A Review: Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher, by Jacqueline Mariña. Pp. x + 270. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, ISBN 978 0 19 920637 7. £61.

In this study, Jacqueline Mariña, a Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, seeks to provide an exposition and analysis of the key metaphysical concepts undergirding Friedrich Schleiermacher’s thought regarding moral and spiritual transformation. She does so via an exegesis of the post-Enlightenment and post-Kantian metaphysics upon which the mature Schleiermacher develops his ethics – particularly the notions of self-consciousness and personal identity – and that in sustained conversation with some of the German theologian’s key dialogue partners, principally Kant, but also Spinoza and Leibniz, and, less so, Fichte and Jacobi, and with Platonic and Augustinian metaphysics of the self. Mariña also offers some helpful analyses of the development of Schleiermacher’s thought regarding ethics.

Mariña’s essay has notable merits, principal among them being its defence of Schleiermacher’s overall moral theory as both the cornerstone of his thought and a legitimate entrée for understanding his theology. She understands that Schleiermacher’s ethics are irreversibly engaged with his metaphysics of the absolute and the philosophy of religion. Building on the work of Frederick Beiser, she argues that ethical theory is ‘central to Schleiermacher’s outlook’ and that ‘it is in the sphere of ethics that religion has its ultimate meaning, for the fruit of all true religion lies in its transformative power over the self’ (p. 3). The significance of Schleiermacher’s achievement, Mariña argues, is that by focusing on religious experience and the transcendental conditions of subjectivity, Schleiermacher offers an account of religion unencumbered by reductionism and dogmaticism. Insofar as he does this, Mariña contends, Schleiermacher makes an important contribution to contemporary interreligious dialogue.

Drawing on Schleiermacher’s early essays On Freedom (1790–2), his notes on Kant’s second Critique (1789), the third of his Dialogues on Freedom (1789), and his review of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1799), the opening chapter, titled ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’, examines Schleiermacher’s struggle with Kant’s practical philosophy. Mariña notes that while he had some sympathies with Kant’s project, the early Schleiermacher became ‘increasingly dissatisfied with some of the deep philosophical problems posed by the notion of transcendental freedom’ (p. 16).

Chapters Two and Three provide an analysis of two early works (1793–94) by Schleiermacher on Spinoza, namely Spinozism and the Short Presentation of the Spinozistic System. Chapter Two examines Schleiermacher’s claim that there are no genuine individuals, and does so by way of considering Kant’s distinction between noumena and phenomena. Mariña argues that Kant’s analysis of transcendental subjectivity remains an important part of the early Schleiermacher’s thought and informs his decision to abandon Spinozism. She concludes: ‘Despite his familiarity with Kant’s arguments against the possibility of knowledge of the transcendent, in Spinozism Schleiermacher had already come to the conclusion that it is through the transcendental activity of the self that the soul comes into contact with what is genuinely real’ (p. 75). Chapter Three builds on the work undertaken in the previous chapter and considers more deeply issues of personal identity and (in agreement with Kant) our lack of access to a substantial noumenal self.

Mariña then turns to the influence of Leibniz – ‘a poor philosopher [who] from time to time … developed better insights’ (p. 109) – on Schleiermacher’s thought by way of discussion on Schleiermacher’s Monologen (1800) wherein Schleiermacher, playing on Leibniz’s notion of the self as a mirror of the world, envisions transcendentally-free beings expressing themselves into the world. The author recalls Schleiermacher’s appropriation of Kant’s critique of rational psychology and his avouchment that we have no access to knowledge of self as it is in itself. ‘Self-knowledge is only of the empirical self, and this means that the self knows itself only in its relation to that which is different from it and stands outside it. It is, therefore, through the world that the self comes to know itself’ (pp. 110–11). ‘Without the other, there is no knowledge of the self. The person expresses him or herself to the other, and the self as thus expressed is reflected back to the self in the self-consciousness of the other. Loss of the other is therefore a loss of oneself’ (p. 143). This contextualises and anticipates the later discussion on christology, and addresses a foundation of Schleiermacher’s employment of Leibniz’s (and Hegel’s) claim that it is ‘only in relation to a historical individual with a perfect God-consciousness’ that human beings can ‘achieve moral perfection. For only such a one who expresses the divine love perfectly knows the essence of all rational beings as their capacity to express the divine love. Such a one reflects this essence back to them so that they can thereby know themselves as beings that express the divine love’ (p. 144). Clearly, Schleiermacher has moved beyond Kant. The author here identifies key Leibnizian themes that Schleiermacher will develop further in his Dialektik (1814–15) and in Der christliche Glaube (1821–22); particularly the relationship between God and the self, and the self and the world, and the integration that occurs between one’s representation of the world and one’s own desires, and so one’s actions.

In Chapter Five, Schleiermacher’s 1805–06 works, Notes on Ethics, and his Outline of a Critique of Previous Ethical Theories (1803), serve as the basis for exploring the implications of ensouled human nature, and so a reality in which sensuously-conditioned desires can be infused with ethical content. Mariña considers how the teleology of moral action seeks the perfection of this world and not some other. She recognises (in a later chapter) that at the centre of Schleiermacher’s ethics lies the ‘non-transposable character of individuals and historical communities, each of which has a special character determined by a particular historical development’ (p. 168), and that ‘Schleiermacher recognized that not to acknowledge our situatedness can only lead to delusions of absolute knowledge having the most pernicious of consequences’ (p. 176), but unfortunately she does not take up Karl Barth’s suggestion, in The Theology of Schleiermacher, that we know Schleiermacher best when we understand him as a virtuoso of family life, in the society of relatives either of blood or of one’s own choosing (pp. 108–9).

The notion of ensoulment is further developed in Chapter Six, wherein Mariña probes the ensoulment of human nature through reason and through the establishment of community, and in Chapter Seven, ‘Transforming the Self through Christ’, in which the author recalls Schleiermacher’s christology (a subject which ‘encapsulates the whole of his theology’ (p. 187)) in terms of Christ’s own God-consciousness and in terms of Christ’s creating God-consciousness in others, consequently transforming their ethical outlook. Mariña contends that Schleiermacher’s Christ – the one who ‘defines what it means to be human’ (p. 196) – engages in person-forming activity, a work established in the original divine decree and which involves a transformation of ethic. Insofar as he does this, Christ is, in Schleiermacher’s words, ‘the completion of the creation of man’ (cited on p. 196). This means, Mariña contends, that for Schleiermacher, ‘Jesus is no mere teacher of morality, but that what he mediates is a relation to the ground of being and love, and thereby to the transcendental ground of all true religion and ethics’ (p. 197). Moreover, our assimilation into Jesus’ divine life is ‘achieved through the communication of his words and deeds’, both of which are required to effect the divine love in history and shape human self-consciousness and being in the world. ‘The divine love manifest in the life of the historical Jesus brings a new way of envisioning what it means to be a human being, and what it means to be in community’ (p. 219).

The final chapter returns to the challenges of religious pluralism which were broached in the introduction and does so via an analysis of arguments proffered in the 1821 edition of On Religion and in the second edition of Der christliche Glaube. Mariña argues that Schleiermacher’s thought provides a ‘generally coherent account of how it is possible that differing religious traditions are all based on the same experience of the absolute’ (p. 224). She further claims that religious differences are differences only in degree, not in kind. ‘It is because there is a single, fundamental experience to which all the world’s religions are related that there can be meaningful and significant dialogue among them’ (p. 243).

Mariña’s study has a number of strengths. Building upon her already published work on Schleiermacher and Kant, she offers a valuable analysis of several chief sources of Schleiermacher’s thought, and of Schleiermacher’s employment, discarding and development of some of their ideas through various stages of his own theological and philosophical maturation, properly observing the way in which Schleiermacher’s ethics are grounded upon his theological claims, that philosophical ethics is purposely descriptive of how divine causality finds shape in human community through individual persons. Insofar as she does this, Mariña’s essay fills a noticeable gap in the English-speaking literature, and is a welcome complement to works by Richard R. Niebuhr (Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, 1964), Albert Blackwell (Schleiermacher’s Early Philosophy of Life: Determinism, Freedom, Phantasy, 1982), Brian Gerrish (A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology, 1984), Julia A. Lamm (The Living God: Schleiermacher’s Theological Appropriation of Spinoza, 1996), Catherine L. Kelsey, (Thinking about Christ with Schleiermacher, 2003), and Richard Crouter (Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism, 2005).

Mariña’s argument could have been more persuasive had she attended further to a number of her claims: for example, the claim that Schleiermacher’s proposals concerning transcendental freedom are made at the cost of abandoning determinism. Readers may also be left unsatisfied that Mariña stops short of recounting how the transformation of self with which Schleiermacher is so concerned is effected, and what lay behind the author’s decision to give relatively little attention to Schleiermacher’s more mature ethics (for example, his lectures on philosophical ethics delivered at the University of Berlin between 1812–1830, a period which overlaps Hegel’s time at that same institution, or Schleiermacher’s six Akademieabhandlungen read before the Academy of Sciences between 1819 and 1830) which invite us to consider how language, tradition and institutions inform the moral shape of human being both universally and particularly, and which may have assisted Mariña to provide a more rigorous comparison between Schleiermacher’s early and later ethics and their relation to Schleiermacher’s christology developed in Der christliche Glaube (1821/22, 1830/31) – to which she appropriately turns in her penultimate chapter though fails to develop as fully as her project requires – and particularly the relationship between Jesus’ own God-consciousness, the ethical significance of the hypostatic union, and his mediating to us divine causality. Moreover, Schleiermacher’s privileging of God’s ecclesiological community as that creation of the Spirit with which Jesus’ religiosity is a contemporary reality is disregarded by Mariña. Here, some readers may also take issue that Mariña’s reading of Schleiermacher as positing unmediated moments of the feeling of absolute dependence (a notion which betrays Leibniz’ influence) are offered too independently of Schleiermacher’s careful underscoring of historical, social, theological and cultural contingencies and practices with which much of his philosophical ethics are concerned. Finally, while appropriately situating this project and its value against the backdrop of contemporary challenges posed by various forms of religious (and other) fundamentalism and inter-religious dialogue, the author minimises the obstacles to interreligious dialogue and overplays the profitability that Schleiermacher’s project offers therein.

