Dialogues between Faith and Reason

H. Smith John

Description

The contemporary theologian Hans Kung has asked if the "death of God," proclaimed by Nietzsche as the event of modernity, was inevitable. Did the empowering of new forms of rationality in Western culture beginning around 1500 lead necessarily to the reduction or privatization of faith? In Dialogues between Faith and Reason, John H. Smith traces a major line in the history of theology and the philosophy of religion down the "slippery slope" of secularization-from Luther and Erasmus, through Idealism, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and contemporary theory such as that of Derrida, Habermas, Vattimo, and Asad. At the same time, Smith points to the persistence of a tradition that grew out of the Reformation and continues in the mostly Protestant philosophical reflection on whether and how faith can be justified by reason. In this accessible and vigorously argued book, Smith posits that faith and reason have long been locked in mutual engagement in which they productively challenge each other as partners in an ongoing "dialogue."Smith is struck by the fact that although in the secularized West the death of God is said to be fundamental to the modern condition, our current post-modernity is often characterized as a "postsecular" time. For Smith, this means not only that we are experiencing a broad-based "return of religion" but also, and more important for his argument, that we are now able to recognize the role of religion within the history of modernity. Emphasizing that, thanks to the logos located "in the beginning," the death of God is part of the inner logic of the Christian tradition, he argues that this same strand of reasoning also ensures that God will always "return" (often in new forms). In Smith's view, rational reflection on God has both undermined and justified faith, while faith has rejected and relied on rational argument. Neither a defense of atheism nor a call to belief, his book explores the long history of their interaction in modern religious and philosophical thought.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of religion
• History of Europe
• Germany

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780801463273
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

 DIALOGUES BETWEEN FAITH AND REASON

DIALOGUES BETWEEN FAITH AND REASON n T he Deat h and Re tur n o f Go d i n Mo de r n Ge r ma n T ho ug ht

J o h n H . S m i t h

CORNELLUNIVERSITYPRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the pub- lisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2011 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Smith, John H., 1954–  Dialogues between faith and reason : the death and return of God in modern German thought / John H. Smith.  p. cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-8014-4927-7 (cloth : alk. paper)  ISBN 978-0-8014-7762-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)  1. Death of God theology. 2. God (Christianity)— History of doctrines. 3. Theology, Doctrinal— Germany—History. 4. Philosophical theology— Germany—History. 5. Atheism—Germany—History. I. Title.  BT83.5.S65 2011  231.0943'0904—dc22 2011000861

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  Co nte nts

Preface vii

Introduction:Logos,Religion, and Rationality 1. Erasmus vs. Luther: Philo-logos vs. Faith 2. God and theLogosof Scientific Calculation (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Pascal)

3. Kant: The Turn to Ethics asLogos

4.Hegel:Logosas Spirit (Geist)

5.Logosand Its Others: Feeling, the Abyss, Willing, andKritik (Schleiermacher, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach) 6.Nietzsche:Logosagainst Itself and the Death of God 7. Being after the Death of God: Heidegger from Theo- to Onto-logos

8. Dialectical Theology (Gogarten, Barth, Bultmann) 9. “Atheistic” and Dialogical Jewish Theologies of the Other (Rosenzweig and Buber)

1

23

45 68 95

120

152

175

205

236

vi CONTENTS

10.Fides et Ratio:and“Right Reason” Europe in Contemporary Catholic Thought (Benedict XVI)

Bibliography 275 Index 293

258

  P r e f a c e

In 1966, the death of God made the front cover ofTimemagazine—on Good Friday, no less. We have here not so much a case that confirms Nietzsche’s madman’s point that it will take a while for the news of God’s death to reach the masses. Rather, what sparked the cover story was in fact the return of theology in the form of a North American move- ment called “death-of-God theology.” In a more academic forum—namely, his extensive study of atheistic philosophies and Christian apologetics in the seventeenth century—Hans-Martin Barth begins with a reference to the disappearance and return of discussions about God’s existence:

In the Preface to the first edition of his complete works in 1846 Lud- wig Feuerbach wrote: “The question of whether God exists or not, the opposition of theism and atheism, belongs to the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, not to the nineteenth.” Not to mention the twentieth—, one could logically conclude. Amazingly, however, the question of God has been the focal point of an intense theological discussion for nearly a decade. What a philosopher of the last century could consider over and done with for at least a century, appears to have found its way, with considerable delay, back into the field of vision of contemporary theology. (13)

What Barth has in mind with this “return” of the question of God’s exis- tence in “contemporary” discourse is, in fact, the same “death-of-God the- ology” that made the cover ofTime,for he encountered it during his studies in the United States (at Harvard Divinity School) in the late 1960s. And so this professor of systematic theology at the famed University of Marburg, which had been part of a new movement to “save” Protestant theology and rethink philosophy after the demise of Judeo-Christian values in the wake of Nietzsche and World War I, himself must engage with a new movement that takes as its explicit starting point the death of God. The goal of this book is to provide a broad historical and intellectual context for these amazing phenomena—the death(s) of God and his return(s).

