Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit E-Book

Gary Dorrien

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1682

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Winner: 2012 The American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in Theology and Religious Studies, PROSE Award. In this thought-provoking new work, the world renowned theologian Gary Dorrien reveals how Kantian and post-Kantian idealism were instrumental in the foundation and development of modern Christian theology. * Presents a radical rethinking of the roots of modern theology * Reveals how Kantian and post-Kantian idealism were instrumental in the foundation and development of modern Christian theology * Shows how it took Kant's writings on ethics and religion to launch a fully modern departure in religious thought * Dissects Kant's three critiques of reason and his moral conception of religion * Analyzes alternative arguments offered by Schleiermacher, Schelling, Hegel, and others - moving historically and chronologically through key figures in European philosophy and theology * Presents notoriously difficult and intellectual arguments in a lucid and accessible manner

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Books by Gary Dorrien

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface and Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Introduction: Kantian Concepts, Liberal Theology, and Post-Kantian Idealism

Imagining Modern Theology

Kantian Liberalism and Mediating Theology

Kantian and Hegelian Ordering

Ideal and Normative, Subjective and Objective

Chapter 2: Subjectivity in Question: Immanuel Kant, Johann G. Fichte, and Critical Idealism

Refashioning Enlightenment Metaphysics: Immanuel Kant

Pure Reason and the Bounds of Sense

Moral Religion Within the Bounds of Reason

The Kantian Legacy

Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, and Post-Kantianism

Chapter 3: Making Sense of Religion: Friedrich Schleiermacher, John Locke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Liberal Theology

Sense for the Infinite: Friedrich Schleiermacher

Spiritual True Religion

Christian Theology of Religious Feeling

John Locke, British Empiricism, and the Anglican Threefold Cord

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and English Romanticism

Chapter 4: Dialectics of Spirit: F. W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, and Absolute Idealism

Imagining Hegelian Idealism: Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel

Concept and Intuition: Hegel, Schelling, Kant, and Jena

Phenomenology of Spirit: Conception, Consciousness, Self-Consciousness

Spirit, Absolute Religion, Absolute Knowing

The Struggle for Recognition

Logic, Encyclopedia, Right

Hegelian Philosophy of Religion

Hegelianism

Chapter 5: Hegelian Spirit in Question: David Friedrich Strauss, Søren Kierkegaard, and Mediating Theology

Mediating Schleiermacher's Legacy

David Friedrich Strauss and Left-Hegelianism

History, Myth, and Hermeneutics

Becoming a Self: Sren Kierkegaard

The End as the Middle: The Fragments and the Postscript

Provoking Ridicule

Training in Christianity, Attack Upon Christendom

Chapter 6: Neo-Kantian Historicism: Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, Wilhelm Herrmann, Ernst Troeltsch, and the Ritschlian School

Ritschlian Theology

Adolf von Harnack and the Spirit of Liberal Protestant Theology

Wilhelm Herrmann, Ernst Troeltsch, and the Scope of Historical Criticism

Another Kind of Ritschlianism

Revelation as Freedom from History

Ernst Troeltsch: The Relativity of Christianity and the History of Religion

Political Ethics and Social Christianity

Chapter 7: Idealistic Ordering: Lux Mundi, Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, Hastings Rashdall, Alfred E. Garvie, Alfred North Whitehead, William Temple, and British Idealism

Lux Mundi and Liberal Catholicism

Getting Hegel and Personality Right: Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison

Idealistic Elitism: Hastings Rashdall

Liberal Evangelicalism: Alfred E. Garvey

Idealistic Ordering: William Temple

Organic Realism as Theology: Temple and Alfred North Whitehead

Chapter 8: The Barthian Revolt: Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and the Legacy of Liberal Theology

Fire Alarm of a Coming New World

Dialectic in the Service of Dogmatics

Refashioning German Idealism: Paul Tillich

Interrogating German Liberal Theology and Idealism

Dialectics of the Open Word

Chapter 9: Idealistic Ironies: From Kant and Hegel to Tillich and Barth

Idealism as White Supremacist Ordering

Deflating Idealism: G. E. Moore and the Analytic Turn

Idealism Fading and Embattled

Tillich and the Future of Idealism

The Neo-Kantian/Postmodern Barth: Realism, Idealism, and Dialecticism

Index

Books by Gary Dorrien

Logic and Consciousness

The Democratic Socialist Vision,

Reconstructing the Common Good

The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology

Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity

The Word as True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theology

The Remaking of Evangelical Theology

The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology

The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900

The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism and Modernity, 1900–1950

Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana

The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony and Postmodernity, 1950–2005

Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition

Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice

Obama in Question: A Progressive Critique and Defense

Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology

This edition first published 2012 © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dorrien, Gary J. Kantian reason and Hegelian spirit : the idealistic logic of modern theology / Gary Dorrien.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-67331-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Philosophical theology. 2. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804–Influence. 3. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831–Influence. I. Title. BT40.D67 2012

230.09′034–dc23

2011045996

For Cindy, Nelleke, Mike, Xan, Kevin, and Hannah, with affection andtreasured memories.

