In a Post-Hegelian Spirit

Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent

Gary Dorrien

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781481311595
• eBook ISBN: 9781481311618
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Gary Dorrien expounds in this book the religious philosophy underlying his many magisterial books on modern theology, social ethics, and political philosophy. His constructive position is liberal-liberationist and post-Hegelian, reflecting his many years of social justice activism and what he calls "my dance with Hegel." Hegel, he argues, broke open the deadliest assumptions of Western thought by conceiving being as becoming and consciousness as the social-subjective relation of spirit to itself; yet his white Eurocentric conceits were grotesquely inflated even by the standards of his time. Dorrien emphasizes both sides of this Hegelian legacy, contending that it takes a great deal of digging and refuting to recover the parts of Hegel that still matter for religious thought.

By distilling his signature argument about the role of post-Kantian idealism in modern Christian thought, Dorrien fashions a liberationist form of religious idealism: a religious philosophy that is simultaneously both Hegelian—as it expounds a fluid, holistic, open, intersubjective, ambiguous, tragic, and reconciliatory idea of revelation—and post-Hegelian, as it rejects the deep-seated flaws in Hegel's thought. Dorrien mines Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel as the foundation of his argument about intellectual intuition and the creative power of subjectivity. After analyzing critiques of Hegel by Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, and Emmanuel Levinas, Dorrien contends that though these monumental figures were penetrating in their assessments, they appear one-sided compared to Hegel. In a Post-Hegelian Spirit further engages with the personal idealist tradition founded by Borden Parker Bowne, the process tradition founded by Alfred North Whitehead, and the daring cultural contributions of Paul Tillich, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosemary Radford Ruether, David Tracy, Peter Hodgson, Edward Farley, Catherine Keller, and Monica Coleman.

Dispelling common interpretations that Hegel's theology simply fashioned a closed system, Dorrien argues instead that Hegel can be interpreted legitimately in six different ways and is best interpreted as a philosopher of love who developed a Christian theodicy of love divine. Hegel expounded a process theodicy of God salvaging what can be salvaged from history, even as his tragic sense of the carnage of history cuts deep, lingering at Calvary.

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Introduction

Modern Theology as Religious Philosophy

This book develops the post-Hegelian religious philosophy that I take from the post-Kantian tradition in modern theology, making an argument for a liberationist form of religious idealism. It mines Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and G. W. F. Hegel for my founding argument on intellectual intuition and the creative power of subjectivity. It sifts critiques of Hegel by Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, and Emmanuel Levinas, contending that all were penetrating but one-sided compared to Hegel. It features an extensive discussion of the personal idealist tradition, commending its empirical emphasis on human dignity and why personality matters. It appropriates the process tradition founded by Alfred North Whitehead and the thought of Paul Tillich, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosemary Radford Ruether, David Tracy, Peter Hodgson, Edward Farley, Catherine Keller, Sharon Welch, and Monica Coleman. It makes an argument about the religious character of Hegel’s thought and a case for his theodicy of love divine. Like the Whitehead school, Hegel expounded a process theodicy of God salvaging what can be salvaged from history. But Hegel’s tragic sense of the carnage of history cut deeper than Whitehead, lingering at Calvary.

To engage a thinker as notoriously complex and elusive as Hegel is to invite misunderstanding because many interpreters take for granted that Hegel fashioned a closed system. There is a basis for interpreting him as a panlogical right-Hegelian, an anti-Christian left-Hegelian, a conceptual realist metaphysician in the mode of Aristotle or Spinoza, a social philosopher and phenomenologist who only pretended to care about metaphysics, the founder of postmodern nihilism, and a philosopher of love who developed a radically hospitable theology. I am in the last school, but I respect the others while contending that Hegel was both offensively wrong and brilliantly creative. Hegel broke open the deadliest assumptions of Western thought by conceiving being as becoming and consciousness as the social-subjective relation of spirit to itself. His concept of the cunning of reason (Die List der Vernunft) offered a dynamic, holistic, open, ambiguous, tragic, and reconciling idea of how revelation takes place, conceiving the divine as spiraling intersubjective Spirit.

