In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent

In a Post-Hegelian Spirit

In a Post-Hegelian Spirit

Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent

Gary Dorrien

BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESs

© 2020 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

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Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4813-1159-5

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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

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

Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana

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

Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition

Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice

The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective

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

The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel

Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel

Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism

In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent

For Catherine,

Cherished friend and eminent theologian

Contents

Preface

1. Introduction

Modern Theology as Religious Philosophy

2. Kantian Foundations

Creative Reason and Moral Freedom

3. Post-Kantian Feeling

Romantic Idealism as Theology

4. Hegelian Intersubjectivity

Dialectics of Spirit

5. Against Hegelian Spirit

Marxism, Existentialism, and Wholly Otherness

6. Personal Idealism

Why Subjectivity Matters

7. Whiteheadian Ordering

God and Creativity

8. Neo-Hegelian Theonomy

Religious Socialism as Theology

9. Struggling for Liberation

Breaking White Supremacy and Sexism

10. Rethinking Relationality

Theologies of Becoming

11. In a Post-Hegelian Spirit

Divine Becoming and Discontent

Notes

Index

Preface

This book builds a post-Hegelian religious philosophy out of my interpretation of modern philosophical theology. It has an origin story dating to 2013 and 2014, when I lectured for a week to large ecumenical gatherings in St. Simon’s Island, Georgia. In 2013 I lectured on social ethics and politics alongside biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, who regaled the crowd in customary Brueggemann fashion with torrents of exegesis sprinkled with uproarious humor. The following year I lectured on theology and religious philosophy alongside the late biblical scholar Marcus Borg, in his last venue of this kind. Marcus was as sharp and engaging as ever, to the end. Every day, it seemed, there was a book signing before we commenced lecturing; perhaps the trauma magnified my sense of the frequency. The line on the left, for Walter and Marcus, was always very long. My line on the right was nearly always a modest affair, and some of my folks lined up just to talk. The second year one skittish soul, having heard me speak at least ten times, wanly observed that my books were awfully large and numerous. Did I have one that conveyed the gist of the others?

I began to say that Economy, Difference, Empire¹ distills much of my work in social ethics, but he cut me off: "I mean your other books, in theology and philosophy." One side of my work is theological and philosophical, and the other side explores the intersections of politics, economics, social theory, and social ethics. To my mind, these sides complement each other, but I recognize there is a difference in how I come through. My social ethical writings are driven by my convictions and are rife with them, taking positions on issues large, small, historical, and contemporary. My theological writings are analytical and reflective in the disciplinary modes of intellectual history, historical theology, and philosophy of religion; here I marshal various traditions of thought into a conversation and make arguments about them. At the podium, whatever the subject, I readily throw off scholarly restraints. Time is pressing, the audience is broader, and the speaker is compelled to cut to why-it-matters.

This book offers the gist argument that my friend in the book line requested. I teach at a seminary that is theological in its very name and at a university that excludes theological claims on principle. In both contexts we interrogate the truth claims of seminal religious thinkers in ways best described as religious philosophy and customarily described as philosophical theology. The subtitle of this book defers to the conventional category, but the book itself is geared to straddle the theology-versus-no-theology divide. Religious philosophy can be approached by all the methods employed in religious studies—comparative, phenomenological, analytical, historical, theoretical, and evaluative. It has a role to play in mediating the chasm that currently prevails between theological and religious studies approaches to religion. Kant, Hegel, Alfred North Whitehead, and Paul Tillich wrote broadly visionary works for ages that prized such thinking. Our postmodern age is dramatically otherwise, yet these thinkers shaped our fields of discourse to the point of shaping even the theories and movements that arose to throw off their influence. In particular, every post-something theory or critical approach traces in some way to Hegel. I will argue that Hegel was not a panlogical monist and did not fashion a closed system, but no matter which Hegel one holds in view, grappling with his thought binds thinkers on both sides of the chasm to each other.

My first glimmer that I had thoughts about such things occurred in my sports-dominated youth, perplexing over what it could mean that God is everywhere. I fixed in my youth on the crucifixes in Christian art, struck deeply by the image of a suffering God, and on the searing witness of Martin Luther King Jr., who became a martyred Christ figure when I was in high school. These two cross stories melded together in my thought and feeling. At Alma College I had four treasured teachers who helped me find my way into religious philosophy, although none meant to do so. Physicist Louis Toller persuaded me that nothing on earth is more wondrous than light theory. Sociologist Dave Lemmon taught me the canon of sociological theory and guided me to political economists, especially Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, and Gunnar Myrdal. Philosopher Wesley Dykstra sent me to Aristotle and Kant, told me to waste no time on Hegel, and thus inspired my first plunge into Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—a wild, puzzling, obscure, rollicking monster of a book that hooked me like no other. Theologian Ronald Massanari, fresh out of graduate school and taking leave of Christianity, introduced me to Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, describing them as theological rivals who differently overthrew the liberal approach to theology.

