Liberalism and Not-So-Postliberalism

Peter J. Leithart, May 09, 2005

The following includes some material from published essays, but also includes new material.

In his third lecture on the �Essence of Christianity,�Edelivered at the turn of the century, Adolf von Harnack expressed a common modern understanding of the nature of Christianity:

"Anyone who wants to know what the kingdom of God and the coming of this kingdom mean in Jesus�Epreaching is must read and meditate on the parables. There he will learn what the kingdom is all about. The kingdom of God comes by coming to individuals, making entrance into their souls, and being grasped by them. . . . Everything externally dramatic, all public historical meaning vanish here; all external hope for the future fades also. . . . It is not a matter of angels and devils, nor of principalities and powers, but of God and the soul, of the soul and its God."

For Harnack, Jesus �severed the connection existing in his day between ethics and external forms of religious worship and technical observance�Eand traced moral issues to their �root, that is, to the disposition and intention.�E Continuing this work, Paul �delivered the Christian religion from Judaism,�Eby virtue of his insight that �religion in its new phase pertains to the individual�Eand by introducing the dichotomies of spirit/flesh, inner/outer, life/death. Harnack recognized that the gospel had a bearing on the problems of law, social problems, culture and work, and justified the formation of churches by noting that religion cannot remain �bodiless.�EBut these �externals�Eare not constitutive of Christianity per se, and Harnack argues that these necessary forms took on a life of their own, transforming Christianity into catholicism, in which the church was believed to be a necessary institution and, in Eastern Christianity, turning worship from �a worship of God in spirit and in truth into a worship of God in signs, formulas, and idols.�E While Harnack struggles to make room for externals like baptism within his theology, his gospel hardly begins in baptism.

Against this conception of Christianity, George Lindbeck�s preference for a cultural-linguistic account of religion has much to recommend it and breaks free of many of the limitations of expressivist and cognitive accounts. Yet, for all his efforts, Lindbeck falls significantly short of a framework that accommodates a gospel that begins with baptism. This is largely because of the effects of the lingering effects of a framework that detaches �religion�Eas an a priori scheme from the actual speech and practice of religious communities, which is then �interiorized�Ein the minds of religious adherents. Thus, Lindbeck defines religions as �comprehensive interpretive schemes, usually embodied in myths or narratives and heavily ritualized, which structure human experience and understanding of self and world.�E Religious stories thus function like a �Kantian a priori,�Ethough, since they are culturally formed, they are not invariably universal, as Kant�s categories are. Religion is the �idiom�Ethat makes possible �description of realities, the formulation of beliefs and the experiencing of inner attitudes, feelings, and sentiments�Eor a �vocabulary of discursive and nondiscursive symbols together with a distinctive logic or grammar.�E To be religious, then, means becoming �skilled in the language, the symbol system of a given religion. To become a Christian involves learning the story of Israel and of Jesus well enough to interpret and experience oneself and one�s world on its terms." In all this, religion is treated as langue rather than parole, and the emphasis is on religion as a framework for making sense of the world.

These formulations suggest that Lindbeck wants to emphasize that religion is �above all�Ea verbum externum, yet, because there is a gap between this verbum and the actual practice of a religion, Lindbeck paradoxically ends up interiorizing religion. His constant emphasis is that the verbum externum is to be �interiorized,�Erather than, say, �habituated.�E In a summarizing statement, he writes that religions are �idioms�Efor dealing with the most important questions of life and that a religion imprints itself �through rites, instruction, and other socializing processes, not only on the conscious mind but in the individual and cultural subconscious.�E To be sure, what is �interiorized�Eis �a set of skills�Ewhich come by �practice and training,�Enot merely through cognitive understanding, and Lindbeck does sometimes include practice within his definition of religion. Yet he hesitates to say that the skills are imprinted also on �bodies�Eor that what ritual seeks to inscribe are �patterns of social interaction,�Epreferring to highlight that the target of religious instruction and ritual is the �conscious�Eand �subconscious�Emind. Though the causative relation of experience and cultural embodiment has been reversed in Lindbeck�s scheme, the ultimate goal of the patterns of the verbum externum is still the mind. For Lindbeck, religion either hovers above the life of the community or is lodged in the heart of its members; it does not seem to be identifiable with a religious community�s actual speech and practice.

