the realities
ingredient in the religious self-consciousness as such can never be
projected without the appearance of a certain concomitant distortion.67
Moreover, Schleiermacher himself had pointed to the lack of clarity of the notion of
religion. Therefore, he proposes its exclusion from theological vocabulary. Since its
academic use is too recent, Schleiermacher prefers the terms Glaubensweise (way of
believing) and "piety."68 This preferred terminology brings to expression the results
of the distinction between religion and theology in Protestant theology.69
Second, the distinctiveness of the category of religion within modern
Protestant theology has a history prior to Schleiermacher. In the Enlightenment,
religion was adopted as an inclusive category that embraced more than
Christianity, so that one distinguished between religion and Christian
theology.70 Enlightenment thinkers sought specifically to express this greater
inclusiveness of the term "religion" through the category of natural or rational
religion. A correlation, however, if not a correspondence, was made between
rational, natural religion and Christianity. Thus, this effort to make the term
more inclusive failed. Schleiermacher opposed precisely this notion of religion
as natural religion. He thereby radically changed the problematic. He replaced
the category of natural religion with the issue of the specificity and
individuation of religion.
"See Thomas Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993) 159.
"Niebuhr, Schleiermacher, 190. See also Schleiermacher, Dialektik, 297-314.
"Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith § 6. In the first edition of The Christian Faith
(§ 12.3; footnote 6), Schleiermacher notes that the notion of religion has its roots in paganism
and is a difficult word to explain. Schleiermacher's suggestion of Glaubensweise as a preferred
term is close to Smith's own proposal to emphasize the personal pole of religion.
69
Hans-Joachim Birkner, "Beobachtungen und Erwagungen zum Religionsbegriff in der neueren
protestantischen Theologie," in Dietrich Rossler and Gottfried Voigt, eds., Fides et Communicatio:
Festschrift fur Martin Doerne zum 70. Geburtstag (Friedrich Wintzer: Gottingen, 1970).
™For the distinction between theology and religion in Semler, see Trutz Rendtorff, Church and
Theology: The Systematic Function of the Church Concept in Modern Theology (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1971).
30 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
In other words, his theology sought to confront both the problem of categorical
abstraction and the abstractness of natural religion. His choice of the term
"feeling" might be misleading today because of the connotations we associate with it.
However, by using this term Schleiermacher sought to designate the
presence of the total self (spiritual, sensual, and unified) in its spiritual and
material world. He selected the term "feeling" rather than "knowing" or "doing" to
express this experience of the unity of the self, since he viewed thinking as ordered
toward objects via logical abstraction and as constituting this unity as an
objectification. Schleiermacher aimed to avoid the objectification that the
category of religion might entail. Both his choice of terms, and his very
understanding and location of religion, are directed toward this goal. Thus, the
interpretive emphasis upon feeling as pre-linguistic overlooks the significance of the
linguistic within Schleiermacher's understanding of religion.
Thirdly, categories such as conversation, discourse, and dialogue have
become commonplace within philosophical and theological parlance.71 Both
the acknowledgement and the recognition of the other have become a central
goal. This emphasis upon dialogue and upon otherness emphasizes that truth
is not the possession of an individual or even of an individual group—as if
truth were a set of coins, which some people have in their pockets but others
do not. Instead, truth is what emerges within conversation. Truth is that
toward which the dialogue constantly moves in increasing spiral, zigzagging
and emerging through serendipitous turns and creative moments.72
71
Schleiermacher's own understanding of dialogue is connected with his translation of the
Platonic dialogues. For background, see Rudiger Bubner, "Die Entdeckung Platons durch
Schelling und seine Aneignung durch Schleiermacher," in Innovationen des Idealismus (Gottingen:
Vandenhoeck, 1995) 9-42.
72
See Gordon D. Kaufman, God, Mystery, Diversity: Christian Theology in a Pluralistic
World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).
