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Schleiermacher and Otto on religion: a reappraisal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2008

A. D. SMITH
A. D. SMITH
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV47AL
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Abstract

An interpretation of the work of Schleiermacher and Otto recently offered by Andrew Dole, according to which these two thinkers differed over the extent to which religion can be explained naturalistically, and over the sense in which the supernatural can be admitted, is examined and refuted. It is argued that there is no difference between the two thinkers on this issue. It is shown that Schleiermacher's claim that a supernatural event is at the same time a natural event does not invite, but rather forecloses the possibility of, a naturalistic explanation of the event. It is further demonstrated that Otto, like Schleiermacher, denied the existence of supernatural events interpreted as events that infringe the laws of nature.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 295 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1 Simple references such as this are to Dole's, Andrew article, ‘Schleiermacher and Otto on religion’, Religious Studies, 40 (2004), 389–413CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 References such as this are to Friedrich Schleiermacher The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1928). This is a translation by H. R. Mackintosh, J. S. Stewart, and others of the 2nd edition of Der Christliche Glaube – a work commonly known as the Glaubenslehre.

3 Sensible self-consciousness is that which accompanies our perception of and interactive relation with things in the world, and which variably involves both a feeling of dependence and of freedom.

4 Rudolf Otto The Idea of the Holy, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950). This is an English translation by John W. Harvey of the 9th German edition of Das Heilige.

5 ‘Christus sich ihm … unmittelbar vergegenwärtigt’. A more literal translation would be that ‘Christ presents himself immediately to’ the person.

6 Schleiermacher also has various specifically religious objections to interventionist supernaturalism: it supposes God to have been incompetent in creating the world and to be answerable to what occurs in it, and it renders the recognition of the miraculous dependent on a supposition that a law of nature has indeed been infringed – something that cannot be determined with any certainty (§47.1–3). I should, however, point out that even the metaphysical claim that the domain of divine causality is the same as that of natural causality taken as a whole has a religious foundation for Schleiermacher. The claim is warranted, according to him, by taking the feeling of absolute dependence seriously (§51.1).

7 Compare Karl Barth's claim that, according to Schleiermacher, ‘the coming of Christ is similar to the formation of a new nebula’, in D. Ritschl (ed.) The Theology of Schleiermacher, tr. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1982), 205.

8 The questions of the supernatural and of naturalistic explicability can be raised in connection with two sorts of events, religious states and experiences, and events in the physical world that are ‘miracles’ in the usual sense. Dole is primarily interested in the former; and it is on this that I focus in the present section. He also, however, expresses a concern with the second. That will be addressed in the following section.

9 Rudolf Otto Naturalism and Religion (London: Williams & Norgate and New York NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1907). This is an English translation by J. Arthur and Margaret R. Thomson of Naturalistische und religiöse Weltansicht (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1904).

10 Rudolf Otto The Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant and Fries (London: Williams & Norgate, 1931). This is an English translation by E. B. Dicker of Otto's Kantisch-Fries'sche Religionsphilosophie und ihre Anwendung auf die Theologie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1909).

11 I have quoted Andrew Dole's own translation of the passage. The corresponding passage occurs in Otto The Idea of the Holy, 145.

12 This ‘eternal covenant’ is referred to, and, to my mind, incomprehensibly criticized and set in opposition to Otto's position, by Dole (390).