Page "Systematic theology" Paragraph 3

In the 19th century, primarily in Protestant circles, a new kind of systematic theology arose: the attempt to demonstrate that Christian doctrine formed a more tightly coherent system grounded in some core axiom or axioms.

Such theologies often involved a more drastic pruning and reinterpretation of traditional belief in order to cohere with the axiom or axioms.

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, for instance, produced Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche ( The Christian Faith According to the Principles of the Protestant Church ) in the 1820s, in which the core idea is the universal presence amongst humanity ( sometimes more hidden, sometimes more explicit ) of a feeling or awareness of ' absolute dependence '; all theological themes are reinterpreted as descriptions or expressions of modifications of this feeling.