Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Reformed Orthodox Doctrine of Predestination

This chapter assesses Friedrich Schleiermacher's view of the Canons of Dort and of the Reformed Orthodox understanding of Predestination in his essay Über die Lehre von der Erwählung (1819), comparing it with the Leiden Synopsis Purioris Theologiae (1625), in which Antonius Walaeus articulates the Reformed position in his disputation on predestination. The chapter concludes that Schleiermacher does not do justice to the nuanced way in which the Reformed heritage was elaborated on by the later generations of theologians who made use of the scholastic method.
An essential difference between Schleiermacher and Calvin is that Schleiermacher approaches the theme of election from the perspective of history instead of from eternity and that he equates history with the unfolding of the divine decree. Compared with the nuanced assessment of the Augustinian and Reformational heritage in Reformed Orthodoxy Schleiermacher seems to over-systematize the heritage – a fault of which he blames the Reformed Orthodox – leading even to a position that can easily be interpreted as deterministic or even as pantheistic.