Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834) was a German theologian and philosopher born in 1768 in Breslau, Lower Silesia. His father was a minister in a reformed protestant church. He was educated at the University of Halle from where he studied theology and other independent courses. After completing his course, he became a private tutor and two years later (1796) he became a minister. During his time at the university, he studied the philosophies of Aristotle, Plato and Immanuel Kant. He denied Orthodox Christianity and is often known as ‘Father of modern Protestant Theology’.
Schleiermacher studied Kant and accepted the ethical terms but rejected Kant’s deep e***asis on universal laws of morality. He argued that religion was not a philosophy, nor natural science but rather the feeling, belief and action. It is the feeling that God exists as opposed to the rational thought. The knowledge of soul and the knowledge of God are inseparable and thus Religion is more subjective i.e. individual (one’s personal experience). He said that in order to have this feeling, one has to look into the soul or consciousness after which one discovers the feeling for the unity of multiple things. For him religion is primarily neither morality nor belief or knowledge but an immediate self-consciousness or feeling of absolute dependence on God. He believed that Christianity (Protestant) is the specific form of consciousness shaped through Jesus Christ and the faith in him whereas the church is foundation to the experience of God.
He was influenced by Baruch Spinoza a pantheistic philosopher and said that Religion is a sense and taste for the infinite (the underlying unity or wholeness), not already present in the senses but rather reveals itself to feeling. And this feeling creates the idea of God in the individual and further imagination creates the concept of God as either a theistic supreme being outside the world or the pantheistic (many things of existence are really one God) to which personal characteristics are not defined i.e. comes close to mystical experience but does not identify the world as "infinite and eternal." And hence for him, religion is centered on feeling and God is the feeling of absolute dependence.