Individual, communication and community in the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher

Friedrich Schleiermacher considered the Church to be “the most exalted of all human institutions,” and devoted an entire speech in his 1799 Speeches to religious community. This speech builds upon the theory of religion established in earlier speeches, and uses Schleiermacher's dramatic revision of religious experience and communication as the basis for offering an equally dramatic revision of religious community—a vision of what the Church should, and indeed, can be. By the 1830s, Schleiermacher had not only established an ecclesiology based on the development of his anthropology and communication theory, he had also applied this theory to the context of the Evangelical Protestant Church.; This study explores the foundation of Schleiermacher's understanding of religious community and his application of this to the liturgical life of the Protestant Church. His vision of religious community draws on two theories developed primarily in Schleiermacher's philosophical work: (1) the theory of the human being as related to the Transcendent, the world, and the inter-subjective community in which it lives, and (2) the theory of communication as a range of forms utilized for the mediation of the immediate experience affected by these relationships, for the stimulation of immediate experience in other humans, and for reflection upon immediate experience for the purposes of communication. The essentially relational nature of human beings and their drive to communicate experiences with each other form the basis of communities. The specific shape and purpose of communicative forms, and the way human beings live out their relationships to each other and to the world, give communities their structure, yielding a variety of communities, intellectual, political/economic, religious, artistic, social and familial. In the religious community, the human being becomes aware of her relationship to the Transcendent through her relationship to other humans, and this community serves as the context for the communication of and reflection upon this awareness. Schleiermacher applies this theory of religious community to the liturgical life of the Protestant Church. The Christian experiences her relation to God through the communication of Jesus Christ within the Cultus, the worshipping community of individuals bound together by the Holy Spirit.