Ethics and the Future of Religion: Redefining the Absolute 1978708645, 9781978708648

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Ethics and the Future of Religion

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Ethics and the Future of Religion Redefining the Absolute W. Royce Clark

LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Selections from The Being of God by Robert P. Scharlemann. Copyright © 1981 by Robert P. Scharlemann. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Selections © Friedrich Schleiermacher, 1928, The Christian Faith, T&T Clark, used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021933332 ISBN: 978-1-9787-0864-8 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-9787-0865-5 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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To Dessie for encouraging me to study theology under Dr. Scharlemann and for teaching in the schools those three years to get me through

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

Preliminary Explanation

xvii

1  The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 1 2  The Christ of Faith as “Awakened” Consciousness?

47

3  Corroboration by Mystical Union with Christ (God)?

123

4  The Absolute as Depth of Being: The Priority of Accepting Oneself

189

5  The Absolute as Relational Truth: The Instantiating Words of Unity

285

6  Conclusion: A Redefining of the Absolute as a Universal Embracing Differences

377

Bibliography 431 Index 439 About the Author

455

vii

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Preface and Acknowledgments

Can religions supply an ethic that can unite rather than divide people? In a previous study, Will Humanity Survive Religion? Beyond Divisive Absolutes,1 I compared the question of “humanity surviving religion” with Thomas Wolfe’s book You Can’t Go Home Again.2 In both cases the implication seems exaggerated, since it appears that one could always go home and that presumably humanity would survive religion, especially with religion’s beneficial ethics. But on a closer look, “religion” comes with an assurance of security that may cost a person their autonomy, and “going home again” to the desired nostalgic security is finally understood to be merely a dream, since things have changed. Those changes in both cases have come through the agency not simply of a changing world but of oneself as well. Everything we know is impermanent. Religion itself, however, has often represented itself as never changing, always the same. In that sense, religion is often experienced as described by Wolfe’s nostalgia to return home, as that “dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged” that continually “pulls one back,” insists on one returning to the “old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting” but now are understood as continually changing.3 So long as one feels pulled to any religion’s “eternal Absolute,” there is a cognitive dissonance with any recognition of real change. But real life—as Wolfe and his protagonist, author George Webber, knew—demands that Webber allow the change, admit its necessity, and abandon the pseudosafety or nostalgia of thinking of some fantastic “going home again” to that imaginative but nowfictitious everlasting security. I repeat the question: Can religions supply an ethics that can unite rather than divide peoples? In ancient times many believed in superhuman powers spatially beyond them, whether above or below them. They conceived ix

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x

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of these powers in anthropomorphic terms and developed symbols, rituals, and general rules of life to court the powers’ favor, feeling dependent on them for certain essentials of daily living—such as warmth, water, food, and good health. Some deities were even thought to personally intervene within human history, whether to take human form to fight their enemies or to provide humankind with the rules for living or to re-create the world after it had degenerated. Most people within a culture knew little to nothing about competing religions and gods of other cultures, and if they ever did confront these strange religions and gods, they then became deadly enemies. Their own god(s) demanded the annihilation of the competition. As time passed, the claims made about many of these deities became more comprehensive, finally universal, and even Absolute, ironically, even as the process of questioning the claims—which is called “desacralization”—became more widespread through the new human sciences, beginning in the West in the late eighteenth century. Many sensed that, if their absolutized deity were dislodged by doubt, then the world would flounder without an ethic. Some religions had been for many centuries defending their deity by emphasizing that the deity was really beyond any “attributes,” beyond human reason. This defense stretched from the understanding of the Tao to Isaiah’s understanding of Yahweh to the Nirguna Brahman to Anselm’s and Maimonides’ medieval view of the Jewish-Christian “God.” The German Idealism of the nineteenth century painted “God” as Absolute. G. W. F. Hegel especially described God as quite knowable, since “God” is Absolute Reason; but, Hegel said, human thinking is actually the activity of God. He was convinced that the Spirit in its Absolute form had been manifest in history first by Christ but now was appearing in the German culture by the early nineteenth century. Søren Kierkegaard replied, in an extreme negative, that “God” was the “Wholly Other”—not to be equated with or in any way similar to humans but was, rather, “infinitely qualitatively” distinct, unable to be understood or known. By shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, the influence of this “otherness” of “God” challenged the Hegelian Absolute—ironically through “dialectical” theology. The Christian “God” became the Ineffable, the Incommensurable, even the “Wholly Other”—whose ways are beyond human comprehension, on the one hand. Yet both the Christian institution as well as its theologians continued to preach, teach, speak, and write as if this “God” could be understood. This “God” was so transcendent that it was far beyond being anything definite or in any particular form. But if it were wholly transcendent, then how could it be experienced, much less known? Hegel had sustained the dogma of the Trinity, but only as a symbol of the process of Spirit, which as Absolute is simply thinking about thinking. But this did suggest that whatever the process that might make this otherness

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Preface and Acknowledgments xi

of God meaningful might also help explain Christology as well. If this “God” was thought to have become Incarnate, then the belief in the Incarnation had to be defended in a similar way to defending “God.” Therefore the question involved theology, Christology, and ethics—all three. Meanwhile, despite globalization and the emergence of multinational corporations, and even despite the interfaith meetings of leaders of many religions in an attempt to come to some consensus of a global ethic, this needed ethics for the world cannot be supplied by any religion, as the Dalai Lama has admitted, because of each religion’s unique claims, each of which translate into exclusiveness and a sense of rivalry. Most religious people still oppose laws and ethical systems perceived in competing religions, and nonreligious people probably just shake their heads at what they think is futile. If there is no going back in time, to unlearn what we have learned—to simply “return home” to some imagined, nostalgic, simple, and secure life—then the search must go forward from where we are. The attempt to answer the search using some historical method seems to have reached its nadir in the meticulous and wide-ranging works of John Dominic Crossan and Wolfhart Pannenberg, whose approaches I analyzed in an earlier study, Will Humanity Survive Religion? During the past two centuries, several ingenious theologians have tried to address and resolve this theological and Christological problem in another way. I have selected for this study the answers given by four of the most prominent and innovative Christian theologians and philosophers to see where it leads as they analyze “ideas,” “Ideals,” “faith,” “reason,” “feeling,” or “awareness” of the Infinite in the finite, ontology, religious symbols, and instantiating power of words (and any combination of these), since there seems to be a consensus among them that if that were solved then ethics would take care of itself. Whether or not this latter assumption is correct—that ethics would take care of itself—their brilliant approaches to the problem need to be considered. There may be no easy answers, but an ethic supported by all of humanity, not just people of one religion or another limited group, is a necessity for survival of the species. A parallel pursuit might use different scholars or different religions, but I have selected these four because they have been so influential in addressing the question, even if they have not put it in the narrow form that I give it. Here it is a question of whether the basic claim of Christianity—that Jesus was the Christ or Son of God or Redeemer—can be somehow “corroborated” in order to become credible universally and therefore enable the ethics attached to Jesus to be potentially voluntarily embraced by all people. This means addressing the changing world rather than attempting to restore former antiquated positions—or, rather than “returning home” in that imaginary sense.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

That process or change has been at the very center of my professional experiences as well. When I began teaching religion on the college level in 1961, I had no idea how much my life and views would change in the subsequent decades. But development is a fact of life; it is what education is all about. One does not seek education to remain confined to one’s specific present understandings. When I began this book and subsequent manuscripts in London in the winter of 2000, I understood the challenge before me of piecing together years of reading and weighing ideas; but the end result was not a return “home” but an ever new and exciting venture. The diverse works of William James, Richard Rubenstein, Immanuel Kant, Robert Scharlemann, Paul Tillich, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Richard Rorty, Friedrich Nietzsche, and John Rawls were probably the great intellectual stimulants for me, as I saw “clues” in each one pointing beyond their work and even their major interest but providing a new territory to be explored. Michel Foucault unpacked to a degree why I felt it was a “new territory” in his description of the changes in the “archeology of the human sciences”: the old “metaphysics of infinity” had begun to erode and show itself as no longer appropriate to the human sciences by the eighteenth century, even if the landscape revealed that there remained a tenacious hold on the ancient metaphysics among various religious groups. Professors Crossan and Pannenberg revealed the hiatus. That, in a nutshell, is the problem, and it creates cognitive dissonance once a person admits the breach or stalemate. Paul Tillich’s masterful attempt to interpret the meaning of the Christian faith in light of cultural changes had been in my scope during the first semester of my PhD program at the University of Iowa in 1967; it was in a seminar on the thought of Paul Tillich, directed by Professor Robert P. Scharlemann. As I often read portions from Tillich’s Systematic Theology to my wife, she encouraged me to do my major work in theology instead of what I had earlier planned. I still remember those occasions of her encouragement with fondness. Unbeknown to me at that time was the fact that Scharlemann was quickly becoming the foremost authority on Paul Tillich in the United States and was recognized for his insights and his continual encouragement for people to confront Tillich’s theology, an influence and leadership that became worldwide and lasted more than half a century, until Scharlemann’s death in 2013. Tillich and Scharlemann both attempted to bridge the gaps between religion, science, and art—or culture in general, any culture that gave their insights relevance. Although I had never been a historian, much less a historian of culture, these scholars’ influence led me to relish the wonderful climaxing work of cultural historian Jacques Barzun, his inspiring From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present; 500 Years of Western Cultural Life.4 I stand in

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Preface and Acknowledgments xiii

awe of those great minds I list here and of great writers such as Barzun. By the time I found this particular book of Barzun’s, I had already progressed deeply into this project, begun in the winter of 2000 in London after rereading Scharlemann’s most definitive Christological work again and again, The Reason of Following: Christology and the Ecstatic I.5 By the time I had finished the rough draft of the material in this volume, in late 2013, and wanted to phone Dr. Scharlemann to talk with him about it, I learned that he had died that very year. I have studied under many brilliant professors over the years, but it is no exaggeration to say that Dr. Scharlemann was in a category by himself. His lectures were unbelievably precise, as was his thinking. He was respectful of different interpretations, since he was interested in the cogency of the argument rather than in some preferred result. How many times I have reread his works and continue to marvel at his profound penetration of the really significant issues that might never have been seen by a normal mind. But his was not a normal mind. And his modesty and soft-spoken manner were unmatched. If in 2000 I had begun to want to share his insights with a larger world than the small coterie of theologians who were already reading him, now that he is gone I feel even greater urgency to enable people to encounter his understandings of the Christian faith. I just wish I could have shared what I am doing with him. Even if he felt the need to focus more on theology and Christology than on ethics, much of his groundbreaking work points to a new conception of relativism and universalism that necessarily leads to the ethical issues so presently illuminated now in 2021 in a deadly inequality in which mutual trust seems so impossible, even in the midst of a pandemic in which an utter lack of a sense of responsibility for and unity with others has been so apparent among some international leaders. Yet there are many exceptionally moral and compassionate people, many of whom willingly give their lives to try to help others live. That surely has to be a realization of the most “authentic self” about which Scharlemann wrote—perhaps even exactly what he would have called another “Christ image,” in a different place and time with a slightly different task. If this book only assists in making more explicit the need for ethics by which many already live as they relate to others in need, it can serve, then, as only my congratulations for their convictions and lives of empathy in helping others. For any mistakes I have made in my interpretations herein of the great minds of Kant, Nietzsche, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Tillich, and Scharlemann, I bear full responsibility. I certainly remain always open to making corrections in my thinking. I only hope any mistakes are not so significant as to nullify the point of the book. Of course, the wealth of secondary sources on these influential philosophers and theologians is enormous, complex, and unending,

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so I have tried to minimize secondary literature and focus only on what they actually said rather than merely on what others might have thought they said. Needless to say, some of the books these four geniuses wrote are not easy to understand, no matter how much they might have tried to use everyday language and simple arguments. I, for one, will certainly not claim to understand Hegel better than he understood himself, as Søren Kierkegaard claimed. It is quite often easy to find something that an author has failed to consider or to see an element that appears unclear or insufficient, and I do that only with trepidation, recognizing that the vast knowledge of each of these four puts them in a very different league than I. But taken as a whole, they point in a certain direction that may end up being very useful and compatible for future generations willing to spend a bit of time with them. That is the most that I could hope for in writing these volumes and publishing them at such a time as this. They knew that they were not offering a “final word.” Certainly that lies always out of reach for anyone who thinks or writes, as time moves on, as do the problems and issues. The endless, spontaneous, and enthusiastic encouragement I have received from my very patient wife, Dessie, my children, Elaine and Michael, daughter-in-law Joy, and three grandsons, Jesse, Mason, and Zac, and from countless friends and former colleagues has been more than I could ever have hoped for or deserved. In the thirty-one years that my wife and I spent at Pepperdine University I count among the most helpful colleagues David Gibson, Richard T. Hughes, Ron Tyler, Thomas Olbricht, Clarence Hibbs, John Nicks, Norman Hughes, Eugene Priest, Vicki Meyers, Avery Falkner, Cyndia Clegg, Cindy Novak, Mike Gose, Michelle Langford, Joe Piasentin, Ken Perrin, Dan Caldwell, and Nancy Fagan. But the list of my great colleagues goes on and on. I express a special thanks to Dean Norman Hughes, who arranged my schedule so that I could attend the law school for three years, and to the sabbatical committee, who enabled my wife, daughter, and me to spend time in India, and to Dean William Phillips, for inviting my wife and me to be the visiting professor family in our international programs on six different occasions, involving Heidelberg, London (twice), Tokyo, San José (Costa Rica), and Buenos Aires. It was inquisitive, professional colleagues and excellent students that made teaching such a joyous privilege day after day, year after year, and eventually having former students as my colleagues, such as Robin Perrin and Steve Davis. One of the best students I ever had was Dr. Neil Elliott. I knew he went on to Princeton Theological Seminary after graduating from Pepperdine but lost track of him subsequently. After nearly forty years it is a remarkable joy that he has turned out to be my brilliant and helpful acquisitions editor for Lexington Books/Fortress Academic as well as a highly recognized scholar of

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Preface and Acknowledgments xv

the thought of the Apostle Paul. Gayla Freeman, his assistant editor, has also been a real asset in assisting me with logistics and understanding the whole editorial process. I express my great appreciation to them for their patience and encouragement and to Julie E. Kirsch, senior vice president and publisher at The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, for the commitment to publish my research. I also acknowledge and appreciate the work of Della Vache and Linda Kessler with Rowman & Littlefield and Deanta Global’s Arun Rajakumar, along with the help of other very competent editors, artists, and peer reviewers who remain anonymous. With great appreciation I express my thanks to the following publishers for their permission to quote from their publications, with due credit to them and to the many authors they represent: • Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928), used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. • Robert P. Scharlemann, The Being of God: Theology and the Experience of Truth (New York: The Seabury Press, 1981), used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. • Robert P. Scharlemann, The Reason of Following: Christology and the Ecstatic I (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), used by permission of the University of Chicago Press. • Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), quotations from vol. 2 used by permission of the University of Chicago Press. NOTES 1.  W. Royce Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion? Beyond Divisive Absolutes (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020). 2.  Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1940). 3. Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again, 666. 4.  Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, (New York: HarperCollins), 2000. 5.  Robert P. Scharlemann, The Reason of Following: Christology and the Ecstatic I, Religion and Postmodernism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).

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Preliminary Explanation

My intent is to ask a fairly narrow question about religion as a ground for a possible universal ethics in general but using Christianity as the primary example while showing how certain elements of the problem have been addressed by experts in other religions, such as Buddhism. Hopefully Christian readers, after reading my preface, will not be offended by the references to other religions, and those who belong to non-Christian religions will not be put off by the primary close examination of Christian thought and perhaps will be able to gain insights for any similar problems they have in explaining their religions. Further, since the effort is not to try to convince readers that one religion has all the answers, including ethical ones, I trust that any nonreligious readers, after noting the preface, will find the direction of the inquiry inclusive in intent—namely, my conviction that humanity will survive only if as a whole it can develop and work from a common ethic that can be embraced by all people. But most religions are too fastened to a very specific and exclusive tradition and culture to be universal. The specific question of the book is whether a religion that bases its ethics upon its central claim of an event, person, or teaching that is a conflation of history and myth—which cannot be verified by historical method—can still base its ethics on that historical-mythical claim by some way of corroborating it through a form of consciousness, reason, or faith other than by historical method. I have shown in an earlier study that two of the most recent scholarly attempts to utilize historical method to validate the central Christian claim that Jesus is the Christ—by John Dominic Crossan and by Wolfhart Pannenberg—came up quite short. Crossan found an ethic but could not validate the Christological historical claim in its mythological or theological dimension, and Pannenberg had to remove the verification of the Christological claim to the end of history, even then on a dubious historical claim about Jesus being xvii

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a “prolepsis” of that end.1 These were on the “cutting edge” of the historical approach, very recent scholarly culminations of years of work. This “ugly great ditch” that separates historical truths or accidents from eternal truths or from metaphysical truths had been discovered by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Lessing published a posthumous fragment by Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), with whom he had agreed in favoring a natural religion of reason rather than revelation. Some of the most outstanding theological and philosophical minds of the nineteenth century to the present have tried to solve this problem, and that includes the four scholars whose work I cover in this study, each of whom undertook a different “corroboration” approach to avoid the negative results of historical research. I have chosen the four I consider to be the most influential and innovative of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), Paul Tillich (1886–1965), and Robert P. Scharlemann (1929–2013). To trace their attempts takes us into the absolute idealism of the nineteenth century, then into a theontology or ontotheology or existentialism combined with essentialism, and finally into a phenomenological ontology, though even such concise names do not adequately do any of their explorations real justice. Each of these men was a prolific author and deep thinker, and the thought of each is still continuing to shape much of the Christian theological exploration today. Since my question is rather narrow, though the results have broader ramifications, I will not make specific reference to everything each of these scholars wrote. There are massive collections in the German for the first three, and Scharlemann has also published much in German and French, though no one has yet collected all of his publications into a single series. I am writing for English readers and so refer to information or positions in German only when the English translation needs clarification or where there has not yet been a translation of a pertinent book or article, or where the author used precise German words to build a major argument, words whose meanings need explaining. But I have kept that to a minimum. The secondary works on Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Tillich number literally in the tens of thousands of published books, scholarly articles, and PhD dissertations. So my focus is not merely to provide a complete bibliography. I am concerned primarily with their original texts, and even then I will not attempt to relate the question to everything they wrote that might have only tangential connections. Rather, I have kept the narrow focus and related it specifically to what I consider to be their best systematic formulations overall, not to one single article that they wrote, and neither to one unique interpreter’s assessment, unless it is obvious from their original writing and germane to

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Preliminary Explanation xix

my focus. Even then I have had to greatly limit things in order to make the study intelligible to any inquisitive person, not simply to a limited group of theologians. I am aware of many different “literary theories” current today, including many legitimate concerns about language, presuppositions, and the “unthought”; but I am not interested in belonging to any particular “school” of thought or in using strange words that simply obscure real communication. This enables the investigation to at least be circumscribed within fairly reasonable parameters. At my stage in life, I do not have time for more breadth, and neither do I think it necessary in order to sketch the question and the line of attempts to answer it that is carried through these four profound scholars of religion and Christian thought. They did not formulate a cooperative scheme to gradually move the argument in a certain direction, but many people today can see a definite development that seems rather logical, even if unplanned, as each succeeding generation built upon the previous work but attempted to resolve issues raised by it that were left unresolved. As Richard Rorty observes, “language” by which we “make” truth rather than “discover” truth is quite contingent and is not being driven by some overriding intent, such that we often see the truth or causal connections that make sense long after they occurred, in distant retrospect, as quite coincidental or accidental and even far removed from where one would have thought a century prior.2 Regarding citations of “authorities,” where I present a general statement about an author’s general view within a single book, I will usually refrain from attaching a note, since the book can be found in the bibliography at the end. Notes, on the other hand, are largely utilized to locate specifically unique ideas and quotations and to amplify on the thought of the text or to draw attention to a problem within the thinking—either a lack of clarity or even a contradiction—or to show how a major idea has parallel or critical opposition in other religions. Such details have been attached as notes to keep the narrative from being cluttered with too many tangential matters. There are many different ways of reading even these four scholars, and some interpretations are quite at odds with others. I have been deeply involved with most of these authors’ thought since 1967, presenting papers, publishing articles, continually teaching their thought from their primary publications on a graduate level, and studying under Scharlemann for three years and doing a dissertation under his guidance for another three. I approach all of these sincere scholars with humility and only hope that my understanding of their positions is not too far removed from their own conceptions of what they were doing. But I claim no special access to their minds, and I take responsibility for any mistakes that I make in trying to represent them. Finally, if one asks why the world needs a universal ethic, in Will Humanity Survive Religion? I have illustrated that; the international news every

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week shows that humans are so involved in conflicts with each other that they must rethink their relations in order to arrive at an ethical understanding that all people can embrace. Specific religions have traditionally supplied ethics, but each ethic has been based on a very particular theology or on claims that involved what I have referred to as a conflated historical-mythical or historical-metaphysical base, which makes these ethics and their claims exclusive and usually Absolute or not open to questioning. Those who are religious cannot impose their ethic, based on a single religion, on all others without alienating the rest of the human race. The authority or heteronomy that attempts to maintain the religion’s claim as Absolute threatens human autonomy and therefore poses a dehumanizing force. That would seem to suggest that it may be futile for me to examine four scholars of a single religion in this study. But each professed to maintain human autonomy vis-à-vis heteronomy, and each thought that they had discovered some element within that single religion that could enable the religion to provide a universal base for ethics. That was the genius and courage of their attempts at reinterpreting the Christian ideas and symbols. We shall have to see whether their methods and results moved beyond the dehumanizing and crippling Absolute to redefine it and make it more palatable for all. That in turn will help determine to a degree the future of the Christian religion as well as the future of its ethics—that is, whether ethics must become “freestanding” or separated from religion in order to meet the need of being a universal ethic. NOTES 1.  See Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion? 2. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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Chapter One

The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles?

