Christmas Eve: A Dialogue on the Celebration of Christmas
Digital Logos Edition
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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- 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
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)
- 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
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was born in Breslau, Silesia, Prussia. His father was a Reformed chaplain in the Prussian army. Schleiermacher attended a Moravian school and eventually went to the University of Halle. He graduated from Halle in 1794 and began to tutor the children of an aristocratic family. He left after two years and took up a chaplaincy at a hospital in Berlin. While in Berlin, Schleiermacher was influenced by the Romantic movement, particularly the emphasis on imagination and emotion. He read the works of Baruch Spinoza, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. In 1802 he became the pastor of a congregation in Stolp, Pomerania. He left in 1804 to accept a position as preacher and professor of theology at the University of Halle. In 1807, he accepted an offer to become pastor of Trinity Church in Berlin. While there, he helped found the University of Berlin and accepted a chair of theology. He also became the secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Schleiermacher’s advocacy of the unification of the Reformed and Lutheran branches of the German church led to the Prussian Union of Churches in 1817. Schleiermacher wrote his magnum opus, Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche (The Christian Faith according to the Principles of the Protestant Church), in 1821 and revised it in 1831.