Few will follow Mariña on every point, and those seeking a particularly transpicuous exposition of Schleiermacher’s thought might well be disappointed, but this remains a valuable essay all the same, and those wishing to engage with Schleiermacher’s abiding significance for ethics will not want to be without it.

Darwin: Origin of Species

…and why you should read them (or at least be familiar with them).

These are books that have had a deleterious affect on humanity (almost exclusively Western in their thinking).  Some of them had “good intentions”* but fell flat on their face with horrible unintended consequences.  The Christian has the responsibility to defend the truth of the Gospel.  One part of defending the truth is refuting all untruth.  We need to be reading primary sources of the things we are seeking to deconstruct – not summaries, the wikipedia article, or a blog post about it.

*1.  The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin
I do not think Darwin would agree with half of Neo-Darwinianism or macroevolution.  He makes massive concessions that geology and microbiology would need to corroborate his thesis.  He was a good scientist who followed the evidence, I think he would be in the intelligent design camp (perhaps this is a controversial statement, but read Origin for yourself).  I have listed this as #1 as this work was critical in pretty much all of the destructive thoughts of the past 150 years:  Eugenics, Scientific Naturalism, Nietzschean atheism, New Atheism, Liberal Protestantism, and Communism.

2.  Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

This book is probably the most influential book in philosophy since the ancient Greeks.  Kant seeks to synthesize the great debate of the history of philosophy:  Being vs. Becoming aka Plato vs. Aristotle.  In the process, Kant comes to the conclusion that our minds cannot have knowledge of things that are not physical – ie. God and many other absolute truths.  In defense of Kant, his thinking did begin to change in his third work as he makes some wiggle room for faith as being a legitimate pathway for knowledge (but almost no one reads his third volume).

3.  The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

20,000,000 dead under Stalin, 6-8,000,000 dead under Lenin, 40,000,000 dead under Mao Zedong, 1,700,000 dead under Pol Pot… case and point.

4.  On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers by Friedrich Schleiermacher

This guy birthed liberal Protestantism.  His ideas split Protestantism and millions think they know Jesus when they don’t.

5.  Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche decries how humanity has killed God through our apathy.  He then espouses why humanity needs to move beyond God, morality, truth, and the good, in favor of embracing exerting power and control over the weak.

*6.  Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes

Descartes had every intention of proving through pure axiomatic reasoning that God existed.  In short, his arguments for God’s existence were awful and his arguments for doubting everything were excellent.  His legacy is solid argumentation for skepticism.  Epic Fail.

7.  Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

11-17,000,000 dead.  Hitler sees Judaism, capitalism, and communism as the three major threats to Germany.  The Final Solution means purging all associated with these things and the result is the Holocaust.  Awful.

8.  Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty

In my view, this is the most important book to be read today for the Christian.  For an explanation why, read my previous blog post on post-modern-pragmatism.

9.  The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

In order to be successful in life you must exercise control through power and manipulation.  Morality hurts your ability to exert your will.

10.  Origins of the History of Christianity by Ernest Renan

The New Testament is essentially myth.  This revisionist history was seminal in classic liberalism and influential in the later Jesus Seminar.

11.  Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men by Jean Jacques Rousseau

Society is corrupt, man is good.

12.  The Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger

Sanger promoted sexual liberation and then birth control, abortion, and eugenics.  39,000,000+ babies dead worldwide… this year from abortion.

13.  Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

Humans are immoral, therefore only Leviathan is the solution… Leviathan is a strong and aggressive central government.

14.  The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig von Feuerbach

Christianity is superstition that will soon be replaced by humanism.

15.  The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud

Humanity has invented God and this delusion is a kind of mental illness.

16.  Various Writings by Pelagius

Denial of the doctrine of original sin, denial of efficacious grace, and the denial of the sovereignty of God.  1600 years later his teachings still plague the church.

17.  Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey

This was just painful to read (and I was unable to finish) and I am not endorsing actually getting a copy (hence no link).  Kinsey basically says that no sexual behavior or orientation is immoral.  All is permissible.

18.  The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

Some bit of gnosticism had to make this list.  I wrestled with what to choose here.  Pagels is your run of the mill critic who says that the gnostic “gospels” are the real story and history.  These ideas are ridiculous due to their pseudepigraphic nature, date of writing, and mutually exclusive theologies.

19.  Prolegomena to the History of Israel by Julius Wellhausen

Wellhausen espouses that the first five books of the Old Testament were not written by Moses but by editors from four schools of thought.  A flood of Bible criticism followed Wellhausen.

20.  Why I am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell

Russell is one of the few atheists other than Nietzsche that I respect.  His thoughts are well ordered and argued.  The New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens…) wish they could hold a candle to Russell.

21.  Process and Reality by A.N. Whitehead

Whitehead argues for Process Theology.  Read about Process Theology here.

22.  The Council of Trent

Justification by faith alone is anathematized.  Veneration of Mary and saints upheld.  Transubstantiation upheld.  I love my brothers and sisters who are Christians in the Catholic church despite the Catholic church.  Trent had the opportunity to listen to the Reformation and return to God’s Word for truth.  It did not and left in its wake countless eternal casualties.

23.  His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman

Pullman sought to write the opposite of Milton’s Paradise Lost.  He seeks to commend humanism and ultimately atheism as the commendable life path.  His Dark Materials is aimed at young adults and has been recently popularized by the Golden Compass film.

24.  Protagoras by Plato

For clarity sake, these are sayings ascribed to Protagoras and not Platonic thoughts.  The famous quote is “Man is the measure of all things.”  Protagoras is the first person to espouse a kind of moral relativism.

25.  Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead

The logical consequences of naturalism and Darwinianism applied to anthropology and sociology.  What is primitive is good, therefore the sexual inhibition she evidenced in primitive Samoa ought to be writ large.

Some thinkers who nearly made this list:

Leon Trotsky, Mao Zedong, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertolt Brecht, Johann Fichte, Georg Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, John Dewey, Joseph Smith, Percy Shelley, Henrik Ibsen, Edmund Wilson, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, Jean-François Lyotard, Claude Levi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky.

What did I miss?

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Über Gefühl und Anschauung

Friedrich Schleiermacher

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Anschauung ohne Gefühl ist nichts und kann weder den rechten Ursprung noch die rechte Kraft haben, Gefühl ohne Anschauung ist auch nichts: beide sind nur dann und deswegen etwas, wenn und weil sie ursprünglich eins und ungetrennt sind. Jener erste geheimnisvolle Augenblick, der bei jeder sinnlichen Wahrnehmung vorkommt, ehe noch Anschauung und Gefühl sich trennen, wo der Sinn und sein Gegenstand gleichsam ineinander geflossen und eins geworden sind, ehe noch beide an ihren ursprünglichen Platz zurückkehren – ich weiß, wie unbeschreiblich er ist, und wie schnell er vorübergeht, ich wollte aber, ihr könntet ihn festhalten und auch in der höheren und göttlichen religiösen Tätigkeit des Gemüts ihn wieder erkennen. Könnte und dürfte ich ihn doch aussprechen, andeuten wenigstens, ohne ihn zu entheiligen! Flüchtig ist er und durchsichtig, wie der erste Duft, womit der Tau die erwachten Blumen anhaucht, schamhaft und zart wie ein jungfräulicher Kuß, heilig und fruchtbar wie eine bräutliche Umarmung; ja nicht wie dies, sondern er ist als dieses selbst. Schnell und zauberisch entwickelt sich eine Erscheinung, eine Begebenheit zu einem Bilde des Universums.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)

So wie sie sich formt, die geliebte und immer gesuchte Gestalt, flieht ihr meine Seele entgegen, ich umfange sie nicht wie einen Schatten, sondern wie das heilige Wesen selbst. Ich liege am Busen der unendlichen Welt: ich bin in diesem Augenblick ihre Seele, denn ich fühle alle ihre Kräfte und ihr unendliches Leben, wie mein eigenes, sie ist in diesem Augenblicke mein Leib, denn ich durchdringe ihre Muskeln und ihre Glieder wie meine eigenen, und ihre innersten Nerven bewegen sich nach meinem Sinn und meiner Ahndung wie die meinigen. Die geringste Erschütterung, und es verweht die heilige Umarmung, und nun erst steht die Anschauung vor mir als eine abgesonderte Gestalt; ich messe sie, und sie spiegelt sich in der offenen Seele wie ein Bild der sich entwindenden Geliebten in dem aufgeschlagenen Auge des Jünglings, und nun erst arbeitet sich das Gefühl aus dem Innern empor und verbreitet sich wie die Röte der Scham und der Lust auf seiner Wange. ■

Aus Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über die Religion – Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, Berlin 1799

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Fr. Robert Barron is a powerful advocate for a Christianity rooted in spiritual praxis, not abstraction. He laments that Christian spirituality – as originally expressed in liturgy, practice, and apprenticeship – has been attenuated and transformed into a beige, bland approximation of its former self. It has become little more than a faint echo of its enveloping secular culture or another set of private convictions. In his book “The Strangest Way” Fr. Barron traces beginning of this long dreary process to the subjectivity, rationalism, and suspiciousness born of Cartesian philosophy in the so-called “Age of Enlightenment”. This cultural mindset was in turn taken up by Christian apologists like Schleiermacher, Tillich, and Rahner who reduced Christianity to something best understood as an interior, subjective experience.

