Friedrich Schleiermacher is known as the Father of Theological Liberalism. Karl Barth grew up in the shadow of, and under the stature of men who drank freely from the fountain waters that Schleiermacher’s theologizing represented. Barth left his ‘Liberal Theology’ studies, for the small country parish in his homeland of Switzerland. He tried to preach and teach the Schleiermacherean theology that he had learned to his “flock,” but in light of World War I and the reality that the ground of Schleiermacher’s theology was actually the source of the War, Man; Barth had a crisis of faith, and reformulated his theological views, primarily by going back to the strange new world of the Bible — starting with Paul’s Romans. His commentary on Romans thrust him back into the realm of academia, once again; this time he would start a tsunami shift for modern theology that is still being felt today (in many ways we are just getting started). One of the lectures that he provided for his students (of the many over the years), an early lecture, was on the theology of his old teacher (mediated through his personal teachers like Hermann), Schleiermacher. Here is what he had to say in criticism of Schleiermacher’s rather ”creative” theological approach:

[T]he first difficulty to be noted obviously arises for Schleiermacher from the fact that linking proclamation to the figure of the Savior unavoidably means linking it to the Bible. It was clear that even Schleiermacher could not self-evidently find his Christ, the Christ of synthesis, in the Bible. He was happy to find John’s Gospel in the Bible, which he found to be congenial to his message. He gave homilies on it for four years from 1823 to 1826, and afterward as well as before he turned again and again to Johannine texts. But no matter how he might interpret John, he could not preach only on this gospel. The whole of the Old Testament lay before him like a rock. The solution that Schleiermacher found here is radical as it possibly could be. In all the years that concern us he never preached on an Old Testament text, and a glance at his lectures on practical theology . . . the printed version of which is from the same period, shows us that this was no accident but by principle and design: “If I take a text from the Old Testament, I place myself and my hearers in a historical situation and give them an alien consciousness and evoke a train of thought that is not related to what I ought to derive from the text if I am to speak as a Christian. . . . We must treat our hearers as Christians and not as people who have still to become such and who have to be led through the torment of the law.” I cannot recall ever having come across a passage in these sermons in which Schleiermacher speaks of Old Testament man and his relation to God except as something abhorrent. It is obvious, however, that even the New Testament does not fit smoothly into the schematism of his teaching. Much in the attitude of Jesus and the apostles and in the wording of the biblical text seems to point in other directions than he would like and to breathe a very different spirit from his. The total impression of the relation of the preacher to his texts is that of violent wrestling in which one hardly knows which to admire most: the incontestable seriousness with which he exerts himself really to let the text speak for itself (in this regard he does not like to leave any term in the text unexplained); the exegetical thoroughness with which he often tests the patience of his readers for many pages with perspicacious historical explanations leading up to what he wishes to convey, or finally the dialectical skill with which he is able to exploit the situation happily created by exegesis in favor of his own lessons and admonitions.) [Karl Barth, The Theology Of Schleiermacher, 15-16]

A lesson here, and one that many actually charge Barth with ironically (i.e. the one that Barth is critiquing Schleiermacher of), is to avoid what Barth calls “perspicacious historical explanations leading up to what he wishes to convey, or finally the dialectical skill with which he is able to exploit the situation happily created by exegesis in favor of his own lessons and admonitions. . . .” This provides a critique (one that Barth and T. F. Torrance would make) of what we (and when I say “we” I mean modern “Evangelicals” alongside “Liberals” “Higher Critics” et al.) call the Literal, Grammatical, Historical (LGH) method of interpretation. This is the approach that engages in historical reconstruction of the text (as well as historical, evidentiary apologetics of the ‘events’ in the text), as the mode for providing the ground from which we can then finally engage in the actual interpretation (exegesis, through “Literal/Grammatical” means) of the reconstructed text.

To bring this back to Evangelical Calvinism, and to piggy-back on Barth’s critique of Schleiermacher, we, instead of following an un-critical application of the LGH (wherein we can mould the wax-nose of Scripture through our historicist man-handling . . . like Scheliermacher); seek to engage the text of Scripture from what T. F. Torrance would call its depth-dimension (Adam Nigh in our forthcoming book has a chapter on this very topic). So that instead of having a reconstructed history (from our fertile minds) as the control and super-structure of the text (or the inner-coherence and logic); the reality (res) of the text, instead, becomes the one that Jesus (in the text) proclaims as its center and depth — Himself! (John 5:39). This is something that has moved me away from a strict LGH hermeneutic, viz. what is voiced in Barth’s critique of Schleiermacher (making the text conform to my inner-feelings projected out upon the text as the history that purportedly supports and shapes it).