THE QUESTION AND ITS PLURALISTIC SOCIAL PROBLEMS Can any religion ground the ethics of the future for a pluralistic world society? The title of this book—perhaps even this introduction title—may sound a little incongruous. After all, it is common knowledge that every religion has its own historically and culturally very particular code of behavior that its adherents are expected to observe; this has been true for thousands of years. But this is part of the problem prompting this inquiry: the fact that each religion’s ethical norms and authority are so unique and often so old—that is, that they are different from other religions’ ethics and do not address many of today’s specific issues.1 In a world that needs some significant possible agreement among all humans, establishing what kind of behavior is acceptable within the interdependent global population, no single religion can expect those who are not already adherents to simply capitulate to its demands. There remains too much disparity between the thousands of distinct formal religions and their ethics and too much competition, if not lack of respect, between them. Ubiquitous global interaction between people and the instantaneous media broadcast of behavior that others find morally reprehensible reveals the impossibility that any single religious or nonreligious ideological group will be satisfied with submitting to another religion’s or nonreligious group’s particular ethics. If Buddhism’s pacifism finds repugnant Christianity’s willingness to engage in and justify war for a variety of reasons, many Christians also grow up with the assumption that any form of suicide is unethical and therefore were upset to see Buddhists burning themselves to death in the streets in protests against the Vietnam War. If many Christians are repelled by any notion of Islamic “jihad” or of “Shari’ah” law as the law of the land in the United States, some of these same Christians seem comfortable talking 1

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2

Chapter One

about Christian theocracy and promoting their specific ethics from the Christian Scriptures as the law of the land no matter how it may conflict with the values of other US citizens who are not Christian. A neutral party might find the starvation and exile that the Buddhist population of Myanmar is imposing on its Muslim people to be ethically deplorable, just as the neutral party might view as unethical Israel’s disproportionate lethal responses against the Palestinians over the years or the United States’ supplying military armaments to the Saudis so they can kill and wound innocent noncombatants in Yemen. There are genuine religious disagreements over ethics. The divisiveness between religions seen in the Crusades and religious wars and that motivates major genocide—even between different branches of the same religion, such as during the US Civil War—has simply continues in the hostility people have toward one another’s ethics and even civil law. The problem is certainly larger than merely trying to get various religions to form some ethical agreement with each other. A very large segment of the world population identifies itself as nonreligious or “nonaffiliated” with any religion. Yet most if not all of these people nevertheless claim they are moral and hold definite ethical principles. If we add to the mix of religions even a handful of nonreligious ethical systems—such as eudaemonism, deontology, utilitarianism, or pragmatism, with their many profound philosophers—the “common” element of any possible ethic shrinks to an even smaller core. When economic ideologies such as capitalism or Marxism supply their particular ethical worldviews, even this core gets fairly shredded or compromised. That happens when people use their ethics, whether religiously based or not, as something completely unquestionable or absolute. In fact, the absolutizing of any religion or ideology forms the most obvious barrier against finding any universal agreement over ethical human behavior. If people were given the option of living in a world of complete moral chaos, nobody would elect it, since most people want to be protected from the unethical actions of other people. Even the rigidity or extreme heteronomy that an ethical source or institution or identity supplies seems preferable to many as opposed to ethical relativism and its supposed haphazard or amoral ways—at least, as long as people consider themselves to be personally in no danger. Further, many people would admit the validity of John Locke’s insight that when people do not form and live by a civil contract they are simply in a continual “state of war” with one another—at least, potentially. Not many people would choose that either. Thus the recognition of the necessity of a broad agreement among people is a first step in the process of civilization. This basic ethical agreement will need to include procedures for continuing to relate positively to others even when important ethical issues seem tenta-

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 3

tively beyond resolution. The ethic cannot settle for indefinite stalemate or inaction; human existence does not have that purely political luxury. Instead, humanity’s existence seems to require finding a common or freestanding ethical “ground” or foundation or starting point. If we insist on operating from a ground that others refuse to recognize, then there will be at most only accidental agreement on a few ethical issues. Quite often the real problem of ethical disagreement arises not from specific issues per se or content of arguments, actual facts, ignorance, or stubbornness but, rather, from people approaching the situation from radically different ethical grounding. This means that in many if not most cases the specific issues have already been decided by the particular “ground” or presuppositions underlying the ethics from which each person then argued its case. As for nonreligious grounds for ethics, there are as many different grounds as exist between different religions’ ethical foundations. Of course, religious and nonreligious ethics all have some similar judgments of many violent or inhumane acts that we have seen throughout history. Cultures cannot tolerate behaviors that are self-destructive and nihilistic— such as murder, assault, kidnapping, robbery, larceny, rape, mayhem, and the like. In examination of nonreligious elements of our identity, many if not most women find the sexual harassment that they receive from men to be ethically indefensible. And neither do African Americans in the United States feel the treatment they receive under articulated or even subconscious white supremacy to be ethically justified. Yet there are ethical or even legal systems that allow for exceptions to discrimination and inhumane treatment of certain others or that allow for a basic inequality of race, gender, or other to shape all the applications of the law despite the equality within the explicit principles that the statutes espouse on their face.2 If the problem in finding a universally applicable ethic appears to be the “ground” on which the different ethical responses are based and not just an occasional difference of interpretation of a single ethical issue, then a common or freestanding grounding must be sought. On the other hand, if the “ground” has been some particular deity, sacred scripture, single truth, or principle, or if the ground is part of one’s identity, such as race, sexuality, or social status, that is not universal, then the ground is insufficient for a universal ethic. The difference can be seen between people agreeing that “Killing is wrong because Jesus/Buddha/Muḥammad/etc. said so” and agreeing that “Killing is wrong even though Jesus/Buddha/Muḥammad/etc. may never have said so.” A world ethic built upon a ground of male superiority or upon an individual’s being Asian American or being born into a family with assets of more than a billion dollars cannot qualify as a universal ethic, no matter who might have said it could or should. In other cases, even abstract

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4

Chapter One

elements derived from a person’s allegiance not simply to religious but also to political, scientific, economic, educational, or athletic communication systems and institutions become the most influential part of that person’s identity and therefore of that person’s ground or basis for their ethics. The varieties of possible ethical grounds are not easily made compatible with one another. When the “ground” is even unrecognized or a cliché, or when questioning the ground is prohibited, an inhumane situation is probable. Religious people usually see the ground of their ethics as the Absolute. If it truly were absolute, then it would probably be obvious to humanity and there would be no disagreements. But if the absoluteness of the grounds is not that obvious, then its being absolutized only adds to the problem and forces a choice between (1) either coercing a claimed-absolutized religion and its ethic in particular and forcing it to be received as universal (2) or adhering to an ethical system that is de facto universal because its freestanding principles are agreed upon by all. Of course, religious people may prefer to think of their religion as a completely private affair—nobody’s else’s business, for example, under US law. But their religion would be no one else’s business only provided they do not violate the neutral principles of the nation’s social contract, which includes all citizens and residents, regardless of what choices they make for or against any religion, regardless of wealth, status, ethnicity, sexual preference, and so forth. Significantly, though, ethics immediately is perceived as having a much more universal role than most religions have, not merely as a private option but as public necessity, since ethics is the underlayment or basic presuppositions for all law. In many countries today, religious and nonreligious people can believe whatever they want, but they are not at liberty to create their own set of public facts or to act however they might want. Real human relationships require reciprocity, basic agreement, mutual trust, and responsibility— a necessary equilibrium—not a treatment of others as mere objects or as “them.” If ethical concern were limited only to close, private relations, then of course there might be considerably less conflict in the world. But this is unrealistic, since most people are aware that in a variety of different degrees many of their actions have far-reaching effects on many others, the ramifications of which they may never be fully cognizant.3 Ethics must be a broad discipline of study, since it is basically a concern for the moral relationships that humans sustain; these are not limited to relationships with simply a few other individuals but, rather, include relationships with various organizations, institutions, and structures, even relationships with the nonhuman and the nonorganic world—a very complex web with worldwide reach.

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 5

Ethical responsibility means not only that we consider many factors including different perspectives of people interpret each other’s actions but also that we realize that any absolutized perspective will likely be too narrow and brittle to survive the process of social contracting. The ethics’ “ground” itself must be informed by all and must be continually updated by an inherently flexible nature and by honest, serious discussion. While many US citizens today are saying that we really do need a national discussion about race and sexuality, the logistic and metaethical questions of how to conduct the discussion are not self-evident. But the discussion must be undertaken with equality, trust, and respect between all. In addition to the question of the “ground” of one’s ethics, another preliminary question is whether a person can be judged to be “moral” or “ethical” if they do the ethical act not by choice but by coercion. Coercion comes in many forms, from a parental demand that a child act according to their ethical standard, to a religious organization’s expectation that all members live by its defined ethics, to a nation’s legal requirement that its people conform to its laws, to a deity’s mandate to live a certain way. The idea that a person would behave in a particular way simply because some power over it demands it would be the equivalent of negating the person’s autonomy. It would be eclipsing autonomy by heteronomy—and is the route to dehumanization. Morality requires autonomy, and it must be mutual to work within a social group. People who do what is moral only out of fear rather that out of a desire to behave morally simply cannot be called “moral.” A democratic society must be a voluntary association built on trust, mutual autonomy, and responsibility of equals. For that reason the issue of autonomy ought to be a vital part of any religion’s most fundamental claims; but it simply is not. Religions rest on heteronomy. Most religions’ ethical principles are based firmly on their unique metaphysical claims, and these claims are often thought by the religion’s adherents to be unquestionable or absolute. The conflicting absolutes between the central, unique claims of diverse religions are what disqualify these religions from supplying a universal ethic. In searching for an ethic that can be universalized, while I am interested in exploring all different possible grounds for ethics, I find the typical religious absolutism to be the least likely candidate for a universal grounding, even though most people probably think that ethics’ often being a major emphasis of most religions is what makes religions the natural group to supply a universal ethic. While many ethical principles are quite similar between various religious, and even between them and many nonreligious ethical systems’ principles, the fact that the religion demands that its ethics be built on the religion’s theology or metaphysics, which is

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6

Chapter One

unique and spatially temporally limited, likely places religion out of bounds for a universal ethic. Nevertheless, we cannot simply say that is the case. We need to examine the evidence to see if that is true. Confining our survey simply to the Christian religion may shed some light on the problem, and it may be that Christianity’s issues have their counterparts in other religions. Christianity’s unique claim is that Jesus is the “Christ”—its most fundamental and difficult claim—so the issue of ethics and autonomy cannot be divorced from any analysis of that claim. Briefly, it is asserted that Jesus was in some way an Incarnation of God and therefore Absolute; so Jesus not only redeemed humanity but also served as the “sinless,” infallible ethical example. I have elsewhere analyzed some of the problems with religion’s divisive absolutes and devoted the last section of that volume to one way of possibly verifying this claim about Christ. Since it is claimed that God’s presence (his Son or other expression) intervened in human history two thousand years ago, there ought to be historical evidence to prove this intervention. As I examined closely the methods and arguments of the most-renowned scholar of the “historical Jesus” of the Gospels (the Jesus Seminar group), John Dominic Crossan, as well as the most famous Christian theologian of the twentieth century who felt that the claim had to be proven by historical evidence, Wolfhart Pannenberg, I concluded that neither had actually succeeded in proving historical evidence of this intervention.4 Another attempt to verify the claim of divine intervention began to take shape late in the eighteenth century and by the turn of the twentieth century was considered proof via the “Christ of faith” rather than the “Jesus of history.” In 1896 Martin Kähler juxtaposed these two different approaches using slightly different wording, and in the mid-1960s Pannenberg referred to the two methods as “Christology from above” and “Christology from below.” I will clarify how this notion emerged and what it means as we proceed. Basically, however, the Christ of faith (i.e., “from above”) approach attempted to exempt the claim about Christ from any negative historical conclusions by “corroborating” the claim by way of one’s “faith” or “Spirit” or mode of “God-consciousness” or new form of reason rather than subjecting the claim to historical research. Is it possible to validate or “corroborate” a historical-metaphysical or historical-mythical claim by way of one’s own state of mind? If it is, if the religion is verified in its assertion of its defined Absolute, then a universal ethic could or should be articulated on these grounds. This is the narrow scope of this inquiry—which may also suggest how other religions could approach their assertions that they are the ethical standard for the world, especially if their most basic religious claim is in some way also a conflation of the historical and mythical or of the natural and supernatural.

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 7

This would not be important if ethics or morality required no thought, if we all already knew the “good” and therefore just automatically did the “good,” or if we already agreed that knowing the “good” was sufficient in itself, if however we acted did not matter. But no one would agree to that. Sigmund Freud was quite perceptive when in The Future of an Illusion he defined religion as human wish fulfillment regarding nature’s disasters, our own deaths, and being hurt by other humans, whether the actual creation of the idea of “God” came from that wish fulfillment or not. But all humans feel a need to be protected from possible injury or hurt from other humans. Freud said humans therefore imagined a “God” who, as all powerful, laid down a law governing all humans, under threat of divine punishment upon disobedience.5 That was a very heteronomous or authoritarian ethic, which many today would consider to be a dehumanization in the sense that it robs a person of their autonomy. Yet many people still seem to think that humans would not treat each other morally and that we would not have any civil law were it not for divine, ethical commands from God. But where did the idea of God itself come from? Whatever their claims for being moral imperatives, ethics and morality are continually in the news, even if we seldom discuss their grounding, presuppositions, coherence, and so forth. We hear much today about lawmakers having articulated ethical standards and even of certain officials whose task is to issue ethical guidance or to evaluate lawmakers’ past or present involvements and behaviors. Yet politicians often deadlock over the most basic differences in their “grounds” or the unarticulated presuppositions that underlie their political parties and corporate sponsors. This means that ethics is often overruled by identity politics, which is itself often embraced as absolute or unchallengeable. The legal profession has had a recognized code of ethics for many years, but this code is largely concerned with maintaining a consistent pattern of client representation so as to be most effective for them; the code doesn’t so much open up questions of the primary ethical ground that the group accepts, if that has ever been made explicit. While the legal profession deals with differences between people, its focus has to be on the articulated law, whether such law articulates any explicit or coherent ethical grounding or not. Most people are aware of the developing field of medical ethics and the variety of complex issues with which it is confronted while government and insurance corporations determine the length of time that a doctor can spend with a patient and the only kinds of procedures for which insurance will pay. The “ground” or “bottom line” of profit-oriented insurance companies is not any ethical principle as much as it is the dollar.6 In many states, teachers’ organizations or even the state’s government appoint committees to examine

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8

Chapter One

charges of unethical behavior on the part of any public school teacher, but one has to ask how many teachers are actually trained in ethics, ethical grounds or presuppositions, or even specific ethical issues pertaining to the teaching profession. Is a person expected to simply absorb an understanding of ethics from culture, or is the ethical so obvious that it never need be addressed? Of course we are fully aware that the basic principles underlying the system of law in the United States, if not underlying most law of other nations, are actually ethical principles, not just legal principles, even if this is never clarified or discussed and even when the applications of the laws are not always ethical themselves. When the US Supreme Court occasionally reasserts that it does not adjudicate on the basis of morality, it is not saying that law stands without ethical principles but, rather, that the Court’s judgment must be based on the articulated law rather than on the specific ethical principles underlying it, an ethical ground that is seldom analyzed either by the legislators or by the courts. Even this, of course, does not prevent the Supreme Court from showing in cases where there is an obvious conflict between unarticulated basic ethical presuppositions that it can discern which is the most reasonable, fair, or ethical presupposition. But the problem remains that even the Court does not clarify how it can determine the most appropriate ethical ground upon which all law should be established.7 Being able to perceive the valid ethical ground underlying specific laws is often as difficult as understanding the majority of laws that are even completely unknown by the average citizen. Even the assumption that all citizens can be held accountable to the law— where a claim of ignorance of the law is not an excuse—because it is necessary for maintaining civil order is reasonable only within the most general parameters. If one means to include detail of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of laws of a given country or state, the assumption appears as specious and ludicrous as the ideal that all citizens have responsibly helped formulate the laws by a common ethical ground that they shared with the lawmakers. While ignorance of the law may not be a legal excuse or defense, to not care to participate responsibly in formulating the law, understanding the law, and propagating the law with its general ethical values is to elect heteronomy rather than autonomy, to relinquish personal freedom and voice, to prefer that others do one’s thinking. The whole process of establishing ethics and the social contract must become visible, must involve all people, and must be perpetually reexamined.8 THE TITLE AND SPECIFIC SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM A further word is needed to explain the title and scope of this study, which will then suggest a brief view of its background. By “ethics” I refer to an

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 9

articulated group of principles or guidelines addressing “morality,” which I define as humans’ autonomous choice regarding how to relate to one another responsibly and symbiotically. By “religion” I mean an organized body of belief and behavior that usually has rituals, symbols, and ethical codes to reinforce its unique identity and that usually if not invariably involves holding to something very particular, whether a god, event, person, or supreme principle, as Absolute or unchallengeable. The particularity given to each religion, whether a mythological, ethnic, historical, or other specific, tends to drive a wedge even between religions that otherwise profess to espouse the same God—for example, between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each religion professes an absolute, but the temporal-spatial particularities of their claims nullify any possible religious unity between them, despite the fact that each succeeding religion appropriated some of the claims and stories from its predecessors.9 The same was true in the absolutism found within Buddhism, in that religion’s adoption of Dharma and Karma from Hinduism but using them in its own unique ways so that Dharma could be seen as absolute— somewhat parallel even to the way Judaism later saw the Torah as “Wisdom” existing even prior to the Creation. While Siddhārtha Gautama became “Enlightened” but claimed to not be interested in discussing whether or not there are “gods,” instead wishing to address the pain and suffering of humanity, he was not really absolutized as the Buddha. This happened only as his attributes were supercharged over many generations, and among some he was seen as the Compassionate Buddha. Other parallels of specific or particular ideas, items, or beings elevated into the realm of the absolute include the Tao, the Brahman, Shiva, Elohim, Allah, Om, the Koran, Nirvana, Sunyata, the Way, Guru Granth Sahib, sharia, and so forth.10 The approach that one assumes in trying to explain and defend the Christian claim that the historical Jesus is the “Christ” without attempting to prove it by particular historical details invariably also posits some “absolute.” If the earlier Christian theism, based on the religion of ancient Israel as it evolved into Judaisms, had an absolutely transcendent personal God as a definite being—who came into history over and over, rescuing his people, but finally at the kairos came in a fully human form, as an Incarnation, and suffered and died for humanity’s sins but was raised up from death and returned to its eternal “heaven”—then historical method obviously could not verify this with any degree of certainty. But we shall see that great Christians theologians supplied many different explanations in an attempt to prove that the claim was absolutely certain and not simply probable. Many lay Christians were taught that the church’s claims of “authority,” the “inspiration” of the “revelation” in the Scriptures, and, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, the doctrine of the “inerrancy” of the Scriptures or the “infallibility” of the pope when speaking on behalf of the church on faith or morals was sufficiently

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Chapter One

certain, which then made up for the lack of historical certainty surrounding the claim about Jesus as the Christ. By the last half of the nineteenth century, the absolutizing of these entities reached its zenith as Christianity felt threatened by new sciences, new theories of knowledge, new philosophies, new economics, and new egalitarian political structures. The absolutizing, however, did not prevent natural historical questions from arising. So many biblical scholars still pursued a historical methodology, while many Christian theologians abandoned it and sought the verification of Christology (the belief that Jesus was the Christ) through the “corroboration” through faith. In 1892 Martin Kähler published his famous So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ in German, which was translated into English shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. Kähler argued that we do not need details of the life or teachings of Jesus but, rather, only need (1) to believe that Jesus died for our sins and (2) to have faith in his redeeming death and Resurrection.11 It is this “Christ of faith,” as it has often been called, that is the focus of this study. And the question is simply whether Kähler and others were right—that faith in Christ needs almost no reference to the “historical Jesus.” The problem is in the “almost,” since Kähler mentioned the historical necessities of Christ dying to redeem humanity and of his being raised from the dead; how either of those would be verified by historical data is not obvious. The typical method of verification was simply circular reasoning: to say that the evidence was in the Bible, that the Bible was the Word of God and hence could not be wrong, and that therefore the Bible’s claims are fact. Yet if a parallel argument were made by another religion about the central historical claims in its scriptures, the argument would be rejected as circular reasoning. Harold Bloom described lay Christians in the United States in general as not being interested in historical data pertaining to Jesus.12 Two other very significant analyses of Christianity also easily support ignoring historical details: In the late eighteenth century Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in contrasting “revelation” with “reason,” observed that to opt for revelation means no end to one’s reading, even in the “original” languages of Scripture, in order to justify and understand the particular revelation one espouses—an impossible job—and even then one is forced to use reason in that whole process. Then in the latter part of the nineteenth century Søren Kierkegaard, in his opposition to Hegel, insisted that, if one begins with the presumption that “Jesus was a man,” then there is simply no historical event or shred of argument that reasonably changes this fact and allows us to conclude that “Jesus was God” or that “Jesus was Christ” (which is the same claim). So lay Christians could feel relieved that they neither have to master Hegel nor spend their lifetimes in methodical, exacting examination of history as it pertains to biblical tradi-