Liberal theology, according to my religion professors and everyone I read, was long dead and refuted. Adolf von Harnack was the quintessential liberal theologian, and he was readily dismissed. The last significant liberal theologian was Walter Rauschenbusch, who died in 1918 and only mattered because of his social gospel activism, not his outdated theology. It would be hard to exaggerate the force of these conventions when I began reading theologians. The canon consisted of the so-called neo-orthodox titans who killed liberal theology—Barth, Tillich, Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, and Reinhold Niebuhr—but these figures had passed and it was hard to figure where theology was going. Massanari favored the new death-of-God theologies of Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton. Altizer and Hamilton made me skeptical about reading more theology. If that was where theology was going, I was inclined to stick with Marx, Polanyi, and Myrdal. I didn’t belong to a church, so there was nothing holding me to theology except Jesus crucified and King. In this ambivalent mood I had two sophomore-year experiences that put me on a theological path.

One was reading Rauschenbusch’s social gospel classic of 1907, Christianity and the Social Crisis. He described the teaching of Jesus as a message of radical social transformation. Christianity obscured the revolutionary spirit of the gospel, but it was not too late for the church to adopt the way and spirit of Jesus. The church is supposed to be a new kind of community that transforms the world by the power of Christ’s kingdom-bringing Spirit. The idea of the indwelling and growing commonwealth of God is not merely part of Christianity; it’s the central thing holding everything else together. Christianity is a kingdom movement that carries God into everything you do. In a concluding chapter titled, What to Do, Rauschenbusch made a scintillating case for radical democratic socialism.²

His liberal theology and radical politics were equally compelling to me. I turned the pages exclaiming that this was what Christianity should sound like. For years I had felt that King laid hold of something in Christianity that the rest of the church somehow missed—something inspiring movement idealism and a real surge for social change. Rauschenbusch explained what was missing, and he expressed brilliantly the vision of a socially regenerative Christianity. The books that I read about the social gospel said it was an idealistic understanding of Christianity that briefly influenced liberal Protestantism before it was discredited by the neo-orthodox reaction, especially Barth and Niebuhr. Reading Rauschenbusch, I could see various problems. He loved idealistic rhetoric, said almost nothing about racism, and was proudly, stridently, vehemently anti-Catholic. But for grasping and expressing the prophetic core of the gospel, Rauschenbusch soared above everyone except King.

The same year I read James Cone’s recently published manifestos for black liberation theology, Black Theology and Black Power (1969) and A Black Theology of Liberation (1970). These searing books sundered my recently acquired ideas about liberal arts education and theology. I told our college president, Robert Swanson, about Cone’s books, vaguely aware that Swanson was a Presbyterian minister. To my surprise he said we should invite Cone to Alma.³

Cone rocked our campus with a fusion of his fiery first book, his powerful second book, a brief excursus on a song by the Rascals, and a stunning concluding section that was just for us. He talked about slave ships and auction blocks and lynching. He explained that black theology interprets Christianity and the American experience from the perspective of oppressed black Americans. He said very hard things about white liberals, white Christianity, white conceits, and King, describing nearly all white Americans as racists who couldn’t imagine giving up their white privilege. He lightened the mood for a moment with a song that everyone knew: All the world over, so easy to see! People everywhere, just wanna be free. Then he held up a copy of Alma’s course catalog and ripped it to shreds from a standpoint that no one had ever heard at Alma College: We were being taught white theology, he said, and white philosophy, white sociology, white psychology, and white everything else as though nothing but white thinking counted as thought. And all of it was paraded in the name of universality and the liberal arts.

Rauschenbusch and Cone had no time or inclination to grapple with philosophers, so their names occur only occasionally in the present book. This absence marks that philosophy is both indispensable to me and never quite what I most care about. Rauschenbusch and Cone have been in my head and heart since my college sophomore year, and both are featured in other books of mine.

