ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to the claim with which this study began: that the assumption of the principle of parallel priority underwrites disagreement between traditional and modern accounts of sin, and that Schleiermacher’s account demonstrates that this assumption is unnecessary. It gathers the evidence and arguments for this and related claims and explains what this shows in terms of the broader impasse in theological debates over sin and its origins, but also for Schleiermacher’s account of agency and his relation to the theological tradition. This chapter also considers the place and promise of Schleiermacher’s account of sin and nature in conversation with recent theology-and-science work on the matter and argues that Schleiermacher’s work offers a neglected and advantageous alternative. Finally, this chapter compares Schleiermacher’s account with the history of theology as told in the years since Schleiermacher’s death. In so doing it becomes clear that significant elements of this historiography are untenable, especially those which see Schleiermacher’s thought, and as a result modern theology as a whole, as principally informed by the thought of Immanuel Kant over and against ancient and medieval thinkers. In consequence, this chapter argues for the revision of central assumptions about what makes modern theology modern.