Mark�s opening verses have also been scandalous because they are so Jewish a starting point. Of course, Christianity is a different religion from that of the Old Testament, but there has been a strong tendency in modern thought to treat Christianity and Israelite religion as two different kinds of religion. J.C. O�Neill�s comment that in New Testament studies �Marcion the historian had his greatest success in the ninteenth century�Eapplies to other areas of theology and modern thought and applies beyond the nineteenth century. Marcion rejected the Old Testament as part of the Christian canon because it introduced legal elements that had no place within the gospel and because its creator god endorsed a morality that differed from Christianity�s. Modern Marcionism has a strong Gnostic tone. It first appeared in late medieval Spiritualist attacks on the established church, continued through Renaissance Humanism, Anabaptism, and certain sectors of Puritanism, and entered the mainstream of modern through by way of Anglican Latitudinarianism and English Deism. This tradition rejected the Old Testament not only on Marcion�s moral grounds but also on the basis of its incompatibility with the purely spiritual religion of the New Testament. Tertullian mocked the Marcionites for continuing to baptize and celebrate the Supper, though they believed water and bread to be products of an evil creator; late medieval and early modern Marcionites were sometimes more consistent in their inclination to reject all ceremonial elements of Christianity. Tindal and Morgan, two prominent Deist biblical critics who had strong affinities with Marcion, considered external ceremonies as Jewish and superstitutious, a view that Reventlow traces to �a hostility to ceremonial which has developed out of a Spiritualism which is hostile to the body, bound up with hatred of everything priestly.�E Christianity is prophetic, Judaism priestly. Christianity is spiritual, individual, internal; the Old Testament material, collective, external.

From the English Deists, such sentiments were transmitted to the Continent and reappeared in modified forms in the French and German Enlightenment. Kant was reflecting this tradition when, having defined pure religion as the disposition to fulfill duties as obedience to God, he went on to assert:

"The Jewish faith was, in its original form, a collection of mere statutory laws upon which was established a political organization; for whatever moral additions were then or later appended to it in no way whatever belong to Judaism as such. Judaism is not really a religion at all but merely a union of a number of people who, since they belonged to a particular stock, formed themselves into a commonwealth under purely political laws, and not into a church; nay, it was intended to be merely an earthly state so that, were it possibly to be dismembered through adverse circumstances, there would still remain to it (as part of its very essence) the political faith in its eventual reestablishment (with the advent of a Messiah)."

Christianity, however, �completely�Eforsook Judaism and was �grounded upon a wholly new principle�Ethat required �a thoroughgoing revolution in doctrines of faith,�Ethough this was a revolution for which Judaism somehow prepared. Typological and allegorical efforts to connect Judaism and Christianity were not theologically substantive but only provide evidence of the sensitivity of Christians to the prejudices of the people; early Christianity sought to introduce a �purely moral religion in place of the old worship, to which the people were all to well habituated, without directly offending the people�s prejudices."

Modern theology stumbles here as severely as Kantian philosophy. Harnack�s view that Christianity is a purely spiritual, individual, and internal religion was allied to his explicit endorsement of a Marcionite program. Already at the beginning of the ninteenth century, Schleiermacher set Protestant theology off on a similar course. For all his opposition to the Enlightenment�s rationalistic view of religion, he shared its view of the Old Testament. In what Brunner calls the �decisive sentence of his dogmatics,�ESchleiermacher argues that the connection of Christianity with Judaism, defined as �Mosaic institutions,�Ewas purely historical, while �as far as concerns its historical existence and its aim, [Christianity�s] relations to Judaism and Heathenism are the same.�E Even the historical connection with Judaism must be qualified, since by the time of Jesus Greek and Roman influences had altered Jewish beliefs and practices. In part, this means simply that the transition from either Judaism or Heathenism to Christianity is a �transition to another religion,�Eand that Christianity�s demand that Jews give up the Torah and reinterpret the promises to Abraham is as radical as the demand that pagans give up their multitude of gods. Moreover, Schleiermacher wishes to show that Christianity is not the product of immanent forces of history; this seems to be the point of his denial that �purer original Judaism�Econtained the seeds from which Christianity grew, without the intervention of any �new factor.�E

