Schleiermacher, Bonhoeffer, and the Emerging Church

Today I read two student essays prior to supervising, one on Schleiermacher, and one on Bonhoeffer. In one conversation we compared the Romantic setting to the postmodern, and noticed that many of Schleiermacher's questions to theology are surprisingly similar to "Emerging" ones. The kinds of questions raised by Schleiermacher, and later by Bonhoeffer, and the kinds of tensions they faced in two different centuries, have striking parallels with the Emerging conversation (at least, with the UK bit of the conversation that I'm au fait with, although this may have relevance elsewhere in the world too.)

Big shifts in culture and philosophy, accompanied by the catastrophic events of war, cause people to ask searching questions about what we do and why. They also make us feel that we are the first people ever to feel like this. (I'm reminded, in fact, of the sweet and comical fact that teenagers can't ever believe their parents know what it feels like to fall in love...) We feel we are in new territory, ground that has never been walked before. And indeed we are, in one sense. Our experience is not a repeat of prior history - as von Balthasar put it neatly,

No historical situation is ever absolutely similar to any other preceding period; none can therefore furnish its own solutions as so many master keys capable of resolving our contemporary problems.

Balthasar, Présence, viii. 

And yet it is also true that there is nothing new under the sun. The value in looking back to previous reforms and revolutions is not that we need to stay the same, or emulate our forbears, but simply that there are aspects of being human, and aspects of being Church, in which it makes no sense to reinvent the wheel. The territory we are in is both old and new, and the theology and wisdom we need is both old and new. Arrogance will insist that it is all new. But it isn't. And the truly new will only emerge when we have the humility to admit that people have been here before us.