In René Descartes highly influential “Discourse on Method”, he laid out the program that has formed the current culture that has in turn shaped most of us: “Surveying the history of philosophical and religious thought, Descartes despairs of finding any coherency, consistency, or certitude, Whereas mathematics has remained impressively stable over the centuries, metaphysics and philosophy are a jumble of conflicting opinions, varying starting points, elemental disagreements. The greatest minds — Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas — are at odds with each other and, worse yet, there seems no common ground on the basis of which to adjudicate their disputes. Classical philosophy, in short, is like an old seaside city, full of winding streets, dead-ends, collapsing buildings, and blind alleys — an ugly and dangerous place. Would it not be a desideratum, Descartes reasons, simply to tear down the old town, find a firmer construction site, and start afresh, this time under the guidance of one architect with a grand, unifying plan?”

Barron continues: “The wrecking-ball Descartes chooses is the powerful one of systematic doubt: if a proposition or conviction can be doubted, it should be doubted. So avid is Descartes to discover philosophical terra firma that he swings this ball wildly, knocking over every idea, principle, experience, and assumption — save one. He finds that the one thing he cannot doubt is that he is doubting; the one thing the wrecking ball cannot knock over is itself This intuition is expressed in what is certainly the most famous one-liner in the history of philosophy: cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. In this luminously “clear and distinct” idea, utterly incapable of being doubted or thought away, Descartes has found his starting point, his foundation. Not in nature, not in the tradition, not in conversation, but in the private interiority of his consciousness, he has discovered the rock upon which he can confidently build his new modern city of thought.

And the unified plan for the construction is a purely rational, mathematical method consisting of four steps:

1. begin with clear and distinct ideas,
2. break problems down into their component parts,
3. move from one step to another in a chain of reasoning only when logic compels such a move, and
4. rigorously check your work,

Beginning with the cogito and following the methode, the Cartesian philosopher will design a safe, clean, orderly, and rationally satisfying system; the philosopher will build a “modern” philosophical city, happily unlike the untidy and confusing town of classical thought.”

Now this Cartesian approach – which Fr. Barron sees as being subjectivist, rationalist and suspicious in nature — had an enormous influence, not only on the shaping of the modern physical sciences and the scientific method, but also on the emergence of a typically modern understanding of religion. When Immanuel Kant, at the end of the eighteenth century, sought to delineate a religion “within the limits of reason alone,” he appealed to the luminous inner conviction of a moral imperative. All of religion — liturgy, ritual, biblical narrative, dogmas, creeds — can and should be reduced to this subjective sense from which we must follow our ethical duty.

And when Friedrich Schleiermacher, at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, endeavored to defend Christianity against its “cultured despisers,” he did so on the basis of faith being reducible to a mystical intuition of being. In short, both Schleiermacher and Kant made a typically Cartesian appeal to a clear and distinct subjective starting point for an understanding of the religious. If you can’t beat ‘em, goes the familiar nostrum, join ‘em. An echo of Kant and Schleiermacher writings is found in two of the most influential twentieth-century theologians, Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner. For Tillich, Christianity is grounded in a sense of being “ultimately concerned” with the unconditioned power of being itself  And for Rahner, faith rests on the individual’s experience of standing in the presence of the absolute mystery, which conditions and lures all particular acts of knowing and willing. Hence interior, subjective experience is the religious terra firma, the rock upon which the whole structure is built.

Barron again: “In the popular Christianity of the last thirty years, this subjectivist bias has been plainly evident. In catechetics, theological reflection, liturgy, and parish ministry, a great stress has been placed on “experience,” one’s inner sense of the presence and activity of God, “Recall a time when you felt close to God” or “remember a moment when you were sure of God’s forgiveness” have been standard starting points for religious instruction and formation. Biblical texts, doctrines, liturgical formulas have tended to be read in light of private experiences, as though the experiences constituted the criterion of faith, the final court of appeal.”

And along with all of this has come an almost gleeful questioning of received traditions and authorities. Kant’s early essay “What Is Enlightenment?” expresses the Cartesian idea not as wrecking ball on the dangerous old city but, using a metaphor of coming of age, Kant tells European intellectuals that they had been behaving like children. Kant announces to them that the moment of their majority has arrived: they can celebrate “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” It is time for European thinkers to move out of the comfortable but infantilizing confines of their intellectual kindergarten and, in his famous phrase, “dare to know.” 

Adolf von Harnack gave powerful expression to this Kantian imperative. Harnack scrapped the old traditions and presented Christianity as a simple moral system and Christ, not as the Son of God, but as a humble ethical teacher. Liturgy, the dogmatic tradition, rituals, metaphysics — all of it was seen as peripheral to, even ultimately obscuring of these core Christian facts. We can see here a dumbing down of Christian thought. In Paul Tillich’s early work in dogmatic theology, many traditional Christian ideas have been found unintelligible. Tillich sought to redefine them in terms of our psychological experience. Thus God becomes “that which unconditionally concerns us” and the Incarnation is “the appearance of the new being under the conditions of estrangement.”

Barron: “In many ways, the work of Josef Jungmann is paradigmatic here. This extremely influential thinker held that almost all of the liturgical developments since the time of Charlemagne amounted to so much clutter, obscuring the pristine beauty of the church’s house of prayer. Accordingly, he recommended (and his recommendation was widely heeded) a cleansing return to the simplicity of the patristic liturgy and ritual. It is instructive that Jungmann employed the very Cartesian metaphor of the cluttered house in need of purification and not, say, John Henry Newman’s image of the developing plant requiring occasional pruning.

Once again, tradition was construed rather one-sidedly as obscuring rather than as illuminating. One would not have to look far to see this suspicion of tradition in the recent life of the church, For many years in Catholic circles an appeal to the broad tradition was seen as retrograde, dangerously “preconciliar.” In popular articles, workshops, and homilies, the “new” theology was presented in sharp contrast to a usually caricatured “classical” version, this despite the fact that the great theological Fathers of the Council — de Lubac, Danielou, Rahner — remained profoundly respectful of the tradition. There has seemed to reign in contemporary Christianity a sort of hermeneutic of suspicion with regard to traditional ecclesial practices and theological forms, a tendency to see them as a front for plays of power or systems of domination.”

Recall that the foundation for Descartes’s project is the cogito, the self-authenticating thinking subject, guided by the mathematical method. Now precisely because all sense experience can be doubted, and because the body belongs to the realm of sense, this indubitable ego can have no necessary connection to the body. The source and ground of the characteristically modern philosophy therefore is literally disembodied. Just as the Cartesian mind is removed from the environing tradition, so is it removed from muscle, bone, movement, and blood. A spirituality derived from liturgy, practice, and discipleship becomes an interior, subjective experience.

 Barron: “One can spot this body-spirit dualism in so much of modern philosophy. Thus Kant radically separates sensuousness from understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason and, in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, he drives a wedge between anthropology (empirical, culturally determined) and the categorical imperative (purely rational, universal, disembodied) ~ And in Hegel, we find a sharp distinction between religion on the one hand and true philosophy on the other, religion tainted by imagination and particularity and philosophy beautifully abstract and rational.

This splitting of body and mind has shaped contemporary theology precisely in the measure that certain theologians have done their work apart from the discipline and practice of the believing community. Paul Tillich, for example, composed a massive three -volume systematic theology, while admitting that he rarely attended church service. Purely academic theologians — alone with their books, immersed in the intellectual tradition of Christianity, but not practicing their faith in any measurable way — are thinking in the disembodied Cartesian mode. When Hans Urs von Balthasar calls for a “kneeling theology” rather than a “sitting theology,” he is assuming that intellectuals will theologize more accurately about Christianity when their minds are formed in the concrete (and very bodily) discipline of prayer and worship.

And this Cartesian body/mind dualism is especially apparent in the texture of ordinary Christian life. In the last thirty years (especially in Catholicism), the bodily gestures and practices of the faith, the roots of spiritual praxis — rosaries, benedictions, processions, the performance of the works of mercy, devotions to the saints, novenas, pilgrimages, kneeling for prayer, the wearing of distinctive clothes — were largely set aside and not replaced. From the height of a typically Cartesian rationalism, such things were decried as superstitious, primitive, unworthy of properly enlightened Christians.”

My page of desultory reading selections from one of his books “And Now I See” is here

Here’s my posts so far on a theology of the child in historical perspective. It’s a series that I’ve enjoyed doing and which I’d like to return to at some stage (but not for a wee while).

• John Calvin on Children
• Friedrich Schleiermacher on Children
• Karl Barth on Children
• Karl Rahner on Children
• David Jensen on Children
• Tony Kelly on Children
• Jürgen Moltmann on Children

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834) is among the most significant Reformed theologians between Calvin and Barth.[1] What constitutes an area of great neglect in his thought, however, is his thinking on children, explored in a number of his writings: Soliloquies (1800), Celebration of Christmas (1806) and Sermons on the Christian Household (1820). He was concerned throughout to explore a number of questions:

• What is the child?
• What is the unique spiritual perspective of childhood?
• Must maturity alienate us from childhood?
• How might parents best nurture their children and draw out the unique individuality that expresses itself in children?

These kinds of questions were explored against the backdrop of a rise in the importance of the nuclear family as a social institution, and the sharper demarcation between the roll of mothers and fathers – the home, children and emotions were increasingly seen as the domain of mothers, the withdrawal of extended family, etc. More positively, there was greater emphasis on the value of children’s nurture and development through age-appropriate play and education. The period also saw the development of the kindergarten, children’s literature and children’s toys.