His discussion of Abraham is more problematic. Schleiermacher concedes that Paul cites Abraham as the example of evangelical faith, but this means �only that Abraham�s faith was related to the promise as ours to the fulfillment, and not by any means that the promise was the same to Abraham as the fulfillment is to us,�Ewhich certainly implies a somewhat weak notion of �fulfillment.�E Schleiermacher is willing to defend the traditional proposition that there has been �one single Church of God�Efrom the beginning of the race, but only by reinterpreting it. Greek philosophy has as much a place in this chain as Mosaic religion, and it is not proper to suggest in either case that the church�s teaching �forms a single whole�Ewith its predecessors. Nonetheless, the single church doctrine does express a truth, namely, that �Christ�s active relation to all that is human knows no limits, even with regard to the time that was past,�Eand in this sense Schleiermacher believes it is compatible with his view of the Old Testament.

The Old Testament itself, Schleiermacher claimed, �ascribed to the New Covenant a different character from the Old,�Eeven an �antithesis�Ebetween them. This view of the transition from Old to New means, theologically, that the Old Testament is safely ignored by the dogmatician, that it is to be �utterly discard[ed],�Esince it is merely the �husk or wrapping�Eand since �whatever is most definitely Jewish has least value.�E The �most definitely Jewish�Eelements are �a legalistic style of thought or a slavish worship of the letter,�Ewhich improperly enters the church when the Old Testament is used for the expression of Christian piety. The early church�s example of preaching and teaching from the Old Testament furnishes no warrant for continuing this practice; in the apostolic age, the connection was �historical,�Eand these connections have appropriately frayed with the the passage of time.

Most importantly for Schleiermacher, the form of Christianity�s piety and of its religious consciousness is wholly different from that of Judaism. In this point, it becomes apparent that Schleiermacher�s downgrading of the Old Testament is of a piece with his entire program, as Harnack realized. Countering those who defend a homiletical use of the Old Testament by appealing to the example of Jesus and the Apostles, Schleiermacher argues, �the New Testament approves of men ceasing to believe on the ground of such witness when once they have gained immediate certainty through their own perception.�E The members of what Schleiermacher in On Religion called the �true church,�Eas opposed to the institutional clingers-on, have no need of text or letter. Consistent with this is Schleiermacher�s effort to define an irreducible �essence�Eof religion and religions. Such a program falters before the religion of Israel, in which the covenant with Yahweh, embodied in texts, embraces the whole of the community�s life, and which, in turn, is seen as the key to human history; Israel�s religion is not a seed inside a dispensable husk but an onion. Schleiermacher�s definition of religion as a �modification of feeling�Eor a �taste for the Infinite,�Ehowever brilliantly it might be qualified by noting the social aspects of religion and by explicating the connection of feeling with acting and knowing, simply cannot serve as a definition of Old Testament religion. Schleiermacher does not follow Kant in denying that Judaism is a religion, but he treats the forms of Old Testament religion as so much rubble that must be removed to find the religious treasure at the core. Religion, he insists in his speeches, is necessarily �positive,�Eand he rejects the idea that natural religion is somehow more pure. But this does not mean that the church constitutes a political community in any sense. On the contrary, part of his refutation of the charge that positive religion breeds civil strife is to say that dragging religion �from the depths of the heart into the civil world�Eis a perversion of religion, and he generally regards institutional religion with suspcion. Again, whatever �positive religion�Emeans, so long as it excludes a religion�s civil presence, it does not describe Israel. In short, some variation of Marcionism is essential to his definition of religion, which is at the heart of his entire system.

