Volume 11 (2019)

Introducing the Issue
Foreword to Ian Wishart’s Schleiermacher’s Interpretation of the Bible
Sean McGrath

When the following monograph first appeared, as a thesis successfully defended at the Toronto School of Theology in 1968, very little work had been done on Schleiermacher’s sermons. Ian Wishart produced one of the most careful studies of Schleiermacher’s preaching ever to have appeared in English. The work has been inaccessible until now, available only at the University of Toronto, where it was shelved alongside other successfully defended theses. It is our pleasure to publish it in revised form in Analecta Hermeneutica, and, through the revolution of open access, offer it to the world. Since the thesis was written, Barth’s commentary on Schleiermacher’s sermons has been published.1 But there is little repetition here. Wishart’s approach to Schleiermacher’s sermons could not be more different than Barth’s. Barth has little time for hermeneutics, and even less time for transcendental psychology; Wishart, recognizing Schleiermacher’s decisive contributions to both these fields, reads Schleiermacher’s sermons as complementary, indeed essential, to his hermeneutics and psychology.