The Eternal Covenant: Schleiermacher on God and Natural Science

In The Eternal Covenant: Schleiermacher on God and Natural Science, I defend a novel account of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s well-known, but little-understood, proposal for an ‘eternal covenant’ between faith and science. Contrary to received wisdom, I show how the ‘eternal covenant’ is the result of a complex case from the doctrine of God and divine action, using arguments primarily borrowed from Leibniz and Spinoza. Schleiermacher synthesizes arguments from both figures to secure the in-principle explicability of everything in the nature system though natural (i.e. secondary) causes, thus countering certain notions of divine action. However, his case is not only negative. Far from a mere concession, for Christians who recognize that the nature system is both intended for love and wisely ordered, the world is a supremely beautiful divine artwork and is, therefore, the absolute self-revelation of the divine essence.