More than most theologians, it was Schleiermacher (and later people like Karl Rahner) who believed that children could teach adults, that children – as children – were full human beings and so worthy of respect and dignity. So, in Schleiermacher’s novella The Celebration of Christmas: A Conversation, one of the characters, Agnes, poses a series of important questions:

Is it then the case that the first childish objects of enjoyment must, in fact, be lost that the higher may be gained? May there not be a way of obtaining the latter without letting the former go? Does life then begin with a pure illusion in which there is no truth at all, and nothing enduring? How am I rightly to comprehend this? In the case of the man who has come to reflect upon himself and the world, and who has found God, seeing that this process is not gone through without conflict and warfare, do his joys rest upon the eradication, not merely of what is evil, but of what is blameless? For it is thus we always indicate the childlike, or even the childish, if you will rather so have it.[2]

In 1834, Schleiermacher preached a sermon on Mark 1:13-16. In exegeting v. 15 ['anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it'], he noted:

The peculiar essence of the child is that he is altogether in the moment … The past disappears for him, and of the future he knows nothing – each moment exists only for itself, and this accounts for the blessedness of a soul content in innocence.[3]

This, Schleiermacher believes, is a child’s gift to adults, and it is towards a recovery of precisely this perspective that Jesus has in mind for those who would enter the Kingdom of God – that those who know communion with God might live in the present with no anxiety about past or future. So DeVries on Schleiermacher:

Children remind us of the fact that God created humanity to live simply. They help adults shed their obsession with the complexities of work and public life. Indeed, children draw adults back into the most basic of human relationships.[4]

Charles Blackman, 'Children Playing' (1974)

Celebration of Christmas is a revelation into Schleiermacher’s theology (on many levels) and not least his (overly)-optimistic view of human personhood. It was this that Barth, in his 1923/24 Göttingen lectures on the Theology of Schleiermacher, rightly picked up on, criticising Schleiermacher for positing an anthropology too without regard for an adequate account of the realities of sin, conversion and the in-breaking of the Word of God.

In those lectures, Barth’s reading of Schleiermacher’s ‘Christological Festival Sermons’ (as Barth calls them) spans some 50 pages wherein Barth expresses his usual mixture of appreciation and criticism for the Silesian-born theologian. One place where Barth’s praise for Schleiermacher’s Christmas sermons is noted concerns Schleiermacher’s sermon on Acts 17:30-31 ['In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead']. On this, ‘the most powerful and impressive Christmas sermon that Schleiermacher preached’, Barth comments:

Let us look beyond the narrow sphere of individual life, Schleiermacher asks in the introduction, to the large and universal sphere. It is the Savior of the world whose coming we celebrate. A new world has dawned since the Word became flesh. His appearing was the great turning-point in the whole history of the human race. What is the change whereby the old age and the new may be distinguished? The fact that ignorance of God is no longer overlooked and tolerated by God. Christ’s life was from beginning to end an increasing revelation. The world’s childhood ended with it. Sin is now known and the image of God is evident. Hence judgement passes on all human action, and we ought to rejoice at this. We are now told that he commands everyone everywhere to repent.[5]

DeVries suggests that Barth’s reading of Schleiermacher’s (positive) child-anthropology is not nearly as nuanced as it ought to be. She notes that, for Schleiermacher, children a not perfect and sinless mediators of the higher life and are born with as much potential for sin as for salvation, and that it is the parents’ duty to nurture their children’s ‘higher self-consciousness’ which connect them to the transcendent and also opens their hearts to others.[6]

Rather than follow the formal catechesis that Calvin and Luther had stressed (and which Schleiermacher thought were too impersonal), the Moravian/Pietist-educated Schleiermacher stressed that the Christian home is the ‘first and irreplaceable school of faith’, for only here can children really experience the full range of what Christian faith is about and so come to faith in Christ. Schleiermacher believes that faith is more ‘caught’ than ‘taught’.

Still, he notes that parents can also damage a child in a number of ways:

1. by failing to take their concerns/interests seriously.
2. by failing to respond empathetically or appropriately to their emotions.
3. parents whose own emotional lives are chaotic or unreliable will drive their children into secrecy.
4. by attempting to live their own dreams/aspirations through children.

Lewis Hine, 'Children playing with Campbell Kid dolls' (1912)

Schleiermacher also stresses that pastors have a pivotal role to play in children’s faith, among the most important duty of which is informal and personalised catechises where the focus is on leading children to develop, in DeVries words, ’sound and sophisticated abilities in reading and interpreting scripture. Such instruction might begin with memorizing Bible verses, but it should eventually lead to developing in children a way of thinking (Gedankenerzeugungsprozess) that can be applied to questions or situations that will arise when the catechizing process is over’.[7] In other words it is about helping children to think theologically about all of life. DeVries continues:

Schleiermacher holds high expectations of the catechizing pastor. He states that when children who have been raised in the church lose their faith in adulthood, it is often because they have received poor catechetical instruction. Mindless repetition of correct answers will not sustain faith through the journey to adulthood. Pastors should treat children as fellow seekers who will be no more satisfied with pat answers than adults. If there is a virtue to be developed in the teaching pastor, it is the virtue of humility, for teaching the faith is probably his [sic] most difficult task. Schleiermacher urges his ministry students always to consider their teaching a work in progress, and challenges them to be quick to admit their mistakes.

What children need more than anything else is living faith in Christ. Parents, teachers, and pastors must devote all their energy and enthusiasm to presenting Christ to their children. This is best achieved through the whole of life itself, lived with children. They should feel the love of adults as “reflecting the splendour of eternal love” in Christ. Children who have received the Spirit in baptism and who have been raised within the loving discipline of the Christian community give us reason to hope for the future.[8]

[1] Here I draw heavily upon an essay by Dawn DeVries, ‘”Be Converted and Become as Little Children”: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Childhood’ in The Child in Christian Thought (ed. Marcia JoAnn Bunge; Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001), 329-49.

[2] Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christmas Eve: A Dialogue on the Celebration of Christmas (trans. W. Hastie; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1890), 33.

[3] Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schleiermachers sämmtliche Werke (vol. II/6; Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1834-1864), 71-2.

[4] DeVries, ‘Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Childhood’, 341.

[5] Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24 (ed. Dietrich Ritschl; trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1982), 72.

[6] See DeVries, ‘Schleiermacher on the Religious Significance of Childhood’, 341-2.

[7] Ibid., 345.

[8] Ibid., 346-7.

When I filled out the application for Duke Divinity and got to the question asking if there was an particular faculty member I was looking forward to studying with, like every other potential student, I wrote in “Stanley Hauerwas.”  Sure, there are some Richard Hays fans out there, some J. Kameron Carter fans, and a handful of others (speaking personally now as a devoted fan of Tammy Williams and J. Warren Smith), but Hauerwas is Duke in a lot of ways for a lot of people.  Of course, when I wrote his name in, I had only recently heard of him and had not read a word of his, other than some obnoxious, albeit true, comment (I characterize it as such because my initial read of him is that he likes to be provocative and, yes, obnoxious, not because I don’t respect him) he made to Time when they named him America’s Best Theologian in 2001: “Best is not a theological category.”

At Duke, it is impossible to escape from his ideas.  They are in the water (or Kool-Aid, I suppose, depending on your perspective).  And the rough-hewn and not quite accurate version is that the Enlightenment caused everything wrong with the church and the world.

Unlike many Duke students, I was not one who had to have Hauerwas before leaving.  But then his class (Happiness, Virtue and the Life of Friendship) looked great and fit into my schedule well, so I signed up.  Two-hundred sixty one pages to read for the first class period, but it’s not so bad now.

All this to say that postliberalism is a thing that Duke does and perhaps is, but what is it?  Postliberalism is an amorphous term which seems to mean whatever people need it to mean in the moment, sometimes used almost as a synonym for postmodernism, but very definitely a reaction and critique to Christian (and particularly Protestant) theological liberalism.  And I say liberalism in a technical sense, referring to the Enlightenment version of Christianity whose archetypal figure is (inasmuch as such things can be said to start with one man) Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Returning to the rough-hewn and inaccurate version of these ideas that seems to flow out of Duke’s air ducts, Germany (where Schleiermacher is from) seems to be the sources of all the problems of the modern age, both in 19th century German biblical scholars’ total reduction of Biblical criticism to a “science” (historical-critical methods) and a reduction of Christianity to something reasonable (thank you, Immanuel Kant).  Please note that I truly mean “rough-hewn and inaccurate” before getting upset about this history, and realize that it is a caricature (although only slightly, to be honest).

I still have some questions about this whole thing, but I feel like I’m getting a better grasp of what “this whole thing” actually is this semester, and in more helpful ways than before.  Namely, I’m taking a class with Hauerwas, reading some of his stuff, reading Alasdair MacIntyre, reading Samuel Wells, reading John Howard Yoder (several important folks).

This post started as something else and became this because I realized I couldn’t write the post I wanted without some basic introduction.  That explanation will hopefully make sense when the next post is finished.

Bavinck, in summarizing Schleiermacher’s view of regeneration, shows how an exclusively “Christ in us,” rather than a  ”Christ for us”-type of Christianity (if the former can even be called that) leaves no room for an objective justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. When our justification is made to depend on anything but the imputed righteousness of Christ, whether it be morality, or a “personal life in communion with God,” we cease to look outside of ourselves for help, and in so doing cease to look to Christ.

In theology the concept of regeneration was again restored by Schleiermacher. In his thought the concept even became the center of the redemptive order for religion. Specifically, Christianity was not a revealed doctrine, nor a moral code that enjoins activity upon us, but life, personal life in communion with God. In keeping with this, redemption consisted objectively in the impartation of the holiness and blessedness of Christ’s God-consciousness, to which regeneration then corresponds subjectively, with the assumption of humans into living fellowship with Christ. When Christ encounters us and vigorously exerts his influence in us, the previously feeble and oppressed God-consciousness is raised up, reinforced, and brought to dominion in us. Within us there then arises a new religious personality who breaks with the old state, starts a new life, and develops and completes it in sanctification. Regeneration, accordingly, is “the turning point at which the earlier life as it were breaks off and the new begins.” Schleiermacher’s virtue is that he again included regeneration in dogmatics, understood by it a religious-ethical process of change, and also related it to the person of Christ. But in the process he was not able to disentangle himself completely from the influence of pantheistic philosophy. This is apparent in the first place, in the fact that, in connection with his view of sin as sensuousness and of Christ’s appearance as the rebirth of the human race, he views the rebirth of the individual as a moment, be it a very significant moment, in the process in which the human spirit, in fellowship with God, elevates itself above and frees itself from the dominion of the sensuous nature. On the other hand, this again carries within itself the consequence that justification is made dependent on repentance. The assumption into fellowship of life with Christ, which is regeneration, has two dimensions. On the one hand, it brings about a change in one’s relationship to God, which is justification; on the other hand it consists in a change of life and is called conversion (further differentiated into repentance and faith). The moment a person is reborn, repenting and believing, one no longer as in the past faces God as the Holy and Righteous One but experiences his love and grace and loses the consciousness of guilt and doom by which one was burdened in the past. Regeneration includes a change of consciousness and in that respect is called justification. But in Schleiermacher’s doctrine, there is no room for an objective justification that precedes conversion, is based on the righteousness of Christ, and is accepted and enjoyed by faith alone.
- Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4, Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 60-61. 