In college I wrote a thesis on Karl Rahner’s transcendental Thomism that drew on my studies of Kant, and a thesis on Marx’s social theory that similarly featured Hegel, already accustomed to autodidactic philosophizing. My philosophical education resumed at Harvard University, where I absorbed Dieter Henrich’s courses on Kant and Hegel, and at Harvard Divinity School, where George Rupp taught me to read Hegel as a source for comparative theology. I also heard John Rawls lecture on his theory of justice, but otherwise I lamented that Harvard philosophers were somehow content to reduce philosophy to language analysis and modal logic. A bit later, when I studied at Union Theological Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary, I had similar experiences with the university philosophy departments at Columbia and Princeton.

This experience closely resembled my study of liberal theology. None of my teachers anywhere, except Rupp, taught about liberal theology per se. They took liberal methodologies for granted while assuming that liberal theology itself was passé. I was vaguely aware that this situation might be different at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Boston University School of Theology, and Vanderbilt Divinity School, strongholds of the old liberalism. I did not realize, during my graduate school years, that a liberal renaissance was quietly germinating among theologians who began their careers as epigones of the neo-orthodox giants and were reinventing themselves as latter-day liberals. Gregory Baum, Anne Carr, Edward Farley, Langdon Gilkey, Peter Hodgson, Elizabeth Johnson, Gordon Kaufman, Sallie McFague, W. Norman Pittenger, and David Tracy became prominent examples of this trend. But I was slow to see the trend that I featured, twenty years later, in volume three of The Making of American Liberal Theology.⁴

Much of my expertise in liberal theology is thus self-taught and was acquired after I preached liberal-liberationist sermons for seven years in Episcopal pulpits. I came through the door of solidarity activism and ministry, speaking for two Latin American solidarity organizations and a democratic socialist organization, and became an academic at the age of thirty-five. From my college days onward I embraced the liberationist starting point and liberationist criticism: theology must begin in solidarity with oppressed people and interrogate theological complicity in racism, sexism, class privilege, and colonialism. In seminary I learned to add heterosexual privilege to this list. But I did not construe liberationism as something that began with Cone or Gustavo Gutiérrez, since I was steeped in the Christian socialism of Rauschenbusch, King, Tillich, Leonhard Ragaz, and Rosemary Radford Ruether. Three of my first five books were about religious socialism. Moreover, beginning with liberationist questions and assuming liberationist criticism never precluded, to me, the necessity of grappling with liberal questions and liberal thinkers. The Schleiermacher agenda of addressing the challenges of critical disbelief cannot be wrong, even though it is only part of what theologians and religious philosophers must take up.⁵

Having written many books that run long on thick description, historical detail, winding arguments, and colorful stories, it is against my habit to boil down to the what-matters arguments featured in this book. Every chapter except the concluding chapter contains highly condensed versions of arguments and narratives I have developed elsewhere. The book moves toward its constructive post-Hegelian conclusion with swiftly summarized analyses and judgments. My desire to distill this half of my work owes much to the fact that Economy, Difference, Empire is singularly meaningful to me for representing the other half.

I have had only good experiences with publishers and editors, so my thanks to them could go on for several pages. I am especially grateful for the privilege of working in recent years with Rebecca Harkin at Wiley-Blackwell, Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press, and Jennifer Banks at Yale University Press—stellar editors and friends. Above all the debts that I owe to publishers, I am grateful for the unfailing generosity, hospitality, and proficiency always extended to me by everyone associated with Westminster John Knox Press. My six books with WJK contain the majority of my theological writing, and the first versions of most of it. The late Stephanie Egnotovich edited all of them; eventually I won a few debates with my beloved friend over her aversion to short sentences. Daniel Braden (project editor), Catherine Carpenter (copyeditor), and Hermann Weinlick (copyeditor) worked on these books, superbly. I do not forget, and was reminded while writing the present book, what I owe to them and to everyone at WJK.

Chapter 1 mines my analyses of modern theology and philosophy in Gary Dorrien, The Word as True Myth (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997); Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000); Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001); Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003); and Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.) Chapter 2 draws upon my discussions of Kant, Kantian idealism, and modern philosophy in Dorrien, The Word as True Myth; Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology; Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion; and especially Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit. Chapter 3 draws upon my discussions of Schleiermacher, Coleridge, and modern theology in Dorrien, The Word as True Myth; Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology; Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Theology; Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity; Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit; and Dorrien, Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). Chapter 4 draws upon my discussions of Hegel, Schelling, and post-Kantian idealism in Dorrien, The Word as True Myth; Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology; Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Theology; Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity; Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006); Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit; and Dorrien, Social Democracy in the Making.

