In any presentation of Christian theology that aspires to be systematic, the order of topics is by no means a matter of indifference: the sense of a doctrine is, at least in part, a function of its location. Anyone who has looked into some of the leading works of Protestant dogmatics may be puzzled to find “providence,” “justification,” and “election” linked in a single discussion. At first sight, they seem to make an odd association of three theological terms that belong in different parts of a system. (“Grace,” the second term in our title, is likely to be ubiquitous in Protestant theology rather than reduced to a particular locus.) Providence has always appeared early in the order of topics, under the doctrine of God, and justification comes much later under “soteriology,” the subjective appropriation of the redemption won by Jesus Christ. The placement of election has varied. In the definitive edition of his Institutes (1559), John Calvin took the unusual step of moving the discussion of election (or predestination) from its customary attachment to the doctrine of God's providence and attached it instead to justification by faith and prayer as the principal exercise of faith; there it served to answer the question why one individual comes to faith, another doesn't. Friedrich Schleiermacher, though he placed providence and justification in their conventional systematic locations, postponed election still further than Calvin, placing it under ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church. Why, then, Schleiermacher on providence, justification, and election?

Anyone, whether historian or theologian, who writes on John Calvin is likely to venture judgments concerning his place in Christian theology. Over the years the judgments have varied widely. Calvin's admirer Benjamin B. Warfield, for example, argued that the man the Roman Catholic Church judged a heretic actually marked a fresh epoch in the history of the catholic dogma of the Trinity. A less generous opinion, made from another ecclesiastical corner, is that Calvin was at best a mere epigone of Martin Luther, at worst a debaser of pure Reformation doctrine. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was said that Calvin represented a certain “atrophy” or “degeneration” of the idea of Protestantism (Ferdinand Kattenbusch), and in the mid-twentieth century one of the most widely used textbooks of church history in Germany could still present Calvin's theology in the form of six “deviations” from the theology of Luther (Kurt Dietrich Schmidt). Yet another well-known estimate from the last century judged Calvinism a more creative intellectual force in the modern world than Lutheranism but placed Calvin himself, with Luther, on the side of the “old Protestantism,” which only tried to give a new answer to an old medieval question, “What must I do to be saved?” (Ernst Troeltsch).

The importance of the eighteenth century for interpreting religion is commonly recognised; but how its importance is perceived depends on where one sees its outcome. It was a time of intense disagreement about the nature and worth of religion. A student at Cambridge in the early years of the following century – say, around 1810 – would have been confident that the redoubtable Archdeacon Paley had finally vindicated religion, both natural and revealed, against a hundred years of criticisms. The doors of the church and the academy were still open for business as usual. Today’s admirer of the Enlightenment is more likely to find the representative figure in the sceptical David Hume or the acid Voltaire, their exposure of frail arguments and pious absurdities being taken as the final antidote to conventional religion. Yet others may think that at the end of the eighteenth century the meagre religious insights of the Enlightenment, such as they were, were taken up in various ways into the grander visions of Herder, Goethe, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. Still, there would be general agreement that the eighteenth century raised good questions about religion, whoever is held to have come up with the best answers.

Old theological controversies endured; frequently, they became entangled in domestic politics. But the main interest of the period for religious thought arises out of questions brought to the forum of public debate by the Deists. The participants in the debate, including both the defenders and the critics of religion, held overconfident opinions that time would prove to be much more parochial than they imagined. On all sides, limited perceptions of the essence, benefits, and defects of religion were naively universalised, and obstinate stereotypes of a complex and elusive mode of human behaviour were bequeathed to future generations.

The publication of Schleiermacher's anonymous book On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) has been hailed as the birth of a new theological era. But even his friends found it, in some respects, a puzzling work. Friedrich Schlegel, for instance, as we know from an amusing letter of Schleiermacher to Henriette Herz (19 June 1799), demanded to know where the new author's ‘centre’ was. Over the years, as the first book grew into the collected works, the answer to Schlegel's question did not become any easier. And yet it is obviously crucial for any attempt to sum up Schleiermacher's lifetime achievement. The task calls, not for an inventory of all his writings and ideas, but for the courage to single out dominant motifs that seem to determine, if by no means to exhaust, the thoughts that have to be left out.

A pietist of a higher order

As the first division of the collected works indicates (it was planned in thirteen volumes, of which eleven were published), Schleiermacher concerned himself with virtually every branch of theological studies except Old Testament. There are titles on philosophy of religion, systematic theology, New Testament, church history, Christian ethics, and practical theology. He was, besides, a busy preacher, and the entire second division of the works consists of ten further volumes of sermons. The third division, entitled ‘philosophy’ (in nine volumes), embraces studies in the history of philosophy; in dialectic (epistemology and metaphysics), ethics, politics, psychology, aesthetics; in philology and education. In addition, Schleiermacher was an amazingly prolific letter-writer and – through his labours on Plato's dialogues – one of Germany's most eminent classical scholars.