Schleiermacher and the Evangelical "Worship" Obsession

I've only just read the great 18th century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher for myself and don't claim to be an expert on him, but it is pretty alarming to me how much common ground the contemporary evangelical worship phenomenon finds with the worst trajectories of his religious philosophy and how little it seems to have heeded the best correctives of his theology.

In response to the "cultured despisers" of religion, pastor/theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher defended the thesis that neither metaphysics (philosophy) nor morals (ethics) provided adequate ground for a unifying theory of humankind (something which was more of a concern for people in the 18th century than it tends to be now). Humanity needed and had a third category, which he called "religion", which enfolded the others and also kept each from swallowing the other.

Now, to understand this you need to understand what "religion" meant for Schleiermacher. Heavily influenced by literature and Romanticism, the essence of "religion" was for him the intuited feeling which lay at the heart of the most transcendent expressions of humanity, and yet was itself tainted the moment it transitioned into the necessary but fleeting language of human expression. Some have equated his definition of "religion" with the realm of art, or aesthetics.

Regardless of how it is classified, for him, the "sense of the transcendent" (my term) was the unifying principle in which human thinking and acting could productively cohere. It was an experiential moment that was ruined by trying to hold too tightly, and yet which was worthy of all seeking. If one could live or abide in that experience of absolute dependence upon the intuited, one would be experiencing the true religious life. Schleiermacher felt that Jesus Christ embodied this life for humanity.

As Schleiermacher's theology developed, his focus went more and more away from the character of the divine and more and more on that feeling of absolute dependence which divine faith so constructively produced in the pious. God was effectively reduced to being the "source of the feeling of absolute dependence"---so that the ecstasy and the penitent humility of faith, of absolute dependence, became the heart and focus of his "theology".

In my opinion, this is the perilous edge that the contemporary evangelical worship phenomenon has encroached upon and in countless situations crossed. It is the obsession which has overtaken the evangelical ethos at its worst, with catastrophic results that are felt both in the "successes" and the "failures" of the church growth movement.

It has infected the traditional church, the seeker church, and the emergent church alike where it has made the spiritual experience (however engendered by notions of Christ) the leading edge of its acts, attitudes and goals. Seen in this light, each of these types of churches, for all their claims to have improved upon one another, appear at this point to be suffering under different strains of the same disease. The experiential product is simply tailor-made to a different target audience.

I am not seizing upon Schleiermacher to make this point in order to blame him. In fact, from what I've been reading he seems to have wanted to avoid this problem, at least early on. A crucial element of his explanation of the religious experience was that it had to be given, and could not be reproduced or manipulated on the human side. In fact, it was just such endeavours of encapsulation or reproduction that corrupted religion!

Thus it is that, while he may in some ways be the father of today's so-called "worship" movement, a corrective lay in some of Schleiermacher's own statements as well. For instance, consider the following caveat he gave in the heights of his promotion of "religious feeling". Regarding what we might call today the "spiritual high", Schleiermacher wrote:

“If I could create it in you, I would be a god; may holy fate only forgive me that I have had to disclose more than the Eleusinian [inititiatory] mysteries" (On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 113).

To be fair, we're touching here upon the catch-22 of Christian ministry and expression: How to speak of God without playing God? I think that this is the very thing that seems to have struck the prophets Jeremiah (on whose tongue the scroll was bitter sweet) and Isaiah (whose lips cried out for the purifying burn of the coal). I count myself among the worship leaders, preachers and theologians who must wrestle with this.

My concern, however, is that we have so often left it up to each individual minister to do this wrestling alone in the secret turmoil of their well-intentioned and important ministry preparations, while week after week they serve up the best product possible and let the experiential fixation of our evangelical ethos prevail.

Where the focus on being inspired and reproducing an experience has so taken over, one wonders if it can even be called worship other than if God accepts it---much like a father accepts from a son a birthday present that is clearly meant for the son's own enjoyment. But one has to wonder how long before us children grow up.