Religion in Modern Europe

Samuel Huntington (left) and Edward Said (right).

In 1993, the Harvard University political scientist Samuel Huntington published an article in the journal Foreign Affairs entitled “The Clash of Civilizations.” In many ways, Huntington’s article was a response to the thesis put forth several years earlier by Francis Fukuyama and others that the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe marked the “end of history”–i.e., that the great battle of ideas had been resolved in favor of liberal democracy and capitalism and the future would involve the working out of this victory, as liberal democracy and capitalism eventually spread to the rest of the world. Huntington, by contrast, pointed to the what he saw as the real barriers between the world’s different “civilizations” (which included the West, Islam, Japan, and China) and which presented obstacles to the spread and acceptance of Western ideas among the non-Western populations of the world.

Huntington’s ideas seemed to acquire a new relevance in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks, as many commentators sought to explain the reasons for 9/11 and its significance for the future direction of American (and European) foreign policy. This provoked a response from the Columbia Universty professor Edward Said, a long-time critic of Western policy in the Middle East and its intellectual underpinnings (see esp. this book). In “The Clash of Ignorance,” which appeared in the October 4th, 2001 issue of The Nation, he sharply criticized Huntington’s ideas, describing the clash of civilizations thesis as a “gimmick like ‘The War of the Worlds,’ better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time.”

The blog questions for this week turn on these two articles, which will be discussed in class on Wednesday (Dec. 2nd).

* Why did Samuel Huntington believe that the “fundamental source of conflict” in the future would not be “ideological or primarily economic” but instead based in culture? What evidence does he cite to back up this claim? What role does religion play in his arguments?

* On what grounds does Edward Said reject Huntington’s argument? What does he see as its major flaws?

The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland recently released a report detailing the Church’s handling of accusations of sexual abuse perpetrated by priests and nuns over the past 40 years. The New York Times reports on this story here.

Left: Rosemary Ruether in 1980. Right: Starhawk (undated)

The American feminist theologian Rosemary Ruether has been one of the most outspoken and controversial (see her wikipedia entry, which was obviously not written by an admirer) voices in Catholic theology of the past thirty years. The essay by her that I have assigned for this week, “Goddesses and Witches: Liberation and Countercultural Feminism” (1980), actually represents an early critical take on the feminist theologies that had come into being in the 1960s and 1970s. This essay is available on the class’s e-Learning website.

Here are the study questions for next week’s blogs:

* What are Ruether’s main criticisms of the feminist and woman-centered theologies that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., those of Starhawk and Mary Daly)? What does she suggest is the path ahead to a more productive and “critical” feminist theology?

* Do you agree with Ruether’s claim that the “ancient nature religion” exalted by contemporary feminists (in the 1970s and 1980s) has its roots not in pre-Christian antiquity but rather in 19th century Romanticism? Give evidence to support your answer.

On Monday, I provided an introduction to some of the ideas of Emil Fackenheim and Richard Rubenstein, figures who have figured heavily in post-Holocaust Jewish thought. On Wednesday, we will be discussing their ideas, along with those of the Catholic theologian Rosemary Ruether. You will note that all three of these writers have been active primarily in North America. In the cases of Fackenheim and Rubenstein, this is because Jewish intellectual life was largely displaced from Europe to the United States and Israel as a consequence of the Third Reich and World War II. Fackenheim, for example, was born in Germany in 1916 and served as a rabbi there before emigrating in 1939. Obviously, European Christianity survived World War II and gave rise to some important political, religious, and cultural movements and figures (perhaps most notably, Pope John Paul II). Yet for many years, the most intense reckoning within Christianity about the implications of the Holocaust took place among British and North American scholars, in part because of their close proximity to Jewish colleagues and the Jewish experience.

Questions for blog (due next Wednesday):

* What, according to Fackenheim, is the “command of Auschwitz”? What does he see as the implications of the Holocaust for Judaism and Christianity?

* Why does Rubenstein call for a “demythologization” of Judaism and Christianity? What does he mean by this and what is it intended to accomplish?

* What does Roesemary Ruether see as the Christian roots of anti-Semitism?

Over the past 5-10 years, there have been several documentaries and feature films dedicated to the life and thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In many ways, Bonhoeffer is the most compelling figure in the German resistance to Hitler, because he was both politically active and yet possessed a first rate theological mind. Unlike Stauffenberg (aka Tom Cruise), whose politics were somewhat questionable, Bonhoeffer appears to have been on the right side of many issues and someone who, intellectually speaking, was ahead of his time. For that reason, Bonhoeffer is often spoken of in the same breath as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. (who, like Bonhoeffer, became martyrs to their causes).

