This post is about Friedrich Schleiermacher’s First Speech titled “Defence” from his book On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers (1799). I will summarize the main points of the speech, and at the end I will provide a brief reflection. By “cultural despisers,” Schleiermacher is speaking of the cultural elite of his time in Germany (cf. p. 10). What they despised was religion itself, or more specifically, the traditional understanding of Christian doctrine and its dogmas. Regarding the purpose of the speech, Schleiermacher is giving an apologia for his own perspective (panentheistic) on true religion in terms of the Romantic …