Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit

The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology

Gary Dorrien

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781119016540, 9780470673317
• eBook ISBN: 9781444355895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Winner: 2012The American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in Theology and Religious Studies, PROSE Award. In this thought-provoking new work, the world renowned theologian Gary Dorrien reveals how Kantian and post-Kantian idealism were instrumental in the foundation and development of modern Christian theology.

• Presents a radical rethinking of the roots of modern theology
• Reveals how Kantian and post-Kantian idealism were instrumen t al in the foundation and development of modern Christian theology
• Shows how it took Kant's writings on ethics and religion to launch a fully modern departure in religious thought
• Dissects Kant's three critiques of reason and his moral conception of religion
• Analyzes alternative arguments offered by Schleiermacher, Schelling, Hegel, and others - moving historically and chronologically through key figures in European philosophy and theology
• Presents notoriously difficult and intellectual arguments in a lucid and accessible manner

Chapter 1

Introduction

Kantian Concepts, Liberal Theology, and Post-Kantian Idealism

This is a book about the role of Kantian and post-Kantian idealism in founding modern theology. More specifically, it is a book about the impact of Kantian and post-Kantian idealism in creating what came to be called “liberal” theology in Germany and “modernist” theology in Great Britain. My descriptive argument is implied in this description, which folds together with my normative argument: Modern religious thought originated with idealistic convictions about the spiritual ground and unifying reality of freedom, and there is no vital progressive theology that does not speak with idealistic conviction, notwithstanding the ironies and problems of doing so.

Liberal theology was born in largely illiberal contexts in eighteenth-century Germany and England, a fact that helps to explain why much of it was far from liberal. Most of the great thinkers in this story were Germans, the key founding thinkers were Germans, and there was a vital intellectual movement of liberal theology in Germany for a century before a similar movement existed in Britain. Thus, the German story dominates this book. British theology comes into the picture mostly as it engages German idealism, as do the book's principal other non-German thinkers, S

ren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, although the British story begins with a figure that preceded Kant by a century, John Locke. For better and for worse, German thinkers dominated modern theology right up to the point that liberal theology in Germany crashed and burned, after which the field was still dominated by the intellectual legacies of Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the Ritschlian School.

The idea of a distinctly modern approach to Christian theology built upon early Enlightenment attempts in Britain and Germany to blend Enlightenment reason with a Christian worldview. I will argue, however, that early Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism did not privilege the questions of subjectivity, historical relativity, and freedom, and thus did not develop a liberal approach to theology. It took Kant's three critiques of reason and his writings on religion and ethics to launch a fully modern departure in religious thought, through which Kant became the quintessential modern philosopher and inspired rival streams of theology and idealism.

I will argue that Kant's influence in modern religious thought is unsurpassed by any thinker, that his use of metaphysical reason is usually misconstrued, that he was a subjective idealist who mediated between extreme subjective idealism and objective idealism, that his recognition of universal forms of experience paved the way to post-Kantian objective idealism, that his moral faith mattered more to him than anything except his idea of freedom to which it was linked, and that the key to his system – terrible ironies notwithstanding – was the emancipating and unifying reality of freedom. I will argue that Kant's transcendental idealism laid the groundwork for all post-Kantian versions and that the post-Kantian idealisms of Hegel, Schleiermacher, Friedrich W. J. Schelling, and, very differently, Kierkegaard, surpassed Kant in creatively construing religious experience and the divine. I will argue that the dominant forms of liberal theology flowed out of German idealism and tried to calibrate the right kind of idealism to distinct positions about the way that any religion is true. And I will argue that even the important critiques of religious idealism proffered by Kierkegaard, William James, G. E. Moore, Paul Tillich, and Karl Barth demonstrated its adaptability and continued importance.

Philosophers loom large in this story. Kant defined himself against René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, G. W. Leibniz and Christian Wolff, the leaders of the German Enlightenment, and John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume, the luminaries of British empiricism. By the late 1780s, everyone had to deal with Kant and the beginnings of post-Kantian idealism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge plays a major role in this book for doing so, as Coleridge brought post-Kantian idealism to England. Kierkegaard plays a similar role in the book's scheme by prefiguring the twentieth-century reaction against religious idealism from a standpoint that assumed it. Alfred North Whitehead plays a key role in this book's account of the beginning of process theology in England. None of these thinkers was a theologian.

One should not make too much of the lack of theologians. Schleiermacher and Barth, the major Protestant theologians of the modern era, are central figures in this book's narrative. The book also features theologians Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, Wilhelm Herrmann, Ernst Troeltsch, Hastings Rashdall, William Temple, and Paul Tillich. But it matters that non-theologians played such important roles in founding and shaping modern theology.