A number of excerpts from these films are now available on youtube. Here are a few of them:

* The attraction of Barth’s theology for Bonhoeffer (from a documentary on Bonhoeffer).

* Bonhoeffer on “religionless Christianity” (from Bonhoeffer, Agent of Grace).

* Bonhoeffer speaks out against the Nazi regime (from the same documentary)

* The ethics of assassination (from the same documentary).

* The interrogation and execution of Bonhoeffer (from Bonhoeffer, Agent of Grace).

Martin Buber (left) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (right)

Next week we will be discussing Buber (Monday) and Bonhoeffer (Wednesday).  Both blog posts are both due on Wednesday at 1pm. Here are the study questions for next week’s readings:

BUBER: 1) What are the “two foci of the Jewish soul”? 2) According to Buber, what to Christianity and Judaism have in common and what sets them apart? 3) What is the main source of Christian antisemitism?

BONHOEFFER: 1) What does Bonhoeffer mean by “religionless Christianity”? 2) How does Bonhoeffer’s idea of Christianity differ from that of Barth? 3) Compare Buber and Bonhoeffer: what makes them different? what common problems are they trying to address?

Barth and Tillich on the cover of Time magazine in 1962 (l) and 1959 (r)

Karl Barth and Paul Tillich were two of the most influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. Both became to scholarly prominence in the decade after World War I, and both were defined by their opposition to Nazism. As a leftist, Tillich fled the Third Reich and took up residence in the United States, where he taught at Union Theological Seminar and later at Harvard Divinity School.

Meanwhile, Barth became the spiritual leader of the “Confessing Church,” a group of Lutheran and Calvinist clergy who  opposed the attempt by the Third Reich to “Nazify” Protestantism and unify the Protestant churches into a single “Reich Church.” As a result of his activities for the Confessing Church, Barth was forced by the Nazis to give up his position as a professor at the University of Bonn and return to his native Switzerland, where he became a professor at the University of Basel.

After World War II, both Barth and Tillich exercised a considerable influence on American religious thought, as can be seen from their making the cover of Time magazine (for those of you born after 1980: Time magazine used to be a pretty big deal–not so much these days). In America, Tillich became associated with a form of Christian existentialism, based largely on his book The Courage to Be. Barth was embraced by seminarians and theologians who could not accept fundamentalism or biblical literalism but who nonetheless sought a more robust form of Christianity than that found in liberal theology.

Karl Barth’s theology is based on a firm rejection of the liberal theology that was predominant in Protestant Germany before World War I (when Barth was a student). In particular, he denied the liberals’ assumptions that a) Christianity’s truth could only be apprehended historically; b) the Gospel message is bound up with the life and teachings of Jesus; c) that Jesus’ message was essentially ethical. In response to this, Barth argued that God was essentially a “hidden God,” who existed on a plane that was utterly distinct (”wholly Other”) from that of humanity and the world. Jesus’ resurrection represented the moment of God’s revelation, when he delivered a divine “no” to humanity while declaring a “yes” to humanity through the faithfulness of Jesus.

The paradox of God’s simultaneous “yes” and “no” to humanity (which Barth describes elsewhere as “krisis”) points to the fundamental distinction between the Christian revelation and the rational concepts that constitute human knowledge. Indeed, Barth condemned all attempts to understand God using human logic and experience as “religion,” by which he meant a kind of idolatry no closer to Christianity than the polytheistic worship of the ancient Greeks and Romans. (Compare this approach to that of the Romantic Novalis, who praised “religion” and suggested the links between Christianity and other forms of religious mediation. Likewise, Schleiermacher had defended “religion” in his treatise On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers [1800]).

In his theology, Barth was able to rescue and recover a number of theological concepts associated with orthodox Lutheranism and Calvinism that had fallen by the wayside in Protestant liberal theology. These included grace, atonement, sin, revelation, depravity. At the same time, there were clear differences between Barth’s position and the theology of Luther and Calvin, as well as with conservative and fundamentalist Protestants in the twentieth century. For one thing, Barth’s insistence that the Resurrection constitutes the entirety of the Revelation downplays the significance of the Bible and its status as the revealed Word of God. Indeed, Barth argued that the gospel life of Jesus, including the miracle stories, his ethical teachings, and his unique personality, was  insignificant in the grand scheme of revelation: all that mattered was the Resurrection.