Chapter 5 draws upon my discussions of Kierkegaard, Marx, and Barth in Gary Dorrien, The Democratic Socialist Vision (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986); Dorrien, The Word as True Myth; Dorrien, The Remaking of Evangelical Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998); Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology; Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit; and Dorrien, Social Democracy in the Making. Chapter 6 draws upon my discussions of Bowne, Royce, Troeltsch, Knudson, Brightmann, Muelder, and personal idealism in Dorrien, The Word as True Myth; Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology; Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion; Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity; Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity; Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit; and Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). Chapter 7 draws upon my discussions of James, Whitehead, Hartshorne, Meland, process thought, and the Chicago School in Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity; and Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity. Chapter 8 draws upon my discussions of Tillich and religious socialism in Dorrien, Reconstructing the Common Good: Theology and the Social Order (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1990); Dorrien, The Word as True Myth; Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Postmodernity; Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit; and Dorrien, Social Democracy in the Making.

Chapter 9 draws upon my discussions of Du Bois, King, and Ruether in Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity; Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making; Gary Dorrien, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); and Dorrien, Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). Chapter 10 draws upon my discussions of Tracy, Hodgson, Farley, Keller, and postmodernity in Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity. Thanks to these publishers for permitting me to adapt material from these works.

I am grateful to many friends and expert readers for reading early or later versions of arguments made in this book. There are too many to name, but the short list includes Gregory Baum, Rufus Burrow Jr., Philip Clayton, John B. Cobb Jr., the late James Cone, Harvey Cox, Sheila G. Davaney, William Dean, Mary Doak, Frederick Ferré, Juan M. Floyd-Thomas, Nancy Frankenberry, the late Langdon Gilkey, David Ray Griffin, Roger Haight, William D. Hart, Stanley Hauerwas, Obery M. Hendricks Jr., Peter C. Hodgson, Michael Hogue, Jennifer Jesse, William Stacy Johnson, Catherine Keller, Christopher Latiolais, Vincent Lloyd, Kelly Maeshiro, Margaret R. Miles, Jürgen Moltmann, Christopher Morse, Robert C. Neville, Larry Rasmussen, Joerg Rieger, Donald Shriver, Jerome A. Stone, Marjorie H. Suchocki, Mark C. Taylor, Mark Lewis Taylor, Thandeka, John Thatamanil, Edgar Towne, Emilie M. Townes, David Tracy, Keith Ward, Sharon Welch, Cornel West, Demian Wheeler, Andrea White, Robert R. Williams, and Thurman Willison.

I am grateful to Carey Newman, the director of Baylor University Press, for taking on this book. I have long admired his work at Baylor and was mindful of it from early on because he came from WJK. I am equally grateful to managing editor Cade Jarrell, copyeditor Jon Haney, production manager Jenny Hunt, and editorial assistant Bethany Dickerson, all of whom worked superbly on the manuscript.

One style point and two terminological points are noteworthy. This book contains many quotations, some of which contain italicized emphases. I have a simple rule about italicized emphases: NEVER add or subtract one. Every cited italicized emphasis comes from the original quote. On occasion I will also refer to U.S. Americans instead of Americans; this usage registers the point that the USA is only one of the Americas. Lastly, most of the time I will employ post-Kantian in the customary sense of the term that includes Hegel, but my argument about Hegel’s originality sometimes compels me to distinguish between the post-Kantian and Hegelian traditions.

1

Introduction

Modern Theology as Religious Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America came out not much better on his telling. Hegel said that history deals with the past, philosophy deals with reason, America had no history, and he had his hands full dealing with Reason. So he gave short shrift to both American continents, despite claiming that the burden of world history would surely reveal itself in America, perhaps in a contest between the two continents. In North America, he noted, the native tribes were mostly destroyed and otherwise repressed. In South America and Mexico, the conquering violence was much worse, yet larger native populations survived. The Portuguese conquerors were more humane than the Dutch, Spanish, and English, but all were deadly violent and destructive, leaving North America to the surplus population of Europe, while South America forged mixed-race republics based on military force. Hegel singled out the Creoles for evincing Hegelian self-awareness and autonomy, though of a low order. He thought the United States was better off than South America for being Protestant, industrious, and steeped in freedom consciousness, but he could not find an intellectual culture, and he believed its federalist government would not survive. It had survived into the 1830s only because the United States was perched between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Sooner or later, Hegel said, the United States would discover that a large republic lacking a monarchy cannot defend itself from foreign invaders. The United States was doubly vulnerable for relying so exclusively on commercial trading. It was hard to say what the United States would become, once it developed its vast unsettled territory: What has taken place there up to now is but an echo of the Old World, and the expression of an alien life.⁴