Until the eighteenth century, Christian theology operated exclusively within houses of biblical and ecclesiastical authority. External authorities established and compelled what had to be believed on specific points of doctrine if one was to claim the Christian name. In theory, the Anglican tradition cracked open the rule of external authority by making reason an authority second to scripture and (in Richard Hooker's formulation) ahead of church tradition. But Anglican theology up to and through the Enlightenment was cautious about what it meant to recognize the authority of reason. The English tradition, though producing a major forerunner of modern theology, John Locke, did not produce any important founders. An ethos of provincialism and the oppressive weight of the state church slowed the development of liberalizing trends in British theology. Plus, the greatest British philosopher, David Hume, was someone that religious thinkers had to get around, not someone who helped them get somewhere. The modern departure in religious thought had to wait for the later Enlightenment, biblical criticism, the liberalizing of German universities, Kant, an upsurge of Romantic and Absolute idealism, and Schleiermacher's determination to liberalize Christian theology within the context of the Christian church and tradition.

The founding and early development of liberal theology was sufficiently rich in Germany and Britain that this book restricts itself to accounting for it, always in a manner that focuses on the importance of German idealism. I do not pursue the founding of liberal religious thought in other national contexts, aside from occasional references that illuminate what happened in Germany and Britain. I do not take the story of liberal theology beyond the responses of Barth and Tillich to it; otherwise I would have another multi-volume project on my hands. For the same reason, plus two more, I do not describe the attempts to develop a Roman Catholic version of liberal theology that occurred during the historical frame of this account. Roman Catholic Modernism was mostly a French phenomenon, and the Vatican crushed it in the early twentieth century. The development of a Catholic tradition of liberal theology had to wait until Vatican Council II.

For over a century the only distinctly modern approach to theology was the liberal one; thus, when analyzing trends in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theology, I shall use these terms interchangeably, always with the caveat that neither term had a stable meaning until the twentieth century. “Liberal theology” is more complex and slippery than most of the literature about it, and the same thing is true of German idealism. In the former case, an over-identification of liberal theology with late nineteenth-century Progressivist idealism, or a too-simple rendering of a Kant-to-Harnack tradition, made liberal theology too easily debunked by its neo-orthodox detractors, who convinced the rest of the field to define liberalism as they did. In the case of German idealism, complexity was undeniable, but much of the literature gets around it by treating idealism as only one thing or by simplistically rendering Kant as a subjective idealist.

For historical understanding and constructive purposes, it is better not to evade the historical and theoretical complexities. Liberal theology cannot be understood without coming to grips with post-Kantian idealism and its influence in the Kierkegaardian and Barthian reactions to it. More importantly, it cannot be revitalized lacking a robust sense of the divine presence in movements that lift up the poor and oppressed and that contribute to the flourishing of all people and creation.

Imagining Modern Theology

Modern theology began when theologians looked beyond the Bible and Christian tradition for answers to their questions and acknowledged that the mythical aspects of Christian scripture and tradition are mythical. How should theology deal with modern challenges to belief that overthrow the external authority of Christian scripture and tradition? What kind of Christian belief is possible after modern science and Enlightenment criticism desacralized the world? How should Christian theology deal with the mythical aspects of Christianity and the results of biblical criticism? These questions were peculiar to religious thinkers of the modern era; Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin did not ask themselves how to do theology without an infallible external authority or whether Christian myth should be demythologized.¹

Eventually there were distinctly modern theologies that were not liberal; Kierkegaard was the key precursor of that possibility. The founding of modern theology, however, was a decidedly liberal enterprise. The roots of liberalism lie deep in the history of Western thought, especially in the Pauline theme of spiritual freedom, the fifth-century Pelagian emphasis on free will, the limitations on sovereign authority in the Magna Carta Libertatum of 1215, and the Renaissance humanist stress on free expression, all of which resonate in the modern Western appeal to the rights of freedom. As a political philosophy, liberalism originated in the seventeenth century, asserting that individuals have natural rights to freedom that are universal. As an economic theory it originated in the eighteenth century, asserting the priority of free trade and self-regulating markets. As a cultural/philosophical movement it arose in the eighteenth century as a rationalist critique of tradition and authority-based belief. As a theological tradition it originated in the eighteenth century in tandem with modern humanism, biblical criticism, and Enlightenment philosophy.