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 11

tions if at the end there was nothing that historical analysis could supply to justify shifting the statement from “Jesus was a man” to “Jesus was God.” Of course, most Christian lay people were unaware of both of these developments in Christian theology and in biblical-historical studies. Lay Christians continued for the most part to approach their faith unreflectively. But long before Kähler Christian theology had undertaken to find “certainty” about the Christological claim to avoid being vulnerable to contradictory and therefore dislodging historical data. Two of the four scholars we examine in this pursuit—Friedrich Schleiermacher and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the two most famous Christian Idealists—lived between Rousseau’s (1712–1778) and Kierkegaard’s (1813–1855) lifetimes. The other two we will analyze in this work were aware not only of the split between the historical and theological pursuits but also of the shortcomings in the answers provided by Schleiermacher and Hegel; I speak of Paul Tillich and Robert P. Scharlemann. If a lay Christian has difficulty following the pursuit of the “historical Jesus”—as I examined in two of the final chapters in Will Humanity Survive Religion?—then they will find it much more difficult to understand those theologians who abandoned the historical data in pursuit of another method of verifying the claim that Jesus was the Christ. Certainly one could no longer simply take refuge in unexplained ideas of final revelation, divine inspiration, plenary inerrancy of Scriptures, or the infallibility of the pope—the latter two ideas themselves not articulated until the second half of the nineteenth century. One had to reasonably defend whatever issue one presupposed, no matter how absolutized or unquestionable one had been taught to view the issues. As difficult as it will be to grasp in these investigations what can be presupposed or on what basis any certainty can be obtained for the primary Christological claim that Jesus was the Christ, the only alternative to investigating this claim is to simply avoid the question altogether in favor of merely accepting sweeping claims by the authority of the church or by Scripture, whatever one is taught to believe, an appeal to authority that is itself then the basic unquestioned and unproved presupposition—or, again, is reasoning in a circle. This to the late theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg would have been simply to have “faith in faith” or “blind faith,” which he felt was completely and gullibly irresponsible. Inasmuch as it abandons autonomy for heteronomy, faith in faith becomes dehumanizing and is vulnerable to extreme forms of authoritarianism if not complete chaos. If Rousseau thought “reason” was the answer rather than some professed “revelation,” Schleiermacher found religion as only “Feeling” that precedes both theoretical and practical reason—which itself, though contentless,

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involves an awareness of “absolute dependence,” which can become revelatory. Hegel went on to combine reason and revelation but see Reason or Absolute Spirit itself as both the revealing power and that which is revealed— meaning it is the unity of Divinity and humanity, the unity of idea and reality, and the reconciling power that conquers all difference by taking up into itself the most extreme opposites. Tillich would then discover that revelation had to embody “paradox” to be revelatory, while insisting that paradox does not mean unreasonable and while insisting that paradox marks both Christology and the human situation of always being “saint and sinner.” Scharlemann would himself go so far as to develop a new form of “reason”—acoluthetic or “following” reason—that enables the identity of the self and the other through “ecstasy” or “instantiation” via either an actual voice or an “inscribed” voice in a text. So the Absolute is in process of being redefined. Does this mean that the Absolute is not actually absolute? All four great thinkers we examine here, of course, by avoiding historical details about Jesus, cannot certify a factual embodiment of the Ideal by alluding to past history. But they are confident of the “actual” corroboration of the claim that Jesus is the Christ through an individual’s present state of consciousness—whether that present state of consciousness is described as enlivened “God-consciousness” or “Spirit” or “transformation by the biblical image” or the freedom to be authentically one’s own in the world while not being “of the world.” The general thrust of these ideas is some form of the self-transcending temporality in some way, either through imagination or identity with God or Christ or through “dying” to the world as “I Am.” It is not incorrect to call these beliefs “mysticism,” since both Hegel and Tillich were explicitly influenced by various mystics, while Schleiermacher and Scharlemann’s idea of a person’s consciousness is also the notion of God’s immediacy and available only in what can be called a state of “ecstasy” or not being an actual moment of time or space or of subject-object reasoning. There is still an “embodiment,” but not in the usual sense of the word, of its being within a person in the past but, rather, only in oneself as a believer. This may all sound cryptic at this point, but it gives us a brief glimpse of what will be involved. So the subtitle of this book is Redefining the Absolute, which the reader will at this point understand. It involves a significant change. THE GENERAL CULTURAL BACKGROUND OF THIS CHRISTIAN PROBLEM The problem created by Christianity’s claims that conflate historical and mythical elements is not that dissimilar to how conflation has emerged in the

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 13

beliefs found in countries dominated by other religions. But we must narrow the focus so as to understand what occurred and the options. Also, the background of this need for a universal ethic is complex, and the dynamics continually evolve. Although globalism had begun to a degree to shift the economic centers of Europe long before the eighteenth century, it was at that time still possible for various nation-states to assume a fairly common Christian ethic grounded in Christian (and Jewish) scriptures. Christians considered anyone outside this religious and cultural circle “pagan,” which meant the outsiders were thought to have no right or voice to make any contribution in determining any encompassing ethic or civil law. These outsiders were in many cases not considered legal citizens and not even fully human. But cultures eventually overlapped, intermingled, intermarried, and migrated, and people began to become aware that there are other decent people among them in the world who actually have quite different values and customs. Wherever the dominant group continued to absolutize its specific values, ethics, and religion, the treatment of the other continued to be inhumane. But an inevitable opening toward inclusiveness and humanization was beginning in small pockets of the world. Some people became aware of the problem of religious exclusivism as well as religious and ethical pluralism by the period of the Enlightenment. By the eighteenth century, the scholarly world sufficiently influenced European culture that most educated people were aware of certain incompatibilities between their new scientific understandings and the claims made by their religion—even some moral claims. Responses varied—from deserting religion to trying to reinterpret the religion so as to diminish the effect of the cognitive dissonance to reinforcing the religion’s claims more vigorously or even to claiming that science’s discoveries were simply alternate theories that, similar to religion, required “faith,” which to them was not the “true faith.” The Enlightenment had placed great value on “reason”—and in many cases even more value than had been formerly assumed by “revelation.” Many scholars insisted that Christianity had to be “reasonable”—at least most of it, or perhaps, as John Toland (1670–1722) contended, all of it. But Christianity had never been about reason. Human free will, natural theology, and the question of miracles had become a thorn in the flesh of some Christians and had been famously debated in correspondence between Gottfried Leibniz and Samuel Clarke in 1715 and 1716. Religious institutions’ authority, of course, had been challenged even earlier, in the sixteenth century, with Luther’s strong emphasis upon individualism, which had modified Christian communions and their treatments of ethics in manifold ways. Religious toleration of those who disagreed with the majority religion was redefined by John Locke (1632–1704) with an increased scope by his promotion of freedom of

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conscience, just as he protested against the Christian dogma of inherited sin as an unjustified negative. Critical studies of Christian Scripture began in earnest with Johann Semler (1725–1791), splitting scholars into two opposing camps: rationalists and supranaturalists. When Christianity’s very ground seemed to be challenged by the contingency of history and the uncertainty of its historical-mythological claims, other great thinkers sought to find a new credibility and certainty without laying themselves open to being dislodged by the new critical-historical method. They did not think that their “corroboration” was eliminating the historical claims of Christianity but was actually strengthening claims under threat of the critical-historical method. But how could “corroboration” both eliminate and strengthen? Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) “critical idealism” limited any supposed “proofs” of God’s existence while still assuming that humans had to postulate freedom in order to have any moral order—and that, in turn could provide a new, universal moral base from which to interpret Christian doctrine. Kant’s idealism provoked not only a rational refinement of Christian theology by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) but also the beginning of speculative idealism by Johan Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814)13 and then the absolute speculative idealism of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), which bore many characteristics of Fichte’s work, though Hegel turned more orthodox with time. Fichte was labeled an “atheist” and so lost his professorship at Jena.14 Nevertheless, “Idealism” had allegedly moved the focus beyond the danger of dissolution by the new historical analyses just as the material or empirical world was being relegated to a second level of importance, with the “mind” or “spirit” given Hegel’s primary focus. But many churches within Christianity were not ready to accommodate this new thinking. This was, of course, a more theological split between British empiricism and Continental rationalism. Christian theology widened this gap between the empirical and rational as it developed approaches that were strictly biblically oriented on historical records and descriptions of ancient people and events on the one hand and, on the other, those approaches of the new Idealism in theology that examined the basic Christian ideas or symbols in light of modern epistemology, many of which were attempting to figure out what “truth” or “meaning” Christianity contained rather than merely what “historical” things it could determine as fact.15 Friedrich Schleiermacher eventually divided “theology” into three divisions: philosophical theology, historical theology, and practical theology. But Scripture studies—or, more broadly, what Schleiermacher called “exegetical theology”—comprised only a subcategory of “historical theology,” as did “dogmatic theology.”16

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 15

Schleiermacher called The Christian Faith, his monumental work, “dogmatic theology,” which indicates that he was trying to explicate the most current understanding of the Christian tradition within the Reformed church. Yet he obviously was also attempting to base this analysis on rationalistic categories, including much of Kant’s idealism, which meant that Schleiermacher’s theology was actually a mixture of historical theology and philosophical theology, since he thought philosophical theology pursued the truth rather than merely describing the present status of dogma. His distinction between “faith in Christ” and “faith in Scripture” indicated that the two were not of equal importance. Many things that he found rationally lacking in Scripture he simply suggested did not concern “faith in Christ”; rather, the issue was only how much faith one would put in the Scriptures. To him Scripture was only a human document, whereas redemption was available through faith in Christ or God. This obviously split Christian ethics between either finding its ground within the Christian Scriptures—which would always be subject to exegetical revisions and historical discoveries—or trying to ground it in a philosophicaltheological approach—which hunted for truth on a different level in order to insulate itself from historical criticism. Yet we will see that none of the four systems that we analyze in the following chapters was lacking in historical claims. The real question, then, became how their “systems” of explaining symbols could stand on their own as if they were grounded in history, upon which they were dependent, yet still be immune to any dislodging historical criticism. If their systems could be exempt from historical criticism, how could they then be thought of as corroborating any alleged historical reality? And if the systems find a different certainty that is not of anything in past history, how could they then be called “Christian”—or why should they? But these questions are only secondary here, since this is a study of whether or not that separate ground they professed actually “corroborated” the basic claims of Christianity and therefore established Christianity’s ethic. Christendom—that is, the organized state church—still existed in European countries in the eighteenth century within the different nation-states. It was this “unholy alliance,” as Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) saw it, that discredited the Christian faith in Europe, especially since so much of Europe was under the influence of Hegel. In contrast, in the founding of the United States, Christendom was superseded at the end of the eighteenth century by a secular constitution and government. The United States found a place for autonomy in the private rights delineated in the Bill of Rights, and autonomy was extended from a mere tolerance for religious diversity to a freedom of conscience with the First Amendment, an autonomy that had been presupposed in the extensive Christian revivals of the eighteenth century in New

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England and that was again presupposed in the nineteenth century on the Western frontier, as that freedom was finally being articulated into law. While the religious beliefs born of the revivals tended to not be as theologically or philosophically informed as in Europe, some of the nation’s leaders helped spread the Enlightenment influence of Paine, Locke, and others— many of whom embraced deism. This religious autonomy was integrated into law by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson—with the assistance of conservative Christian leaders such as Baptist minister Isaac Backus—first in Virginia and then as part of the new nation’s First Amendment. “Freedom of conscience” was assumed to be agreeable to all citizens and did not assume a single specific religion, so whatever ethics grounded the law would necessarily come from the agreed-upon freestanding principles. On that basis, an ethical ground could unite people rather than divide them, and deism seemed the more likely candidate. But no religion was named in those founding documents. The intention of inserting the “religion clauses” into the First Amendment was to separate religion and government so as to prevent either one from interfering with or manipulating the other, all while maintaining each citizen’s duty to follow the various states’ and the nation’s neutral or universal laws. That meant, of course, that while people could believe religiously as they chose and even worship without any interference, their behavior had to correspond to the common law, with its common or universal ethic. This was precisely Jefferson’s description: that government would not interfere with religion unless and until religion somehow broke out into overt acts of social disorder.17 It was assumed that people would not push their religious ethic to this point of violating state or federal civil and criminal laws, and it was assumed that the freestanding principles upon which civil and criminal law were based would not be in violation of anyone’s religious ideals. This form of democratic secular government was startlingly unique after 1,400 years of “Christendom”; it was a radically new religious freedom and separation of religion from government. Even so, in the United States the theological and philosophical “burdens”—which many Europeans discovered in their religious beliefs as a continuing form of Christendom merging state and religion, which made them feel that either state or religion was subservient to the other and thereby made fairly insignificant—were not yet discovered, or at least were not very influential on religious thought. What most Christians in the United States heard were simply less theologically refined versions of Calvinism, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and Catholicism. This is to say that, while the absolute metaphysics of Christian revivalism continued to spread, because of its simplicity, in the United States, European forms of Christianity were beginning to lose their appeal or credibility in

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 17

Europe. By the nineteenth century, for the first time in human history, the development of not just the natural sciences but especially the human sciences, as Foucault showed, enabled the human being to be studied as never before, since up to that point the “metaphysics of infinity” had been operative and pervasive.18 By the middle of the 1800s, Darwin’s view of human evolution provided the most conservative US forms of Christianity an enemy with which to do battle while the Catholic Church retrenched in its war against modernism, the new sciences, and liberalism. In its “Syllabus of Errors,” also of the nineteenth century, the Catholic position explicitly denied that any human has a right to belong to any religion other than Catholicism, as the Christian religion, and in Vatican I Catholicism declared the dogma of papal infallibility. If the Reformation had presented a powerful case for individualism, the Enlightenment had put the ideal of human autonomy and reason at the forefront. Now entities were studied by focusing on their empirical qualities, with new forms of comparison, description, and classification. If astronomy had proven the heliocentricity of our solar system, then the new forms of study of entities were also developing new ways to examine labor, life, and language, each in its empirical depth, beyond the classical ideas of representation. Although ethics was recognized as a field of study in itself, without any reference to religion in nations that were predominately Christian, the historical connection that most of the Western populations had with Christianity required that the discourse be introduced among religious peoples as well. For Protestants, this meant that the basic ground of their ethics needed to be reexamined vis-à-vis nonreligious ethics—and not only their ethics but their basic theology and Christology, since their ethics had been built upon the Christology, and it was based upon that now-antiquated “metaphysics of infinity,” as Foucault called it.19 While some great thinkers such as Herman Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), out of fear of reprisals, had to conceal until posthumous publication that they had embraced “natural religion” rather than “revealed religion,” others such as David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) published their insights quite early in their professional careers and were quickly removed and prohibited thereafter from teaching religious studies in the university setting. That was “Christendom’s” inevitable approach to critical studies. The United States’ First Amendment division between specific religious beliefs and a common ethical behavior in its move beyond Christendom suggests that all religious people would have to (1) assume the difference between the general ethics underlying law and specific religion’s ethics and choose to live under one or the other—perhaps even doubling down on its superiority over the other—or (2) assume that the general ethics of civil laws and specific religious laws are compatible enough that no choice need be

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made between them or (3) ignore the legitimacy or authority of one or the other. Some of Christianity’s most brilliant scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries felt that they had found an answer and so elected the first option—seeking to “corroborate” their religion’s claims by some method other than history so as to bestow on their religion the title of “Absolute” and minimize if not solve any ethical disagreements. The four systems examined in the following chapters are among the most coherent, innovative, and influential attempts at this option and became a leading edge of Christian thought over the last two centuries. Yet most Christian lay people have little acquaintance, if any, with these four unique and innovative approaches to the problem. That is the reason for this book. Historically the “proofs” for God’s “existence” had become discredited by the beginning of the eighteenth century by Kant (although he has been interpreted in radically different ways), and the historical proof of Christology had been totally dislodged from Reimarus to Schleiermacher by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Many Christian scholars saw the need to avoid the consequences not just of relativism but also of some absolutism, as they became more aware of the necessity of following their nation’s laws with their underlying ethics, which subordinated their religious ethics. The growing awareness of myth and legend even within Scripture made the task of using historical data to prove that the historical Jesus was Son of God extremely questionable. By the twenty-first century even many lay Christians have became aware of the different views toward religion and ethics—enough to fear the whole becoming relative and chaotic. This poses the larger question about the relationship between religion and ethics in a pluralistic global culture: Would the diversity of religions as well as nonreligious ethics present a relativism in ethics that will destroy the possibility of any unity in a nation or in the global population and end up dehumanizing? Or, within that which is pluralistic or relative, can it be possible to reorient an ethic that would be both universally adopted and yet sufficiently flexible to grow with culture and change while placing priority on real human relations rather than on a mixture of metaphysics with principles that have priority over real human relations—a ground that would simultaneously allow people to believe religiously what they want? This suggests that Christian ethics may now be required to find a different approach to Christology—an approach that does not need historical data and so is impervious to its negatives but that also is so general that it easily can be seen as a ground for a universal ethic, or at least not incompatible with a freestanding ethical ground as a global ethic. The difficult questions, then, are (1) what any approach to “corroborate” the Christology by something unique

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 19

in one’s consciousness, thinking, or speech actually does corroborate or (2) whether the approach ends up with specific ideas, symbols, or presuppositions that are too narrow to form a basis for a universal ethic. Whether the focus in such approaches will remain the same as in traditional Christology will have to be analyzed—especially at the point where Christology and ethics are connected. On the surface it appears that the focus would move beyond a “theistic” conception of “God,” which itself may be too innovative for the lay Christian. The other option is to find an ethic that not only is neither exclusive nor suspect in its historical or metaphysical claims but also rests on principles that can actually be universal because they are freestanding, leaving Christology to go its own way. The options in the title of this chapter are obviously contradictory approaches or requirements—one attempting to corroborate unique claims of a single religion (with its ethics), simply assuming such ethics would be superior enough or have sufficient obvious authority to be adopted universally, the other requiring that we move beyond the particularity of religious bases to “freestanding” principles, if there are such, that would be universal from the outset. Since this study is asking whether or not religion can be a ground for ethics—an ethics that can be universal yet autonomous—then before we examine the four brilliant attempts at corroboration of specific claims in the nineteenth and twentieth century we need also to further define “freestanding” principles as a possible social and global requirement in a pluralistic situation. “FREESTANDING” PRINCIPLES: A DIVESTMENT OF VESTED INTERESTS For the meaning of “freestanding” principles, I turn to political-legal-moral philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002).20 Rawls was certainly correct in emphasizing that ethical agreement underlying any social contract of fairness will require that we divest ourselves of arguing our case from the personal advantages that we have been given by way of happenstance or accident, such as our sexuality, race, ethnicity, religious identity, family wealth, and so forth—that is, all the areas over which we personally had originally little or no choice, which are sometimes referred to as the irrationality or absurdity of our existence. This divestment of personal advantage is what Rawls called the “hypothetical original position” behind a “veil of ignorance.” It includes areas that US law has deemed “suspect” categories or areas in which discrimination has been recognized as the most insidious to our civil rights and social contract.

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One still always has these predetermined or “given” parts of identity; one will still be of a certain race, ethnic group, sexual orientation, and so forth and, in many cases, even belong to a specific religion. Rawls is not saying these individualizing aspects are unimportant or that they should be abandoned. But they are too specific and supply either advantage or disadvantage instead of creating a common ground on which to build a social contract. To try to draw up a social contract from all these vested accidentals is impossible, because in most existing cultures there are already inequities within most of these categories and discrimination often perpetuates or infuses these inequities. Those who are on the privileged side of the inequities will not be keen to relinquish their vested advantages, and so no social contract could occur to change the inequities. The privileged would likely influence public policy and particular lawmakers to maintain their advantages, and their voices would have greater volume with legislators than would the voices of the underclasses, especially if the privileged donate to the political campaign of those they intend to lobby. In order to form a fair social contract, then, we must imagine ourselves in that hypothetical original social-contracting position where we are bargaining as if we had no knowledge of what our real situation in life would be. In such a bargaining position we would all hedge our bets, so to speak—not agreeing to a contract in which one sex, one race, one religion, one ethnic group, one educational level, and so forth, is favored, lest we find ourselves in the unfavored group. In this form of a hypothetical ignorance and divestment, Rawls emphasized that we would discover what we each consider to be most important. But so would all those with whom we are bargaining, and they will probably make choices that are similar to our own regarding the most basic principles. Rawls was convinced that the most important principle we all would select would be a maximum equal liberty, which includes such basics as universal suffrage. The second-most important principle would be some form of compensation for those who, despite the agreed-upon first principle, still end up on the short end because of contingent social or economic inequities. This second principle Rawls called the “principle of difference.” These two principles, as well as most basic principles flowing from them, will be put in a “lexical order”—or order of priority. In other words, no one would be willing to trade their equality or liberty or voice for a little bit of extra cash each election cycle. Finally, whatever other principles we insert into our discussion will also have to stand on their own—be “freestanding”—not derived from our specific sexuality, race, or religion or from our specific favored form of some nonreligious equivalent element. Only in this way can we eventually arrive

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 21

at a “consensus” on these principles as they are seen to “overlap,” although they came from radically different people. For example, saying that I do not steal because one of Buddhism’s Ten Precepts or one of Judaism’s Ten Commandments forbids stealing is not a “freestanding” principle; it becomes “freestanding” only when no authority, either divine or sacred, and when no universal principle forces the ethical idea but, rather, when people who live in mutual autonomy agree on the principle as thereby self-validating, needing no greater authority than their mutual agreement. I see this element of authority via agreement in Rawls as superior to Dworkin’s assumption that the ethical or conscience not only is somehow freestanding but also perhaps does not need any agreement. To form laws as well as to adjudicate requires acceptance or basic agreement. I explore this ethical base and its political ramification in much more detail elsewhere—especially the degree to which the democratic system of the United States corresponds to such an approach21—but the development even of the attempts at “corroboration” in this volume demand a basic familiarity with this concept of “freestanding” within Rawls’s system of justice as fairness. No religious or nonreligious person wants to be on the slighted side of unfairness, and neither are most people willing to admit that their system of ethics may naturally be “unfair” or oblivious to the “fair” in the pursuit of justice. Rawls therefore insisted that uncovering “freestanding” principles means that our ethical agreement and social contract will be “political” rather than “metaphysical.” This does not mean that a person is prohibited from having ethical principles that differ from the social contract’s “overlapping consensus.” Anyone is welcome to have such principles so long as the principles do not cause the person to violate the social contract itself with its overlapping consensus of principles to which the state or nation has generally agreed. Of course, the social contract could not be a metaphysical one without some religion or other absolutized ideology coercing, by some external power, all those who find such a base or ground of ethics incredible or irrelevant. That will not work. This means that the “ground” of any ethic to be honored by a pluralistic society will have to be neutral so that the ethic’s basic principles are freestanding—neither self-gratifying nor disproportionately centered upon or beneficial to only a select group of people by coercion. This is especially true when we realize that mere conformity with a moral norm does not make any person moral: one is moral only if one voluntarily selects a moral course of action—that is, if the decision and action are autonomous, not some heteronomous demand or unquestioned obedience. This is also human maturation.