Friedrich Nietzsche described the God of Western theism as the enemy of freedom and subjectivity. Martin Heidegger said that Western metaphysics wrongly took being for God. Emmanuel Levinas countered that Western metaphysics wrongly took God for being. I argue that Hegel undercut these critiques by creating a new category of thought subverting Western metaphysics—fluid, intersubjective Spirit, the dynamic whole of wholes that unifies thought and being in Spirit. Hegel’s discovery of social subjectivity created a new kind of idealistic metaphysics, or something better named by dropping the categories of idealism and metaphysics. The closed system Hegel described by countless textbooks and the founders of postmodernism does not get him, notwithstanding that the bad parts of Hegel were terrible to the point of being repugnant.1

Liberal theology poses similar challenges as a subject, interlocutor, and discourse tradition. This book is disciplined by the tradition of Christian liberal theology while favoring the streams of it that engage multiple religious and philosophical perspectives. On my definition, theology is first-order reflection about matters of religious truth, liberal theology is a distinct species of it, and theology is open to mutual give-and-take with philosophy. But the liberal tradition contains a complex array of positions about religious philosophy ranging from robustly metaphysical to strategically philosophical to anti-metaphysical to anti-philosophical. Liberal theology is distinct for its approach to the authority question, not the philosophy question; one can be theologically liberal and take any conceivable position about metaphysics or philosophy. Theological liberals who minimize or oppose philosophy usually define theology as reflection on faith, not religious truth. Here the driving concern is to secure the autonomy of faith and theology. I am of a different mind, recognizing that theology and religious philosophy are different things, but disbelieving in the autonomy of faith or theology. On my terms, any time that we espouse convictions about religious truth, we are doing theology, whether or not it takes the form of a religious philosophy. Theology ventures into the perilous, cognitive, normative, existential work of adjudicating whatever it is that concerns us ultimately. It is about the things that individuals and religious communities care about sufficiently to stake their lives upon and invest their passion.

This definition of theology is geared to include theologies that rest on authority claims, those that rule out such claims, and those that negotiate between these approaches. Until the modern era, every Christian theology operated within a house of authority. The external authority of the Bible and Christian tradition established what had to be believed about very specific things. Liberal theology, first and foremost, was and is the enterprise that broke away from authority-based religious thinking. Liberal theologians variously rejected or relativized the external authority of Scripture and tradition, affirming their right to intellectual freedom. They invented the critical methods of theological scholarship, navigated between orthodox overbelief and atheistic disbelief, and reestablished the credibility of theology as an intellectual enterprise. But liberal theology took a mighty fall in the twentieth century for sanctifying bourgeois civilization.

In its glory years, liberal theology espoused a religion of cultural progress even in its socialist and anti-imperialist versions. This optimistic faith did not survive World War I in Europe or the Depression in the United States, to put it mildly. The heyday version of liberal theology came from the Ritschlian school theologians, who dominated theology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Adolf von Harnack, Albrecht Ritschl, Wilhelm Herrmann, and Ernst Troeltsch. They swept the field by historicizing Christianity, idealizing bourgeois culture, producing major works of scholarship, and touting their own social relevance. Theologically the Ritschlian school was based on its commitment to historicism and the autonomy of faith. Then it splintered three ways over both claims, flanked on opposite poles by Herrmann and Troeltsch. Ritschlian liberals, it turned out, profoundly disagreed about historicism and philosophy. Their actual basis of unity was their Culture Protestant nationalism. German Ritschlian theology grew strong by reducing theology to bourgeois moral religion and baptizing Germany’s conceits about itself. It thus set up liberal theology for a mighty fall, becoming an object of ridicule and overthrow. Later a similar toppling occurred in the United States, with less drama. Liberal theology ever since has had this fateful history to overcome.

Historically and logically, the cornerstone of liberalism is the assertion of the supreme value of the individual, an idea rooted in Christian theology, the Magna Carta Libertatum of 1215, and Renaissance humanism. In all its historic forms, liberalism makes a defining appeal to the rights of freedom. As a political philosophy it originated in the seventeenth century as the threefold claim that individuals have natural rights to freedom, the state must prevent the tyranny of the mob, and religion must be separated from politics. As an economic theory it arose in the eighteenth century as a defense of free trade and self-regulating markets. As a cultural tradition it arose in the eighteenth century as a bourgeois humanistic ethic and a rationalist critique of authority-based belief. In liberal ideology the universal goal of human beings is to realize their freedom, all traditions are open to criticism, and state power is justified only to the extent that it enables and protects individual liberty.

