A project this size has had to be a team effort. Each of the translators is grateful for the specific knowledge, gifts, and skills that our two colleagues have brought to the project. Terrence N. Tice has unparalleled familiarity with the breadth of Schleiermacher’s corpus, with his consistent language usage across that corpus and, for the most part, across time. Tice has often reminded us that “Schleiermacher has another word he uses for that meaning.” Catherine L. Kelsey has focused knowledge of how Christology provides the structural framework for this dogmatic work and deep familiarity with the corresponding preaching. She has been the one to insist that the English sentences “make sense” to readers unfamiliar with German academic writing. Edwina Lawler is a Germanist and frequent translator of a variety of Schleiermacher’s works. She has made sure that we noticed every word in the German text and accounted for the grammatical details. Kelsey and Tice have managed the thousands of details that constitute editing the text and bringing it to publication.
The three of us could not have completed this project without the help of a larger team as well. We are deeply appreciative of a number of persons who have helped us manage portions of the manuscript. Philippa Anastos, Jeremy Garber, Emily Flemming, Thomas Barlow, Judith Streit, and Rosa Henneke have each contributed to moving the text from one draft to the next through four drafts of each of the 172 propositions.
Our commitment to providing a translation into English of every single reference to a Latin or Greek or German text has been a major undertaking in itself. We are grateful for the then-called Robert E. Speer Library at Princeton Theological Seminary and Ira J. Taylor Library at Iliff School of Theology. The skilled assistance of librarians at each has been invaluable. Particular thanks to Laura Harris, Katie Fisher, and Alice Runis (for online database access) at the Taylor Library. Some of the texts to which Schleiermacher referred have never been translated into English. We turned to Kathleen Kienzle, AB, AM, and Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Professor of the Practice in Latin and Romance Languages, Harvard Divinity School, for about 101 separate quotations. We provided them a small amount of context, and asked them to provide translations. Their fine work can be found throughout the footnotes. Near the end we also discovered a couple more items, for which two Iliff School of Theology colleagues provided assistance. Thank you to Alton Templin and Richard Valantasis for help in a pinch.
We want to acknowledge several persons at Westminster John Knox Press whose trust that we could accomplish such a large undertaking and encouragement, as it took far longer than we intended, made it possible for this translation to appear. Donald K. McKim and Robert Ratcliff have been patient and sure editors. We are also very grateful for the skill of our production manager, Julie Tonini; copyeditor, Tina E. Noll; and typesetter, Allison Taylor. This project has required extraordinary attention to detail all the way to the end. The volume editors take responsibility for any errors that might remain.
Finally, we want to acknowledge the importance for all forms of Schleiermacher scholarship of the critical editions of Schleiermacher’s work published in the Kritische Gesamtausgabe Schleiermachers (KGA) by the press Walter de Gruyter. We have translated the original publication of Schleiermacher’s second, reworked edition of 1830–1831, but, as you can see in the footnotes from the works to which we refer the reader, we have been in scholarly conversation with English and German editions of many of Schleiermacher’s various works, almost all of which have been published in German by Georg Reimer and its successor Walter de Gruyter. We hope to have matched the quality of textual care that marks the KGA and to have joined our German colleagues in providing an enduring contribution to theologians and pastors for generations to come.
The editors
Catherine L. Kelsey and Terrence N. Tice
August 2015