Lecture Series: Daniel Weidner. The Letter, Not the Spirit. Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics Revisited

Trained in German and comparative literature Daniel Weidner received his PhD in 2000 and his Habilitation (second thesis) in 2009 at the Freie Universität Berlin. He teaches German and Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität and has been Visiting Professor in Gießen, Basel, Stanford, and Chicago.
His main areas of research are the interrelation of religion and literature, theories of secularization, the history of philology and literary theory, and German-Jewish literature.

ABSTRACT: Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is usually considered as ‘idealist’ or ‘romantic,’ but recently it has also been suggested that this is related to its Protestant background. And indeed, it was delivered as a lecture course on the hermeneutics of the New Testament, which seems to support its orientation toward spirit. However, a closer look at this neglected context shows that Schleiermacher mostly deals not with any form of spiritual exegesis or with ‘Einfühlung’ but with specific problems that Biblical Criticism raised and which rather point to the materiality of the text: for example, the (Aramaic-Greek) mixed language of the New Testaments, its insecure textual basis and its composition from fragments. All these features of the New Testament present radical obstacles for understanding, thereby shifting Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics from its idealist and verbalist orientation towards a hermeneutics of (written) scripture. The paper pleas for a rereading of Schleiermacher as a material hermeneutics and argues for a more complex conception how the religious heritage influences hermeneutic theory.