As part of my advent journey this year I’ve been reading Schleiermacher’s 1806 novella Christmas Eve: A Dialogue on the Celebration of Christmas (trans. W. Hastie; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1890). It’s a beautiful read, not least because undergirded by Schleiermacher’s enormous respect for childhood as childhood. Like Rahner, Schleiermacher believes that children teach adults, that children - as children – are full human beings and so worthy of all the respect and dignity due to creaturely personhood.

For example, one of the characters in the story (Agnes) poses a series of important questions:

Is it then the case that the first childish objects of enjoyment must, in fact, be lost that the higher may be gained? May there not be a way of obtaining the latter without letting the former go? Does life then begin with a pure illusion in which there is no truth at all, and nothing enduring? How am I rightly to comprehend this? In the case of the man who has come to reflect upon himself and the world, and who has found God, seeing that this process is not gone through without conflict and warfare, do his joys rest upon the eradication, not merely of what is evil, but of what is blameless? For it is thus we always indicate the childlike, or even the childish, if you will rather so have it. (p. 33)

The book is a revelation into Schleiermacher’s – and Barth’s – theology (on many levels) and not least Schleiermacher’s (overly)-optimistic view of human personhood. It was this that Barth, in his 1923/24 Göttingen lectures on the theology of Schleiermacher, rightly picked up on, criticising Schleiermacher for positing an anthropology too without regard for an adequate account of the realities of sin, conversion and the in-breaking of the Word of God.

In those lectures, Barth’s reading of Schleiermacher’s ‘Christological Festival Sermons’ (as Barth calls them) spans some 50 pages wherein Barth expresses his usual mixture of appreciation and criticism for the Silesian-born theologian. One place where Barth’s praise for Schleiermacher’s Christmas sermons is noted concerns Schleiermacher’s sermon on Acts 17:30-31 ['In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead']. On this, ‘the most powerful and impressive Christmas sermon that Schleiermacher preached’, Barth comments:

Let us look beyond the narrow sphere of individual life, Schleiermacher asks in the introduction, to the large and universal sphere. It is the Savior of the world whose coming we celebrate. A new world has dawned since the Word became flesh. His appearing was the great turning-point in the whole history of the human race. What is the change whereby the old age and the new may be distinguished? The fact that ignorance of God is no longer overlooked and tolerated by God. Christ’s life was from beginning to end an increasing revelation. The world’s childhood ended with it. Sin is now known and the image of God is evident. Hence judgement passes on all human action, and we ought to rejoice at this. We are now told that he commands everyone everywhere to repent. [Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24 (ed. Dietrich Ritschl; trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1982), 72.]

For the world to have been judged so graciously is indeed the good news that advent dare not dream to hope for.

Still … Maranatha.

The latest issue of Journal of Reformed Theology (Volume 2, Number 2, 2008) is out and includes the following articles:

Cornelius van der Kooi, The Appeal to the Inner Testimony of the Spirit, especially in H. Bavinck

Abstract: “The Reformation took-deliberately and freely-its position in the religious subject.” In this article, the argument is made that Bavinck has not formulated a strong position with this statement; but rather, a dubious starting point for Reformed theology. The question is whether this thesis, with its focus on the subject, can still be maintained in this manner within the current ecumenical situation, or whether it is imperative that it be adjusted.

Jason A. Goroncy, ‘That God May Have Mercy Upon All’: A Review-Essay of Matthias Gockel’s Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election

Abstract: The doctrine of election lies at the heart of Reformed theology. This essay offers a review of Matthias Gockel’s recent comparison between two of Reformed theology’s greatest voices: that of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth. Gockel outlines Schleiermacher’s contribution to the doctrine before turning to consider its modifications in Barth’s work. The advance of these two thinkers on this issue has significant implications for the ongoing questions of universal election and universal salvation. Consequently, the possibility of an apokatastasis panton arises naturally from their theology. This possibility is briefly explored.

Oliver D. Crisp, The Election of Jesus Christ

Abstract: In modern theology the election of Christ is often associated with the work of Karl Barth. In this paper, I offer an alternative account of Christ’s election in dialogue with the Post-Reformation Reformed tradition. It turns out that, contrary to popular belief, there is no single ‘Reformed’ doctrine of election; a range of views has been tolerated in the tradition. I set out one particular construal of the election of Christ that stays within the confessional parameters of Reformed theology, while arguing, contrary to some Reformed divines, that Christ is the cause and foundation of election.

Ad Prosman, A Dutch Response to Nihilism: an Evaluation of K.H. Miskotte’s Interaction with Nietzsche

Abstract: This article discusses the way in which the Dutch theologian K.H. Miskotte interpreted the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche. It will be pointed out that religion is the central notion of Miskotte’s approach of Nietzsche. Discussing this theme, it will be necessary to pay attention to the concept of Nietzsche’s nihilism. From there we receive a clearer insight in the interaction between Miskotte and Nietzsche. It is expected that examining nihilism and the interaction with nihilism will be helpful to contextualize theology. The method of Miskotte is attractive because he does not evaluate nihilism in a philosophical manner, but he counters it by the Thora. Belief stands against belief. Nevertheless we can ask whether Miskotte’s concept of religion is adequate enough to tackle the problems we have to deal with in our nihilistic culture. Is Miskotte right when he connects nihilism and religion, and what kind of religion is he connecting with nihilism?

Mechteld Jansen, Indonesian and Moluccan Immigrant Churches in the Netherlands: Missionary History and Challenge

Abstract: As a result of immigration of many Christians from all parts of the world to the Netherlands, about 1,000 ‘immigrant churches’ have been established in the country during the last decades. This paper focuses on two churches in the Netherlands that mainly consist of members of Asian descent: the Gereja Kristen Indonesia Nederlands (GKIN) and the Geredja Indjili Maluku (GIM). Both are Protestant churches that have a history within the Netherlands for many years. Since these churches are not very well-known in the worldwide family of Reformed churches, I will describe their historical and cultural backgrounds quite extensively. This also includes the Dutch missionary involvement with the former Dutch colony of Indonesia. Subsequently, I will turn to their actual situation, and my main question will be how they view and carry out their missionary vocation in Dutch society. In the final section, it will be maintained that these churches do not simply mirror the missionary approach of the Dutch in Indonesia, but they consider themselves partners with other churches in a revised mission in which their own features can be a blessing for the whole Dutch society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bongmba, Elias K. “Two Steps Forward, One Step Backward.” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa (March 1997): 81-96.

Christian, C. W. Friedrich Schleiermacher. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1979.

Clements, Keith. Friedrich Schleiermacher: Pioneer of Modern Theology. London: Collins Liturgical Publications, 1987.

Corduan, Winfried. Neighboring Faiths. Illinois: IVP Academic, 1998.

Heard, Gerry C. “Schleiermacher’s Concept of Religion.” Perspectives In Religious Studies (Fall 1980): 19-43.

Marina, Jacqueline, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Redeker, Martin. Schleiermacher: Life and Thought. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. Translated by John Oman. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1958.

Sykes, Stephen. Friedrich Schleiermacher. Richmond: John Knox Press, 1971.

In Theological Reflection and Education for Ministry: The Search for Integration in Theology, John Paver observes that the credit for the definitive catergorisation in modern theology and its attendant implications for the training of pastoral ministers lays with Schleiermacher. He writes:

‘… including theology in a research university could be seen as a betrayal of the educational revolution that the research university represented. Schleiermacher had to answer to these objections if theology was to have a place so he added another pole [to the "Berlin" type of theological education] by advocating that theological education should constitute professional education. His argument was partly sociological and partly philosophical-theological. Schleiermacher’s sociological argument was that every human society has sets of practices dealing with bodily, health, social order, and religious needs. These are socially necessary for the well-being of society as a whole and each of these requires properly trained leadership. Schleiermacher’s philosophical-theological argument proposed that religions such as Christianity do not rest on principles, but on a kind of initiation or insightful experience, which can be the subject of philosophical enquiry. hence, Christian theology can be a subject of Wissenschaft enquiry without threat or compromise to Christianity’s integrity or the integrity of the university’. – John E. Paver, Theological Reflection and Education for Ministry: The Search for Integration in Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 8.

Paver’s essay is a significant contribution to the ever-burgeoning field of theological education, training for ministry practice, and pastoral supervision as a vehicle for theological reflection. Whether it justifies the £55 price tag is another story, but then that’s what libraries are for.

Fachrizal Halim

The idea of questioning the essence of religion was partly addressed as a response to the Cartesian cogito’ during 17^th century. Kant had done this before and Schleiermacher apparently had been strongly influenced by Kant, of course, without denying the influence of Schelling on him. Kierkegaard, on the other side, wanted to purify what he called as ‘temptation’ within a religion that stumbling people from God. The respond to rationalism, for Kierkegaard should not end by mediation that based on feeling. Both Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard finally agreed that ethics per se will not transform someone to the highest faith.

From the book On Religion: Addresses in Response to Its Cultural Critic, Schleiermacher obviously wanted to revitalize the idea that human feeling, according to him, is absolutely dependent on God. It seems to me that something had disappeared from religious life because of subjective rationalism. I assume this is exactly the reason for Romantic movement. In the context of Friedrich Schleiermacher, romanticism was a movement of the rediscovery of feeling as the essence of religion. Feeling is the key idea of how someone internalizes the values, morality, and even the idea of God within himself.

