Friedrich Schleiermacher

Friedrich Schleiermacher was a German theologian and philosopher who founded modern hermeneutics — the theory of interpretation — and liberal Protestant theology. His On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers argued that religion is not primarily doctrine or morality but a direct feeling of absolute dependence: an immediate awareness of the infinite within finite experience.

Schleiermacher's hermeneutics proposed that understanding any text requires reconstructing the author's historical and psychological context — a method that shaped all subsequent humanistic scholarship from Dilthey to Gadamer. His theological project of making Christianity intelligible to educated modern people who had rejected orthodoxy defined the liberal tradition in Protestant thought and provoked Barth's neo-orthodox reaction a century later.