Schleiermacher's Defense Of Christianity In Baruch Spinoza

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Through 1750-1800, radical Enlightenment was at its peak when it come to critiquing religion, especially Christianity. People like Spinoza, Reimarus, and Hume heavily criticized Christianity along with Jesus and the God in the Christian Bible. The likes of Schleiermacher and Hegel came to Christianity’s defense along with their theological and philosophical reasonings. During the radical Enlightenment, many started to realize what is really being stated in the Bible and started to go against the scripture, one example is Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza believed that the God that is portrayed in the Bible is a “God that is highly immoral and arbitrary so we have an additional reason to doubt that religion based on revelation can give us an accurate …show more content…

Friedrich Schleiermacher being considered as the father of Liberal theology uses it to help him prove his points. Even though Schleiermacher agrees with Kant that God can’t be seen, he believes that the essence of religion comes more from feeling and emotion than from concepts like dogma and revelation. His explanation of Jesus tries to be sympathetic towards Christianity and places a positive light onto it. Schleiermacher sees Jesus not as God, but a mere mortal who chose to be morally good til his end. “We are capable of achieving a god- consciousness to the same extent and of the same kind as Jesus” (Alvarez, Handout 1.) He is stating that if Jesus is human, that it can aspire us to try to be morally good just like him. Hegel uses philosophical reasoning to help Christianity. Hegel argues that Christianity is a form of self-conscious involving God in both philosophy and religion itself. He believes that there are no two realities and two objects, but “one sensible and the other supersensible.” (Alvarez, Handout 1.) Hegel also believes that God is not an intangible being, but that he is us; a finite being and that God was incarnated in

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