For Schleiermacher, science and knowledge which is based on rationality could not explain the essence of religion. Religion has nothing to do with the knowledge of nature. The knowledge of God, on the contrary, could not be understood in the frame of ‘cause and effect.’ Religion always related to the infinite thing, and in order to understand it, one must use immediate feeling. Schleiermacher said, “to seek and to find this infinite and eternal factor in all that lives and moves…and to know life itself only in immediate feeling—that is religion.” Schleiermacher obviously denied science because it could not bring out the contemplation of the infinite. Science or knowledge of religion is not religion itself, and it obviously, cannot be, possibly on the same level with feeling or the contemplation of religion.

It is very clear in his book that Schleiermacher wanted to put science and morality underneath religion. One could not understand any thing without religion. As a result, morality and all ethical systems have no meaning without religion. Briefly, it is impossible for a person to be moral or scientific without religion.

After subjugating science, morality and even art, Schleiermacher redefined religion and its relation to the universe. He defined religion based on human feeling, even though it doesn’t mean subjectivism. We feel all particular action, our being and life, only through the consciousness of God. The consciousness of God is a kind of “external circumstance” that makes all people have the same feeling. Thousands of people could feel the same religiosity aroused in the same manner because of that external circumstance.

I found a unique idea in Schleiermacher’s book when he said: “Every particular religious organization has limited horizons. None, therefore, is able to embrace all; nor, accordingly, is any able to believe that nothing is to be seen beyond its own horizons.” From this argument, I assume that Schleiermacher wanted to convince readers that difference of feeling is inevitable. Everyone, then, must be ready to see that there may be different views and experiences. Again, this can happen because “the quality of feeling” may be different. Schleiermacher stated: “Religion, however, doesn’t for a moment desire to encapsulate all who have faith and feeling within a single faith or feeling. Its task is to develop sensitivity for the eternal unity of life’s originating source among people whose capacity for religious experience is still immature.” Therefore, within the condition of ‘immature,’ one must be ready to have openness. Each person must be open to the fact that perceptions and feelings belong to other forms of religion for which he may well lack any sensitivity at all. From this point, Schleiermacher imagined a clear conception of inter-subjectivity in religion. He said, “this is precisely the real source of the art and love we are looking for.”

In relation to morality, Schleiermacher made a distinct separation between religion and conduct. He used an example: one who acts badly may have no morality at all, but one who has morality may not be pious as well. So, the relation between religion and morality is not implicative. Religion, in itself, doesn’t urge people to action at all. One can act well or badly depending on one’s feelings. Therefore, conduct as a whole should be regarded as a reaction of feeling. If someone puts a good character into his feeling, his conduct will be good as well. The more we can attribute the character of piety to a feeling, the more strongly it tends to retreat within it.

It should be noted that morality must not go beyond religion. Schleiermacher reminded that the higher feeling is within religion itself, not in morality. He emphasized that religion stands as the summation of all higher feeling. Look at this sentence: “Religion is not a servant to morality but its indispensable friend.”

Schleiermacher’s idea of humanity is very fascinating. For him, humanity and religion are inseparably conjoined. One depends on others because he needs to supply all that he lacks to form his own humanity. If some one finds his humanity, he will find religion as well. Of course, it is difficult to achieve. In addition, no man is entirely the same as another. Even the noblest man represents humanity in only one particular way and in only one aspect. It is what he called as the uniqueness of humanity. Human kind is unique because every person always represents the small picture of humanity as a whole. The self, or one particular consciousness, cannot be alienated from the others. If one feeling is isolated from the other, it will shrink and empty. This is the reason why, then, Schleiermacher concluded that “the whole only becomes transparent to us in fellowship with the others”

Kierkegaard, in his book Fear and Trembling, had proposed the idea that is different to Schleiermacher’s.  What Schleiermacher called as a “feeling” for Kierkegaard called a temptation (Anfechtung). Temptation cannot transform people into the divine or the universal. To be a true knight of faith, one must deny himself and sacrifice himself, for duty gives up the finite in order to grasp the infinite. Kierkegaard, in this sense, referred to a biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is a good example of someone who believes there is no higher expression of faith than to put himself in an absolute relation to the absolute.

The story of Abraham and Isaac is problematic (perhaps a ‘paradox’) in the sense of absolute piety. Kierkegaard had proposed the main difficulty of Abraham when he wanted to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. Abraham had a dilemma whether or not he should tell anyone in his family about his planning. However, his decision was not to tell anyone. He concealed his plan in order to devote himself to God. He believed that no one could accept his plan, and there was also no need to tell his plan because he feared his devotion would be mediated by his words.

Kierkegaard concluded that in certain cases, faith is a paradox. It comes to my mind that Kierkegaard verily wanted to show that in order to transform to become ‘the knight of faith,’ one must pass as difficult a decision as Abraham did. In the case of Abraham, no ethical systems could justify his act to sacrifice Isaac. At the time no one doubted his feeling toward Isaac. However, for Abraham, sacrificing Isaac was a trial of his faith. Abraham was convinced that his relation to God required no mediation. For Abraham, his beloved son Isaac or even his speech could be a mediation that would cause his devotion to God to stumble. Kierkegaard said, “if he really wanted to speak to Isaac, he must transform his situation into a temptation (Anfechtung), for otherwise he could say nothing, and if he were to do that, then he is not even so much as a tragic hero.” At last, Abraham came to the situation where he could not say anything. Perhaps, this is the highest faith toward God. The highest faith is where there is no need of tears, no need of admiration, and no more any feeling.

In relation to Schleiermacher, it seems to me that Kierkegaard wanted to show that one must not fall into a temptation to reach God. A true faith doesn’t require any ethical system. Ethics will not transform someone to the highest faith. For Kierkegaard, this is exactly the uniqueness of Abraham. His faith seemed to be a paradox, but he is truly the good example of a man who devotes himself totally to God.

List of References

Kirkegaard, Soren, Fear and Trembling, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univerity Press, 1941).

Schleiermacher, Friedrich, On Religion: Addresses in Response to Its Cultural Critics, trans. Tereence N. Tice (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1969).

Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 12:49 PM

“Idealism” is a technical term in philosophy with a very narrow and specific meaning (see #3). It is very different from the general usage of the word (see #1 & 2). Worth checking out the full Wikipedia articles if you have the time.

i·de·al·ism
Definition:
1. belief in perfection: belief in and pursuit of perfection as an attainable goal
youthful idealism
2. living by high ideals: aspiring to or living in accordance with high standards or principles
3. belief that material things are imaginary: the philosophical belief that material things do not exist independently but only as constructions in the mind

i·de·al·ist
Definition:
1. impractical person: a perfectionist who rejects practical considerations
too much of an idealist to compromise with her opponents
2. somebody with high ideals: somebody who aspires to or abides by high standards or principles
3. philosophy believer in idealism: a believer in a philosophy holding that material objects do not exist independently of the mind

Idealism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism

Idealism is the doctrine that ideas, or thought, make up either the whole or an indispensable aspect of any full reality, so that a world of material objects containing no thought either could not exist as it is experienced, or would not be fully “real.” Idealism is often contrasted with materialism, both belonging to the class of monist as opposed to dualist or pluralist ontologies. (Note that this contrast between idealism and materialism has to do with the question of the nature of reality as such — it has nothing to do with advocating high moral standards, or the like.)

German idealism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_idealism

German idealism was a philosophical movement in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment. The most well-known thinkers in the movement were Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, while Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and Friedrich Schleiermacher were also major contributors.

Meaning of idealism
The word “idealism” has more than one meaning. The philosophical meaning of idealism here is that the properties we discover in objects depend on the way that those objects appear to us as perceiving subjects, and not something they possess “in themselves”, apart from our experience of them. The very notion of a “thing in itself” should be understood as a sort of shorthand for an operation of the mind, such that we consider something that appears without respect to the specific manner in which it appears. The question of what properties a thing might have “independently of the mind” is thus incoherent for Idealism.

Monday, February 25, 2008

A couple of days ago, I stumbled across this article about Deepak Chopra, a spiritual teacher who is promoting his new book, titled, The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore.  Although I knew little about him, I was struck by some of the things he said in his interview with Reuters.

On his Web site, a reviewer of Dr. Chopra’s new book called it ”fresh and profound,” but as I read some of the excerpts, some of his ideas sounded vaguely familiar.  At that point, I cursed that I hadn’t read more carefully during seminary!  Thank goodness I haven’t sold all of my old books yet.

Chopra’s basic thesis is that there are three interpretations of Jesus: 1) the sketchy historical figure (who is ultimately unknowable, since the New Testament is a mixture of fable and history), 2) the Christ of faith created and appropriated by “the church,” and 3) Christ, who embodies the highest level of enlightenment, the “God consciousness.”

Fresh?  Profound?  Alas, in the words of the sage, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9 ESV)  It seems that Dr. Chopra’s ideas are more like warmed-over Enlightenment, rather than anything terribly fresh or profound.

The Third Jesus: “God consciousness”–Chopra’s third Jesus–is a term coined by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), a German philosopher and theologian (hardly an Eastern mystic) who attempted to do the same things as Deepak Chopra more than 200 years ago (Schleiermacher probably picked up the thread from someone even earlier!).  Schleiermacher, who was immersed in the rationalism of his day, attempted to rework traditional Christian orthodoxy so that it would be acceptable to the European Enlightenment crowd.  Basically, for him, Jesus was not the divine Son and his death was not redemptive in any cosmic way.  Rather, Jesus, a good rabbi, manifested perfect “God consciousness,” or a constant awareness of his dependence on God.  Redemption, in Schleiermacher’s terminology, is the journey from “God-unconsciousness” (evil) toward “God-consciousness” (salvation), modeled by the man Jesus of Nazareth.  Sound familiar?