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KANT’S “CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE” The question of this book is nowhere more obvious than in a brief contrast of the positions of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche in their quest for autonomy. The Enlightenment spawned a dependence on reason that prompted the unleashing of natural, critical questions about religions and their sources, claims, and history vis-à-vis scientific insights into magic, superstition, opinions, or mere heteronomous traditions. The questions remained, then, (1) whether or not there was a traditional personal God or specific religion that could provide the grounds for a universal human ethic, even if the religion’s metaphysics were seen as antiscientific, (2) whether or not this religion’s merged historical-mythical claims were unintelligible, baseless opinion or sheer heteronomy or tradition, or (3) whether or not the new epistemological, ontological, and scientific understandings could furnish a more visible, obvious, and universal ethical source. Both Kant and Nietzsche were nineteenthcentury figures, but their relevance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries makes them also stand as almost opposite “bookends” of the period we are covering here—and hence vital to the question of this inquiry. Elsewhere22 I have briefly introduced Kant’s position, which showed the limits of pure reason, and his analysis of practical reason and the relation of both to religious claims. In Critique of Pure Reason23 Kant’s idea of making science possible and credible utilized what was called a “Copernican Revolution” of reversing the focus. Whereas the dominant epistemology saw the object informing the human mind—for which the human as subject simply found the correct concept to fit the perception of the singular entity—Kant was persuaded that the human mind itself informs the object, so to speak, dictating the criteria that the object must meet in order to be “understood.” The human can form concepts of what it perceives only if those perceived or sensed objects are within time and space and can be judged by the mind’s logical possible forms of judgment—which are quantity, quality, relation, and modality, all of which are a priori categories. The judging subject or human mind does not derive these limits of its ability from the sensible intuition or from mere tradition; rather, the limits are simply the analytical logic with which the mind works. In cases in which the sensed object meets all these criteria or is within one’s logical a priori system of judgment, in which the imagination of one’s “soul” is able to apprehend and synthesize the manifold sensations, one achieves “understanding.” This “a priori synthetic” makes science such as math and geometry possible—or at least makes their propositions intelligible, as Eco suggests.24 However, ideas of pure reason that cannot be sensed and conceptualized in that way, though they may serve as symbols by which to organize one’s thinking,

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 23

are not provable as reality. Attempting to treat them as if they were reality only means that they can be both “proven” and “disproven,” which means that they do not fit in; their supposed “objects” cannot be “understood.” Even though the “objects” in “practical” reason are neither sensible phenomena nor judged by the conceptual “categories” and therefore cannot be proven or “understood,” the objects point to a universal consciousness of duty or categorical imperative that requires “freedom” to be postulated for ethical purposes. Without such a postulate or presupposition25—whether one views it in that specific way or not—civilization could not exist. But when it is assumed or “postulated,” one becomes aware of the necessity that humans make ethical choices when dealing with others with whom they are sensibly related. Thus far Kant’s position is hard to fault, although there seems to be the possibility that the four so-called a priori categories of judgment are actually learned through the influence of one’s environment or culture—and so are not a priori. Some Kantian scholars such as Carl Friedrich have even felt that Kant’s basic aim in all of his writings was not simply to ground science or to release religion from having to meet its apparent empirical claims without being nullified by science; rather, it was to establish a “political” ethic.26 Kant published treatises on the “groundwork” or “foundation” of a “metaphysics of morals” in which the word “metaphysics” is used simply to mean the realm of the “intelligible” world rather than the sensible world—that is, that the “categorical imperative” is a universal human concern. But this does not mean that it is grounded either on some empirical reality or on some specifically religious, otherworldly power or metaphysics in a sense of provable supranatural beings. To avoid the ethic’s being discredited as only reflecting a single religious orientation or reflecting only local or limited cultural interests rather than reflecting the universal by involving a variety of different and therefore conflicting ends or goals (that is a “teleological” ethic), Kant elaborated a “deontological” or principle-grounded morality, which alone, he was persuaded, could be universal while avoiding being based on goals that could be narrowly egoistic or selfishly mere human “inclination.” The ethic would not be based on some personal goal of “happiness” or on other inclinations or desires but, rather, on the ethic’s ability to work from a universally accepted principle. The “categorical imperative” is an absolute sense of moral duty in which the only pure “good” is the “good will,”27 and such a sense of “ought” means that it must also be what “can” be done. Further, something can be judged as good only if the maxim driving the individual can be accepted as the principle for all rational beings. This means that a person can will to live only by a principle that could also be willed as a maxim for all rational beings. It also means

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that a person cannot treat a rational being as a means to some end but rather only as and end in themselves,28 since there is nothing “higher” than rational beings. Within the political realm, it also means that a person must consider themselves to be a necessary part of the law-making body. In this way, the person retains autonomy as a necessary part of the “enlightenment”—or of the shedding of their self-incurred tutelage.29 Civilization requires this sense of responsibility for all people involved, and this seemed a logical fit for defining ethics. In Critique of Practical Reason Kant pressed the moral summum bonum as justifying the postulation not only of the possibility of freedom but also of a “Supreme Being” as the cause of the summum bonum.30 In addition, however, Kant attempted to interpret the major theological or metaphysical teachings of Christianity completely in moral categories in his brilliant Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. But this is where the earlier no that denied religion a place now turned into a yes, and vice versa. The lack of “proving” God now shifted to a moral imperative with the functional status of God. Yet religion, whose ideas seem so congruent with true ethics, now had to be shown to also embody a great amount of illegitimate stuff that, because Kant had insisted the stuff had no moral implications, was simply “pseudoreligion.”31 This included such things as sacrificial rituals, prayers that make requests of God, and similar elements. Kant elaborated that the metaphysics of the Christian religion were only ethical ideas that, though useful, could not be proven to have ever been or to possibly ever be “embodied.” Yet he ironically insisted that the “categorical” nature of the moral imperative must be the equivalent of a divine command. But this insight he had already disclosed in his nonreligious analyses of practical reason. That is, he had already emphasized that the categorical imperative must be the cause of the universality of one’s maxim, which requires not only postulating the possibility of freedom” but also postulating a Supreme Being whose intelligence and will were the causal agents, despite the fact that he had earlier shown proofs of God’s “existence” to be unverifiable from “pure reason.” However, when Kant interpreted the specific Christian dogmas or ideas by his moral system, the religious dogma as well as the moral ideas he utilized to explain the Christian symbols were culturally limited—so, irrelevant to people outside the Christian circle.32 Things fared even worse for those who were Christian, however. Kant’s ethicizing of the strictly metaphysical and mythological symbols seemed to dispense with the central claim of those symbols—that the ethical ideal was actually embodied in one particular person in history. Kant furthermore transposed the symbol of Jesus’s suffering in place of all others as simply anyone’s “old” self, which operated from a maxim that could not be universalized, thereby punishing or crucifying one’s “new” self, which does operate

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 25

from a universally applicable maxim.33 That was the innocent suffering for the guilty but would probably not be acceptable to most Christians. Further, Kant was sure that the approximation of the goal of moral perfection is never realized in a single lifetime and that, hence, a person has to take comfort simply in the fact that they could see some moral improvement in their life. If they could not, then what were they to do, since they were convinced that they had to be “worthy” of any grace from God,34 which meant doing their best? If the Reformation presented individualism, then the Enlightenment had brought human autonomy to the forefront. Was Kant convinced that a person had to “deserve” the results of their life to at least a significant degree?35 And what of the Christian understanding that the ultimate reward would be unblemished “happiness” in heaven, now that Kant’s ethics had eliminated “happiness” as well as “inclination” or “desire”? This is instructive to our analysis, since the question we are asking is whether a religion can supply the ground for an ethic even when the religion’s metaphysical claims are not verifiable. But the question does not end there; it needs to be reformulated: Can a religion supply the ground for an ethic and still honor each individual’s autonomy? The latter release from one’s own “self-incurred tutelage” was, of course, Kant’s definition of enlightenment. The least we could conclude from a short introduction to the problem is that, if religion could be compatible with a universal ethic, then it still would be acceptable only if it were to rid itself completely of all authoritarianism or heteronomy. But Nietzsche pushed the argument further, using different wording. NIETZSCHE’S “REVALUATION OF VALUES” Nietzsche, in his bombastic rhetoric, called Kant simply a “concept cripple” or a “backdoor philosopher,” since he thought that Kant, after demolishing the absolute metaphysics of Christianity, had tried to sneak Christian ethics in the back way.36 In opposition to both Kant and Hegel, Nietzsche styled himself as the great “immoralist.” His biting sarcasm and hypercritical namecalling of those with whom he disagreed must not be interpreted literally. He was not a nihilist but rather a nihilist of the nihilism he perceived in ethics like Kant’s—ethics that aimed to deny or kill human “inclination.” But even more particularly, Nietzsche was a nihilist of the nihilistic ethical ideals of Christianity. He insisted on a complete rejection of any antilife morality, which means that one is required to revaluate all values, as painful as that may be. In his thinking, to even attempt to articulate a “universal” ethic would be a preposterous insult to human nature, an idealistic presumption of squelching

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individual ingenuity, genius, strength, desire—which results in eliminating life. Without “inclination” or “desire,” humanity would end. I elaborate the “burdens” of the religious metaphysics elsewhere,37 the burdens of religion’s Absolute, unquestionable, antiquated, and unscientific metaphysical and mythical claims. Nietzsche was confident that Kant himself had felt these as burdens; that was the reason Kant separated religion off from theoretical reason or science, by virtue of articulating (if not concocting, as Nietzsche saw it) his “categories,” and why he insisted that they have no empirical origin when it is pretty obvious that they do. Nietzsche could not belittle Kant enough for his “synthetic a priori.”38 But Kant formulated these categories not only to separate religion and ethics from science, thinking they could operate independently of each other, but also because he was persuaded that “will” is the primary causal factor of everything, as if will had no connection to anything empirical, including the human brain. Nietzsche argued that “will” has become completely exaggerated, as the prime value and prime cause of everything, without any awareness of the way a person’s own physical body informs that will by the body’s instincts, needs, and desires.39 Nietzsche thought Kant’s conclusion was a compromise, a sign of decadence and ressentiment, of false causation, not of true autonomy. True autonomy requires that one fight the opposition: this is the second stage of Nietzsche “three metamorphoses” of the spirit. In the first stage, the person as the “camel” bears the burdens until they finally decide to go to a lonely desert to shed them. The person then changes into a “lion” to fight against the “final god” or “great dragon,” which means every heteronomous demand or duty that is antilife or spun out of “ressentiment,” every “thou shalt.” The person’s task in this lion stage is to disclose their sole enemy, the great dragon, morality, the “last god,” for what it really is—the nihilism of real autonomy and real human life. The grotesqueness of the dragon and its insidious power over others does not come merely from its golden metaphysical scales with “thou shalt” written on all of them. If we were to pursue Nietzsche’s colorful metaphor, the dreadful power in this dragon is its self-betraying morality, which it will continue to use in an authoritarian manner to force people to question their own human judgment and will. That underbelly of apodictic morality is part and parcel of the whole ugly creature of heteronomy, a claimed Absolute Other, whether real or imagined, the emptiest of empty concepts, as Nietzsche judged it, by which decadents insist on controlling other peoples’ lives despite the fact that this metaphysical foe has lost its metaphysical or ontological credibility. The inner nature of this dragon is opposed to all individuality, difference, and uniqueness. Its most life-destructive organ is ressentiment toward this world for being so diverse and continually changing. As a ressentiment

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denied but nevertheless real, it stands as the final but most subtle vestige of discredited religions. The ethics so absolutized thrives off the preconception that the truth requires eternal validity and universal uniformity, that permanence is not only possible but preferable, all of which means to Nietzsche a “mummifying.”40 Instead, nothing escapes time and change. That means that the old religious moral values must be exposed for what they are, human creations, as all values of humans, no more, but attached artfully to a religious carcass that one can no longer admit to be credible in its Absolute form. If these values and duties had been viewed as sacred and Absolute once upon a time, then they now must be opposed with a “sacred No!”41 or Radical No!—as deep a commitment as that shown by religious devotees. Yet to Nietzsche, to seriously consider the thought of challenging all of one’s values—to think a “new value”—is a terrifying thought,42 similar to the madman’s estimate of what happens if everyone takes seriously the announcement that “God is dead. We have killed him!”43 This heteronomous morality of ressentiment, as a distortion of real life, must be exposed so that real values can be set back upright. This Nietzsche meant by a “revaluation of all values”—not a mere overturning44 but a turning over in order to reinstate the only real values of consistent life affirmation rather than hypocrisy, ressentiment, and decadence. This is the side of Nietzsche’s system that was often overlooked as people sought to fight him as a “nihilist” when he was actually a skillful but hyperbolic poet-reformer. This morality will be instinctual, life-affirming, as the “new” values are the values that are obvious and visible rather than invisible, whatever their age. Rather than extricate one’s inclination, as Kant required, in order to be ethical, Nietzsche suggests “sublimation” in one’s posture toward oneself and others. On the other hand, Nietzsche was repulsed by all superficial “improvement morality,” whether from a religious or philosophical ground, that advocates a distrust of the senses, thereby exaggerating reason into a tyrant. This, he said, was pure decadence and self-deceit. As long as the “Good” stands over a person in a reified and absolutized form, whether within or outside religion, that person cannot be free or autonomous. But more than that, if a person is not autonomous, then they cannot relate morally to any person. Nietzsche is not interested in dictating to any other what they should do. Even if Zarathustra felt compelled to warn or teach others, he did not want to demand anything of them. Each person must find themselves, and that is not possible if someone or something has authoritarian or heteronomous control over them. This is the reason that Nietzsche preferred to praise individuality and “instinct” rather than simply “reason,” since “reason” can so easily turn into an Absolute in Kant, with many thinking mistakenly that they have thereby escaped “unreason” or the “absurd” entirely.

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Yet to remove the heteronomous, hypothetical, and universalized “good” as a fixture in which a person has earlier also found misguided comfort creates a war—a war between what “is” and what the person thinks or once thought “ought” to be. “What is” is what is immediate, concrete, sensible, and actual, not mere “appearance,” as the idealists think, not chimeric ideals or false causes or even “postulates.” Inasmuch as the senses reveal becoming and change, they do not lie, no matter how much decadent pseudomoral postures despise the senses, alleging as Descartes that the senses fool us,45 with the end result that reason is turned into a tyrant, as if it could be separated from the body and a person’s diet. Although Nietzsche does not emphasize mutual autonomy, to be realistic would require that a person allow others to have the same autonomy as the person demands for themselves. When Nietzsche belittles the idea of equality or democracy, he is fighting primarily against people he thinks are stifling their own “will to power” or are simply resentful about what others have achieved that they themselves have not. He considers them cowering in weakness and ressentiment, being untrue to themselves and to their basic instinct and reason. As Nietzsche concludes Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the former followers of Zarathustra are sent away to find themselves. For Nietzsche there is no “the way” but only “my way.”46 He is not speaking of “my way” as something to force onto others or trying to convince them that this is “the way”; rather, he says only that every person does indeed have a different “perspective.” This is relativism, but by its emphasis upon the “life instinct” it is certainly not nihilistic. Nietzsche admired Jesus but felt that Christianity violated Jesus’s message primarily because of the influence of “Saint Paul’s” theology.47 PARTIAL RESOLUTION OF THE “I OUGHT” VERSUS THE “I WILL”? Is it necessary or even probable that the source of human moral concern come from something that is Absolute or God in order to be universally applicable? Is it imperative that the moral concern come only in the form of a demand, law, or duty? Finally, is there any possibility that a person can be moral more spontaneously simply because of the real relationships that they sustain? In religions or other authoritarian approaches, we hear a “You must,” which in a family situation usually implies that we are being told we are immature and need to be directed. This command could be thought as coming from “God” or from parents, teachers, or other supervisors. But it is usually heteronomous, even if the other from whom it comes informs us that it is only for our own good.

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A second level of command is the one that I give myself, which is what “autonomy” means—when I think or say to myself that “I ought” or “I must” do a certain thing in my relationship with others. This is Kant’s autonomous position: he felt we should hear our own self-command, the “categorical imperative,” in the same “categorical” or authoritarian way that we would hear “God.” It is not another being commanding but simply ourselves, even if in his Critique of Practical Reason he felt that it required “postulating” “God.” It is not any more a real “being” than is postulated “freedom.” Kant felt that we hear it this way as we recognize ourselves as a responsible part of the “intelligible” world, as long as we are guided by the pure idea of Freedom vis-à-vis being determined in ways by the sensible world. So he concluded that the “moral ‘ought’ is thus an ‘I will’ for man as a member of the intelligible world; and it is conceived by him as an ‘I ought’ only in so far as he considers himself at the same time to be a member of the sensible world.”48 But is this to suggest that a person no longer has any connection with the “sensible world,” or is it just in moments of a greater resoluteness so as to diminish the attraction of the sensible world? Is a person still living if they no longer consider themselves a “member” of the sensible world, or does that membership imply a connection that cannot be dissolved without dying? Moreover, does a person really hear themselves in that manner unless it is either a form of repression or an overwhelming sense of “duty” being imposed from an external source? If all a person is saying by “I ought” is that something makes them think that they ought, even if that something is simply their “conscience,” as Kant painted it, could it not still be their conscience as conditioned and affected by others and so actually be a less-direct form of heteronomy? But would a wife be complimented by knowing that her husband treated her morally only because she either demanded it explicitly or at least because he had to demand it of himself—in other words, that he was complimenting but not because he really wanted to? Perhaps that would be a grudging autonomy, but it hardly meets Kant’s idea of the “good” being a “good will,” which is not based on results but on motivation. Or if Kant is emphasizing that the summum bonum involves the creation of a more moral self, would the wife be happy that the husband was operating only from that motivation—of making himself “more worthy” of the rewards that come to the moral person? Does a person really move beyond the sensible world and all of their sensible relationships with others? That brings us to the idea of the power of relationships—a person’s ability to will something for the other aside from any sense of “ought” or “duty.” In chapter 3 we will see Hegel call it “love” or “what is,” which means a sense of the unity with the other rather than a sense of duty. This can produce a

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moral union and motivation far beyond any words, especially any demands. But is that real and possible? It seems almost “instinctual,” which is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s solution: For him, morality, if it can even be spoken of, must be a person’s autonomous decision—simply, a person’s will, which itself is driven considerably by their instinct and metabolism but utilizes reason in reflecting and acting upon the instinct. If the instinct expresses “I will” or “I desire to”—whether I am speaking of what I want to eat or with whom I want to live—the instinct is genuine or authentic, I have not relinquished my autonomy or inclinations,49 and I am not ashamed of my will at all; I own up to it honestly. But some will ask, “What prevents this from leading to terrible conflicts with other people and thus sheer chaos?” Nietzsche is not concerned with supplying the answer to this, since the question seems to him to suggest that the person asking would prefer a peaceful heteronomy to their own self-integrity. But that may be only the peacefulness of the graveyard—of no longer being their own person and no longer even caring. But Hegel went further in equating “love” with “what is.” Not only does a sense of real unity with another make a demand from either party superfluous, but it also insults the unity. Hegel implied that this sense of unity stimulates “reciprocal recognition”—admission of a person’s limitations—and mutual requests for forgiveness in such a way that the whole process is reciprocal and produces reconciliation.50 We saw another answer earlier in Rawls’s idea that we are involved in a social contract, in a hypothetical original position behind a veil of ignorance, which, when done reciprocally, divests us of the mere “happenstance” or “absurd” elements of our identity, opening us to mutual, trusting interdependence and equilibrium rather than to sheer competitiveness that becomes divisive, producing chaos and violence, even if we are not instinctually empathic. Albert Schweitzer provided an answer, showing how a person can move beyond their particular, limited religious or ethical understandings to recognize the fundamental “reverence for life.” That is, although Schweitzer at first was a Christian theologian looking to the New Testament and Christian dogma as his ethical source, he eventually saw the ethical base to be much more universal, something he discovered in every living being’s own desire or will to live. That change of focus came over years as he worked as a medical doctor in Lambaréné, Gabon, in western Africa, assisting people he might never have been aware of nor felt any responsibility for but whose lives now were entwined with his own in a sense of real unity. The “will to live,” Schweizer said, is the first datum of life rather than the Cartesian cogito,51 and the will to live includes not simply a human desire to live but the desire or instinct

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to live of every living being—including goats (which sometimes came into their hospital in Lambaréné) and flies and even worms. Only a few decades ago philosopher and pragmatist-humanist Richard Rorty (1931–2007) posited that the source of our moral concern is the voice of the other in its “cry” for help—that is, in the unconditional status of every other person as we all make claims on each other. Rorty says this moral concern is a sensitivity that I develop toward those who are others, whether the other and I hold many things in common or very little. It is the decision that I make to be more inclusive in my sense of “we” and less negative in assigning people to the impersonal category of “them” (in Buber’s terms, the category of “it” as plural) to whom I give less consideration or treat in lessthan-humane ways. The source of my moral concern can be discovered in novels, plays, movies, and so on, and it may not always be in identifying with the one in need but can also be in my identification with those characters who are cruel, wherein I become ashamed of my relation to others and change my behavior.52 This is the sense of unity. If it is true that in conversation with others we feel their very presence in their moral needs or assurance from us and they can feel the same from us, then it is mutual sensitivity to others, no matter how different the other may be from us. It is not a metaphysical demand, and neither is it a capricious, self-serving motivation, such as mere prudence that we discover; but at best it is a real empathic relation of equals. It is not an imaginary being or relation, and neither is it absolute or eternal. But it is real and always in process, thereby always presenting choices and responsibilities to everyone involved. It does not require some great philosophical acumen to think in abstract or universal terms, and neither does it depend upon any separate authority. It is a process in which I and the other(s) have some form of basic agreement, whether articulated or simply sensed—an agreement not only about what our language means but also of the way we will act toward each other and how it will be a reciprocal, symbiotic relation with real equilibrium. It provides each person with what they can expect from the other or how the other will act. That agreement is our only authority, the agreement that we hold and honor in trust. The final stage of the spirit’s metamorphosis of maturation into the true self, or autonomy, says Nietzsche, is entering the stage of the “child.” This calls to mind the innocence, originality, and flexibility of most children before they learn simply to conform to various cultural heteronomies. This suggests that the “source” of a person’s moral concern is empirical, obvious, and immediate—the presence in a person’s life of any other person or any form of life, whether conscious or reflective or not.