The Eurocentric hubris that Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel took for granted is an abyss separating me from the many things I admire about them and take from them. Post-Hegelian is decidedly both to me: leaving Hegel behind by passing through him. Right-Hegelian readings of Hegel miss what matters in his thought, while postmodern critics wrongly suggest that Levinas and Jacques Derrida discovered the problem of difference. Hegel blasted the monism of Parmenides, the Eleatics, and the ontological tradition, and he rooted reason and rationality in interhuman relation. Moreover, contrary to postmodern convention, I do not disparage the rhetoric of freedom that the Kantian and post-Kantian traditions bequeathed to modern thought. No philosophy has defended human freedom and dignity more powerfully than the post-Kantian tradition, and no philosophy has surpassed Hegel’s grounding of social subjectivity in the struggle for freedom, recognition, and power.

My dance with Hegel is an elective affinity, making a case for his persisting relevance. My argument about modern theology says the same thing with stronger finality: we are never done with the questions that gave rise to it. How should theology deal with the challenges to belief that overthrew the external authority of Christian Scripture and tradition? What kind of religious belief is possible after science, the Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment criticism disenchanted the world? How should Christian theology deal with the mythical aspects of Christianity and the results of biblical criticism? These questions were peculiar to the founders of modern theology and remain very much with us.

The Making of Liberal Theology

Every tradition of full-fledged liberal theology emphasized the individual’s right to intellectual freedom, yielding six defining principles. My definition of liberal theology features these principles that liberals have espoused in various national contexts for three centuries. Liberal theology refuses to establish or compel religious beliefs on the basis of a bare authority claim, seeks a third way between orthodox overbelief and secular disbelief, accepts the historical-critical approach to the Bible, allows science to explain the physical world, looks beyond the church for answers, and seeks to make religious faith relevant to the modern world.

Modern theology began as a liberalizing impulse in contexts where Enlightenment movements delegitimized appeals to external authority to establish or compel religious beliefs. In Britain it began with the early Enlightenment deists and Anglican rationalists, spawned a vaguely liberal Broad Church tradition in the 1820s, and produced a full-fledged liberal movement in the late 1890s. In Germany, liberal theology began with the mid–eighteenth-century founders of historical criticism. In the United States, the founding liberals were mid–eighteenth-century rationalists influenced by British theology, with the exception that the American founders were Congregational descendants of the New England Puritans and chiefly concerned with alleviating Calvinism of its most objectionable features. Theology, to be modern, had to recognize contradictions, faulty history, and outright myths in the Bible. That required stripping Christian orthodoxies of unbelievable teachings and paying close attention to deist and atheist criticism—the mediating agenda signaled in the subtitle of the first fully modern work of theology, Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, 1799).

Britons had long preceded Schleiermacher in producing Christian apologetic responses to rationalist criticism, and Schleiermacher had read similar fare from German scholars of his time. British critics ransacked the Bible for unbelievable things and skewered Christian doctrines, compelling Anglican rationalists Samuel Clarke and Joseph Butler to defend slightly alleviated forms of Anglican orthodoxy. In Germany, a deceased anonymous deist (Hermann Samuel Reimarus) caused a stir in the mid-1770s by portraying Jesus as a misguided political messiah lacking any idea of being divine. Schleiermacher, surrounded by cultured Romantic scoffers in Berlin, contended that true religion and the divinity of Jesus are credible on modern terms. He took for granted that theologians had to accept biblical criticism and modern science, engage modern culture and other religions, and make religious faith relevant to modern living, even though he had no models for doing so. His argument was constructive and new, never sealing an argument by citing Scripture or any ecclesiastical authority. Both things were crucial to the historic significance of On Religion. It offered a positive approach to theology without making any appeal to external authorities or traditions.

To say that liberal theology dispenses with external authority can be misleading. It does not mean that Scripture and tradition have no authority, or that liberal theology necessarily operates outside the sphere of the church. The first school of liberal theology, Kantian theology, did in fact dispense with scriptural authority and operated outside the Christian church and tradition. But it was possible on liberal terms to affirm a doctrine of scriptural authority, and to do so within the Christian church. Nearly every form of Anglican and Roman Catholic liberal theology has done so, and still does. Schleiermacher became the quintessential liberal theologian by grounding his theology in the Christian church, conceiving theology as interpretation of the church’s experience of redemption. He did not call himself a liberal, because Kantians owned this category in his time. Neither did Schleiermacher speak of scriptural authority, because that sounded like a throwback to the original problem. But Schleiermacher inspired Mediating theologies in which liberals invoked the authority of Scripture on liberal terms: scriptural teaching is authoritative within Christian experience, not as an outside word that establishes or compels truth claims about particular matters of fact or doctrine.