The First Jesus: The quest for the historical Jesus–Chopra’s first Jesus–is also old news.  According to Enlightenment skepticism, Holy Scripture–usually considered by believers to be the Word of God, the normative rule of faith and practice–is merely a record of the religious experience of believers who lived in another time and place.  Therefore, in Enlightenment thinking, the Bible is not normative for contemporary Christians, but offers guidance and insight into others’ God-consciousness.  Moreover, in this line of thinking, the real story about Jesus–what really happened–lurks behind the legends expounded by his followers (a.k.a. the New Testament).  For better or worse, lots of scholars have offered to reconstruct the historical Jesus for us.  This quest began with Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), another Enlightenment philosopher, continued with William Wrede (1859-1906) and Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), and now finds its home with the Jesus Seminar (Oddly enough, the idea that the original religion of Jesus was deformed by later tradition is the staple of Islam, Mormonism, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and various feminists and revisionists today).  The queer thing about the quest for the historical Jesus, however, is that the questers invariably “discover” a Jesus who conveniently endorses their preferred political and social convictions and only challenges the positions of their opponents.  Sound familiar?

The Second Jesus: As for Chopra’s second Jesus–the Christ of faith–I’m not sure where he stands exactly.  His words sound like a mixture of personal anger directed at the Catholic Church (sort of like Dan Brown who wrote The Da Vinci Code), progressive politics, and liberal social convictions. 

In an excerpt from his book, Dr. Chopra employs a tired, old saw in denouncing the religion about Jesus: “The second Jesus [i.e., the Jesus of the church] leads us into the wilderness without a clear path out.  He became the foundation of a religion that has proliferated into some twenty thousand sects.  They argue endlessly over every thread in the garments of a ghost.  But can any authority, however exalted, really inform us about what Jesus would have thought?  Isn’t it a direct contradiction to hold that Jesus was a unique creation–the one and only incarnation of God–while at the same time claiming to be able to read his mind on current events?  Yet in his name Christianity pronounces on homosexuality, birth control, and abortion.”  Dr. Chopra joins the chorus: religion is bad because some of its adherents have gone to war in God’s name, etc. etc. etc.

I look forward to reading Dr. Chopra’s book to encounter his “fresh and profound” ideas.  But since I feel like I have already read his book, I’m not expecting much.  I wish he would write another book where he seriously engages the richness and diversity of Christian thought, rather than pigeon hole all Christians as dupes and sketch a caricature of “the church” based on his negative experiences with Roman Catholicism.  The church–that is, followers of Jesus from all times and places, rather than an institution secretively operated from within the walls of the Vatican–is not nearly as monolithic as some revisionists think.  Using his own categories, I believe that Jesus can be all three at the same time: a historical person, the object of Christian thinking (theology), and the one who connects us to the transcendent God (the Father).  But I guess that boring stuff doesn’t sell books or make headlines.

I’m afraid that Dr. Chopra’s book is not exactly “fresh” or “profound”–just more warmed-over Enlightenment in fancy new packaging.

Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures (transcribed and edited by Paul H. Brazier; T&T Clark, London/New York, 2007). xxiv + 285 pages. ISBN: 9780567031402.

While he fruitfully enjoyed a life-long engagement with and formation by Karl Barth’s work, produced numerous articles on various aspects of such, and lectured on Barth most years he taught at King’s College London, Colin Gunton never fulfilled his ambition to pen a monograph devoted solely to this his favourite theologian. Had he done so, these lectures (recorded and transcribed almost verbatim by Paul Brazier, complete with charts, diagrams, live-questions and Gunton’s responses) would have served as the basis.

Chapters 1-3 attend to the intellectual, historical and theological background to Barth’s thinking. Beginning with a focus on Enlightenment philosophy as it finds voice in Kant, Schleiermacher and Hegel – all three of whom ‘identified Christianity too closely with modern culture’ (p. 17) – Gunton then turns to Barth’s early theological formation in the nineteenth-century liberalism of Harnack and Herrmann, as well as to some other voices and ideas that impinged on Barth’s theological development – Johann Christoph Blumhardt (who also influenced Moltmann), Albert Schweitzer and Franz Overbeck through whom eschatology was re-confirmed on the theological radar. Barth’s engagement with existentialism (Kierkegaardian and other) and theologies of ‘religion’, ‘crisis’ and ‘dialectics’ are introduced in the second and third lectures, and re-appear subsequently throughout. Certainly, for the Swiss theologian, ‘no road to the eternal world has ever existed except the road of negation’ (p. 33). Thus when Gunton later comes to unpack something of the charge concerning Barth’s ‘irrationality’ through the continuing influence of Der Römerbrief, empiricism, and Barth’s ‘assertive style’, the United Reformed Church minister notes:

The influence of empiricism, especially on the minds of English and American theologians, cannot be dismissed. The English, or to be more pertinent, the Anglican theological mind is shaped by a philosophical tradition that does not find Barth’s approach to theology easy to understand let alone agree with … Part of our intellectual tradition makes it hard for us to understand – particularly an Anglican tradition. Anglicans on the whole like things to be nice and middle way, the via media. And there is not much of the middle way in Karl Barth! … Barth’s assertive style does make it difficult for mild-mannered establishment Anglicans to cope with. (p. 66)

Whether critiquing Augustine, Calvin, Kant, the ‘Absolutely Pagan’ Hegel (p. 17), or the ‘great opponent’ Schleiermacher (p. 15), Gunton repeatedly identifies that the crucial question for the author of the groundbreaking Der Römerbrief remains ‘how much of your intellectual method hangs on something foreign to Christianity?’ (p. 42; cf. pp. 52-3). To this end, Gunton also devotes an entire lecture (pp. 53-63) to Barth’s 1931 work on Anselm, Fides quaerens intellectum, and to the Archbishop’s understanding of the relationship between ‘proof’, ‘reason’ and ‘faith’. He later writes: ‘Barth is a post-Reformation thinker with the rallying cry, by scripture alone and by faith alone! Barth found in the Reformation tradition a conception of theology based on a view of God that is linked with human salvation. The problem for Barth with the Scholastic tradition is that they begin with a rational view of God – a rational idea of God abstracted from human salvation. Barth begins with scripture because the God of scripture is about salvation not philosophical argument’ (p. 69). And on a comparison with Schleiermacher: ‘the problem with beginning with religion is that it is not theological, it can be, it can lead into theology, but in essence it is not: religion is an experiential concept, not a theological concept. Barth wants a theology that is theological right from the very outset. Barth considers that Roman Catholics and Protestants such as Schleiermacher are wrong in thinking that there can be a non-theological basis for theology. Barth is a theologian you see, to the fingernails’ (p. 69).

From Chapter Four onwards, Gunton turns to Barth’s Church Dogmatics, acutely aware that ‘there is nothing as boring as résumés of Barth’s Dogmatics‘ and that ‘the way to get into Barth is to select and to read – read him, there is no substitute!’ (p. 71). Over the next 190 pages, this is precisely what Gunton masterfully helps us do; whether on Barth’s theological prolegomena, his witness to the three-fold Word, trinity, the doctrine of God proper, election, christology, soteriology, ethics and creation, we are all along driven by the only thing of theological interest for Barth, the question ‘Who is the God who makes himself known in Scripture?’ (p. 77). ‘When Barth is at his best’, Gunton writes, ‘he looks at the biblical evidence in detail; when he is weak he tends to evade it’ (p. 119)

A few tastes from ‘5. Barth on the Trinity and the Personal God’:

Barth is anti-foundationalist … God’s revelation is self-grounded; it does not have to appeal to anything else beyond itself. Because it is revelation through itself, not in relation to something else, because it is self-contained, lordship means freedom. This is characteristically Barthian: a characteristically Barthian phrase. Lordship means freedom – freedom for God, absolutely central for Barth’s theology. (p. 78)

The basis of all theology lies in the fact that revelation does happen … This revelation is Christological: Jesus Christ is God’s self-unveiling. The Father cannot be unveiled, but the Father reveals through the Son. This is imparted through the Holy Spirit. A little artificial I actually think, but you can see what he is actually trying to do: he is trying to show that inherent in the structure of God’s presence in Jesus Christ is a Trinitarian view of God … The point here is that in Jesus Christ we see the limits, the possibilities of the knowability of God … So Barth in a way is still retaining this dialectical structure: veiling-unveiling, knowability -unknowability, revelation-hiddenness … In the end you have only got paradox … God preserves his privacy. (pp. 79-80)

The logic is that if God is like this in time then because he doesn’t con us, so to speak, he doesn’t pull the wool over our eyes, because he is a revealing God, then that is what God is. So don’t think that the God we meet in Jesus is one God and that the God of eternity is entirely different from Jesus. The God you meet in Jesus is no different from the God you might meet if you were able to have a direct view of eternity. (p. 83)

Barth is against all mathematics in theology – he is against theories and ideas propounded down the centuries by theologians whereby examples are given of the Trinity, where three things make one; Augustine was often doing this, it is pure analogy or an attempt at analogy, which generally fails to offer any theological elucidation … I don’t like Augustine. I think he is the fountainhead of our troubles. (pp. 84, 96)

[Barth] is often accused of modalism, and I think he is near it … I think he is on a bit of a knife-edge myself, but then all theology is on a knife-edge, it is such a difficult discipline. [Barth] wants to do what the Cappadocians did, and Barth thinks he has done it better with this term – ‘modes of being’. Well, I don’t agree with him, but that is the way he puts it. (pp. 88-9)

Theology is our interpretation of God’s self-interpretation. God interprets himself to us, that is what revelation is. Our response is to interpret this faithfully, or as Jüngel would put it, responsibly … We move from faith to understanding. We move from a grateful acceptance of revelation to an attempt to understand as best we may what that revelation means for God and ourselves. And the understanding consists in the fact that we can talk of God as Father, Son and Spirit. It is so obvious that we should, isn’t it! We might talk of God as a tyrannical monad, but the fact that we can talk of God as Father, Son and Spirit is, so to speak, a demonstration after the event that we are making sense, that God is making sense, our theology makes sense. (p. 91)

And from ‘8. Ethics: Church Dogmatics Chapter VIII:

I do think that there is a problem of abstractness because there isn’t really in Barth, I think (and I say this tentatively), I think that there isn’t really in Barth an account of how this relationship between God and the moral agent takes shape. There is not much of a principle of formation. How are people formed so as to take one ethical direction rather than another? Barth is relatively weak in ecclesiology; that is, some account of how ethics are shaped by the community of belief. He is so anxious not to tie God down; that is always his anxiety, not to tie God down. (p. 133)

Throughout, Gunton is rousing his 30-40 mostly MA and PhD students (although the lectures were intended for undergraduates and so leave considerable ground un-traversed and engage minimally with secondary literature) to ‘read as much of the man himself’ not least because ‘the people that write about him are much more boring than he is’ (p. 9; cf. p. 39). In a sense, this is one book to ‘listen to’ more than to ‘read’. At times, it’s a bit like the difference between a live album and a studio version. Not all the notes are spot on, but the energy – filled with a depth of theological and pastoral insight that betray years of wrestling with the things that matter – is all there.

