Schleiermacher, Coleridge and Kierkegaard

A good chunk of yesterday was spent at the London Seminary. They have a week of special lectures with Nick Needham. Nick has not been well enough to travel but is delivering the lectures on 19th century church history remotely. That worked quite well with very few glitches. The main audience (half online, half in person) is the students but there are a few of us others also sitting in. Nick, an excellent lecturer, is doiung tbings biographically and yesterday we considered Freidrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Samuel T Colerdige (1772-1834) and Soren Kierkegard (1813-1855). All very interesting.

Two quotes for you

Herman Bavinck

"Schleiermacher has exerted incalculable influence. All subsequent theology is dependent on him. Revelation in nature and revelation in Scripture form, in alliance with each other, a harmonious unity which satisfies the requirements of the intellect and the needs of the heart alike."

W G T Shedd

"Now as the defender and interpreter of this decidedly and profoundly theistic system of philosophy, we regard the works of Coleridge as of great and growing worth, in the present state of the educated and thinking world. It is not to be disguised that Pantheism is the most formidable opponent which truth has to encounter in the cultivated and reflecting classes. We do not here allude to the formal reception and logical defence of the system, so much as to that pantheistic way of thinking, which is unconsciously stealing into the lighter and more imaginative species of modern literature, and from them is passing over into the principles and opinions of men at large. This popularised Naturalism - this Naturalism of polite literature and of literary society - is seen in the lack of that depth and strength of tone, and that heartiness and robustness of temper, which characterise a mind into which the personality of God, and the responsibility of man cut sharply, and which does not cowardly shrink from a severe and salutary moral consciousness .... The intensely theistic character of the philosophy of Coleridge is rooted and grounded in the Personal and the Spiritual, and not in the least in the Impersonal and the Natural. Drawing in the outset, as we have remarked above, a distinct and broad line between these two realms, it keeps them apart from each other, by affirming a difference in essence, and steadfastly resists any and every attempt to amalgamate them into one sole substance. The doctrine of creation, and not of emanation or of modification, is the doctrine by which it constructs its theory of the Universe, and the doctrine of responsible self-determination, and not of irresponsible natural development, is the doctrine by which it constructs its systems of Philosophy and Religion."