Romanticism

Romantic era

Looking below ground to understand religion.

2 Romantics

• as in art, the discovery of native traditions led to new sensitivities about the nature of religion
• if religion followed individual or cultural patterns, in what sense does it express universal truths?

Schleiermacher

• religion as a feeling not thought "feeling of absolute dependence"
• every event is a miracle, a "sign"
• revelation is "every original and new communication of the Universe to man"
• embrace the "genius" of one's own tradition

Coleridge

• tradition is not conservatism but interpreting Christianity in terms of Romanticism
• "factual accuracy of the Bible does not matter" but whether it finds me

Hegel

Structure of Reality & How we can know it

• everything we see and experience is bound by historical setting
• thus: How can we know anything with certainty?
• triadic structure of reality p. 237
• Overview of Hegel
• 30 min. more in depth on Hegel

David Strauss

• until Strauss, miracles either:
  • happened as described (literal) or
  • some "rational" explanation or -"fraud"
• Strauss proposed that they consisted of "myth" (religious language that conveys sacred truth)

Ludwig Feuerbach

• "theology is anthropology"
• many college freshman can say, "God is just a projection of the human imagination." (a function of low-level thinking? or pervasiveness of Feuerbach's position)

Søren Kierkegaard

• writing in pseudonyms to make the point that we always only know from a certain perspective
• "We understand backwards, but we must live forwards."

Development of Religious Person for S. Kierkegaard

• aesthetic stage
• ethical stage
• religious stage - The "Knight of Faith"

Knight of Faith?