Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Reformed Orthodox Doctrine of Predestination

This chapter analyses Schleiermacher's essay Über die Lehre von der Erwählung (1819), translated into English as On the Doctrine of Election, and compares his position both to that of John Calvin and to a Reformed Orthodox source: the Leiden Synopsis Purioris Theologiae (1625). It concludes that Schleiermacher does not do justice to the nuanced way in which the Reformed heritage was elaborated on by the later generations of theologians who made use of the scholastic method. Schleiermacher systematizes Calvin's position from his own perspective approaching the theme of election from the perspective of history instead of from eternity and equating history with the unfolding of the divine decree. Compared with the nuanced assessment of the Augustinian and Reformational heritage in Reformed Orthodoxy Schleiermacher seems to over-systematize the heritage - a fault of which he blames the Reformed Orthodox - leading to a position that can easily be interpreted as deterministic or even as pantheistic.