AUTHOR: Ovidiu Cristian NEDU
THE PROJECT OF A NATURAL AND SECULAR RELIGION, AT FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER ȘI DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
Danubius, XLI, Galati, 2023, pp. 337-366.
Abstract
Under the influence of the rationalist and humanist tendencies of the Enlightenment, Schleiermacher attempted the construction of a new kind of spirituality, based not on a revelation received from above but on the natural human experience. Religious affections are considered a natural human experience present, to various degrees, even in the most ordinary states, such as the sensorial interaction with the Universe. Piety is different from knowledge and action and consists in the direct feeling of the intimate connection of the individual being to the Whole, to the Universe. Religious intuition points to the utter dependence of every finite being on the Infinite. Not only human experiences and culture, but the entire Cosmos naturally evolves towards the unity revealed in religion. Religion becomes a human affair, a chapter of anthropology. It is not different from any other humanistic science, being based not on a „God” but on the human experience of that „God” which, in the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, coalesces with the Whole, with the Totality.
At its climax, religion will be entirely dissolved in human culture, at a point where humanity will fully appropriate the unitary perspective of religion. Secularity is the ultimate destiny of religion, which tends to lose its separate identity through a total pervasion in the immanence.