Theology: Taste for the Infinite

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Passional Approach. Today an increasing number of U.S. Protestant thinkers regard Barth as somewhat old hat and Schleiermacher as much more of a living force. University of Chicago Theologian Langdon Gilkey notes that "when students come across him, they say, 'This is a guy who can help me.' Students tend to come alive with Schleiermacher." The most obvious reason for the revival of interest in his work is that the "passional" experience of religion—as Schleiermacher called it—makes more sense to modern man than a purely intellectual one.

There are several other major theological questions that Schleiermacher made pioneering attempts to answer. As one of the first thinkers to study the cultural setting of Biblical writings, he was the forerunner of modern critical scholarship on Scripture. Convinced that denominationalism had outlived its usefulness, he was an embryonic ecumenist and worked to achieve a merger between Germany's Reformed and Lutheran churches. "People are learning," says Schubert Ogden of Southern Methodist University's Perkins School of Theology, "that Schleiermacher was the first great theologian to articulate a reinterpretation of Christian tradition in reference to modern life."