Preface and Acknowledgments

Until now, I lacked an answer for one of the nicest questions: “Which book of yours means the most to you?” Usually I stammered the truth – “I have no idea.” Otherwise I settled for an evasion – “The next one.” At last I have a real answer, because this book makes an argument about the thinkers and ideas that underlie modern religious thought as a whole.

My work ranges across social ethics and politics, on the one hand, and modern religious philosophy and theology, on the other. I am equally committed to these subject areas, having never tried to settle on one of them or even ranked one higher than the other. There is a disciplinary link between the fields of ethics and theology – theological ethics – but that is not where most of my work takes place. On the ethical side, I work mostly at the intersections of social ethics, social theory, and politics, and on the theological side, I work mostly in the branch of historical theology that deals with modern religious and philosophical thought.

I started this book with the idea of something analogous to my three volumes on The Making of American Liberal Theology, but soon I realized that I had too much at stake in this project to give it the encyclopedic treatment. Instead of tracking, in a multi-volume format, the history and variations of modern German and British theology, I went straight for an argument about the importance of Kantian and post-Kantian idealism in the founding of modern theology.

This decision reflects something about how I learned modern religious and philosophical thought, something about how I teach it, and something about my constructive perspective. In college, I cut my teeth intellectually on G. W. F. Hegel and Paul Tillich. Long before I had an inkling of a future in the academy or anything pertaining to religion, I was drawn to Hegel's theory of self-knowing Spirit arising through the realization of consciousness, an idea that, importantly to me, held a similar lure for Martin Luther King, Jr. But one day I realized that it was pointless to grapple any further with modern philosophers and theologians until I took on Immanuel Kant's critiques of reason. Kant is the single unavoidable thinker in modern philosophy, and one of the founders of modern religious thought along with Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Today, in the classroom, I find it impossible to teach almost any subject in religious thought or social ethics without spending at least two weeks on what the subject in question owes to Kant and Hegel. This interpretive and pedagogical standpoint underlies the normative argument that I make in this book – that progressive theology at its best is always buoyed with idealistic conviction and armed with a realistic brake on it.

Karl Barth enjoyed regaling his students with the story of how Hegel and Schleiermacher came up at the same time, Hegel eclipsed Schleiermacher when they lived, and Schleiermacher overtook Hegel, at least in theology, after they were gone. Usually Barth cautioned his students about their acquired liberalism, telling them that they lived in Schleiermacher's age and under his influence, whether or not they realized it. Sometimes he urged them to imagine what theology might have been like had Schleiermacher never existed. But I will argue that even Barthian theology is unimaginable without Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher.

This book is like my previous one for Wiley-Blackwell, Social Ethics in the Making, in that I held my students at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University chiefly in mind as I wrote it, especially my doctoral students. For me, it is always a high priority to help students grasp the story of the field they are entering. My understanding of it has been greatly enriched by working with three recently graduated doctoral students (Ian Doescher, Eboni Marshall Turman, and Christine Pae), and a special group of graduate students with whom I have worked closely (Nixon Cleophat, Preston Davis, Peter Herman, Dwayne Meadows, and Elijah Prewitt-Davis), and my current group of doctoral students: Lisa Anderson, Nkosi Anderson, Malinda Berry, Chloe Breyer, Babydoll Kennedy, Jeremy Kirk, David Orr, Tracy Riggle, Dan Rohrer, Gabriel Salguero, Charlene Sinclair, Joe Strife, Rima Vesely-Flad, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, Demian Wheeler, and Todd Willison. Blessings and thanks to all.

All my colleagues at Union and Columbia are superb colleagues and some are special friends; in the latter category I am especially grateful to James Cone, Roger Haight, Esther Hamori, Kelby Harrison, Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Brigitte Kahl, Paul Knitter, Serene Jones, Barbara Lundblad, Daisy Machado, John McGuckin, Christopher Morse, Aliou Niang, Su Yon Pak, Jan Rehmann, Mark C. Taylor, John Thatamanil, and Janet Walton. Many thanks to my editors at Blackwell for their skillful work, especially project manager and copy-editor Graeme Leonard and publisher Rebecca Harkin. And thanks to Diana Witt for another superb index.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Kantian Concepts, Liberal Theology, and Post-Kantian Idealism

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

Liberal theology was born in largely illiberal contexts in eighteenth-century Germany and England, a fact that helps to explain why much of it was far from liberal. Most of the great thinkers in this story were Germans, the key founding thinkers were Germans, and there was a vital intellectual movement of liberal theology in Germany for a century before a similar movement existed in Britain. Thus, the German story dominates this book. British theology comes into the picture mostly as it engages German idealism, as do the book's principal other non-German thinkers, Sren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, although the British story begins with a figure that preceded Kant by a century, John Locke. For better and for worse, German thinkers dominated modern theology right up to the point that liberal theology in Germany crashed and burned, after which the field was still dominated by the intellectual legacies of Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the Ritschlian School.

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

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

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

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

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

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