Such wrestling means that whether expounding a key motif in Barth’s theology or fielding questions, Gunton reveals not only a deep indebtedness to Barth’s work, but also points of divergence. He is upfront in the first lecture: ‘Not everyone buys into Barth … I don’t, all the way along the line, as I get older I get more and more dissatisfied with the details of his working out of the faith … over the years I think I have developed a reasonable view of this great man who is thoroughly exciting and particularly, I can guarantee, if you do this course, that you will be a better theologian by the third year, whether or not you agree with him – he is a great man to learn to think theologically with’ (p. 10; see the prefaces to his Theology Through the Theologians and to the second edition of The Promise of Trinitarian Theology). Clearly, Gunton is no clone of Barth. Though mostly unnamed, he draws upon Coleridge, Owen, Zizioulas and Polanyi as allies in order to attain a measure of distance from Barth’s theology (and that of Barth’s student Moltmann), notably on creation, trinitarian personhood (Gunton prefers the Cappadocians), natural revelation, Jesus’ humanity, Christ’s priesthood, the Word’s action as mediator of creation, ecclesiology, and an over-realised eschatology, among other things (see pp. 52, 74, 82, 88-90, 96, 133, 142, 148, 170-1, 186, 200, 212, 227, 236, 250, 253-4, passim). Not alone here, Gunton reserves his strongest criticisms for what he contends is Barth’s weak pneumatology (for which he blames Augustine and the filioque): there is ‘not enough of the Spirit accompanying and empowering Jesus at different stages of his ministry’ (p. 200). Again: ‘the second person of the Trinity is made to do a bit more than he does in Scripture’ (p. 212). Gunton is always cautious and respectful however: Barth ‘never really forgets anything, he is too good a theologian for that. And when you are criticizing Barth it is only a question of where he puts a weight; he never forgets anything, he is too good a man for that’ (p. 171). Even on the Spirit, Gunton suggests that he can only be critical here because of what he has learnt from Barth already: ‘That’s the great thing about Barth: he enables you to do other things that aren’t just Barth but yet are empowered by him. Yes, that’s his greatness’ (p. 200).

While the reformed theologian is ‘too-multi-layered a thinker to have one leading idea’ if there is one, Gunton suggests it is that of covenant: ‘that from eternity God covenants to be the God who elects human beings into relation with himself’ (p. 149), that from eternity the triune God is oriented towards us. Gunton’s chapter on Barth’s revision of God’s election in CD II/2 is an astounding example of his adroitness and élan as a theological educator. Not many teachers could summarise so sufficiently and with such economy (just 12 pages!) what for Barth is the root of all things, ‘creation, atonement, all’ (p. 115), that is, election. Gunton concludes by (over?)-suggesting that Barth’s effort was ‘a huge improvement in the crude determinism of the Augustinian tradition, which did not represent a gracious God. The Augustinian doctrine replaces grace with gratuity: God gratuitously chooses group A and not group B – this is not the God who seeks out the lost [even Judas] and does not reject them’ (p. 121).

This volume is significantly more than merely a course on the theology of the twentieth century’s superlative theologian. It is also a reminder that to read Barth attentively is to be introduced to a broader dogmatic and philosophical tradition. Moreover, it is to be led to do so by one of Britain’s ablest pedagogues. A foreword by Christoph Schwöbel and a warm introduction by Steve Holmes prepare us for one of the freshest introductions to Barth available. Again, we are placed in Professor Gunton’s debt.

Here is a list of links to my 10-part review of Gockel’s book:

Matthias Gockel on Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Review – Part I

Matthias Gockel on Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Review – Part II

Matthias Gockel on Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Review – Part III

Matthias Gockel on Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Review – Part IV

Matthias Gockel on Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Review – Part V

Matthias Gockel on Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Review – Part VI

Matthias Gockel on Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Review – Part VII

Matthias Gockel on Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Review – Part VIII

Matthias Gockel on Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Review – Part IX

Matthias Gockel on Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Review – Part X

The only two tenable (i.e. biblically and theologically defensible) positions available for the soteriological question are either (i) a robust reaffirmation of limited atonement (the negative side of which includes the possibility of annihilation), or (ii) some form of christological universalism (with various degrees of agnosticism). Barth, of course, was rightly suspicious of ‘isms’, whether universalism or any other -ism, and would not affirm a dogmatic doctrine of universal salvation, although he does join a tradition of both Eastern and Western theologians going back to Origen of Alexandria (185–232), Clement of Alexandria (d. 215), Gregory of Nyssa (335–394?), Ambrose of Milan (337?–397) and Gregory of Nazianzus (329–389) who all affirm a strong hope in universal salvation.

Barth famously concludes IV/3/1 by again urging that we have no good reason why we should be forbidden, or forbid ourselves from an ‘openness to the possibility that in the reality of God and man in Jesus Christ there is contained much more than we might expect’, including the ‘unexpected withdrawal of that final threat’.

If for a moment we accept the unfalsified truth of the reality which even now so forcefully limits the perverted human situation, does it not point plainly in the direction of the work of a truly eternal divine patience and deliverance and therefore of an apokatastasis or universal reconciliation? If we are certainly forbidden to count on this as though we had a claim to it, as though it were not supremely the work of God to which man can have no possible claim, we are surely commanded the more definitely to hope and pray for it as we may do already on this side of this final possibility, i.e., to hope and pray cautiously and yet distinctly that, in spite of everything which may seem quite conclusively to proclaim the opposite, His compassion should not fail, and that in accordance with His mercy which is ‘new every morning’ He ‘will not cast off for ever’ (La. 3:22f., 31).

The creature cannot impose anything upon God because God is sovereign and free. That is why universalism equals the elimination of God’s freedom. But if God in his sovereignty and freedom has revealed himself in his being-in-act – that is, in Jesus Christ – then ought – nay, must – this not have radical implications for all doctrinal issues, and no less this one. We have no reason to presume that God in his total freedom will act other than he has acted in Jesus Christ – full of grace and truth.

Therefore, we may reasonably hope for a full Apokatastasis. Few have expressed this hope more beautifully than the nineteenth century Congregationalist minister, James Baldwin Brown: ‘The love which won the sceptre on Calvary will wield it as a power, waxing ever, waning never, through all the ages; and that the Father will never cease from yearning over the prodigals, and Christ will never cease from seeking the lost, while one knee remains stubborn before the name of Jesus, and one heart is unmastered by His love’. Or consider these words from Thomas Erskine,

I cannot believe that any human being can be beyond the reach of God’s grace and the sanctifying power of His Spirit. And if all are within His reach, is it possible to suppose that He will allow any to remain unsanctified? Is not the love revealed in Jesus Christ a love unlimited, unbounded, which will not leave undone anything which love could desire? It was surely nothing else than the complete and universal triumph of that love which Paul was contemplating when he cried out, ‘Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!

In Jesus Christ, the Triune God has bound humanity to himself in such a way that even if we refuse him and damn ourselves to hell, God in his love will never cease hunting us down. So even if the church cannot affirm the apokatastasis panton, we can hope for it, and pray for it, and stop denying the possibility of it in the grace of God. Hans Urs von Balthasar was right when he said that there is all the difference in the world between believing in the certitude of universal salvation and hoping for it.

It is difficult to imagine a more solid basis for an Apokatastasis panton than Barth gives us in his doctrine of election and reprobation. But does Barth’s commitment to divine freedom contradict the centre of his christological revision? Does he ultimately lead us all to a country and then not promise us that we might enter? Gockel, following Janowski, suggests he does, and that the payment for such a commitment threatens to ‘tear open again, though in a modified way, the abyss of the decretum absolutum et horribile (p. 210) – as though God’s Word towards a person might be different from that which he has spoken in Jesus Christ.

While Gockel notes Barth’s denial of an ultimate apokatastasis panton, he joins a pantheon of critiques – sympathetic and otherwise – who see an inconsistency in Barth here. Consider, for example, the critique from Bromiley. As one of the editors (with T. F. Torrance) and principal translators of Barth’s work, few are more familiar with Barth’s corpus and theology than Bromiley. Citing IV/3, § 70.2, Bromiley synopsises Barth view: ‘The lie cannot overthrow the truth, but God may finally condemn the liar to live in it’. Bromiley observes in Barth a ‘trend toward an ultimate universalism’ although acknowledges that, for Barth, ‘universalism in the sense of the salvation of all individuals is not a necessary implicate of Barth’s Christological universalism’. He suggests that Barth’s reservation here is ‘not really adequate’. Gockel identifies the same inconsistently in Barth, a holding back of the full consequences of Barth’s christology. Again, Bromiley notes, ‘God’s manifest purpose in Christ is to save, but under the sovereignty of the Spirit some might not be saved. The question is whether the Christological reference finally helps or matters very much. Is not the ultimate decision still taken apart from the revealed election – that is, not in the prior counsel of the Father but in the inscrutable operation of the Spirit? In other words, the decision regarding individuals is simply removed from the inscrutability of sovereign predetermination to the inscrutability of sovereign calling’.