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RELIGIOUS ATTEMPTS TO “CORROBORATE” THE “GROUND”: WHAT AND HOW? If a Christian is convinced that Christian ethics is important to both private and public life and that it is generated from “Christ” in some way, then the immediate question is whether or not the ethics is universal, since all humans have never at any time had access to this religion. If the ethics is alleged in some way to have been generated from “Christ,” then what does “Christ” mean in such a statement? (1) A historical person in past history who was Incarnate God? (2) A spiritual presence of some invisible “Christ” in a person’s present? (3) A tradition about an exceptional person of the past? (4) A vague image of some moral Ideal? (5) An actual detailed embodiment of that moral Ideal? (6) The realization of the great truth of life of the unity or perhaps identity of God and humans? (7) The process of thinking or speaking and the certainty that provides? (8) The mind’s ability to accommodate a pluralistic, paradoxical, or self-contradictory picture without dissolving into agnosticism or relativism? These are questions that will arise in our inquiry. If the whole point of this new theological emphasis is to find the “truth” of Christian claims vis-à-vis merely talking about historical elements, then what is that specific “truth” that can be discovered without historical reference, and what is the present status of the proof of that truth—that is, the other evidence a person is trying to “corroborate?” If that claim to truth actually is thought to have been a historical one—that is, that of the Incarnation, that God was present in a specific man in history (as traditionally described)—precisely how do nonhistorical ideas make a historical claim more credible—that is, strengthen the otherwise-insufficient historical evidence? Will the method a person uses to make this case have any other possible application? Or, to put it this way, is it a truth only about one specific person and so could not be a method used to corroborate any other historical claim about any other person, such as Gautama Buddha, Guru Nanak, Muḥammad, Mohandas Ghandi, Thomas Jefferson, and so forth? Even more importantly, if the truth is thought in some way to be inextricably connected to a historical figure, and if this is an attempt to corroborate the claim being made by supplying additional evidence, even of a different nature, does not the idea of “probity” come into play? Since a court views “corroborating” evidence as supplementary evidence, affirming original evidence, no court would count any of the following as “corroborating”: (1) someone claiming to have seen a centaur robbing a bank; or (2) someone claiming that the voice he heard singing proved Elvis is literally still alive; or (3) someone claiming to have the Spirit of God which means everything they speak is truth. It’s not that all judges are closed-minded people or irreligious

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but, rather, simply that the type of supposed “evidence” that may be offered to “corroborate” the earlier claim is simply unconvincing in its logic or unscientific in its perspective. It lacks probative value. If Buddhism were to argue that all people are inherently totally ignorant and therefore suffer—with no exceptions—but then make the exception for Gautama, asserting that somehow he was not ignorant at all but truly “enlightened,” then how would a person go about proving the claim—or “corroborating” it? Would they first analyze all human thinking and then offer the solution that all human minds are actually manifestations of the Divine Mind but only Gautama realized that—out of all humans in history? Would this not dislodge the initial claim of the universality of human ignorance and therefore also the significance of Buddha? Or, if this analysis of the “intelligible” world or “Mind” or “Spirit” were the “proof,” would a person feel that there is no need to offer any historical data to back up the claim? Or could the claim be completely sufficient in itself, on a higher plane than relative or contingent historical details? If the claim stands on its own, then any person could have been the origin of the claim, or every person already always had that understanding and so needed no spiritual leader. If, on the other hand, a person insists that this “Enlightenment” only began with this one historical person named “Gautama” who dates his birth in the sixth century BC, and if the person insists that this “Enlightenment” is absolutely necessary for every person to experience and that it must be the same as what Gautama experienced and taught, then we run into another problem: To put it again in more legal terms, now the piece of “evidence” being submitted to “corroborate” the claim that Buddha had the only answer to Enlightenment must actually trace back to that specific person, and so proving the claim once again requires much historical groundwork. In criminal law an example of this “tracing” could be found in chain of custody, tracking of the whereabouts of a specific item (such as a murder weapon) and the item’s movement from its discovery to the day it is presented in court. In fact, in criminal jurisdiction corroborating evidence provided by the local police or law-enforcement institution cannot include simply hearsay or an item that has little or no probative value or an item that is tainted because of questionable custody. For example, in a murder case, when the trial is almost over and the prosecutor has finished presenting many witnesses who have offered a body of evidence against the accused, if the evidence is not strong enough to convict, since in this hypothetical case no one directly witnessed the murder and much of the witness testimony has been contradicted by defense witnesses, then the prosecutor cannot suddenly introduce the alleged murder weapon out of nowhere as the clinching piece of “corroborating” evidence. It could not be offered into evidence unless the prosecutor had

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earlier built the foundation for such a presentation and then presented the item within an unbroken and trustworthy chain of custody, originating with the suspect and continuing without any or at least very much opportunity of significant alteration from the time of the crime to the time of the discovery by and possession by the police and from that time to the actual presentation of the weapon in court. The attorney cannot say that the officer found the gun and kept it at home for safekeeping all these months. They cannot say that the police have no idea where the weapon came from but that it is a revolver and the gun used in the crime was a revolver and so this gun presented in court must have belonged to the suspect. After all, there are many revolvers. The prosecutor cannot present a gun that they just purchased at the local pawn shop because it is the same caliber as the murder weapon and they think the suspect might easily have sold it to the pawn shop under an alias. The prosecutor cannot simply point to the fact that the gun was found in a particular spot and has been held in custody by the police department ever since, when that spot was a public square and we have no evidence that the suspect ever went there. The prosecutor cannot present the gun as necessarily being used only by the suspect if the gun could just as likely have been used by any number of other people either before or after the alleged murder and therefore have come from someone else originally other than the suspect. The prosecutor cannot present the gun as connected to the suspect merely because they have brought the gun to court directly from the police department. That is, the gun must attach by some other physical evidence to the suspect, whether by the suspect’s fingerprints, a photo of that very gun being used by the suspect, the gun’s registration by the suspect, rifling patterns inside the gun’s barrel that are unique to that particular gun as registered to the defendant, or other. But what if the police commissioner and mayor made it quite obvious to the district attorney’s office that they needed the conviction, and needed it immediately, because there is terrible social unrest over the killing and the only way order and comfort can be restored is to convict this suspect? Would that need for “comfort” be justifiable motivation to enable the use of the evidence that skirts the reasonable rules of evidence? Can we make such an exception to reason and ethics merely to experience the “comfort” provided by some newly proclaimed “certainty” that the suspect is guilty so as to move past uncertainty, no matter what the exception requires or who suffers because of it? Or would we allow the police commissioner or mayor to assure us as the jury that this is actually the “truth” since only this particular culture in all of history has arrived at the proper understanding of the working of Mind or Spirit and that this alone guarantees the truth of the claim? Would we accept it if the prosecuting attorney were to insist that all other understandings are

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preoccupied with data that are too contingent, material, atomistic, that can never provide us with the whole truth that Mind or Spirit can? That only the Mind or Spirit of the most intellectually gifted people in this particular culture know the truth, reflect the truth, know the Absolute? Would this be a valid answer, or would it be another form of esoteric gnosticism? This is a strange way to talk about religious faith and the object of that faith. But I do it intentionally to force the issue of the credibility of evidence into the open. There are plenty of “backdoors” allowing well-intentioned scholars to intrude with new theories; but the facts of any religion are the facts, and they are, as most Christian theologians are aware, not subject to being ignored or greatly altered. Long ago John Locke thought that Jesus was the “Christ” primarily because Jesus performed miracles and “fulfilled” all the ancient Jewish prophecies about the Messiah (at least the things that Locke had been taught by Christians were “prophecies” in Jewish scripture pertaining to the “Messiah”). By the early nineteenth century Friedrich Schleiermacher had put a decisive end to this approach for examining the validity of Christianity. The credibility of this “evidence” that Jesus was the Messiah was totally nullified as having any Christological or theological corroboration by the observation that, in order for there to be “fulfilled” prophecies, the predictions would need to have been actual predictions, have been very specific and not ambiguous, intending only one particular person at one particular time, and no other, and Jesus would need to have met their intended detailed pictures in every respect—none of which, of course, was the case.53 Otherwise, any kind of later manipulation of the text or incongruous application of it to absurd historical circumstances could be alleged as the “fulfillment” of the prophecy. What would it prove for us to say that the “faith” experienced by a Christian today carries the same identity, content, quality, and so on as that faith experienced by the original disciples and to say that correspondence in our experiences verifies who that Jesus was? But this would be only to say that I have faith similar to the early disciples’ faith. Does this assume that in those original years of Christianity there was a genuine uniformity, when the present status of our historical studies of the early years of Christianity show absolutely no sense of uniformity but, rather, a vastly diverse conglomeration of different ideas and personal experiences? Further, how can we ascertain what form or content was necessary to convince those original people to convert? And why did the form or content not convince the majority of the Jews, seeing as the profession was that Jesus had fulfilled their Messianic prophecies? How am I sure—or am I—that the figure behind the “historical Jesus” in the Gospel traditions was actually Jesus and not simply one of his disciples who came up with the ideas and claims?

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If the second-century church’s idea of “apostolic succession” guaranteed only a chain of successors but not any real religious, ethical, or theological content, then that chain would be of no probative value when it comes to tying my present experience of faith to the faith of the earliest disciples. Is anyone so lacking in knowledge of the history of the religion to say that it really never changed, that “faith” was always defined and understood in exactly the same way through twenty centuries? Finally, if we are attempting to say that the Jesus who was living in that first century, as we call it, is still living today and providing his continual presence to all believers worldwide simultaneously as well as confronting other nonbelievers in the same powerful way—as “Spirit” or as “the Infinite” or even, as many lay people say, as “Jesus”—how do we make his simultaneous, ubiquitous, universal presence around the globe scientifically reasonable? People around the globe do not even breathe the same air everywhere at the same time. Children who have been taught to believe in Santa Claus, even before they reach more than seven or eight years of age, already sense the logistic problem inherent in Santa’s getting around to everyone to bring presents in just one Christmas night; not even Santa can be a simultaneous presence everywhere. Here Idealism—as we will see even in Schleiermacher and Hegel—pushes the limits for “evidence” or “corroboration” of its claims too far, ignoring that even the “mind” or “spirit” is the material brain and not something above Nature that has its own ways of violating or controlling Nature. Saying that the spiritual presence is not through the personal Jesus but through Jesus’s Spirit within the New Testament presents an insuperable problem at the outset, since the description of the essentials about that Jesus come to us by written sources; that is, they were written by other people, not by Jesus himself, in some cases, and certainly not even by eyewitnesses of the events they describe. If part of the evidence held “in custody” includes the “words” or “message” of Jesus, then the words and message cannot be altered, edited, decoded, reinterpreted, mythologized or demythologized, abridged or embellished, summarized, and so on, without violating the idea of a chain of custody. In the eyes of most recent historical and literary critics, there simply is no chain of custody or corroboration for the claims being made by Christianity, since there is yet no agreement on the precise original teachings or claims that Jesus made about himself—nor specifically what he did or what occurred to him, nor on the exact changes through which they (whatever they were) went, whether in oral tradition or written; and because each “reading” or each “reader” of the “text” or story is different, there is not a single “correct” interpretation in the sense of some uniformity. We will see this “unbroken chain of custody” or spiritual causality in the opening quotation in the following chapter. That basic concept has been

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around for a long time and in many religions. The Catholic Church adopted the idea of ”apostolic succession,” and yet all it guaranteed was a formal institutional continuity, not really any continuity of actual content of faith. The leaders of the church had freedom to change, always thinking they were improving on the text or the body of doctrine or were making it all more intelligible. Biblical, textual scholars realized this centuries ago. And neither has such chain of custody been secured by an unbroken chain of rituals, disciplines, symbols, or oral tradition; all of these have changed time and again, significantly, over the centuries. Church leaders and Christian theologians realized this also centuries ago. The most famous New Testament scholar of the twentieth century, Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976)—after his historical rigor showed that most of the content of the Gospels was insufficient for a Christology based on history— found the “Jesus” of the Gospels to be only the “presupposition” for the theology of the New Testament or the message of the kerygma (the preaching), just as the “Resurrection” was not Jesus rising from the literal grave but metaphorically “rising into the kerygma.” At one point Bultmann said that the most historically probable thing about Jesus was not some system of ethics or even theology but only his death. Other than this, Bultmann noted, was Jesus’s idea of eschatology, which itself must be stripped of its cosmic and eschatological literalness and seen rather as the reader’s or hearer’s own “end.” This existential interpretation means that the real message of Jesus was simply that people should live out of God’s resources rather than their own.54 Of course, this message could fit any era with its vagueness and lack of specifics, and there would be no worry of its being dislodged by historical data that turned up. Of course, even if the latter were not true, since there is no indication from historical data that Jesus himself intended his audience to deconstruct his eschatology in this manner, was it the case that an existential reading was more a reading from the culture in Germany during Bultmann’s lifetime? Still, Bultmann and other of his colleagues among the “dialectical” theologians who rebelled against their liberal professors after World War I remained convinced that, even though the religious history they had received was mistaken, nevertheless the “words of men” in the Scripture and in the preached message (kerygma) actually transformed into the “Words of God.” All this was well intentioned as an attempt to avoid the negative implications of actual history but presumed that simply by speaking the right words, such as “Word of God,” the connection from present to past was “corroborated,” even if they never used this word. But we are not told how the kerygma remained essentially the same so as to carry the original and only power, to reveal itself as the present evidence that has been preserved in the chain of

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custody of the church all these centuries, even though the church has made such sweeping claims as always having believed exactly the same thing. If this were true—that the church’s beliefs have remained unchanged over time—and if the Word of God were that obvious and certain, then none of the great theological debates would have ever occurred in history, much less split the church time and again over the centuries. This is like saying that—if we can return to our suspect and the gun—(1) though it remained within the police department since the beginning of the case, there is real uncertainty as to which specific gun in its custody was the actual murder weapon (since the police department holds dozens of guns in custody, many of similar calibers, etc.), and (2) though many officers had different opinions, and (3) though the most credible witnesses were selfcontradictory at many vital points of testimony, and (4) though there is no direct impartial evidence outside these pieces of evidence connecting the suspect with the alleged crime—despite all of this, we are still sure that we have the gun and that the accused was the one who shot it. So the department placed into evidence one of the guns as “corroborating” evidence, since they were pretty sure that one of the guns they have was likely the actual one used in the crime. Finally, the real question may be what kind of an effect upon the believer would have to occur before these claims would be “corroborated.” Many theologians and Christian scholars think that there would have to be a significant effect, some personal certainty, maybe even some “absolute” knowledge—and this often would indicate the “transforming” power of the source of “ground” of the religion itself. The question would then be what kind of transformation would occur and how it would affect the person . . . or would there really be any transformation at all other than a mere change in attitude? But then, with all the talk of finding certainty about religious claims—with the conviction that, in order for one to belong to the group that knows and has found this certainty and answer the person’s experience today, their experience must match that of the original disciples, hence all of our talk of some connection such as a “chain of custody” and so forth—the most basic question suddenly surfaces when we admit that everything in the world continually changes or is relative. So where would anyone get such a contradictory idea that the answer to all life for all time was actually found by one or even a very few people, which suggests that things do not really change at all but remain static so the answer can be relevant? Which would be the greater illusion? This points to the question of relativism and of real people as the proper focus of ethics. And what then is the future of religion with its Absolute? This is sufficient to introduce us to the question of our inquiry in the following four chapters. I have selected the theologians or religious philoso-

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 39

phers who are among the most innovative and influential in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), Paul Tillich (1886–1965), and Robert P. Scharlemann (1929–2013). It is difficult for me to find fault with any of these brilliant scholars. But the current state of Christian theology and therefore also of Christian ethics—what with the state of our pluralistic world, with so much at stake regarding how we learn to get along with each other—I feel compelled to examine these four insightful approaches as representative of the few possible options to give the religion and its ethics an opportunity to make its strongest case through them. Each of these great thinkers wrote prolifically, and there are hundreds and thousands of secondary works on them in many different languages, including sophisticated doctoral dissertations by the hundreds. One final consideration must be noted: Inasmuch as many if not most religions focus on what they consider to be “invisible” but real, we must see the difference that the words make. Many religious people, including these four brilliant philosopher-theologians whose work we will examine, speak of “spirit,” “soul,” “God,” “eternal,” “Absolute,” “Infinite,” and other such terms as the real, even the most real or only real, yet invisible. The German word Geist, which can be translated as “spirit,” “mind,” “intellect,” “intelligence,” “wit,” “imagination,” “genius,” “soul,” or even “morale” or “essence” or “ghost,” and so forth, obviously conveys something invisible. But few people see “ghost” as something as real as “intelligence,” and many have no idea what “soul” means. Imagination would not be placed on the same level as the reasoning power of the mind but, rather, would be regarded as something less restricted or orderly or common. The question is whether Geist is inherent in all human existence or has to be implanted within it from outside powers. If we say—as Hegel does in his lectures on philosophical ethics—that reason or mind and Nature must be interpenetrated so that reason or mind shapes and controls Nature, then it sounds as if we are speaking of reason, mind, or spirit, not a part of Nature or the empirical world. Perhaps Plato was so convinced. But science today suggests that mind is the function of a person’s physical brain, and that surely is as much a part of Nature as a tree or a stone or a frog. The optional word “soul” (psyche) has been even more mysterious, since Plato conceived it to be an eternal substance that was not material, that would leave the body of the deceased, retreat to the River Lethe, forgetting all of its past life, and be provided the opportunity to select a new body and role in which to be implanted. This was reincarnation of the eternal soul. Many lay Christians still think they have such a soul in them, although not to be reincarnated but to live forever in heaven with Christ, without realizing that the

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word never assured such a thing at all, especially since the mind or intellect or spirit is a function of different lobes of the very physical brain and once the brain is dead there is never again any consciousness. The brain is the physical organ in which thoughts, emotions, and calculations occur; it is the organ that stores data within its different lobes and that can make connections within its different parts to retrieve the data voluntarily or involuntarily, data that comes not only from the short life span of that particular body but that is also implanted in the genetic code over prior generations, as Pinker notes.55 The opposite kind of confusion takes place in language when people speak of the “heart” as the organ of emotions and love, as if it is that organ in the chest. And we see icons of Jesus’s “Sacred Heart” in the middle of his physical chest. But the heart is a physical pump absolutely vital to keeping the body alive, since the heart pumps blood throughout the body, sustaining every organ, including the brain, while emotions such as love come strictly from the brain rather than from the heart. I would not even mention this except for the fact that all four of the following religious geniuses we will examine continued to speak of Geist or “Mind” or “Reason” as well as of the “Absolute,” “Infinity in the finite,” and other similar terms, often intentionally not clarifying whether they are speaking of what a single human inherently possesses or of what God gives extra to this person, or not clarifying whether God is thereby identified with the person so that humans are God. If some authors speak of spirit as the common possession but Spirit (capitalized) as the divine capacity of that, the water is only muddied further. On the other hand, all of this is to say that any religious view continuing to speak of “spirit” or “mind” as if it were something other than the functions of the brain is simply a carryover from the prescientific age—as Foucault called it, “the metaphysics of infinity” or the absolute. It is hard not to project a gross diagram of the idea of Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere” in which the Giant or Ultimate mind forms everything into concentric circles as it closes in on itself. To a degree all four of the people we examine—though among the most brilliant of Christian thinkers of the past two centuries—rely on this lingering form of Idealism to determine their results, and the ethics they might have felt is eclipsed by God simply moving and doing everything, with humans absolutely responsible for nothing. But then we are not examining their ethics but their Christology to see if they really have a valid, nonhistorical way of corroborating the central claim about Jesus. If they do, and if Jesus is thereby corroborated to be the Son of God, then obviously whatever ethics attach to Jesus should be the ethics for everyone; but this is true only if Jesus is certainly the Son of God. The reader will have to see where this Idealism leads—whether it corroborates a

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 41

Christology from which universal ethics flows and dictates a secondary or unimportant status to Nature, the empirical cosmos, and our fellow humans or it redefines the Absolute as universally inclusive. Then the reader can decide how this determines the outcome. I must honestly and fairly examine the systems of these four great thinkers but make no pretense of understanding everything they thought. I am receptive to suggestions for better understanding them. Certainly I am not suggesting a better answer to the problem that they dealt with. But I am dealing with a different problem not specifically addressed by them: I am dealing with their attempts to “corroborate” the claims of the Christian faith and thereby establish their Christian faith as s ground for ethics while avoiding negative historical data. They were persuaded that the basic Christian claim about Christ was certain, as was also the ethics of Christianity. I hope to provide sufficient information for any reader to see what they are saying, since I think it is important, and the results do show some way forward—though perhaps not in the way the reader would expect. In that respect, it would not be different from my project of beginning this long analysis with certain expectations and finding the result considerably different. In any case, like Tillich said, one must try to find whatever language necessary to address current problems, and this may require new explorations into areas in which a religion with its claims and special terminology has lost much of its former meaning. NOTES 1.  It is commonly assumed that all religions possess a very similar ethical code or system, that all include prohibitions against killing, stealing, adultery, and bearing false witness in legal proceedings. But even these few elements are qualified in quite different ways within different religious codes, where some religions approve of the killing of humans in certain situations while others do not, where some do not count unethical certain forms of acquiring someone else’s property without permission of the owner or do not count having multiple wives as adultery, and so forth. The greatest disparities between religions are created from their claims to a unique, absolute, metaphysical base. 2.  Martin Luther King Jr. emphasized that even facially neutral laws can be unlawful in the way they are applied. The stop-and-frisk law—which with the Terry v. Ohio (1968) decision began to require only a reasonable suspicion that the person had committed a felony or was armed as opposed to the “probable cause” that had earlier been required—unleashed racial profiling in New York City for years, resulting in the disproportionate incarceration of African American men. 3.  One of the most straightforward books emphasizing the indefinite ramifications on others from our ethical decisions remains H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible

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Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy, intro. James F. Gustafson, fore. William Schweiker (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1999).  4. See Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion?   5.  First published in German in 1927, Freud’s Future of an Illusion appeared in English in 1928 (trans. W. D. Robson-Scott [London: Hogarth Press]).   6.  As early as the 1970s, Leonard Silk and David Vogel wrote that leaders of corporate boards see universities, the media, and legislators as enemies and detractors of capitalism and that some of the Corporate board members stated that not all citizens should be allowed to vote. Ethics and Profits: The Crisis of Confidence in American Business (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976).   7.  Is it only a discriminatory preferentialism that enables some Christian Supreme Court justices to assert that the Ten Commandments came from the one true, generic God for all people? See the comments of two justices in the oral arguments for Van Orden v. Perry, N. 03-1500 (2005).   8.  Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls were two brilliant legal philosophers who each emphasized that law must be based on morality—though they searched for morality in different ways. Compare A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993) by Rawls (both published New York: Columbia University Press) with Dworkin’s Religion Without God (2013), Freedom’s Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution (1996), Law’s Empire (1986), A Matter of Principle (1985), and Taking Rights Seriously (1977) (all published Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Both Rawls and Dworkin realized that, while law must be established on morality or ethics, ethics must have independence—or be “freestanding”—rather than be based on metaphysics, on a belief in God, or on a comprehensive schema of a limited and exclusive association.   9.  Each succeeding religion put its own unique twist on many principles, stories, and norms found in its predecessor, which enabled the successive religion to embrace the predecessor to a degree but also to contradict the predecessor by its own unique interpretation. Stories in the Jewish scriptures were twisted by both authors of the Christian scriptures and of the Qu’ran. Saint Paul cannot decide whether all Jews are lost or all Jews will be “saved,” and the Qu’ran cannot decide whether Jews and Christians are also “people of the book” or “infidels.” 10.  Religions often make finer distinctions than simply absolute versus relative, and many things regarded as “sacred” are approached with the same unquestioning mentality as if they were absolute. 11. Martin Kähler, Der sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblische Christus: Vortrag auf der Wupperthaler Pastoralkonferenz (Leipzig: A. Deichert, 1892). 12.  Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Touchstone Book, 1992). 13.  Fichte, unlike Hegel, saw consciousness not as dependent upon something else outside of itself but as a growing awareness of the other that began with a feeling, then a sensation, then an intuition of an object and finally the recognition of another human being, another consciousness. So the mind arrived at the “I”—though by con-

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 43

ceiving of itself within a social consciousness or network of phenomena, including one’s moral awareness. 14.  Fichte obviously moved beyond the traditional Christian faith when he claimed that “the moral order is itself ‘God’ and we neither need nor could grasp any other.” Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Über den Grund unsers Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung” (“On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World Governance”) (Germany, 1798). 15.  This was not a new way of doing theology. Even Neoplatonist Saint Augustine was continually providing new symbolical and allegorical meanings to the ancient tradition while insisting that this was allowable so long as one still believed their historical reality. Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1972), 535 and 467. 16. We will see that Schleiermacher’s Christian Faith was, by his intention, a “dogmatic theology” and a subcategory of “historical theology.” Yet there is no question that his most-novel interpretations of the dogma were due to his use of “philosophical theology” and that, when he said that the entirety was dependent on the Christian communion to which people voluntarily elect to belong, he was “borrowing” from “Ethics.” Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, Eng. trans. of 2nd German ed., ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1960), 7th ed. originally published in German as Der christliche Glaube: Nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1960). See Schleiermacher’s Brief Outline on the Study of Theology, trans., intro, and notes Terrence N. Tice (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1960). 17.  For more details on Jefferson’s position, see my forthcoming work Reconciling Opposites: Religious Freedom and the Contractual Ethics of a Democratic Society, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press-Fortress Academic), 2022 18.  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, (New York: Vintage Books), 1994. 19. Foucault, Order of Things, especially chapter 7. 20.  John Rawls, Political Liberalism, John Dewey Essays in Philosophy, no. 4, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) and John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971). 21.  See my forthcoming “Reconciling Opposites.” 22.  I discuss Kant further in Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion? Nietzsche elaborates on the camel, lion, and child as three stages of the metamorphosis of a person’s spirit. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), 103–439. 23.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. F. Max Müller (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966). 24. Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 2000). 25.  Kant admits that the “source” of human moral concern cannot be located or ascertained other than by the fact that each person, as a rational being, counts them-

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selves “as belonging to the intelligible world, and solely qua efficient cause belonging to the intelligible world does he give to his causality the name of ‘will,’” from which the person presupposes “freedom.” Kant is persuaded that the laws of the intelligible world are as self-evident as are the laws of the sensible world. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and analysis H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 121, 126–28. In his fuller Critique of Practical Reason, Kant names the moral power “God” (in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 42, Kant: The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason and Other Ethical Treatises; The Critique of Judgement, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952], 289–361. 26.  John Rawls’s “political” system of justice rather than a “metaphysical” one is obviously a legal system that Carl Friedrich intentionally links to Kant’s ethical approach. 27. Kant, Groundwork, 61–64. 28. Kant, Groundwork, 95–102. 29.  Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Philosophy of Kant: Immanuel Kant’s Moral and Political Writings, ed. and intro. Carl J. Friedrich, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: The Modern Library/Random House, 1949). 30. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 345. 31.  Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. and intro. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, with new essay “The Ethical Significance of Kant’s Religion” by John R. Silber (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960). See book 4 on true religion versus pseudoservice. 32.  Many elements are far too Christian to be acceptable to non-Christians—for example, Kant’s idea of “radical evil,” with all its different divisions, including a willfulness to adopt a maxim of self-love rather than the correct maxim that could become universal (Kant, Religion within the Limits, 15–41). But also objectionable would be Kant’s insistence that God judges us by seeing our hearts even if we are always in process and never completely moral, such that God counts this person who has a “good will” as if they had finished perfecting themselves (“a completed whole”) at whatever stage of life they happens to die (61, 71), and this “grace” has a “surplus” (70) to it in the sense that the person is even forgiven of the evil they did prior to their change of heart. That is, any good that the person does afterward only meets their duty and has no “surplus” to apply to their prior life, and so that is where, again, God can see into the person’s heart, even if their works began from an evil state. 33. Kant, Religion within the Limits, 67–68. The symbol of Jesus’s Crucifixion is converted to the individual’s “death of the old man” or “crucifying of the flesh” that the “new man undertakes in the disposition of the Son of God, that is, merely for the sake of the good, though really they are due as punishments to another, namely to the old man (for the old man is indeed morally another).” 34. Kant, Religion within the Limits, 40: Kant said that, even if “some supernatural cooperation may be necessary to his becoming good, . . . man must first make himself worthy to receive it and must lay hold of this aid (which is no small matter)”; furthermore, he said, the requirement that he first make himself worthy was a total offense

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The Problem: Religions’ “Corroboration” or “Freestanding” Principles? 45

to Lutheran Christianity. Further, regarding the origin of evil, Kant insisted that evil cannot be traced back in time to some preceding state (35–36). Moral example or “archetype” can be found only within oneself, not in some person “supernaturally begotten,” since that miraculous element totally eliminates any possible emulation (57). 35. Kant, Religion within the Limits, especially 40. 36.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, selected, trans., intro., pref., and notes Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), 463–563. 37.  See Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion? In this work my basic theme is the metaphysical burdens born in what Nietzsche’s called the “camel” stage, the first of the three stages of a person’s maturity toward autonomy. 38.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans., ed., commentary Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), 202–203, 207–208. Nietzsche opposed Kant for speaking of this as a new “faculty” and belittled Kant’s “categorical imperative.” 39.  Although Nietzsche says he never complained of his illnesses, he nevertheless details in Ecce Homo how he believed the mind to be affected by the body, including by diet and activity. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans., ed., commentary Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), 656–791. 40. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 480. 41. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 139. 42. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 139. 43.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom, trans. Thomas Common, poetry Paul V. Cohn and Maude D. Petre (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1960), 167. 44. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 81–100. 45. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 480. 46. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 307. 47. This is one of Nietzsche’s major theses in The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, selected, trans., intro., pref., and notes Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), 565–656. Notably, Nietzsche’s father—of whom he spoke dearly and who died early—uniquely, had been a Lutheran pastor, totally Pauline. 48. Kant, Groundwork, 123. 49. Kaufmann, Nietzsche, chapters 7–8. 50. These elements especially within Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit are the focus of Molly Farneth, Hegel’s Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of Reconciliation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 51.  Albert Schweitzer, The Philosophy of Civilization, pts. 1 and 2, trans. C. T. Campion (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1960), 309. 52. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 53. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 71–75. 54. Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith and Erminie Huntress Lantero (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958); Rudolf Bult-

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mann, Theology of the New Testament, vols. 1 and 2, trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955); Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology: The Presence of Eternity; The Gifford Lectures (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962); and Rudolf Bultmann [et al.], Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961). 55.  Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). See also Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006).

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Chapter Two

The Christ of Faith as “Awakened” Consciousness?

Friedrich Schleiermacher presents his picture of the connection between believers past and present is his profound dogmatic system, The Christian Faith: In this corporate life which goes back to the influence of Jesus, redemption is effected by Him through the communication of His sinless perfection . . . [and] that perfection was its own work, so that it is just as possible that in some persons the full consciousness of sin and the longing which goes with it are first aroused by means of that recognition, as that in others they are already present . . . If, however, the faith of the later generations, and consequently of our own, is to be the same as the original one and not a different faith—and in the latter case, not only would the unity of the Christian Church be imperiled, but also all references to the original testimonies of the faith—then it must still be possible to have the same experiences . . . But there is given to us, instead of His personal influence, only that of His fellowship, in so far as even the picture of Him which is found in the Bible also originated in the community and is perpetuated in it.1

But note the contrast with another of Schleiermacher’s explanations: “That the Redeemer should be entirely free from all sinfulness is no objection at all to the complete identity of human nature in Him and others, for we have already laid down that sin is so little an essential part of the being of man that we can never regard it as anything else than a disturbance of nature.”2 RELIGIONS’ CLAIMS OF HISTORICAL UNIQUENESS Were the grand hyperbolic religious myths ignored in favor of emphasizing human relations, many religions might still refuse the opportunity to rethink 47

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their self-definition, identity, or status. Or they would be insulted that religion had been “reduced” to morality. They might feel threatened that such a position would imply that there was nothing any longer unique about their religion. Or they might even go so far as to object that this incorrectly implies that religion itself is “natural,” that “religious faith” is quite uniform in its essentials, that religion has been reduced to mere humanism, that disbelief is as good as faith, that God is thereby limited to the lowest common denominator as some vague Providence or other form totally unworthy of God, and so everything dissolves into inchoate, incestuous, anthropocentric relativism. Christianity’s uniqueness was not that it alone believed in a single god. Islam had that in Allah. Nor was it that only Christianity had a single god that occasionally intervened in human history. Judaism had that in Yahweh. Nor was Christianity’s uniqueness its belief in a god that actually became incarnate as a human to bring healing, salvation, or restoration to humanity and creation. Hinduism had that in Vishnu. Nor was it that Christianity alone had a significant ethics. Jainism, Confucianism, and Buddhism all had that. Rather, Christianity’s uniqueness was twofold: (1) it believed that ultimate healing, salvation, or redemption, including life after death, was accomplished specifically and only in Jesus of Nazareth and (2) that this was the “fulfillment” of the Jewish hope for a “Messiah” who would bring it about, now identified with that Jesus of Nazareth. Until the eighteenth century the “proof” of this claim was also twofold: Jesus was the Messiah, Christ, or Son of God because (1) he fulfilled the Jewish Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament or Jewish Scriptures and (2) he performed miracles.3 Yet since the late eighteenth century the claims have lost credence among even biblical scholars and theologians with the rise of historical-critical approaches to the Bible and because the majority of Jews for the past two millennia have rejected Jesus as their Messiah.4 The historical uniqueness that the church claimed about Jesus appears to require historical details or verification as it would for any figure of the past thought to have been quite unique. The usual approach would be to begin with what the people around the individual thought and what the individual and his contemporaries recorded about his words and deeds so as to see if these were unique vis-à-vis his own background or situation in life. This would include responses or data provided from those who had become disciples as well as those who had rejected him and the claims. Even then, since each individual is unique, mere uniqueness itself is never sufficient to ground a religion. Gautama was claimed to be the “Buddha,” the “Awakened One,” who, because of his awakening, could free all people from their suffering and prospect of rebirth. It was soon claimed that he was not just a “bodhisattva”

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The Christ of Faith as “Awakened” Consciousness? 49

but actually the “Buddha,” who had entered Nirvana. Those are fairly extraordinary if not metaphysical claims. This parallels the claims made about Jesus, except that the idea that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah grew into the claim that Jesus was not just a messenger or “anointed” of God, which “Messiah” means, but actually was the “Son of God,” who came from heaven, died for humanity’s sins, was raised from death, and returned to heaven. It took a longer time for some of Buddha’s disciples to begin to think of Gautama as “God” than it did for Jesus’s disciples to proclaim his divinity—especially in light of the Theravādan tradition, in which Gautama said the question of “God” was none of his business, since he was concerned primarily with human suffering. The claims made were exceptional not merely because they regarded the “dispositions” of Gautama or Jesus, and neither were the claims built only around the personality, character, leadership quality, dignity, “inner being,” or “maxim” of each leader. Nor were the claims only about the truth of the ideas they uttered that stand on their own once uttered and so show how brilliant both men were. Instead, the claims made of each were considered to be actual events within human history, even if tinged with the supranatural or metaphysical. It was this actual conflation of the historical and supranatural in the claims that presented the uniqueness but also, centuries later, the problems. None of the disciples of either man was treating these claims as mere “stories,” even if the claims were not committed to writing for sixty years after Jesus’s death or five hundred to six hundred years after Buddha’s death.5 The narratives depicted both Jesus and Gautama as supreme teacher, mediator, perfect example, savior, and, after a passage of time, having divine qualities, as actual embodiments of the Ideal, both example and archetype, and the most “compassionate” or loving Savior. Neither the hellenistic and Roman culture nor the Indian culture in which these conflated claims were made saw the claims as particularly unique, since these cultures supplied numerous anthropomorphized or incarnated gods as well as numerous heroes who were half-human and half-divine. So the historical-supernatural claims were not yet recognized as unscientific or incredible. They were merely exceptional but very believable in those ancient times. In this variety of capacities, examples of historical events were cited as proof of divinity rather than simply irrational claims spun out of a single idea or logic. As time passed, the pictures of each religion’s founder became more and more hyperbolic, legendary, supranatural, and mythical, after which even the mothers of both Gautama and Jesus as well as leading disciples were then claimed to have miraculous powers or mystical insights. This is characteristic of the historical development of images of religious founders, families, and appointed successors in ancient times.

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However, if we are not willing merely to have faith in someone else’s faith, which might be simply illusion, fantasy, or gullibility, then we must justify the claims. Anybody considering becoming a disciple of the founder or deity of a religion always needed some reasonable convincing. That is still true unless the religious allegiance is just passed down in a family as a part of unquestioned identity. Today the critical historian would have to examine all the possible early records that revealed any acceptance of any believer’s claims, as well as records of those who had rejected those claims, in order make a fair assessment of the Christian claim. Of course, given the development of modern science, most critical historians today do not spend time trying to weigh historical claims so entwined in myth and supranatural details. For those still open to the possibility of a historical person being discovered to be a supranatural being or even the ultimate being or power in our universe, the problem with trying to ascertain the actual ancient history is that the main records of Jesus’s or Gautama’s interactions with other people came from the much later disciples in both cases, far removed from the cited events and founders of the religions. Further, there is not one single unified picture of either person but, rather, a plethora of conflicting images. There are neither early reports from definite eyewitnesses to the alleged events nor from objective historians—and even editors such as, in the Christian case, the Gospel writer or editor “Luke” said his purpose was to assure believers that they were right. This was not an unbiased approach to reconstructing the history. If we now focus more specifically only on the development of Christian thought, by the mid-eighteenth century the posthumous work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) and writings (especially Emile) of JeanJacques Rousseau (1712–1778) had diluted the idea of any need for or validity of a divine “revelation.” Johann Semler (1725–1791) marked a turning point in biblical theology from the classical to modern as he developed a critical-historical methodology.6 By the end of the eighteenth century, theology had been divided between the rationalists and the supernaturalists.7 Many biblical scholars and Christian theologians knew that the Bible no longer provided the “certainty” behind faith, that historical details in the Gospels were quite varied and in some cases hopelessly contradictory, fragmentary traditions, coming from several if not many decades after Jesus had been crucified, and that it was doubtful any of the canonical Gospels had actually been put together either by an eyewitness to Jesus’s history or even by one of Jesus’s apostles.8 Biblical scholars tended to reinterpret the teachings of Jesus, first to rationalize the accounts, and later to demythologize, since they had realized how much myth was embedded in the Gospels. After Fichte, Hegel provided a speculative idealism that saw the Absolute as actually shaping history, but Kierkegaard protested that there is nothing of a historical nature

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that can prove Jesus is divine. One either believes he was divine or does not, which has nothing to do with history or his humanity. The “Christ of faith” versus the “Jesus of history” groups went their separate directions, while lay people knew almost nothing of the split or the issues. Subsequently, some scholars focused entirely on the church’s message about Christ, hoping to find some eternally valid existential truth within their “faith,” while occasional scholars still tried to reconstruct the real “historical Jesus,” neither group admitting the lack of vital connection to validate the claim. By the time Albert Schweitzer published his landmark work at the beginning of the twentieth century—analyzing almost two hundred years of attempts to construct this “historical Jesus,” which he concluded gave people a choice only between either “radical skepticism” or “thorough-going eschatology”9—the split between scripture scholars and Christian theologians had widened even further.10 Two later movements or groups, one at midcentury and then the Jesus Seminar in the latter third of the twentieth century, used broader, cross-disciplinary approaches to try to establish the history. But while some lay people found it refreshing, many theologians and lay people did not find these to confirm what they had been taught or what they thought the church should represent. According to my analysis of the two most recent influential attempts to ascertain and establish this historical uniqueness in Will Humanity Survive Religion?—those by John Dominic Crossan and Wolfhart Pannenberg—I find that Crossan, a biblical historian, detailed the earliest traditions about Jesus but left any theological decision up to the church, although he redefined “Incarnation” to make it a general human possibility for anyone opposing systemic injustice. Pannenberg, I find, approaching it as a theologian, saw the history in a different way, establishing the “Resurrection” as the proleptic, decisive event that showed and retroactively made Jesus the “Son of God,” and yet he was unable to make the “event” of the Resurrection in any way intelligible or verifiable before the end of history.11 These have been among the most erudite, systematic, and courageous scholars in their respective fields so far in the early twenty-first century who were attempting to ground the conflated historical-mythological claims about Christ by a historical approach. As I illustrated by already, using the example of Gautama, called the Buddha, the inadequacy of confirming the historical elements of the conflated claims is not a problem unique to Christianity, and the believers’ unconvincing efforts are not their fault. We showed in that earlier study that the historical-metaphysical claims made by many if not all religions seem far removed from any historical verification because the claims are invariably mixed with mythology, the supranatural, the invisible Absolute.