In Germany, four schools of thought vied for influence, yielding Mediating fusions of two or more schools. Kantians grounded Christian truth entirely in the moral concerns of practical reason, conceiving theology as reflection on moral faith and freethinking criticism. The school of Schleiermacher located the essence of religion in religious feeling (Gefühl) and identified Christianity with the experience of redemption. Hegelian theologians construed Hegel’s philosophical system as the highest explication of Christian doctrine. Ritschl founded the fourth major school by fusing Kant on moral religion, Schleiermacher on religious experience, and himself on social-ethical consciousness. Christianity is fundamentally a sociohistorical movement with a distinct social-ethical character founded on Christian faith alone.

All four of these schools and the Mediating variations of them positioned themselves between overbelieving church traditions and disbelieving critics. Unavoidably, they had to battle with conservatives for the right to liberalize Christian doctrine. But they worried more about the challenges to belief from outsiders. The agenda of modern theology was to develop a credible form of Christianity before the cultured despisers routed Christian faith from intellectual and cultural respectability.

During the Progressive Era there was a seventh plank that played a fatefully implosive role in German liberal theology, very little role in British liberal theology, and a permanently redefining role in American liberal theology: social Christianity. In Germany, liberal theology became wholly identified with Culture Protestantism, the bourgeois civil religion of an expanding German Empire, which set up liberal theology for a devastating crash. In England some Christian socialists were vaguely liberal in Maurice’s fashion, but the full-fledged liberal theology movement spurned Christian socialism as a low-grade concern, or too Anglo-Catholic, or too left-wing. In the United States, liberal theology surged into the established churches through the social gospel, a cultural earthquake that should be called the Third Great Awakening.

The American social gospel had a deeper, wider, and more lasting impact on established churches than was true anywhere in Europe, owing to its abolitionist and evangelical Puritan roots plus America’s lack of a state church. The ministers who founded it in the 1880s were stung by the accusation of socialists and trade unionists that churches did not care about the suffering of the poor and vulnerable. They knew it was true and resolved to do something about it. White social gospel leaders combated the ravages of industrialization and economic injustice, black social gospel leaders were neo-abolitionists who combated white terrorism and oppression, and the best social gospel founders on both sides of the color line combined these liberationist struggles. They proclaimed that churches had a mission to transform the structures of society in the direction of social justice, which they called social salvation. All three parts of this message employed language that did not exist before the 1880s. The novel idea that there is such a thing as social structure yielded the language of social salvation, social ethics, social justice, and the social gospel. Salvation, to be saving, could not be personal only. Evil is transmitted through inherited social structures, not only by personal sins.⁵

The American social gospel was politically activist and progressive, supporting cooperatives, the nationalization of monopolies, and the doctrine of social salvation. Here the movements for liberal theology and the social gospel fused together. It was possible to be one without the other, and there were notable examples on each side. Religious philosopher Borden Parker Bowne was a liberal who opposed the social gospel; theologian Augustus Strong was a conservative evangelical who supported the social gospel; and many black and white social gospel clerics resisted liberal theology. But the leaders of the social gospel—Washington Gladden, Richard Ely, W. D. P. Bliss, George Herron, Walter Rauschenbusch, Reverdy Ransom, Richard R. Wright Jr., Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Vida Scudder, and Harry Ward—said it made no sense to be one without the other. To them, the liberalizing impulse in theology and the social conscience of the social gospel were complementary aspects of the same struggle for freedom and progress. Liberal theology and the social gospel were deeply intertwined from the beginning of the social gospel upsurge.

In Britain and Germany, liberal theology had a stronger elitist character. British and German theological liberals took pride in belonging to a cultural elite, having been trained in highly prestigious universities. German theology was far more creative and profound than British theology, partly because Britain had no tradition of treating theology as a university discipline. For most of the nineteenth century, British liberals had to fight for the right to accept modern criticism. In both contexts, socialism was more serious and looming than in the United States and not a foreign idea, and liberalism retained its original character as the individualistic ideology of the middle class.

