Who Said That?

"Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. ... Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it. Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are the reflection of this miracle. Similarly belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of a religion without God, and it would be pure contemplation of the universe; the desire for personal immortality seems rather to show a lack of religion, since religion assumes a desire to lose oneself in the infinite, rather than to preserve one's own finite self."

You know how this works!  Leave your guess in the comments section below.  Please, no google searches or cheating.   

Update on Saturday, January 19, 2008 at 05:53PM by Kim Riddlebarger

This comes from Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern theological liberalism, and is taken from his "Addresses on Religion" (1799).

Comments

[Will]

Friedrich Schleiermacher

[Will]

Ha! I was just joking! You can tell I'm a seminary student...

[Bruce]

Sounds like Deepak Choprah to me...

[Rev. Bob]

If it isn't Schleiermacher, it is certainly an example of the triumph of Schleiermacher!

[Nathan]

William James.

[Matt]

Is it Deepak's future wife, Oprah Choprah?

[art]

Derrida

[GLW Johnson]

Paul Tillich

["lee n. field"]

El Ron?

[Jim Bryan]

I'm going to have to say Thomas Jefferson. It sounds like something he would have written.

[Matt Holst]

Brian Maclaren or some Postmodernist theologian.

[jim cronfel]

John Stott said it since annihilationism denies infinity.

www.michaelshorton.info