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Pannenberg, however, warned theologians that any attempt to justify Christian claims without a historical grounding would always end up a mere “faith in faith,” indistinguishable from illusion or wishful thinking that lacks substance. If that is the case, either option is fraught with built-in super-problems. Prior to that, however, by the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century philosophical Idealism had taken a strong hold among some of Christianity’s most brilliant theologians, who, seeing the negative effect of historical criticism, attempted to find certainty elsewhere—in “faith” itself or “spirit”—that would mitigate the Scriptures’ failure to provide historical certainty. This “Christ of faith” versus the “Jesus of history” split communions and scholars, as some found their calling in ascertaining the most truly objective history that would be certain and never improved, while others took refuge in emphasizing that personal faith or “spirit,” unlike historical facts, required commitment and provided certainty within itself without historical data. The recurrent problem for any historical pursuit was that there is not simply one uniform picture of the originating events or of that Jesus, and historical methodology in the present provides no agreed-upon criteria by which to provide the certainty sought. So the historian is left having to either make a theological decision or leave it up to the “authority” of the church to decide what is true or what is “God’s Word.” Here Lessing’s (1729–1781) “ugly ditch” between historically contingent events and eternal truths remains obvious. Many historians of the New Testament saw the handwriting on the wall, the tentative nature of any results that their study could reach, while others simply avoided critical studies. On the other hand, not all of theology’s attempts to preempt any possible negative results from historical method were convincing either. For example, by the middle of the twentieth century Rudolf Bultmann had insisted by his reading of R. G. Collingwood that historical focus, analysis, and reconstruction depend on subjective decisions that are as relative as faith is. But no one read this to mean that the previous certainty found in the ancient unreflected, literal use of the Bible was thereby restored. To this Bultmann had to supplement with an existential interpretation of all the mythology, which largely reduced the focus from historical events to one’s hearing the actual preached message. Paul Tillich’s insistence against literalism—emphasizing that everything we say about “God” is only symbolical (except for the statement that “everything we say about ‘God’ is symbolical”)—attempted to correlate the symbol with concepts but ended up appearing to be a circumlocution to find literal meaning of some kind, even if not from the current public meaning of the actual words used (for example, that the questioning person is already accepted and standing within the answer sought). Ian Ramsey had written about

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religious language having “models” and “qualifiers,” the latter of which, when used by religion, often stretched the “model” to the point of the “penny dropping” or the “ice melting,” in which one saw the real meaning, but the real meaning has to be more than mere tautology.12 Wolfhart Pannenberg tried to avoid the sting of being accused of obfuscation by referring to the “Resurrection” of Christ as a “spiritual body” as a “metaphor” or an “absolute metaphor” or “paradox” whose meaning we will not know until the end of the world. By speaking of religious language as being “doxological” (or only worship language), and so just naturally equivocal rather than merely poetic, the nature of the event was still not solved. To ground the claims in an extensive ontology but in which ontology, then, in sketching a Christology one changes the ontological structures by inserting “paradox,” as Tillich does, is to presuppose the superiority of one single religion’s nonrational or mythical claims. Likewise, grounding claims on some nonpublic idea of “reason” would fight an uphill battle to gain recognition and acceptance. Any religion can manipulate words, ontologies, or reason in any number of ways. No religion, however, convinces people to convert to it before they weigh the historical claims or claims that it is making about the reality of its founder or founding principles. They are not asked first to make exemptions for those particular claims since they are of a special kind, based on faith or worship or a different type of “reason” but are nevertheless somehow objectively true by common reasonable and linguistic standards. Theological Idealism, which dominated the nineteenth century, still retained its hold through Hegel, so leading twentieth-century theology utilized Hegel, tweaking his interpretations by existentialist insertions or phenomenology and linguistic analysis, still in the hope that a different process of examination could justify the Christian claim about Jesus even without having to substantiate many particular historical details about any supposed Jesus behind the biblical picture of Jesus. Perhaps one could even insist that there simply is no figure behind that biblical figure and focus only on the inherent power of words to create or instantiate that of which they name. If it could thereby substantiate the truth of the claim that “Jesus” was “Christ” without having to use not particularly convincing historical evidence, then whatever ethics derived from Jesus might be unquestionable. This is a significant refocusing, but it is the history of the development taking place within the four scholars that I propose to present in this study. This twofold uniqueness claimed for Jesus, however, is professed to be historical in nature. Unless one wants to trade this uniqueness for something else, it remains and must in some way be involved in ascertaining any “truth” about Christianity or significance to the Jesus called the Messiah or Christ rather than simply imagining what the meaning of the claim might be. The

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four brilliant scholars we examine in this study saw the meaning rather than the factual embodiment of the claims as their focus, though they left the impression that in some way there was a factual basis behind the claims as they continued to find the “truth” in words attributed to Jesus or in the alleged transforming or shaping power attributed to the Spirit of Christ. It became a very complex issue. The necessity that one’s present experience as a Christian be the same as those original disciples is made explicit in the quotation above by Schleiermacher. That was the position the church took throughout the years—that the experience of redemption had to be the same through the ages. Schleiermacher defined Christianity’s primary claims as “redemption in Jesus of Nazareth,” and so Schleiermacher embraced the first element. However, that only “corroborates” the faith experience that the original disciples had by a person’s present faith experience, not the truth of the claims to which that faith was responding. It is the latter that history could not prove, not merely some similarity in the preaching of the church or in responses to or results of that preaching through the ages. Further, Schleiermacher did not embrace the second element of the Messianic identification of Jesus meeting the expectation of Judaism or even having any necessary connection with Judaism. He interpreted the whole of the Messianic interpretation as merely the misguided Jewish expectation of a restoration of a theocracy. In contrast, Schleiermacher was persuaded that Jesus correctly spiritualized that completely. If the emphasis is upon the “meaning” of claims rather than on their facticity, then it would have seemed that Schleiermacher should have given the Jewish meaning of its own Messianic claims more weight. By far the majority of Jews necessarily rejected Jesus’s individual interpretation of their faith. That meant nothing to Schleiermacher, who was persuaded that no religion just evolves into another religion and that Judaism was in no way the “forerunner” of Christianity13; he was sure that only the “inner” element within Jesus was the meaning of his uniqueness, nothing external. But such a division of internal and external cannot determine which “ideas” of his would therefore be valid and which invalid, since ideas are held in the “inner” self or mind, but with most coming from external sources and not limiting themselves to expressing merely one’s self-conception. Even in his lecture on the Life of Jesus Schleiermacher hypothetically admitted that in order to do history honestly one must be willing to acknowledge that any individual is not only unique but also very shaped by their own particular culture. But the most obvious claims about Jesus—that he was the fulfillment of the Jewish hopes for a Messiah—Schleiermacher refused to see as important, almost as insignificant as reciting what Jesus ate for breakfast or

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when he went to a particular little town. These would be only “chronicles,” like the first three Gospels. Therefore the only answer for Schleiermacher was to first decide what comprises “religion” in general and then see if that understanding can avoid the external or historical challenges to the church’s claim. He had learned from Fichte that this requires a “system” organized around a central principle that everything is related to, completely and without gaps. That organizing principle establishing the relationship between knowing, feeling, and doing, Scharlemann observed, was “the life process as one in which the self remains within itself or goes out from itself.”14 The unity achieved between knowing, feeling, and doing “is the essence of the subject itself” and the “common foundation” of these three forms of consciousness.15 One could say that it was the life process of abiding-within-itself and its passing-beyond-itself that—as the “essence” of all subjects by which the individual or uniqueness of each is disclosed—the unique element in the person of Jesus in fact assumed into its power all those in any age who regarded themselves as his disciples. At least that was Schleiermacher’s approach. It is one form by which he attempted to “corroborate” the claim of Christianity not through historical details, since they could dislodge the claim, but, rather, through the believer’s present experience of having their God-consciousness “awakened” by this radiating power of that Jesus, which is allegedly still spiritually effective through the church’s preaching from the Bible. Did Schleiermacher think this escaped contingent subjectivity, or was objectively factual by any and all preaching in all Christian churches? By what evidence would this claim be validated? On the other hand, by any kind of normal historical method religions’ historical claims about their most important historical-metaphysical events simply remain unsubstantiated or unverified and actually unverifiable. Old dogma about “revelation,” “inspiration,” or other equivalent supernatural elements is often surreptitiously slipped back into otherwise-critical approaches. Or one begins with a presupposition that, if the present faith is not to be quite different from the “original” faith, then “it must still be possible to have the very same experiences” that the first disciples of Jesus had, as Schleiermacher insists in the quotation at the start of this chapter. The only reason it “must be” is so a person to call themselves a “Christian,” supported by the testimony of the original disciples and the continuity of the church. But we earlier mentioned the concept of chain of custody or apostolic succession, noting that apostolic succession did not supply probative evidence of unchanging content, whereas a chain of custody demands very specific content so probative that it actually corroborates other kinds of probative evidence that by themselves

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were insufficient. Otherwise, “must” is just wishful thinking. Yet when it came to a philosophical ethics Schleiermacher was sure that to replicate an experience that had occurred hundreds of years prior was neither possible nor desirable, which shows the completely different presuppositions he carried in each discipline. Our question here is simply whether the Christian faith’s essential (i.e., Christological) claims that cannot—even in their most basic and simplest form—be verified by any legitimate historical method can somehow be “corroborated” by the believer’s common experience of faith, which therefore might ground the religion’s ethics as universally valid after all. It would show not only that a common human experience today of the form of one’s consciousness can be credible and universally possible but also that it traces its origin back to the founder of the religion, thus corroborating the history that historians could not prove through mere historical analysis and data. More than that, to be beneficial in our globally integrated world today, it would also need to support mutual autonomy as a basis for true morality while documenting its chain of custody of this unique power or consciousness, such that the experience of the latter would not be regarded as sheer authoritarianism, a mere fluke, or individual innovation by a person today. The adherents of the religion still might object to any notion that the principles could be or need to be divorced from that religious-historical particularity and therefore be “freestanding” in order to be capable of being a universal ethic. This “freestanding” criterion must also be a part of our inquiry, unless we will settle for religions fighting each other over whose ethic is most valid, and so it should inform our social contract in our pluralistic world. However, even if we were to agree that such an incredible replication can occur as a religious experience that “corroborates” the experience of the earliest disciples, that is not the real corroboration needed, since in itself it would prove nothing about Jesus and what is claimed for him. The historical failure was not historians’ inability to ascertain what the early disciples claimed as their “faith” but, rather, their inability to ascertain whether what was claimed was actually true or simply their imagination or wishful thinking or even whether or not the claim was at all verifiable. As the beginning quotation shows, this corroborating connection through the believer’s present experience of faith being precisely the “same” as the consciousness of the original disciples of Christ was extremely important to Friedrich Schleiermacher. But in his hermeneutic writings and his Life of Jesus lectures as well as his Soliloquies, he was not content to simply have an “objective” picture of either the first disciples’ experience or an objective picture of the author; instead, he wanted a full psychological profile of the author, by which he could understand the author better than the author under-

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stood himself. This must apply to the authors of the sacred documents and the claims they made about Jesus, but Schleiermacher is not assessing Jesus’s alleged claims to decide which is truth, since the sacredness and authority of the Scriptures is assumed by him.16 SCHLEIERMACHER’S “FEELING OF TOTALITY”: NO NEED TO “CORROBORATE” Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834)—often referred to as the “father of modern theology,”17 a contemporary of Beethoven’s, a child of the Enlightenment, just as Kant—hoped to reconcile autonomous rationalism with his traditional Pietistic heritage (Moravian Brethren), which could be quite authoritarian or heteronomous. He attempted this within the era and powerful influence of Romanticism.18 He combined (1) Pietism, insisting that religion is primarily a personal “awakening” experience rather than a doctrine or moral standard, (2) rationalism, by subjecting ideas and doctrines of religion to the contemporary criticisms of philosophy and science of his day, and (3) Romanticism, in his inclusiveness, his view of individual uniqueness, of imagination, of the sense of the Totality, and his sense of unity in diversity. Schleiermacher very early understood most of the “burdens” of religion that I covered in my earlier book on religions’ divisive absolutes. In his autobiography Schleiermacher says that during his teen years, as he was being educated in the Moravian Brethren schools of Niesky and Barby, he and his peers continually strained to have some “supernatural experience” or “intercourse with Jesus”—but to no avail. In fact, by age eleven the young Schleiermacher had been bothered by the doctrine of eternal rewards and punishments and could not understand any relationship between them and the sufferings of Christ, which were presupposed as a substitute. During that same year, 1787, he wrote of his Christological doubts to his pastor father: “I cannot believe that he who called himself the Son of man was the true, eternal God. I cannot believe that his death was a vicarious atonement because he never expressly said so Himself; and I cannot believe it to have been necessary, because God, who evidently did not create man for perfection but for the pursuit of it, cannot possibly intend to punish them eternally, because they have not attained it.”19 One problem remained, however, which was the central claim about Jesus, which merged history with myth, though Schleiermacher did not identify it in these terms. As he matured, he discovered the possibility of reading new meanings from these symbols that his youthfulness had found so objectionable, and he tried to combine all three elements of rationalism, Romanticism,

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and Pietism in his understanding of the Christian claims and power. It is that central claim about Jesus in which the church had combined history with myth that caused Schleiermacher’s explanation to remain unconvincing to D. F. Strauss and many others later—but we must not get ahead of ourselves. Schleiermacher pursued his theological method with the presupposition that any conversion was totally wrought by the power of the absolutely potent God-consciousness of that Jesus, either personally present or later empowered in the Spiritual Presence in history. This is the primary form of “corroboration” that Schleiermacher sought, as is evident from the beginning quotation above. It assumes that Jesus is somehow still “alive” or equal to the Spirit (without Jesus’s personal presence) through the Christian community’s preaching and its scriptures, none of which is self-evident. Schleiermacher alternatively attempted to “corroborate” the claim about Jesus by replacing the lost “certainty” with the creation of a whole system. By “system” he meant that the entire field of study would be abstractly organized around a basic principle and related to every aspect of life or being and subcategories that touched it. It would have to be intelligible and complete, having no inner contradictions and no glaring gaps. Yet the “life” processes he was concerned with in his ethics were always “moving” and changing, never static, while in his theology the only life force that counts is the “spiritual,” and the “Godconsciousness” seems always identical and unchanging. Even though Schleiermacher had a philosophical ethical system a religious ethic, and a dogmatic or theological system, I am not interested in asking whether the first is a possible ground for ethics today. Of course it is—though it is very dated. My question is narrower: precisely, can a religion whose absolute metaphysical claims cannot be verified or even intelligible in some way validate its central claim so that the religion could still serve as a ground for a universal ethic in the future? The entire question focuses down on whether or not the specific Christological claim in Christianity can be “corroborated” in some credible form without utilizing historical data that cannot verify the claim. This pushes the focus more narrowly onto Schleiermacher’s definition of “religion,” “redemption,” and “Christology” in general, primarily in The Christian Faith, his dogmatic system, and utilizes his other writings only as they relate to these central facets of his attempted “corroboration.” When in his theological system he emphasizes that Christian ethics must be viewed not as an imperative but, rather, as only a description of “sanctification” or how the “redeemed” live within the Kingdom of God,20 and when he then describes the state of both redemption and sanctification as performed wholly by God so that humans cannot even be said to “cooperate,” humans can no longer feel responsible for their actions, which makes “ethics” with its categories of “virtues,” “goods,” and “duty” simply superfluous categories

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and misleading talk. God’s “sanctification” of the subject does everything. Schleiermacher’s theology and Christology ultimately obliterate his concern for ethics, since they remove any place for ethics within the divine economy. But what pushed Schleiermacher to this point? His rationalism followed Kant’s critical idealism, preventing him from thinking one could speak of any other thing as it is in itself (Kant’s Ding-ansich). This meant Schleiermacher could avoid accepting all the miraculous or unscientific claims made by any religion as well avoid accepting the ancient alleged “proofs” of God’s existence. If Kant had reinterpreted major Christian doctrines in light of his idea of a “categorical imperative,” then Schleiermacher reinterpreted the doctrines by his idea of the “feeling of absolute dependence.” This enabled Schleiermacher to minimize the importance of many significant traditional Christian doctrines—such as eschatology, the doctrine of the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, Christ’s Descent into Hell, and even the Resurrection—within the basic creeds he utilized in his dogmatic classic, The Christian Faith. Even Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers recasts the ideas of “revelation,” “miracle,” “supernatural intimations,” “inspiration,” and “prophecy” as the discovery of the Infinite in any event.21 He never proposed that the “corroboration” would involve any of these doctrines but, rather, only the bare basis of Christian belief, the idea of redemption through Jesus of Nazareth. But even that much connection between a person’s present Christian faith and the consciousness of Jesus was something Schleiermacher worked out only in his comprehensive, dogmatic theology, The Christian Faith.22 Nevertheless, to understand that great system we need to look at Schleiermacher’s earlier works, especially his monumental work, the Speeches. At this point in his thinking, as well as in his Soliloquies, he really had no need to “corroborate” some specific item or entity from the past. There was an emphasis on being one’s own individual person, unique, and no emphasis on replicating some response in one particular religion of the past. As a pastor in Berlin and professor of theology at the University of Berlin,23 Schleiermacher wrote the Speeches in response to requests from his “cultured” literary friends who, though themselves feeling no need for religion, insisted that he publish. The result was to show his readers that their view of “religion” was incorrect, an eclectic hodgepodge of scraps and crumbs of theoretical or moral ideas. These, he said, do not give religion a fair hearing: his friends were religious without realizing it. Their own Romanticist leanings toward inclusiveness of all unique parts within the Whole, of recognizing the necessity of opposites even working against each other, of spontaneity, emotion, and expressiveness, of the uniting of all the arts, of an unwillingness to settle for merely the obvious or finite,

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but of a restlessness seeking of that which is possibly beyond, as “infinite,” and as “mystery,” an openness to the unpredictable as well as an objection to being governed by retrospective rules of earlier generations24—all were part of religious expressions evoked by a primal feeling of the Totality. The Speeches emphasized that the Whole must be seen in its manifold diversity, a pluralism in which each individual maximizes their own uniqueness to make their own special contribution to the richly complex Whole,25 a major theme also in his Soliloquies.26 The question of whether one’s consciousness of the Whole is sufficient to the task or itself has to be somehow “awakened” was not even raised at this stage and did not appear for another two decades, until The Christian Faith, which then held that it had to be “awakened.”27 Schleiermacher insisted that if one were to compare the realities of specific religions, the disparity between belief and ethics from one religion to the next would be evident, so radically different, in fact, that they could not be condensed into some common “core” or “natural” religion.28 Instead, religion is “piety,” which, Schleiermacher said is “feeling” (Gefühl). This “feeling” is an “immediate” consciousness but not a reflection. That means that it is not knowledge any more than it is moral behavior. It is self-awareness but not awareness of the self as object. It is not an awareness of any object. It is an “intuition” (a word that Kant had used as empirical proximity or the equivalent of “sensation” but that for Schleiermacher is real even without the sensation being matched to a concept), or religion is one’s “sense of taste of the Infinite in the finite.”29 Given his awareness of the Totality or Whole—an emphasis he made so strongly—many accused Schleiermacher of being a pantheist, especially when he praised Spinoza in a footnote. Schleiermacher tried to explain the process by which a person acquires any knowledge as a process of uniting and separating, in which the point when the “unity” is experienced necessarily is never temporally caught by reflection, since reflection requires separation. This is a crucial element that pushes Schleiermacher past Descartes potentially into what one might call “mysticism” or the experience of immediate unity with God. “Your thought can only embrace what is sundered,” he writes. “Wherefore as soon as you have made any given definite activity of your soul an object of communication or of contemplation, you have already begun to separate. It is impossible, therefore, to adduce any definite example, for, as soon as anything is an example, what I wish to indicate is already past.”30 He continues, explaining that a person’s life is only in the Whole, by their senses, and that it is for itself by the person’s unity of selfconsciousness, in comparing “varying degrees of sensation.” So this means that the person becomes “sense” and the Whole becomes “object,” and they may mingle together, yet each returning to its place, in which case the object is “perception” and a person’s consciousness is “feeling.”31 He says that one

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always experiences the earlier moment of the unity but never experiences it as a reflection. This “which you always experience yet never experience” because conception and perception come only after it is no longer there did not mean that religion was illusory or simply “natural.”32 It never manifests itself as pure feeling. As Schleiermacher put it, it is an intuition or “sense and taste for the Infinite” in the finite.33 That immediate awareness of the Whole itself has no objectifiable content, since when one is in a state of objectification or reflection one is already removed from the immediate consciousness of unity or the Whole and is conscious only of finite or discreet objects or ideas.34 Only the finite can be objectified, and so the Infinite “within” it or the unity between subject and object is already temporally left behind. That much is not hard to understand. On the other hand, however, the sense of unity can become a definite religion, but only when the feeling or awareness of the Whole (as a relation rather than as an object) informs or shapes whatever conceptual forms are given or drawn from the particular culture or are used as vehicles through which the Infinite is intuited—that is, by which one tries to capture in thought of discrete predicates this fleeting sense of unity or Totality. Each religion, therefore, has a positive, individual shape rather than being a mutation or mere improvement of an earlier shape. This suggests that the forms themselves, derived from reflection within a given culture, can always be criticized, as can anything of any culture. They always remain only culturally contingent forms. While cultures may evolve or develop, religion’s base or ultimate nature does not evolve, not the “feeling” or sense of unity or Totality, which Schleiermacher equated implicitly with “God” in the Speeches. In addition to being invariable and universal (because feeling, in contrast to knowledge and morality, is completely receptive or passive), it is only this “feeling,” “piety,” or awareness of the Totality that is immediate and therefore beyond question or criticism.35 No religion merely emerges out of an earlier or less-articulate form. Instead, every religion is distinct or positive by its accidentals, by virtue of coming into historical existence by the impetus of some person or persons whose originality or genius enabled them to convince people of their specific rendition or form of this “feeling” of the Whole. Religions become mutually exclusive not by their essence but only when the focus is on their particular cultural forms, their timebound theoretical ideas and moral demands. However, the world is not poorer even by the manifoldness of these forms that this “feeling” has taken in various cultures; the sum total or entirety of the religions gives a truer picture of the reality of the Whole,36 just as the “feeling” of religion must be of the Totality.37 Inclusiveness, autonomy, and unity are the keys of this “feeling.”38

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Inasmuch as the full human consciousness involves not simply “feeling” of the Totality or Whole but also reflection and action, the inclusion of the latter two means that the full human consciousness, as a moment in time and space, does always include imperfection, ideas that are mistaken, and actions that are inappropriate or immoral, in the sense that they are separated thoughts or actions, not a precise equivalent of the sense of unity in the Totality. However, whenever the consciousness of the Whole informs or shapes a person’s intellect and behavior, then Schleiermacher can state that the religious person may not know anything but that what they do know cannot be wrong.39 Here Schleiermacher is using “know” in a double sense—in the one case as objective knowledge and in the other as immediate awareness of the Totality. He is not wrong in the latter case, except that is not “Knowing” but what he himself called “Feeling.” This “feeling” as “religion” preserves a person’s need and desire for autonomy in contradistinction from the usual religious idea that a religion rightly expects its adherents to “believe” what “another has said or done, or to wish to think and feel as another has thought and felt,” which Schleiermacher considered a “hard and base service.” He insisted on autonomy strongly. “To wish to have and hold a faith that is an echo,” he says, “proves that a man is incapable of religion: to demand it of others, shows that there is no understanding of religion. You wish always to stand on your own feet and go your own way, and this worthy intent should not scare you from religion.”40 This, of course, sounds contradictory to the sentiment of that quotation at the beginning of the chapter. Here “corroboration” or “replication” shows the opposite of true religion. That may be a more significant thought than his later orthodox ideas. It can also be said here that this “feeling,” since it is not reflection, necessarily means that, if this is what “religion” or faith is, then this is to make a clear distinction between the idea of feeling the Whole and actually feeling the Whole. It is not an idea, and the idea itself can never substitute for the reality and the latter’s certainty. This has its parallel in Buddhism, when the Buddhist speaks of Sunyata (Emptiness): it is not the idea of emptiness that is true or the goal, but it is emptiness beyond the idea, even an emptying of the idea of emptiness itself as a continuous process.41 The definition of religion as “immediate,” as “feeling” of the “Whole” rather than any knowledge or morality, did not dismiss reason or behavior as superfluous parts of every religion. Reason is still quite necessary, since it is the way religious people make their ideas and actions intelligible to themselves and to others. But these ideas and actions are only temporary or cultural forms of expression of the deeper and more certain feeling of being within the Whole. The criteria, therefore, of any of the knowledge or doctrine or ethics that any religion proposes would be the degree to which it corre-

