... in what is perhaps the most famous line from the Speeches, Friedrich Schleiemacher holds that 'true religion is sense and taste for the infinite."…

... the masterful Glaubenslehre (Teaching on Faith), Scheiermacher took up once more the issue of the pious consciousness and analyzed it with greater precision...

Now Schleiermacher holds that "to feel oneself as totally dependent and to be conscious of being in relation with God are one and the same thing." As in Speeches, God has been discovered, not through metaphysical argumentation or scientific demonstration, but through introspection and intuition. But the "sense and taste for the infinite of the Speeches" has been specified and rendered more pointed in the Glaubenslehre as the feeling of absolute dependency.

Both are descriptions of the immediate intuition of the divine presence that can be found in human consciousness, but the second formula is more “existential” than the first, since it highlights the sensing of God precisely as the one who bears us up in our ontological insufficiency. God is felt, in accord with the Glaubenslehre formulation, as the steady ground, the rock, the anchor of our dramatically unsteady lives. In relation to any other reality in the universe, we sense our relative limitation, dependency, and neediness, but in relation to God, we feel the total dependency of our finite being, our sheer emptiness and insufficiency. God is discovered, in short, in the context of ultimate limit experience.

Excerpt from book        And Now I See | Robert Barron |