In German biblical studies too, and through Germany to the world, the Marcionism of the Spirituals, Humanists, and Deists found a home. The revolutionary reassessment of the New Testament by the members of the Tubingen school, described with some exaggeration by Horton Harris as the �most important theological event in the whole history of theology from the Reformation to the present day,�Ewere based on F.C. Baur�s reconstruction of a conflict between Pauline and Judaizing apostles in the early church. Though Baur repudiated Marcion�s idea of two gods, the opposition between Paul�s genuine spiritual gospel and the Judaizing, Catholicizing gospel of his opponents has a Marcionite provenance. Baur�s reconstruction of early Christian history came from Morgan, mediated by Semler.

Hence, Marcion has continued to gain a strong hearing in New Testament studies into the present century. For all his differences from nineteenth century scholarship, Bultmann remained largely at one with the previous century on this matter, and thus was one of many who bequeathed to modern New Testament scholarship a negative view of Old Testament religion. The Old Testament is, according to Bultmann, instructive for providing the Daseinverstandnis presupposed by the New Testament gospel. The Old Testament presents human existence as temporal and historical, as existence under the law, showing that man always and everywhere faces the demand of God. Even in this respect the value of the Old Testament is relativized, since the Vorverstandnis of the gospel can be discovered in other embodiments, and in fact wherever man finds his existence circumscribed by moral rules. Specific details of the Old Testament are, however, irrelevant to Christian life and theology: �insofar as they are cultic and ritual in character [they] are either bound to a primitive stage of man�s social life, economics, government, and so on, or to the history of a particular people.�E Truly moral demands may be found in the Old Testament, and these remain relevant for Christians, but only so long as they are based on God�s relation to man �as such�Eand do not arise from concrete historical circumstances. Old Testament history is not, Bultmann further claims, �our history,�Eand the events of the history of Israel are no more relevant to the church than the history of Sparta or the life of Socrates. While the Old Testament focuses on the continuity of an historical community, the New Testament emphasizes the continuing contemporaneity of the saving event of Jesus. In short, the Old Testament is not directly God�s word to Christian, as the church has made it.

Gnostic Marconism is part and parcel of what John Milbank calls the �liberal Protestant metanarrative,�Ewhich also serves, as Milbank has shown, as the constituting narrative of modern sociology of religion. Lindbeck expresses surprise that Peter Berger would present a culturally oriented account of religion in his sociology, while adhering to classic liberalism in his theology, but there are indications that Lindbeck had reason to be more suspicious of Berger�s claims that his sociology is free of theological assumptions. On the page following his brief discussion of Berger, Lindbeck summarizes the expressivist account of religion, particularly as exemplified by Schleiermacher, as follows:

. . . thinkers of this tradition all locate ultimately significant contact with whatever is finally important to religion in the prereflective experiential depths of the self and regard the public or outer features of religion as expressive and evocative objectifications (i.e., nondiscursive symbols) of internal experience.

Here is Berger, commenting on the relationship of religious experience and tradition:

. . . at the core of the phenomenon of religion is a set of highly distinctive experiences. . . . Religious experience, however, is not universally and equally distributed among human beings. What is more, even such individuals as have this experience, with its sense of overpowering certainty, find it very difficult to sustain its subjective reality over time. Religious experience, in consequence, comes to be embodied in traditions, which mediate it to those who have not had it themselves and which institutionalize it for them as well as for those who had.

Far from being �methologically atheistic�Eas Lindbeck says, Berger�s sociology is �methodologically Schleiermachian,�E and this means his endorsement of liberal theology as the best possibility for religious survival in the modern world is less a �scientific�Econclusion than an elegantly developed tautology.