In the Resurrection the new world of the Holy Spirit touches the old world of the flesh, but touches it as a tangent touches a circle, that is, without touching it.  And, precisely because it does not touch it, it touches it as its frontier–as the new world. The Resurrection is therefore an occurrence in history, which took place outside the gates of Jerusalem in the year A.D. 30, inasmuch as it there “came to pass,” was discovered and recognized. But inasmuch as the occurrence was conditioned by the Resurrection, in so far, that is, as it was not the “coming to pass”, or the discovery, or the recognition, which conditioned its necessity and appearance and revelation, the Resurrection is not an event in history at all. The declaration of the Son of man to be the Son of God is the significance of Jesus, and, apart from this, Jesus has no more significance or insignificance than may attached to any man or thing or period of history in itself. – “Even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer” [2 Cor. 5:16]. What He was, He is. But what He is underlies what He was. There is here no merging or fusion of God and man, no exaltation of humanity to divinity, no overflowing of God into human nature. What touches us–and yet does not touch us–in Jesus the Christ, is the Kingdom of God who is both Creator and Redeemer (Epistle to the Romans, 30).

In this way, Barth was able to sidestep the scholarly controversies surrounding the historical-critical approach to the Bible and the question of whether the Gospel narratives constituted authentic history or a form of myth or legend. (Although it is also worth noting that Paul himself says very little in his epistles about the life and ministry of Jesus, focusing primarily on his status as Son of God and on his Resurrection.)

In addition, Barth seems to downplay the promise of eternal life that many Christians see as the heart of the gospel message. There is little emphasis in The Epistle to the Romans on punishment or reward in a future life, in part because Barth saw such notions of eternity as inherently anthropocentric. For all these reasons, Barth’s theology has been treated skeptically by conservative Protestant theologians (particularly in the U.S.), even if it contains one of the most powerful indictments of liberal theology in all of twentieth-century religious thought.

Barth’s theology was influenced by a wide variety of thinkers, both Christian and non-Christian. I suggested earlier that Barth’s theology shares some affinities with Nietzsche. This is not because Barth did not believe in God, but rather because he shared Nietzsche’s criticism of enlightened and liberal theology, especially the notion that God can be “read” from the workings of nature, history, art, and reason. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche suggests that the “death of God” means the end of the vision of the universe as a well-ordered place, operating according to natural and rational laws. Indeed, he calls for a “de-deification” of nature, suggesting that we no longer view the universe in the image of ourselves or our God and understand the chaos and infinity for what it truly is. In addition, Nietzsche was harshly critical of the comfortable, middle class ideology that he saw as masquerading as Christianity in his day–this, too, was a fault of liberal theology (Nietzsche offered as alternatives the figures of Dionysus and Zarathustra).

Barth had absorbed these criticisms (as well as similar criticisms of liberal Christianity by Nietzsche’s close friend, the theologian Franz Overbeck) but used them as a starting point for a program of  theological construction. In essence, he argues that God stands against the world and against human reason, history, and science (i.e., human pretension) with a profound “No”–there is no continuity between the world and God, or between the divine and the human. In other words, whereas Nietzsche moves from his critique of liberal theology to a call for a post-Christian morality grounded in human creativity and self-expression, Barth moves from his critique of liberal theology back to a renewed apprehension of the Christian revelation and the Resurrection.

Paul Tillich was a contemporary of Barth and was deeply influenced by his theology. At the same time, Tillich was much more a man of the left and associated with some of the existentialist and Marxist philosophers who came to prominence in Germany in the early 1920s. He was among a number of intellectuals who attempted to conceive an idea of “religious socialism.”

Tillich does this through two key concepts. One of them was his notion of Kairos, a Greek word for time. According to Tillich, Kairos meant a moment of time pregnant in meaning that broke up the ordinary chronology and announced an entirely new era. The birth of Christ was one such moment of Kairos and so, Tillich argued, was the post-war era, in which empires had fallen, new political movements were on the rise, and the emergence of a new, more just order seemed at hand. Echoing Karl Barth, Tillich suggested that God had pronounced a yes/no on the current economic and political system, condemning the way it exploited workers and the weak but holding out the promise of a fundamentally social and political system.

In making these pronouncements, Tillich argued that he was working within the spirit of Protestantism. According to Tillich, Luther issued a prophetic criticism of the Catholic Church in order to clear the path for a new church based on the priesthood of all believers. In the current context (1920s Europe), it was possible to take up this prophetic spirit once again by condemning the corruption and sinfulness of the existing socio-economic order and paving the way for a future grounded in the principles of socialism.

