On the New Edition of Schleiermacher's Addresses On Religion

Abstract

Despite the interest and enthusiasm for nineteenth-century theology which has flourished among graduate students since the early fifties and the obvious need for its critical reappraisal in the light of contemporary philosophical and theological discussion, it is surprising how few serious scholars of the nineteenth-century have emerged from our graduate schools, how few scholarly works have been written, and, above all, how few textual resources exist to provide the basis for a reassessment by the English-speaking world. It is depressing to observe, for example, that most of the important theological and philosophical essays of Troeltsch, Herrmann, Ritschl, and the Roman Catholic Modernists are still untranslated, not to speak of major works of Strauss, Feuerbach, and Schleiermacher. That Schleiermacher's name must be included in such a list should occasion some surprise; not only was he the most important liberal theologian of the nineteenth century but he was still widely read and discussed even by those neo-orthodox theologians of the forties and fifties who otherwise