These principles defined liberalism wherever capitalism spread, yielding liberal theologies that affirmed modern humanism, biblical criticism, and Enlightenment philosophy. England had the first trickle of theologies of a liberalizing sort and a nineteenth-century tradition of mildly liberal theology, but no movement of the full-fledged real thing until the end of the nineteenth century. Germany produced the great founding liberal theologies and the movements that propagated them. The United States sprouted a historic tradition of liberal theology in the mid-eighteenth century, but it yielded a Unitarian schism that thwarted the movement ambitions of early nineteenth-century liberals. By the time that England and the United States developed significant movements of liberal theology, liberalism itself had morphed into liberal democracy under pressure from democratic movements, variously contesting older traditions of liberal individualism and elitism.

Religion, from the beginning, was distinctly troublesome for liberal ideology. To the liberal traditions associated with Locke and Kant, the liberal state was naturally tolerant by virtue of deriving from a rational social contract, it existed to protect the natural rights of citizens, and religion had to be constrained by modern rationality. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin espoused a liberalism of this sort in the United States, where it competed with a latter-day Puritan notion deriving from John Milton and the English Puritan revolution that prized faith and religious liberty. Here it was said that the state has a sacred duty to protect liberty—the theocratic seed of what became the American social gospel. In both cases, the liberal founders had an ambiguous relationship to their own rhetoric of freedom because liberalism arose as an ideological justification of capitalism and as tolerant relief from the religious wars of the seventeenth century. The champions of liberal ideology exalted human dignity while denigrating or denying the humanity of vast numbers of human beings. Theories of racial, sexual, and cultural inferiority disqualified most human beings from their rights, while liberals designed a supposedly natural political economy based on self-interested market exchanges that served the interests of the capitalist class.

The liberal state tolerated plural religious traditions, posing as a guarantor of the rights of individuals and communities to pursue diverse interests. Routinely it denied rights of citizenship and humanity to human beings who were not literate, white, male, and owners of property. Some liberals stoutly opposed the hypocrisy and injustice of privileged liberalism, demanding the rights of liberalism for all. Some vehemently opposed the assumption of white-dominated societies that social contract liberalism applied only to whites. The best neo-abolitionists and anti-imperialists in England and the United States campaigned for the extension of liberal rights to excluded communities: Britons John Hobson, Charles Marson, Stewart Headlam, and Scott Holland, and Americans Albion Tourgée, Ida B. Wells, W. D. P. Bliss, George Herron, Reverdy Ransom, and W. E. B. Du Bois. But they had to be called radical liberals or liberal socialists to distinguish them from what liberalism usually meant. Liberalism was better known for protecting capitalism and white supremacy than for defending the oppressed and vulnerable.2

Modern theology arose as an aspect of this story. It began when people began to search for the sacred. I mean that quite literally, because searching for the sacred is a modern phenomenon. For most of human history, the sacred was readily available. Every culture was organized around the sacred observances of a cult, which provided rituals and myths concerning birth, life, identity, community, sexuality, work, redemption, and death. The real world was the realm of the gods, whose history shaped human history. People did not talk about their lives as journeys in search of the sacred. They did not ask how their myths disclosed spiritual meaning. They understood history as myth and themselves as participants in sacred time and space.

In the modern age the sacred cosmos was demythologized by science, religion became a private option for individuals, and the sacred underpinnings of culture in cult were deconstructed to expose its configurations of desire and power. Culture had no attachment to a sacred realm but was real precisely as human work. Enlightenment thinkers contended that the inductive methods of science should be applied to all fields of knowledge and that religion is not exempt from the tests of critical rationality. If rationality is the only valid authority in science or philosophy, no respectable claim to religious truth can be secured by appealing to an authoritative scripture, church, or tradition.

The founders of modern theology took these verdicts very seriously. In the Bible, God created the world in six days, the fall occurred in a real space-time Eden, and God spoke audibly to living persons and intervened directly in history. In modern consciousness the world of the Bible was obliterated and the mythical aspects of biblical narrative became embarrassing to religious people. Early Enlightenment rationalists took the Bible as a flat text and corrected it from the standpoint of their own naturalistic worldview. They exposed discrepant accounts, or harmonized them; rejected miracle stories, or provided naturalistic explanations; stressed that the Bible contains myths, or deduced a rational system from the Bible. Generally, they conceived interpretation as taxonomy. A bit later, in the 1760s, the German founders of historical criticism—Johann Semler, Johann Eichhorn, Johann Jakob Griesbach, and Johann David Michaelis—made a course correction by deconstructing the history of the text itself. They proposed to study the Bible from a scientific standpoint stripped of dogmatic presuppositions. The founders of historical criticism revolutionized biblical scholarship by deciphering the historical development of the Bible. They had no nation, yet they had far more historical consciousness than scholars from the mighty nations of France and England. The German historical critics were the first to call themselves “liberal theologians,” until Kant came along in the early 1780s, after which they called themselves Kantians.

Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel acquired their iconic standing in modern thought by surpassing early Enlightenment rationalism. All are important to me for theorizing Kant’s insight that reason is an activity inseparable from will. I refuse to doubt that I think my thoughts and will my purposes, which does not mean that I believe in a substantive self that possesses thoughts and purposes. Persons think and feel; there is no thought without attention, an act of will; and thought is an act performed with a motive, which implies feeling. Kant revolutionized modern thought by showing that the mind is active in producing experience and freedom is the keystone to the vault of reason. But he made a mighty contribution to the liberal traditions of reducing theology to ethics and expunging metaphysical reason from religious thought. Schleiermacher vastly improved on Kant’s reductionist approach to religion and showed how theology could get along without appealing to external authorities. But Schleiermacher’s theology spun a novel form of fideism, unless one brushed aside what he said about the autonomy of theology, as many of his disciples did. Hegel provided a new basis for onto-theology by conceiving Spirit as a spiraling, dynamic I that is a We and a We that is an I—a triadic social structure unfolding in threefold mediation. But Hegel was nearly as arrogant as his reputation, making grandiose claims for philosophy and his system.

All three were chauvinistic about European civilization, parading Teutonic conceit as fully justified and virtuous. Kant saw only gradations of backwardness and inferiority whenever his lecture courses peered beyond Europe. He taught a course on race that he might as well have titled White Supremacy 101. According to Kant, Europeans were at the top, Africans were at the bottom, everyone else sorted out in between, and Europeans soared so high they verged on becoming a separate race. Schleiermacher said he singled out France and England for criticism in 1799 because he didn’t really care about anyone else. What mattered was that Germany, not yet a nation, needed to catch up to France and England as a national power while preserving its spiritual and cultural superiority. Hegel cared very much about world history, contending that its axis was the Mediterranean Sea. He prattled to the end of his days that Africa proper held no historical interest, being stuck in “barbarism and savagery.” North Africa was interesting only because the Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantine Romans, Arabs, and Turks successively colonized it. Egypt owed its admittedly “great and independent culture” to its association with Mediterranean history. Asia was slightly interesting for giving birth to consciousness, but it got stuck in contradictions. Modern Europe was the land of spiritual unity, where the Spirit descended into itself, overcoming the so-called Middle Ages. Jerusalem mattered to Hegel because of Judaism and Christianity, and Mecca and Medina got comparable credit for Islam, but Greece was the light of history. Delphi, Athens, Rome, Carthage, Alexandria, and Constantinople loomed large in his imagination and feeling, but only for enabling Europe to unite the particular and the universal.3

America came out not much better on his telling. Hegel said that history deals with the past, philosophy deals with reason, America had no history, and he had his hands full dealing with Reason. So he gave short shrift to both American continents, despite claiming that the burden of world history would surely reveal itself in America, perhaps in a contest between the two continents. In North America, he noted, the native tribes were mostly destroyed and otherwise repressed. In South America and Mexico, the conquering violence was much worse, yet larger native populations survived. The Portuguese conquerors were more humane than the Dutch, Spanish, and English, but all were deadly violent and destructive, leaving North America to “the surplus population of Europe,” while South America forged mixed-race republics based on military force. Hegel singled out the Creoles for evincing Hegelian self-awareness and autonomy, though of a low order. He thought the United States was better off than South America for being Protestant, industrious, and steeped in freedom consciousness, but he could not find an intellectual culture, and he believed its federalist government would not survive. It had survived into the 1830s only because the United States...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Kantian Foundations
• 3. Post-Kantian Feeling
• 4. Hegelian Intersubjectivity
• 5. Against Hegelian Spirit
• 6. Personal Idealism
• 7. Whiteheadian Ordering
• 8. Neo-Hegelian Theonomy
• 9. Struggling for Liberation
• 10. Rethinking Relationality
• 11. In a Post-Hegelian Spirit
• Notes
• Index