"See the recent collection of essays, Dieter Burdorf and Reinhold Schmiicker, eds., Dialogische
Wissenschaft: Perspektiven der Philosophie Schleiermachers (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1998).
See Friedrich Kaulbach, "Schleiermachers Idee der Dialektik," Neue ZeitschriftfUr systematische
Theologie 10 (1968) 225-60.
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 31
dialogue, Schleiermacher divides thinking into various types: a thinking for the
sake of knowledge (called pure thought), a thinking for the sake of a practical end
(called gesellchaftliche, or societal thinking), and an artistic thinking (to which
religion belongs). The latter produces creativity in a free and open conversation.
For Schleiermacher, interestingly, it is in linguistic communication that the cat-
egory of revelation emerges.
Schleiermacher's emphasis on dialogue and discourse is relevant to my
discussion for several reasons. Historically, for an understanding of his view of
religion, revelation, and reflection, scholars have turned to The Christian Faith,
with its description of the feeling of utter dependence, instead of his Dialektik,
with its emphasis on thinking and dialogue. Second, Schleiermacher's emphasis
in the Dialektik upon the interrelation between discourse and thinking underscores
the centrality of linguistic communication for his view of religion. This
interconnection is present in the Speeches as well as in The Christian Faith.
Unfortunately, some interpretations focus upon personal and experiential
dimensions of his view and fail to take into account the role of sociolinguistic
communication involved in the origin and spread of religion.
Third, for Schleiermacher there are no a priori answers to questions insofar as one
has to take into account the insights of the conversation partner. This should lead to the
ability to rethink categories. Our own categories need to be considered as
exemplars rather than norms, as working hypotheses and prototypes in need of
further additions and modifications. In other words, as we work with a category we
need to change and expand it, especially as we in the West encounter other
categories that deal with what we call religion and transcendence. Religion has been
described and defined very diversely. The term has a long history in the West that
predates the Christian use of the term and that has undergone several significant changes.
Recent studies on the history of the notion of religion by Michel Despland74 and Ernst
Feil75 have complemented and nuanced earlier studies such as Smith's.
We are faced with a dilemma with regard to the category of religion. As Rodney
Needham notes, the category of religion is insufficiently precise and "too
polysemous, indistinct, and malleable to serve any steady analytical purpose." At
the same time, as he also maintains, "it still possesses a certain odd-job
connotation that makes it somewhat useful in the preliminary assortment of social
facts and general descriptions."76 Or, as Gerald Larson notes, rather than rejecting
• Conclusion
In interpreting Schleiermacher within the context of the current and very diverse
debate about the category of religion, I have advanced three arguments. First, I have
underscored the importance of communication and linguisticality for Schleiermacher's
"Gerald James Larson, "Is South Asian Yoga 'Philosophy,' 'Religion,' Both or Neither?" in Ugo Bianchi,
ed, The Notion of Religion in Comparative Research (Rome: "L'Erma" di Bretschneider, 1994) 261-69.
78
See also John Clayton, "Was ist falsch in der Korrelationstheologie," Neue Zeitschriftfiir
systematische Theologie 16 (1974) 93—111. See also Tim Murphy, "Wesen und Erscheinung
in the History of the Study of Religion: A Post-structuralist Perspective," Method and Theory
in the Study of Religion 6 (1994) 119-46.
"Benson Saler, Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Na-
tives, and Unbounded Categories (Leiden: Brill, 1993).
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 33
!0
Niebuhr, Experiential Religion, 33.
34 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
and teacher over the last four decades of this century has been to show the resources
of the eighteenth century in Jonathan Edwards, the nineteenth century in Friedrich
Schleiermacher and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the twentieth century in North
American pragmatism, especially in Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.
The work of his many students throughout the country testifies to this legacy. It is a
legacy that could have been left only by someone with the breadth of historical
knowledge and the creativity of theological reflection that Richard R. Niebuhr's
work displays. I have tried to honor him in a very limited fashion by suggesting that
Schleiermacher offers us some resources for dealing with religion as a contested site
in the twenty-first century.