vii

viii PREFACE

The divide between believers and nonbelievers, theists and atheists, has been, and continues to be, perhaps the deepest one separating individuals and groups. As we learned from the 2004 U.S. presidential election, in the United States today the main predictor of voting patterns turns out to be regular church attendance. “Red” and “blue” depict not just party affili- ation by state but, more fundamentally, the divide between those who see faith as central to all aspects of their lives and those who consider it a private, if not irrelevant, matter. Certainly the opposition, both real and politically hyped, between religious believers—such as “Christian” versus “Muslim” or “Fundamentalists/Orthodox” versus “modernists/liberals”—can be deadly serious. But the conflictwithinthe realm of faith is different from that between the secular and the devout. After all, for nonbelievers, there is always a “pox-on-both-your-houses” sentiment lurking in the background, a sense that the real problem lies with religion, or at least monotheisms, per se. And, of course, for the religious nothing could be worse than those who profess to challenge the foundation of religion as such. The goal of this book, however, is not to take sides in this debate, as there are enough polemics promoting proofs for the existence or nonexistence of 1 God. It is not my interest either to support radical skepticism or to “dis- 2 place the secular economy” with a new theology.will be arguingRather, I that the two positions have in fact been historically interconnected for at least four centuries. Specifically, I will be retracing the course of a “slip- pery slope” that has led from belief to unbelief, from God to the death of God, resulting not so much from attacks from the “outside” of religion as from intellectual and philosophical developmentswithinmodern Christian theology. Many thinkers along this path who intended to support or at least grasp the essence of Christian faith with reason ended up undermining it. Paul Ramsey wrote in the preface to Gabriel Vahanian’sThe Death of Godin 1961 that “every revival of Christianity in the past three hundred years has revived less of it” (xxiv), a claim I will be applying to mostly well-intended theological and philosophical “revivals.” We know where the best intentions are said to lead. The goal is to show how a certain logic in modern thought about Christianity brought about both its own undoing and the seeds for

1. Hence, I will not take up Bertrand Russell’s call to atheism, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” as does William Connolly in hisWhy I Am Not a Secularist.Nor will I address the strident new athe- ists Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens (or even less strident earlier ones such as Michael Martin). 2. See Phillip Blond’s introduction toPostSecular Philosophy(5).

PREFACE  ix

a revival of faith from a new perspective. Stated in political terms, I’d like to show people in the “red” state of mind how those in the “blue” came to think as they do; and those in the “blue” how their position grew out of “red” soil. The notion of an ongoing “dialogue” over the past five hundred or so years of Western (esp. German) thought between reason and faith presumes two things about the very nature of dialogue. First, despite the contentious- ness of the exchanges and despite the call from both sides to break off all communication with the other, the past existence of a dialogue between the two means that some form of common language must be possible. Within the tradition of Christian theology and philosophy that is the focus of this book that common basis resides in the very notion oflogos,a rich term variously translated as word, discourse, speech, reason, or calculation. It forms the precondition of dialogue, a term derived from the Greekdialogos, fromdialegein,meaning to speak through or across, to speak alternately. After all, as we will see,logosis both the very foundation of Western con- ceptions of rationality and, thanks to the early melding of Jewish and Greek thought, the very beginning of Christian conceptions of God. Hence, in these times of conflict between secularism and religiosity, Enlightenment and piety, we can, I hope, benefit from the exploration of historical sites of interaction, the attempts to “think through faith” (an intentionally ambigu- ous formulation). Second, it is valuable to recall an essential feature of all genuine conversa- tion or dialogue that the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer highlighted in his major study on hermeneutics as the art/science of achieving understand- ing. He argued, namely, that partners in a dialogue who are interested in generating new knowledge, as opposed to merely repeating what is already known or to speaking past each other, do not so much lead the conversation 3 as they are led by it. If in a dialogue we are mutually open to what the other is trying to say, we end up—hopefully—at a new place because we allow the matter under discussion (logosthe dynamic) to set the direction. In this case, of the “slippery slope” guides attempts within modern (German) Christian thought to use reason to justify faith. I hope to encourage readers, even or

3. Gadamer writes on conversation: “To conduct a conversation means to allow oneself to be conducted by the subject matter to which the partners in the dialogue are oriented. . . . What emerges in its truth is thelogos, which is neither mine nor yours and hence so far transcends the interlocutors’ subjective opinions that even the person leading the conversation knows that he does not know. The art of conducting a conversation, dialectic, is also the art of seeing things in the aspect of unity” (Wahrheit und Methode,367–68).