A post-out-of-place on Schleiermacher

Friedrich Schleiermacher /FREE-drik shLIE-ur-mah-kur/ (1768-1834) is on my mind these days, and, believe it or not, he's on your mind, too. Profoundly influenced by the anabaptist tradition, Friedrich lived at a time when religious faith was understood as something alien to humanity; something it could do without (and probably should.) Not so, he shot back in his influential On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799). Human beings are religious by nature, Friedrich argued. Rather than put religion aside, it is more human to cultivate it! Everyone is aware of God; everyone carries within themselves a "feeling of absolute dependence." It is only obscured by the humdrum cares of daily life. The best kind of human life consists in cultivating our natural God-consciousness. Sin, he said, is the obscuring of this consciousness.

Now, I ask myself how far away from Schleiermacher we have come? The truth is: not far, despite the 171 intervening years. How far away from the realization and cultivation of God-consciousness and a feeling of absolute dependence is "having a personal relationship with Jesus" or "getting a lot out of that worship service?" How many books are written on "finding God in the everyday?" Though we have long since forgotten Schleiermacher, he has not forgotten us; and his arguments dictate very much the shape of the way we moderns are religious--for good and for ill.

I read Ephesians this morning. (John G. and I have been circling like wandering planets around this epistle for well-over three months.) Schleiermacher is notably absent. Ephesians isn't about the cultivation of God-consciousness, but the display of the divine victory in personal acts. And for what purpose--to grow in one's awareness of the divine? No, rather it is to display the goodness and wisdom of God by what one is and through what one does. The Kingdom is more about the outward act than it is about the inward state. One has been saved by grace; one is to do good works and so overcome evil. One does from what one is. There is no need to achieve some special insight. There is no gnostic Aha! which lays open hidden and secret rhythmns behind our normal experience of the material (created) world.

How much, then, of what counts for a Christian lifestyle is about the drumming up of this God-consciousness, the seeking of a direct experience of God, the discernment of hidden providences and wills? We divide things into sacred and secular and thus become a voodoo people--forgetting that God made all things and has said they are good. Rather than denying creation, we should be people of creation. We are a secular people who need to put the sacred behind us. Let's leave sacredness to the Hindu's and the New Agers. God came in the flesh.

Oh, I have gone too long. Few will make it this far. Understand that this little sermon is part of the adjustment which informs the recent adoption into the liturgical, Anglican tradition. There is an affirmation of the body--that's the way theologians would talk about this--that is needed: the body and mind need their praise. The mind may take in the truth, but the body is limited. It needs to kneel and to stand. It needs to eat and drink. The body needs its dance, for it, too, must celebrate what it hopes for--to be clothed. Musicians, dancers and others talk about "muscle memory." The body, too, needs to be reminded and to confess what God has said about it. The body, too, demonstrates the goodness and wisdom of God.