The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (2171 page)

(Gk., schisma, ‘tear, rent’). A formal division of a religious body into separate parties. In Christian usage the word refers to sects or churches separating from communion with one another where
heresy
is not involved. Early schismatic bodies (i.e. from the
Catholic
Church) included the Novatianists and
Donatists
. The Orthodox and Catholic churches have been divided by schism (the ‘East–West schism’) since 1054. See also
GREAT SCHISM
. Schism appeared early in the history of Buddhism, due in part to the Buddha's refusal to appoint a successor as leader of the Order and his reluctance to impose a rigid discipline in matters of monastic practice.
A schism (
sa
ghabheda
) is defined as occurring when nine fully ordained monks leave a community together, as a result of dissent, and perform their own communal services apart. If the number is less than nine, there is ‘dissent’ rather than schism. To cause a schism maliciously or from selfish motives is considered a grave offence and one destined for swift retribution (
anant
rya
).

 
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(1768–1834).
Christian
Protestant
theologian, sometimes called ‘the father of modern protestantism’. He followed his father into the
Moravian Brethren
in 1783, and attended a Moravian school. He went to the university at Halle, and in 1794 was ordained into the ministry of the Reformed Church, and became a chaplain at the Charité Hospital in Berlin. Here he associated with an intellectual circle which included the two von Schlegel brothers, and in which there was much criticism of prevailing religion. In response, he wrote
Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verachtern
(On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 1798). He shared the distaste of the cultured despisers for the arid philosophy of religion which issued in
Deism
, and even more for the petty and futile divisions of the Church over dogma and outward form. But this, he argued, is not truly ‘religion’. Thus ‘true religion is sense and taste for the Infinite’. This sense of the Whole, not (as in Newtonian physics) as a passive arena of inert forces, but as an active movement toward the human, evoking a certain feeling (
Gefühl
), is the origin of religion, ‘raised above all error’ because it is primordial and inescapable—it precedes the organization of church and doctrine. But a feeling of what? Schleiermacher here pointed to its relation to the commonly experienced human feeling of dependence (
Abhangigkeit
), but in the religious case, this is a feeling of absolute dependence (‘das Gefühl der schlechthinigen Abhangigkeit’).
In 1800, he applied his understanding to ethics in
Monologen
(Soliloquies). In
Der Christliche Glaube …
(The Christian Faith), every religion is seen as the consequence of the feeling of absolute dependence, but Christianity derives from ‘the Ideal Representative of Religion’, i.e. from Jesus of Nazareth whose consciousness was entirely taken up with this awareness of God.

 
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see
SHNE’UR, ZALMAN.

 
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Scholasticism
.

A Christian intellectual movement which endeavoured to penetrate, and perhaps to bring into a single system, the fundamental (especially revealed) articles of faith by use of reason. It flourished in the 13th cent., and is characterized by the production of
Summae
(i.e. summations) of theology and philosophy. The best known of these are the
Summae
of Thomas
Aquinas
. The method of scholasticism was that of disputation, in which problems were divided into parts, objections were raised and answered, and a conclusion was reached. Scholasticism was thus an assertion of the responsibility of reason in relation to revelation.

 
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