Christmas Eve: A Dialogue on the Celebration of Christmas

by Friedrich Schleiermacher

Publisher:

T&T Clark

, 1890

Overview

Written as a Socratic-style dialogue, Christmas Eve recounts a number of conversations during a banquet held on Christmas Eve by a woman named Ernestine. Through discussions between the various characters, Schleiermacher communicates his views on theology and religion—particularly as they relate to the role of Christ. The people represented in the book are taken from the types of people Schleiermacher associated with—the educated, cultured section of society. These were the type of people Schleiermacher preached to and prayed with. It is thus representative of Schleiermacher’s liberal understanding of theology as descriptive of the experiences of the people in a religious community.

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Key Features

• Offers clear clear insight into the vitality and power of the Christian regeneration, and its supreme significance for the whole life of mankind
• Presents the ideas of Schleiermacher through the use of Socratic-dialogue
• Includes a brief history of the origins of Christmas within the church

Contents

Top Highlights

“And it is only when the individual contemplates and cultivates humanity as a living fellowship of individuals, and carries its spirit and consciousness in himself, and loses and finds again his separate existence in it, that he has the higher life and the peace of God in himself.” (Page 70)

“Accordingly what we celebrate is just what we are in ourselves as a whole; in other words, it is human nature, or whatever you may call it, contemplated and known from the divine principle.” (Page 69)

“the very idea is fitted to excite a certain mood and sentiment in the souls of men; and” (Page 62)

“the religious music produced at first a quiet satisfaction and retirement of soul.” (Page 10)

“ can satisfy her religious sense in the bosom of her family” (Page 17)

Product Details

• Author: Friedrich Schleiermacher
• Translator: W. Hastie
• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Publication Date: 1890
• Pages: 80
• Christian Group: Evangelicals
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Topic: Philosophy of Religion

About Friedrich Schleiermacher

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), often called the father of modern theology, was a German philosopher and one of the greatest Protestant theologians of the 19th century. He is often regarded as the father of modern hermeneutics, i.e. the science of interpreting the Bible, and known for his many other works in the area of systematic theology. Otto Weber states that, “Retrospectively, the dogmatics of the 19th century can be understood essentially as the direct, indirect, or negatively received influence of the theology of Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher, one of the most powerful personalities in all of church history, in some ways comparable with Augustine.”