Historically and theoretically, the cornerstone of liberalism is the assertion of the supreme value and universal rights of the individual. The liberal tradition of Benedict de Spinoza, John Locke, Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Jefferson taught that the universal goal of human beings is to realize their freedom and that state power is justified only to the extent that it enables and protects individual liberty. From the beginning this tradition had an ambiguous, often tortured relationship to its own rhetoric of freedom, for liberalism arose as an ideological justification of capitalism and as the recognition that tolerance was the only humane alternative to the religious wars of the seventeenth century. In both cases liberal ideology deemed that vast categories of human beings were disqualified from basic human rights. Liberalism valorized the rights-bearing individual to underwrite the transition to a political economy based on self-interested market exchanges, which benefited the capitalist bourgeoisie. The liberal state tolerated plural religious traditions, which led to the separation of church and state, which led, eventually, to the principle of tolerance for other kinds of beliefs and practices. The state, under liberalism, became an ostensibly neutral guarantor of the rights of individuals and communities to pursue diverse conceptions of the good life, which did not stop liberals from denying the rights of human beings who were not white, male, and owners of property like themselves.

The founding of modern theology is an aspect of this story. Liberal theology, in my definition, was and is a three-layered phenomenon. Firstly it is the idea that all claims to truth, in theology and other disciplines, must be made on the basis of reason and experience, not by appeal to external authority. From a liberal standpoint, Christian scripture or ecclesiastical doctrine may still be authoritative for theology and faith, but its authority operates within Christian experience, not as an outside word that establishes or compels truth claims about particular matters of fact.²

Secondly, liberal theology argues for the viability and necessity of an alternative to orthodox over-belief and secular disbelief. In Germany, the liberal movement called itself “mediating theology” because it took so seriously the challenge of a rising culture of aggressive deism and atheism. Liberal religious thinkers, unavoidably, had to battle with conservatives for the right to liberalize Christian doctrine. But usually they worried more about the critical challenges to belief from outsiders. The agenda of modern theology was to develop a credible form of Christianity before the “cultured despisers of religion” routed Christian faith from intellectual and cultural respectability. This agenda was expressed in the title of the founding work of modern theology, Schleiermacher's Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers). Here, Britain was ahead of the curve, as there was an ample tradition of aggressive British deism and skepticism by the time that Schleiermacher wrote. British critics ransacked the Bible for unbelievable things; in Germany, a deceased anonymous deist (Hermann Samuel Reimarus) caused a stir in the mid-1770s by portraying Jesus as a misguided political messiah lacking any idea of being divine; Schleiermacher, surrounded by cultured scoffers in Berlin, contended that true religion and the divinity of Jesus were fully credible on modern terms.³

The third layer consists of specific things that go with overthrowing the principle of external authority and adopting a mediating perspective between authority religion and disbelief. The liberal tradition reconceptualizes the meaning of Christianity in the light of modern knowledge and values. It is reformist in spirit and substance, not revolutionary. It is open to the verdicts of modern intellectual inquiry, especially historical criticism and the natural sciences. It conceives Christianity as an ethical way of life, it advocates moral concepts of atonement or reconciliation, and it is committed to making progressive religion credible and socially relevant.

This definition is calibrated to describe the entire tradition of liberal theology from Kant and Schleiermacher to the present day. A great deal of the literature in this field defines liberal theology by features that were distinctive to its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Ritschlian School theology ruled the field and powerful movements for social Christianity existed in England, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. For most of the twentieth century, the standard definition of liberal theology equated it with Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, and Social Gospel progressivism. Some critics, following Karl Barth, treated Schleiermacher and Hegel as founders of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Books by Gary Dorrien
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Kantian Concepts, Liberal Theology, and Post-Kantian Idealism
• Chapter 2: Subjectivity in Question: Immanuel Kant, Johann G. Fichte, and Critical Idealism
• Chapter 3: Making Sense of Religion: Friedrich Schleiermacher, John Locke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Liberal Theology
• Chapter 4: Dialectics of Spirit: F. W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, and Absolute Idealism
• Chapter 5: Hegelian Spirit in Question: David Friedrich Strauss, Søren Kierkegaard, and Mediating Theology
• Chapter 6: Neo-Kantian Historicism: Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, Wilhelm Herrmann, Ernst Troeltsch, and the Ritschlian School
• Chapter 7: Idealistic Ordering: Lux Mundi, Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, Hastings Rashdall, Alfred E. Garvie, Alfred North Whitehead, William Temple, and British Idealism
• Chapter 8: The Barthian Revolt: Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and the Legacy of Liberal Theology
• Chapter 9: Idealistic Ironies: From Kant and Hegel to Tillich and Barth
• Index