It is worth noting that Tillich was not a Marxist. Nor did he stand firmly behind any of the socialist parties in Germany. Nonetheless, he believed that the movement of history pointed inevitably to a form of socialism, and this was certainly enough for the Nazis to remove him from his teaching post once they came to power. Once Tillich arrived in the United States, he backed away from some of these themes. As an undergraduate Religious Studies major, I wrote an honors thesis on Tillich. In this thesis, I noted that in translations of his works, the German term Ware, which normally is translated as “commodity,” was rendered instead as “good” or some other term that sounded less patently Marxist that “commodity.” In the context of Cold War America, it seemed to me, Tillich had no desire to be labeled a “Red” and be subject to expulsion from the United States.

Here are the study questions for this week in case you missed last Wednesday’s class. I have also caught up with putting the outlines on e-Learning.

* How does Karl Barth conceive of God? How does his notion of God challenge the assumptions of liberal Protestant theology?

* Why does Karl Barth distinguish between Christianity and “religion”? What is at stake in this distinction?

* To what extent is Barth an heir of Nietzsche?

Recently several scholars at the University of Michigan published an article describing the results of their examination of the relationship between college students’ choice of academic major and changes in their religiosity. They find, for example, that students in the humanities and social sciences tend to become less religious (e.g., they go to church less often) while students in education become more religious over the course of their college years.  I’m inclined to take these “results” with a grain of salt, in part because correlation does not equal causality, but the article does make for interesting reading.

For a copy of the University of Michigan press release announcing this study, go here.

Left: Selena Fox, a Wiccan priest, offers a blessing on Spirit Rock in Wisconsin. From NY Times. Right: “Prayer of Light” (ca. 1900) by the German neo-pagan artist “Fidus” (Hugo Hoeppener).

Not that “paganism,” as such, ever existed. The term is a creation essentially of Christianity, born of its efforts to define itself against the various polytheistic and other non-Jewish cults of the Mediterranean world. Thus it is not entirely surprising that Westerners who want to define themselves against the monotheistic religions and who identify with the values they see embedded in the pre-Christian European and American religions have appropriated the term “pagan” as a badge of pride. Moreover, the U.S. government (including the military) has found itself compelled to recognize Wicca and other groups as legitimate forms of religion.

For the full story, go here.

So runs a familiar and somewhat omnipresent bit of bathroom graffiti. And yet one could imagine Nietzsche asking God, “Am I really dead? Am I not quite alive?” In fact, if one looks at the landscape of twentieth and twenty-first century culture in the West, no thinker has been more celebrated, more reviled, more simply present than Friedrich Nietzsche. In part, this is a testimony to the multi-sidedness of Nietzche’s philosophy. He has been seen variously as the first existentialist, a prophet of anarchic individualism, of forerunner of fascism, an antisemite and an anti-antisemite, a socialist, a logician, a mystic, an aesthete, an aristocratic conservative, a misogynist, a feminist, a literary theorist, a philosopher, a psychologist, a historian (or, more accurately, genealogist), as the anti-Christ, as the messiah, and as everything in between.

Given the complexity and variety of Nietzsche’s thought, it is almost banal to say that he has been often misunderstood (because this suggests that someone has understood him). For the purposes of this class, what makes Nietzsche an interesting figure is the fact that, while he is typically associated with atheism, he was in fact deeply engaged with questions of religion his entire life. The son of a Protestant pastor, Nietzsche started university studies intending to follow his father’s footsteps before a reading of David Strauss and other historical critics led him away from theology and toward  the study of the Greek classics. Nonetheless, he remained obsessed his entire life with questions of religion–the origin of Christianity, the nature of Judaism, the personality of Jesus, the psychological effects of asceticism, the power and charisma of priests, the advantages of polytheism vs. monotheism, and a host of other issues. This was a man who was by no means indifferent to religion. Indeed, the claim that “God is dead” is not treated by Nietzsche as something to be celebrated–after all it is a despairing madman who utters this cry. Instead, it is a historical fact to be confronted and a threat to be dealt with. For Nietzsche, the great danger was that in the absence of God people would slip into nihlism, that they would give up the attempt to create new values and new meaning in the world and instead embrace a passive and pessimistic hedonism.

It was in part because of Nietzsche’s anti-religious religiosity that his thought could be appropriated by so many religious writers. Indeed, a number of Christian writers would see in Nietzsche’s protest a kind of echoing and amplification of Jesus’ protest against the “world.” Whether that is a stance that makes sense is unclear, but it does testify to the enduring interest in Nietzsche’s engagement with religion and religiosity (both his own and that of the world at large).