"On Religion": Chapter 2

In preparation for the 2007 Theological Conversation, here is the second of several accessible (hopefully) summaries and reflections on the various reading for the theological conference.

On Religion : Chapter 2 : How the Secular World Became Post-Secular
Summary, Thoughts, and Reflections by Joshua Erickson, a student at Princeton Theological Seminary and part of the Emergent Princeton Cohort. 

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Summary:
For people that are familiar with trends in philosophy, it might strike them as odd that John D. Caputo would invoke St. Augustine in his musings about religion.  Not that such an invocation is inappropriate for Caputo but just that one might find it odd.  Caputo suggests that we (by whom I took him to mean Christians, the church, and Western Academia) are now in a place where we can once again listen to the sage words of St. Augustine as we are in a “post-secular” age.  Caputo suggests that the world has gone through three ages of thinking.  Now that we are in the third, St. Augustine is once again a voice to be reckoned with.

Caputo offers these three ages but then suggests that we hold to them lightly.  I suppose he is worried about people clinging to the ages with such earnest as some have with the pre-modern, modern, and post-modern classifications.  The first age was the “sacral age.”  This was the era of which the likes of Anselm were living into the motto of “faith seeking understanding.”  The hermeneutical circle began with God and ended with God.  There were two concepts of God which were being considered.  The first was the metaphysical concept of God and the second was the “You.”  The metaphysical concept of God was the “gift” from Hellenistic philosophy to Christianity and it is this metaphysical concept which is oft debated (and much of the occasion for this philosophical conversation).  The “You” is the God of Anselm’s piety and the God with which Anselm and others would begin and end their days on their knees earnestly seeking and hoping to love more deeply.  Caputo suggests that it is very important to notice that much of the theology done in this age was done while the theologian was on her/his knees.  Theology was done in loving reverence.  It was in this age that theology was done as a spiritual discipline of sorts.

The next age was the age of secularization.  This age was characterized by a prevailing thought that someone had invented religion and then declared it off limits from “reason” (43).  In this age, Anselm’s arguments had been extracted from his hermeneutical circle in which he was doing theology in service of the church and Christian spirituality.  It was then plopped into the philosophical thought world of Kant and thus divorcing Anselm from his hermeneutical circle.  The question or problem of God was ushered away from the inner sanctum of the church sanctuary and put on trial in the courtroom of “reason.”  God was faced no longer with the faithful faces of the church but faced the grim Judge “Reason” (46).  In this court God was already dead.  Even if you could come up with “valid” proof, the proof you had was for an idea for a God that did not exist or was an idol.  This created a dualism between the sacred and the secular world.

The prophets of this age were Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.  They were following Kant and Hegel.  It was Hegel who “put a torch to the epistemological system of Kant in which the oppositional and dichotomizing way of thinking” (49).  Hegel trumped Kant’s “understanding” with historical “Reason” (50).  This was the power to apprehend the convergence of opposites in the correct historical world and see history as the autobiography of God in time (50).  Kierkegaard thought this was awful for “God had not come into the world in order to get an account of himself from German metaphysics” (50).  Kierkegaard was also responding the decadence of Christendom in Denmark.  He believed that Christendom made it “easy” to be a Christian.  He called for a return of some of the marks of the apostolic faith that emboldened those who faced the persecution brought by the Roman Empire.  He was a prophet calling for the purity of heart that would bring those who called themselves Christians actually to their knees.  For Kierkegaard, “history is not the story of Eternal unfolding rationally, but the mind-numbing event of the altogether astonishing intervention of the Eternal into time in the Moment of the God-become-man, a crashing of the party of reason and history by God who assumes the form of a servant, which scandalizes Jews and confounds philosophers” (51).  Kierkegaard was calling for a Christian faith which took this sentiment seriously.  For Nietzsche, God was dead or rather that there was no longer life to be found in European faith (53). For both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the world of Enlightenment Reason and of Hegelian Absolute Knowledge needed to be left behind (55).

The final age is the one of desecularization.  That is the death of the death of God (56).  This age harkens back to the Hebrew and pre-Constantine Christian faiths which did not have metaphysical theologies (57).  Paul, and later Kierkegaard, called for a leap of faith which was beyond description by the philosophical categories of his era.  This is now possible today for people in a post-Enlightenment world (59).  It is possible because of the death of the death of God.  Nietzsche leveled the playing field by declaring that God was dead.  In the same movement, so was Absolute Truth, Physics, and the Laws of Grammar, or anything that tries to hold the center firm (60).  Nietzsche was trying to decapitalize anything that tried to Capitalize itself.  The irony is that Nietzsche’s critique ever so closely parallels the biblical critique of idols (63).  Idols are any human made constructions trying to take the place of God.  Moses smashed the Golden Calf with a hammer; Paul disparaged the Corinthians for their following of the idols built by philosophers and Nietzsche used the Enlightenment critique of reason to thrash “capitalized” philosophical idols (63).

Thoughts and Reflections:
Reading this chapter was a liberating experience for me.  I found the idea that Nietzsche and Moses were both interested in deconstructing idols a striking thought.  Moses is held up in high regard in the Judeo-Christian and Nietzsche is held in nearly quite the opposite.  I find it very insightful on Caputo’s part of see them as doing much the same thing.

When I finished reading this chapter (and the book), I found myself to have an unsettled feeling in the bottom of my stomach.  This was a familiar feeling.  It was the feeling that I get when I know my beliefs and suppositions about faith, life, and God are about to be challenged.  It left me wondering what idols I have been chasing after lately.  This is a terrifying question for me as I am a seminary student.  The thought that I have been chasing after idols and I thought it was God that I was quite alarming.  This was especially true considering that I have recently come to better understand some of the orthodox doctrines of Christian faith.  It is those very doctrines that can come under critique when one follows the critique of Moses, Paul, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.  I do not mean to end this reflection in a cliché manner but when I was finished reading this chapter I was left with the question of “what would Jesus deconstruct” in my mind.  I look forward to the conversation surrounding that question.

Comments

[Greg Laughery]

Thanks for the helpful thoughts and this summary. Might it be better to say that Moses and Nietzsche did some similar things and some different things? Seems like Moses and Nietzsche are related and distinct, not just related. Greetings to Jamie somewhere out there.

[Jim Getz]

While I held Caputo's categories lightly, I still had a hard time buying into his partitioning of history. The Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Reformation under Trent had a major effect on Christianity in the West. It redefined the discussion; and at least in terms of Protestantism, gave rise to a secular society through the Scholastics. Likewise, at Modernity's highpoint with Marx, Freud and Darwin, you still had many like Alfred Russel Wallace who didn't let their mechanized view of the world prevent them from seeing a religious or spiritual dimension as well. I guess I just see everything as much more messy historically.