In 1860 a mildly liberal book, Essays and Reviews, caused a firestorm of condemnation that raged across England, Scotland, and Wales for months. It killed the possibility of liberal theology in Britain for the next generation, aside from temporizing Broad Church–Anglican versions and a handful of Presbyterians. British Anglicanism produced no explicitly liberal organization until 1898, when a group of low-church rationalists founded the Churchmen’s Union for the Advancement of Liberal Religious Thought. These founders naturally fixed on intellectual freedom, especially the right of Anglican clergy to be theologically liberal. Otherwise, they warned, the church would be discredited and theology was sure to be expelled from the academy.⁶

In Germany, liberal theology had a storied history reflecting the strengths of a German invention, the modern research university, and longtime dreams of a united nation and empire, which were not fulfilled until 1871. All four of the German schools of liberal theology had a Prussian nationalistic bent, plus leading scholars named after Kings Friedrich and Wilhelm. By 1889, the year of Ritschl’s death, the Ritschlian school dominated modern theology. It built on the heritage of Luther, Kant, and Schleiermacher, stressing the irreducible autonomy of faith, now meshed with the new social consciousness. It was practical, anti-metaphysical, and comfortably ensconced in the churches, academy, and government. It provided theological ballast for Germany’s expanding empire and was avowedly comfortable with Germany’s mighty growing army. The Ritschlian school was so dominant that when it crashed after World War I, liberal theology as a whole nearly perished in Continental Europe.

I shall argue that the traditions of liberal theology deriving from Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher offer powerful wellsprings for religious philosophy. Yet the most dominating and defining liberal theology ever devised, Ritschlian theology, oscillated between minimizing its debt to philosophy and repudiating religious philosophy. This anomaly looms so large over my subject that it must be addressed before I proceed with my argument about the enduring relevance of liberal theology.

The Ritschlian Heyday: Liberal Theology without Metaphysics

Each of the liberal theologies deriving from Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and the Mediating fusions of them claimed to give historical criticism its due, yet each was also a strategy to curtail its reach. Ritschl said this defensive posture was self-defeating. He cut his teeth on neo-Hegelian historicism, but concluded it was not really historicist. He absorbed the personal idealism and value theory of his Göttingen colleague and friend Rudolf Hermann Lotze, but denied it controlled his theology. Ritschl said theology needed to embrace historical consciousness, reclaim the kingdom-oriented religion of Jesus, accept Kant’s division of knowledge, and defend the indispensable role of religion in society. The school he founded swept the field by doing all four things, albeit as Ritschlian theologians clashed with each other. The leading Ritschlians were theologian Wilhelm Herrmann, eminent church historian Adolf von Harnack, and history of religions theologian Ernst Troeltsch. Other German Ritschlians included Johannes Gottschick, Theodore Häring, Julius Kaftan, Ferdinand Kattenbusch, Friedrich Loofs, Martin Rade, Max Reischle, Friedrich Traub, and Georg Wobbermin.⁷

All grappled with Ritschl’s historicism, judging that he got it approximately right (Harnack), or took it too far (Herrmann), or did not take it far enough (Troeltsch). All grappled similarly with Ritschl’s attempt to expunge metaphysics from theology, judging that he got it right (Harnack), or didn’t go far enough (Herrmann), or was wrong to try (Troeltsch). Liberal theology in the Ritschlian era projected a sunny, confident, outward-reaching progressivism that proposed to make peace with science and make Christianity socially useful, although Troeltsch warned that modern society and the Ritschlian school stood on tottering foundations.

Ritschl was born to the Prussian Union Church as the son of a conservative Lutheran bishop. He was schooled in Mediating theology under Immanuel Nitzsch at Bonn and Julius Müller and F. A. Tholuck at Halle, and subsequently studied under Ferdinand Christian Baur in 1845 at Tübingen. His relationship with Baur was stormy, competitive, and brief, but crucial to Ritschl’s career. Baur began as a philosophical disciple of Friedrich Schelling, moved in mid-career to Hegel, and adopted Hegel’s concept of the self-disclosure of Spirit in and through historical process. He taught Ritschl to interpret Christianity in Hegelian fashion as a total historical reality. Baur employed the conventional simplistic rendering of Hegel’s dialectic, teaching that a thesis generates an antithesis yielding a synthesis. This idea helped Baur explicate his revolutionary claim that the key to early Christianity was the struggle between its Judaizing and Hellenizing factions. Peter and the other Jerusalem-based apostles espoused Jewish Christianity; Paul and the Gentile converts espoused Hellenistic Christianity; the New Testament book of Acts smoothed over the conflict; and Paul did not write the Pastoral Epistles.⁸

