Eternal Blessedness for All?

Anette Hagan is Senior Curator of Rare Book Collections at the National Library of Scotland. She is also an elder in the Church of Scotland and is fully bilingual. Her interest in Schleiermacher arose during her undergraduate years in the early 1990s at the University of Mainz, Germany. It came to focus in a Master of Theology thesis on his doctrine of predestination at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, greatly extended in this work.

Eternal blessedness for all? This work shows how the acclaimed father of modern theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher, brilliantly approached this problem. It took many twists and turns of historical and philosophically minded analyses, however, for him to get to a theologically appropriate answer. This book unpacks those efforts in manageable form, based on a close examination of a pivotal 1819 essay, On the Doctrine of Election; his masterpiece, Christian Faith; sermons; and other related sources. Schleiermacher was the first modern theologian of stature to endorse the universal restoration of all humanity. This study also displays the historical, ecumenical, and doctrinal contexts in which his views were fashioned. It takes a careful look at the contemporary reception of his heterodox, universalist reinterpretation of the traditional Reformed doctrine of double predestination and of Lutheran alternatives, showing that his public stance was, in fact, rather ambiguous, for reasons made clear here. Finally, it examines reasons for his failure to convince contemporary theologians and concludes with an assessment of his interpretation of the doctrine of the one eternal divine decree of universal election in view of current interests in theology.