This is the first translation into English of Friedrich Schleiermacher's key essay of 1819 on the doctrine of predestination. Published almost 200 years after the original German text, which marked Schleiermacher's first contribution on a specific dogmatic topic, this book offers not only a magisterial translation, but also an excellent introduction and helpful endnotes.
Schleiermacher's essay first appeared in the short-lived Theologische Zeitschrift (1819–22) as a contribution to the ongoing debate about the Prussian Church Union, which had been decreed by King Frederic William III of Prussia in 1817. In it, Schleiermacher, one of the spiritual fathers and most outspoken advocates of that Union, responded to the recently published Aphorismen by the Lutheran Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider. His essay explores the doctrine of predestination through close examination and continuous juxtaposition of Lutheran and Reformed interpretations. He sets out to defend the Calvinist against the Lutheran position as the more consistent theory up to the point where it asserted foreordained perdition, and in a spectacular volte-face then abandoned double predestination in favour of the eventual universal restoration of all human beings. Schleiermacher's essay represents one of the most significant interpretations of election since the Reformation, and its translation into English is an important contribution to Schleiermacher scholarship.
In their detailed introduction, Nicol and Jørgenson first provide the historical theological background to the topic by outlining the interpretations of election advanced by Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, Lutheran orthodoxy and John Calvin. This is followed by an illuminating discussion of Schleiermacher's understanding of election, starting with a section on Bretschneider and the Prussian Church Union and continuing with dogmatic aspects: scripture and reason; creation, redemption and the singular decree; election and human solidarity; and election, dogmatics and the task of theology. The translators very aptly characterise Schleiermacher's interpretation as a ‘creative appropriation of Calvin's version’, with the emphasis on creative rather than appropriation.
The translation of the essay itself is not only highly accurate, but makes the text accessible in a way the German original possibly is not. To start with, Nicol and Jørgenson introduce thirteen extremely helpful subheadings, thus structuring what in the original is a continuous text of about 30,000 words without subdivisions. They also provide extensive endnotes, giving original German words or phrases to let the reader assess their translation of unusual or difficult terms, and providing bibliographical references, biographical information on persons mentioned in the essay, full quotations and other useful explanations.
In linguistic terms, the translation cannot be praised highly enough. It is not easy to render early nineteenth-century German into accessible modern English, and in particular not Schleiermacher's style: he has a habit of taking the reader along his diverse trains of thought as he develops his arguments, thus leading them to dead ends and wrong conclusions without announcing first that this is where he is heading. He does so in the typical fashion of his time, with long, complex sentences and plenty of relative pronouns – which cannot be rendered literally in English without causing confusion. Nicol and Jørgenson very successfully manage to circumnavigate such linguistic cliffs by cutting long sentences into shorter chunks and substituting pronouns with proper nouns in order to avoid ambiguity. They also carefully modernise their translation of the somewhat antiquated original, for instance by rendering Schleiermacher's ‘so will mich immer bedünken’ with ‘it will always seem to me’.
I could only detect a single spelling mistake, and one instance of an erroneous translation of a German homonym, where Preise is rendered as ‘cost’ rather than ‘praise’. Otherwise, this is an exemplary, impressive and very accessible translation of Schleiermacher's seminal essay.