In his early career Ritschl accepted Baur’s brand of historicism and his rendering of early Christian history, but in 1850 Ritschl turned against Baur’s dictum that pure historicism is impossible. Ritschl claimed to interpret history without a philosophy, roiling Baur and his disciples. According to Ritschl, philosophy got in the way of understanding what happened in early Christian history. Accusations of bad faith ensued back and forth. Baur said the Johannine literature was a synthesis of the conflict between Judaizers and Hellenizers, which led to Catholicism. Ritschl said Catholicism was no synthesis, but rather a negation of Judaism by a triumphant Hellenistic faction that redefined Christianity in its own image. Catholicism stood for corruption and deracination, erasing the Jewish character of Christianity.⁹

Ritschl grieved that German theologians routinely denigrated the Jewish aspects of Christianity, often with anti-Jewish quotes from Martin Luther. He compensated by emphasizing Luther’s anti-Catholicism and contending that Luther was not as bad on Judaism as his worst writings conveyed. Protestant theology, he taught, especially Lutheran theology, needed to reclaim its Jewish, ethical, historical, this-worldly, monotheistic heritage, discarding the pagan motifs it inherited from Catholicism. Paul de Lagarde, the founder of the history of religions school, was a vile anti-Semite who loathed Ritschl’s pro-Judaism. Göttingen students who studied under Lagarde and Ritschl often steered a diplomatic path between them, yielding evasive theological and historical scholarship that erased this part of Ritschl’s legacy.¹⁰

Ritschl sometimes exaggerated Baur’s reliance on Hegel, but the break between Ritschl and Baur occurred over a real disagreement. Baur taught that every theology needs a philosophical basis, Hegel provided the best philosophy, and Christianity is the very life process of God explicating itself in thinking as spirit. Paul, Baur contended, shifted the focus of Christianity from the historical Jesus to the person of Christ. The unknown author of the Fourth Gospel provided a metaphysical foundation for Pauline universalism, replacing Paul’s emphasis on justification with a love theology of new being in Christ. Good theology must be rigorously historicist, unlike the Gospel of John, and robustly metaphysical, like John. Ritschl countered that historicism is a golden key that makes metaphysical speculation unnecessary. From 1846 to 1864 he taught at Bonn; in 1857 he left church history to become a theologian; in 1864 he moved to Göttingen and changed the field of theology.¹¹

He changed the field by contending that Christianity is inherently social, historical, and based on faith. Ritschl had two defining concerns: the challenge of Darwinian evolution and the bitter disputes between conservative confessionalists and Pietists in the Prussian Union Church. As a modern theologian, he was anxious to avoid religious conflicts with science; as a Prussian churchman, he was appalled at the erosion of the church’s moral and social authority. His solution to the religion-and-science problem came straight from Kant: science describes the way things are or appear to be, while theology is about the way things should be. Religious knowledge is never disinterested, consisting entirely of value judgments about reality, especially judgments contributing to personal and social good. Ritschl explained in The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (1874): Religious knowledge moves in independent value-judgments, which relate to man’s attitude to the world, and call forth feelings of pleasure and pain, in which man either enjoys the dominion over the world vouchsafed him by God, or feels grievously the lack of God’s help to that end.¹²

Ritschl took from Kant and Lotze—without putting it that way—that the goal of true religion is to attain the highest possible good. He said this idea and its content are in the Christian apostolic tradition and are discoverable by historical criticism. The point is not to uncover what Jesus really said. Quests of the historical Jesus kept getting this wrong, feeding the impression that Christianity should be based on whatever historical critics discovered about the Jesus of history. What matters, Ritschl contended, is to uncover the collective Christian experience of value inspired by Jesus: It would be a mistaken purism were anyone, in this respect, to prefer the less developed statements of Jesus to the forms of apostolic thought.¹³

What makes a religion good is its concern with value. Historical research shows that the essence of Christianity is the kingdom of God as valued by the Christian community, which makes Christianity the best religion, since Christianity is concerned above all with the realization of social and ethical value. To be sure, the kingdom is valued as absolute only by those who follow Jesus. Outsiders don’t care what Jesus taught about sin, redemption, or the kingdom. Ritschl stressed the logical upshot: Christian truth cannot be grasped outside the Christian community, for Christian faith is knowable only to faith. It is comprehensible only within the inner history of the church’s life and practices. The value of the kingdom becomes a matter of knowledge within the inner history of the church’s life. From this perspective, Jesus is the embodiment of humanity’s highest ideal—the Redeemer of humankind who incarnates and inaugurates the realization of the kingdom.¹⁴

Personal redemption and social religion go together in the gospel. Ritschl’s image for this double character became synonymous with the Ritschlian school: an ellipse determined by two foci, personal redemption and the kingdom of God. Christians know Jesus as their Redeemer and are commanded to follow him in building the kingdom of God. The mark of true Christianity is its