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sponds with the awareness of the Whole, not simply with some one concern or culture or one accepted epistemology or one particular worldview.42 In fact, Schleiermacher even speculated that, if a person found themselves in a situation in a culture in which there was no religion that emphasized adequately this consciousness or awareness of the Whole, then the person might correctly even begin a new religion—which, in fact, is what Schleiermacher thought Jesus did, since Schleiermacher thought Judaism could not have been Christianity’s “forerunner.” That evolutionary development of religion was espoused by traditional Christianity and by Schleiermacher’s colleague Hegel, but Schleiermacher argued that such an approach to religion overlooks its real essence, one’s feeling of the Totality, and simply sees changes in what are accidental or phenomenal aspects. To him the appearances of the finite had to be transcended for one to discover the Infinite within it. Then one would see that individual always experiences the finite forms in their own idiosyncratic way, which is to be expected, but religion is the feeling underlying all this.43 In this earliest writing, Schleiermacher emphasized that all religions must be true to their primary ground, this feeling of the Whole or the awareness of the Universe or the intuition of the Infinite in the finite as well as to human autonomy. When religions have turned to emphasizing a uniformity of doctrines or ideas that have little positive connection to the underlying “feeling” or unity with the Infinite, they promote a dead religion and kill individual autonomy. While I find Schleiermacher’s continual use of the words “Infinite” and “Ultimate” and “Absolute” an indication that he was still encapsulated within what Foucault called the “metaphysics of infinity,” which was beginning to be outgrown by the new human sciences, Schleiermacher could not be expected to not be shaped by his own current culture. Even then, however, he may have intended nothing more by “Infinite” than the “Totality” or “Whole,” as he conceived of it in a variety of forms and sizes. For example, he also spoke of a self as a “whole” or of the objective consciousness and immediate self-consciousness themselves forming a “whole” as regards human consciousness, as well as the Universe as a “whole.” “Whole” can be expansive or extremely contracted, just as “infinite” can be only a negating expression rather than something positive, and “absolute” can mean only what seems to be perfect or complete in our human estimates. But not all nineteenth- or twentieth-century theology left the wholly transcendent meanings of these terms behind. Certainly not Schleiermacher or Hegel. For Schleiermacher, the specifics of any culture are always a part of the form in which a religion is conceptually expressed, and these forms are always temporally and spatially conditioned. They themselves cannot be merged, but, rather, the “essential oneness of religiousness [the discovery of

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the Totality or the Infinite within the finite] spreads itself out in a great variety of provinces” yet “contracts” itself so that the “whole” can be discovered in lesser or greater magnitudes. “Religion thus fashions itself with endless variety, down even to the single personality.” With this insight, he compares religion to music: both come from within a culture that precedes and informs them, yet both manifest an obvious freedom of certain genius in the individual forms, elements, process, and combinations that they involve, as a “self-contained revelation of the world.”44 Schleiermacher says that in praising Spinoza all that he had intended was to say that Spinoza had the Spirit of religion and that his focus on the simple primal substance should not have been taken to mean that Spinoza was “godless.” In the surrounding footnotes, without mentioning Spinoza’s name, Schleiermacher insisted that it is not possible to have an image of God or World in which either is completely separate from or outside the other. He could not conceive of any part of the universe that would be outside of “God”45 and so was espousing more what Tillich later called “pan-en-theism” rather than “pantheism.” If one’s consciousness of the Whole has priority over reason and action, as Schleiermacher insists, it is only because it is more certain by being immediate and possibly extensive enough in scope to be considered universal or totally inclusive. This makes it quite different from knowledge and morality, which are both culturally conditioned, fragmentary, and in continual transition and which both tend to be exclusive by their very necessary discreet selection of particular materials, events, or associations. He holds, in fact, that it is only this “feeling” of Unity by which knowledge and morality themselves become integrated. It connects Kant’s theoretical and practical reason. Finally, religion defined this way as delineated in the Speeches is not something confined to the people who belong to specific particular religious institutions, despite the fact that even in the Speeches Schleiermacher is continually referring to it as “piety” or the religious consciousness. “Feeling” is more universal than knowledge and behavior, since it alone is only receptivity rather than human activity, and this means that feeling of the Whole or Totality is accessible, actually inherent or possessed by people who have no formal religious affiliation whatever. This universalism of Schleiermacher’s was able to remain within the most particular, Christian definitions simply because of his basic definition of religion, which was so general or universal that even sin and grace did not have to be recognized conceptually as such to be reality or effectively felt. At this stage, his definition of religion as one’s consciousness of the Whole—whether one is Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, or other—did not actually corroborate any specific historical details of any religion. There was no need. The closest he came to corroboration was in his short description

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of Christianity presenting its key as emphasizing a constancy of the piety that comprises true religion. He admitted that in most cases people confuse the cultural forms of a religion with religion’s essence and thereby become focused on that which is not the Totality or Whole. From such a state, hopefully, one can be “redeemed” if there is a religion that makes it more obviously explicit that the essence or primary experience and idea, the Unity or sense of the Infinite, takes precedence over the forms in which it happens to be seen. This is all the more difficult, since he is fairly sure that most people recognize the particular moment in which they experienced that sense of the Infinite as the answer and focus on the finite particulars of that moment rather than on the Infinite. The religion itself eventually may do the same, so people are led to believe mistakenly that the externals, the events, the history, are the core of the religion.46 So there might be a difference in religions in their degrees of consistency of focus on the Infinite rather than externals. He went one step further, insisting that every finite thing requires a “mediator of a higher being” if it is not to be further removed from the Eternal as superfluous, and ultimately, in order for that piety to be constant rather than having a partially effective mediator, its mediator must be most fully both human and divine.47 He then inserted his answer: the self-consciousness of Jesus was that he both knew God and knew he had God in him, which enabled him to claim to be the ultimate mediator—being fully human as well as divine. Since Jesus’s consciousness of God or the Totality or Unity was constant, he qualified also to awaken others’ consciousness, thus to serve not only as mediator but as redeemer as well. At that point, there was no “corroboration” given but a mere assertion. It was intensified by Schleiermacher’s negative view of Judaism vis-à-vis Christianity. Schleiermacher contrasted Christianity with Judaism, writing that “the original intuition of Christianity is more glorious, more sublime, more worthy of adult humanity [because it] penetrates deeper into the spirit of systematic religion and extends itself further over the whole Universe.”48 Schleiermacher emphasizes that the uniqueness of Christ was “not the purity of His moral teaching . . . [nor] the individuality of His character.” Rather, the clarity of his idea of “redemption” is that everything finite requires a “higher mediation to be in accord with the Deity.”49 On the other hand, Schleiermacher qualified Christ’s mediation (or redemption) by suggesting that neither did Jesus ever claimed to be the only such mediator, nor were his particular expressions the extent to which this unique form of piety could legitimately take, since he empowered others to follow him in such mediation. This does not mean that Schleiermacher thought Christianity should be the only religion or that Christianity can in no way be superseded in the future. Rather, it simply means that “Everyone who in his religion, sets out from the same cardinal point, whether his religion originates from himself

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or from another, is, without respect of school, a Christian.”50 He even insists that Christianity is not closed to other, even, possibly “stronger and more beautiful types of religion,” which produce what it cannot, so the “best proof of its immortality [is] in its own corruptibleness, in its own often sad history, and ever expecting a redemption from the imperfection that now oppresses it.” In a nutshell, “The religion of religions cannot collect material enough for its pure interest in all things human. As nothing is more irreligious than to demand general uniformity in mankind, so nothing is more unchristian than to seek uniformity in religion.”51 That is the extent of Schleiermacher’s claim of Christianity’s superiority to other religions at this stage, but it obviously contradicts the primary point he makes in the Speeches. Even in this slight effort to defend Christianity against the nonreligious life as well as non-Christian religions, despite his emphasis that the saving power is not some historical detail, the problem is that Schleiermacher established that every religion did begin with a unique historical insight or person, and when he speaks of Jesus as having such a constant consciousness of his God and of Himself as Son of God, he offers nothing at all to substantiate this. A person’s discovery of the Infinite in something finite—however one does that, whether by way of Christian ideas or non-Christian ideas or any secular experience—does not verify either the need to be “redeemed” from any confusion or the need to have that person’s life or consciousness be “mediated” by a higher being. If one must not try to derive religion from historical events, persons, or their teachings, then how is it that Schleiermacher was able to determine the crucial element—namely, that the “truly divine element is the glorious clearness to which the great idea He came to exhibit attained in His soul”?52 Upon what sources does this depend other than on one’s desire or imagination to think this one superior? If what occurred in the events and teachings even of the various founders of religions were only the cultural manifestations of the consciousness of the Whole from which they spawned in a particular situation, and if in all religions those specific ideas can always be subject to criticism, needing to be proven rather than merely asserted, a content nowhere within the contentless nature of religion as “feeling” or Unity of the Totality, then how could one determine that in one particular form or instance that consciousness of the Totality was so powerful that the human possessing it was both fully human as well as fully God? Schleiermacher considered most of these kinds of specifics to be important but not historical proof as much as serving as mere points of origin of religious genius. But that still does not guarantee that their historical details are accurate or that they are a priority or that this genius is fully human as well as fully God. For the most part he was concerned only with showing what

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they had in common, not with judging them by the definition or specific ideas that they propagated. Within the general scope of the Speeches, corroboration was not yet obviously needed, since he emphasized the similar essence of all religions and saw their actual historical differences as very secondary to their common “feeling.” But when he finally selected one historical example and decided that Jesus’s consciousness was so radically different from everyone else’s such that he can validly serve as the ultimate mediator and redeemer, Schleiermacher’s aversion to any historical details or facts make this position totally unjustified. Therefore, if history does not prove this absolute uniqueness of Jesus, which seems to be such an aberration of the main point made in the Speeches, does Schleiermacher think that it was “corroborated” by the awakening of the God-consciousness of Jesus’s disciples? If he does, then he does not explain how that could occur. In any case, in the Christian Faith, because it is a “dogmatic theology,” his need for such a corroboration is more obvious and explicit, and, as we shall see, he never felt these two books were in conflict with one another. He also never went as far as even the “young Hegel,” who, in his early works, had said Peter recognized Jesus’s divinity and Jesus’s reply was tell him that he recognized it only because he himself (Peter) is divine as well.53 However, Schleiermacher did distinguish three levels of consciousness in the Speeches—which we will analyze in the following section—and he emphasized that the highest level was the unity of subject and object, as he spent considerable space stressing the fact that a person must by imagination extend themselves beyond their individual identity so as to experience Infinity in a larger unity. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF NOT BEING SELF-CAUSED BUT NOT YET ABSOLUTE DEPENDENCE Schleiermacher later built upon this early definition of religion to examine the central doctrines of the evangelistic Christianity of his day. He was no longer writing to try to convince people that they were not above the need for religion. Rather, now he was trying to explain the received essence of the Protestant Christian evangelistic faith to those in the church (or at least to his fellow theologians). In the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, his argument seems to be only that the faith of the original disciples and the faith of any later disciples must be regarded as the same faith. This accounts for the “must” but provides no content related to the claims about that Jesus, whether or not they were true; and yet it appears that the religion began because people believed those

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claims to be true, not just that they had similarly responded to what someone else had said. Schleiermacher does not explain what would count otherwise for something being the “same faith” or how an institution through many centuries would not change but, rather, simply assumes that his readers would agree that this is necessary lest the church lose its credibility and the early disciples and the religion’s origin become no longer important. Schleiermacher’s Divisions of Theology and “Disciplines” His Brief Outline on the Study of Theology was first published in 1811, a whole decade prior to The Christian Faith, and from those early divisions we can better understand what Schleiermacher is doing within The Christian Faith. Theology divided into several large disciplines, but the main two of concern are historical theology and philosophical theology. The former describes the particular states of the theology within their development but also as single pictures of any given epoch. On the other hand, philosophical theology concerns itself more with analysis of the essence of the faith—of its truth. Ethics as a whole was a descriptive science of the historical interaction between reason and Nature and so fell within the “historical” area. Dogmatic theology also was within the area of historical theology, since it was a focus on a specific era’s understandings. The Christian Faith was a “dogmatic” theology, as he defined it to be a description of the Christian faith in the present Protestant evangelical position. This was not Schleiermacher’s attempt to avoid the question of truth—as Karl Barth so accused him—but, rather, a need to explain the present church’s faith consistently with his basic view of religion espoused in the Speeches.54 The real question is only whether he achieved the latter. Within this “dogmatic” system, Schleiermacher feels a need to “borrow” certain “propositions” from other disciples. For example, since he begins with the church’s description of religion as “piety,” he feels a need to say that he “borrowing” from Ethics, since the church is a “common association” largely determined by individuals’ decisions, as he calls ethics the “speculative presentation of Reason, in the whole range of its activity.”55 He says this only in contrasting it with a definition of church that would see it as a hierarchical structure or even involving the state, to which he sets limits. On the other hand, his more theological view of the church as a community of the redeemed tends to see it as primarily if not only all God’s doing, not really human decisions at all, which we see as we examine “sanctification” later. In any case, it is allegedly the “activity” of humans (or is it only the activity of Reason?) that grounds all of his new nuances of his earlier definition of “religion.” These include “Feeling” vis-à-vis “Knowing and Doing,” “imme-

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diate self-consciousness” vis-à-vis “objective self-consciousness,” “Feeling of Absolute Dependence” vis-à-vis reciprocity between dependence and freedom, “awareness of not-being-self-caused,” “the abiding-in-self” vis-à-vis “passing-beyond-self,” the “Whence” of our receptive and active existence, and the “consciousness of God.” These overlap and are not painted by him as some chronological sequence, and he appears to think of them as synonymous, or nearly so—in any case, not contradictory. But the feeling of the Whole or sensing the Infinite in the finite, as he framed it in the Speeches, is not the same as the specific “God-consciousness,” which becomes his mostused term in The Christian Faith, since the latter points only to the “God” of the Christian faith, manifest only in the redeeming activity of Jesus’s “absolute-potent God-consciousness.” It is, however, possible that one could have a consciousness of not being self-caused without its being religious or pointing to a “God.” So this plethora of definitions is not particularly clarifying except that Schleiermacher’s emphasis seems to be in all cases that the element of religiousness is completely passive or receptive, and that has to be underscored. To the degree that these definitions of religion are central to his system, we will examine a further development or insight into them that he said was on loan from psychology, which is not only significant for his definitions of religion but also for his hermeneutics, so particularly to his method of trying to understand the Jesus of history. The Discipline of Psychology in Defining “Religion” and Hermeneutics In The Christian Faith Schleiermacher used the general idea of Christianity’s essence as “redemption in Jesus of Nazareth” and combined this with the most current Protestant Reformed creeds as the base from which he defined the religion. While his refinement of “religion” to accommodate these was generally also within the field of ethics, he makes a point to say that he had also to borrow from psychology, and this becomes extremely important. Jesus “awakened” in his followers the consciousness of the Whole, which Schleiermacher reformulated as the consciousness of “absolute dependence” or “God-consciousness,” and this implied that at least that beginning point of the Christian religion in Jesus’s self-consciousness was accepted as true, since he was sure it was the cause of the present believers’ awakened Godconsciousness. More specifically, he was convinced that this “redemption” was an inner persuasion and “awakening” from the very presence of Jesus’s “Godconsciousness” rather than some belief in some fantastic event or miracle or

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sacred scriptures or some authority. In The Christian Faith he insisted that no historical facts prove Jesus’s absolutely potent God-consciousness, although in his hermeneutics and his lectures on the life of Jesus he does turn also to a psychological approach, which we must examine. However, he acknowledged that in Jesus’s later absence this “presence” of the “Spirit” that earlier had been in Jesus—by which Jesus had had such an absolutely potent Godconsciousness—was able to similarly empower believers through the church in every age and country.56 By the preaching of the Gospel, the church was presenting the same “picture” of Jesus, which by the power of the Spirit also awakened the God-consciousness of future generations. The idea is therefore not just an individual’s imagination but also the experience and mission of the church or community itself. This empowerment is what Schleiermacher assumed would “corroborate” the claim about Jesus as the Christ, in light of historical research’s inability to provide certainty about the claim. But it is not precise enough. This comparison of the disciples’ experiences probably came from Schleiermacher’s Pietism. The thing historical research could not prove, which stimulated the very need to “corroborate” from a person’s present faith experience, was not simply something that the disciples experienced but the truthfulness of the unique claims that they made about Jesus. Today scholars are even more united in attesting that the early variety of descriptions of this unique element in the separate Gospels does not provide the uniformity that Schleiermacher needed or assumed.57 It was the acceptance or rejection based on the verification or lack of verification of these claims that was decisive for Christianity, claims used to persuade people to become disciples, not merely a comparison of experiences of disciples in various communions. What were those claims, and how does a person verify or disprove them? Schleiermacher acknowledges in his lectures on the life of Jesus that to present a valid historical picture of Jesus, just as of any person in history, one must see both Jesus’s individual uniqueness but also the common culture that affected or determined many things in his life. That would seem to reinforce the need to the study Judaism of Jesus’s day, since not only was Jesus Jewish but he also was speaking about the Kingdom of God, the Son of man, and many other vital things that came from a long history of very diverse Judaisms. If the Gospels, especially Matthew, assert that Jesus “fulfilled” Scripture or prophecies about the hoped-for Messiah, then that as well as Jesus’s teachings of the impending Kingdom of God and coming “Son of man” seem vital, but Schleiermacher spiritualized all of these concepts, removing them from their cultural setting, as if Jesus himself legitimately did all that and had the divine authority to do so. Jesus showed no real connection to Judaism as Schleiermacher painted him. Additional “proof” of Jesus’s dignity in

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the Gospels include his miracles or “signs,” but Schleiermacher sees these as too supernatural to believe and a distraction to Jesus’s “inner person” or his actual humanity and real uniqueness. Schleiermacher insists that a person is not judged by external events but by the “maxim” of their life, the “attitude” they manifest that was so unique within their situation. Ironically, his psychological approach to knowing the person better than they knew themselves depends also on distance from them, and Schleiermacher can admit that the original disciples were too close to Jesus to get a proper picture and were not yet fully aware of the power of spirit or reason that reflects Jesus’s uniqueness.58 They were still too caught up in Jesus’s physical person. So when was it possible for them to properly understand this Jesus, to know him well enough to be certain of how he would have responded to things if the particulars in his common, cultural situation had been quite different?59 Did that time come only after the four primary heresies had been recognized and anathematized by the church, or was it possible only after the Reformation brought emphasis on individuality and the Enlightenment added reason and autonomy to the search for understanding? So had the possibility of understanding Jesus occurred only in Schleiermacher’s time? Focusing not on the Gospels but on the Apostle Paul for the essence of the Christian faith—and this, Paul says, is Jesus’s Crucifixion and rising from the dead and thereby being declared “Son of God”—is not sufficient for Schleiermacher, despite the fact that his hermeneutic requires comparing Jesus’s inner person with his common culture. What would satisfy him? Only claims that fit into his definition of “religion” as already given in the Speeches and further elaborated in The Christian Faith—a Feeling of the Whole or an intuition of the Infinite within the finite, which was shifted, almost imperceptibly, from an indefinable Whole or Infinite to a single, Absolute Christian God. Perhaps the most interesting if not most disconcerting move Schleiermacher makes to flesh out his earlier comparison of “feeling” vis-à-vis knowledge and morality comes when he notes that the relationship between these three states, had it already been determined, could be used for the base. But since it has not, he says that, in order to explain their relationship, he must “borrow” from psychology. Then he adds, “it should be well noted that the truth of the matter (namely, that piety is feeling) remains entirely independent of the correctness of the following discussion.”60 So he knows that “piety” or “religion” is “feeling” even if he is completely mistaken about why that is so? And even if he has no real proof of how feeling, knowing, and doing are actually related in the mind? The “following discussion” is his analysis, supposedly based on psychology. First, he examines what he considered to be the three primary functions of the human mind—“feeling,” “knowing,” and “doing”—within the two normal

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relationships involved in any “actual state of consciousness,” which he describes as an “abiding-in-self” (Insichbleiben) and a “passing-beyond-self” (Aussichheraustreten), which Scharlemann says is the organizing principle of his system.61 The “abiding-in-self” appears to denote passivity or pure receptivity in which my consciousness does not influence the other, and the “passing beyond self” appears to be a state of “activity” in which I consciously or unconsciously attempt to influence or necessarily do affect the other. If one is looking for that which is truly both universal and uniform in human consciousness, then Schleiermacher seems to think that it would have to be that which is passively inherent at birth—or never affected in any way by my choices. Upon examination, if we think of the type of subjectivity involved in feeling, knowing, and doing, then doing (that is, “morality”) is obviously a “passing-beyond-self,” and both knowing and feeling seem to appear as “abiding-in-self.” However, if we think of the type of relation involved in feeling, knowing, and doing, then once again doing is obviously a passingbeyond-self as one initiates acts toward another person. Knowing, in idealism’s precritical days, might have been conceived as purely passive, a sort of operation by an archetypal world of Forms informing the mind with concepts ready at hand for rediscovery, as in Plato, or even innate ideas, as in Descartes. However, Kant had, by his “Copernican revolution,” changed that, and this provided Schleiermacher with the clue he needed. The mind was not simply a passive storage box of eternal ideas. Kant had shown how self actually initiates self-extension or how one passes beyond self even in knowing. Not only does one seek to know more than merely oneself and chooses in many cases which “other” person, entity, or idea one desires to know, but also, most importantly, the human mind informs or dictates, so to speak, to the other as “object”—that it must meet certain Kantian “transcendental logical categories” in order for the human mind to judge it and finally understand it. This is crucial, since it meant for Schleiermacher that “feeling” is the only one of these three basics functions of human life, of feeling, knowing, and doing, that remains always an “abiding-in-self.”62 But why is it important to make such distinctions? Simply because Schleiermacher was convinced that such a uniqueness of feeling releases one from the relativity of all theoretical reason (knowledge) and practical reason (morality) while making the essence of religion certain or absolute as well as universally accessible, since it is not shaped by any human’s will, reason, or influence. If one’s “God-consciousness” has been “awakened,” then the ultimate source of that awakening is not the relative self but the immediately certain Other. This differs from Kant’s “critical idealism” or “subjective idealism,” which required that humans “postulate” “freedom” and “God”; so Schleiermacher’s view could be called a form of “absolute idealism,” es-

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pecially when he emphasizes that in his examination of “world,” “man,” or “God” he is limited to analyzing only how one’s mind relates to these ideas and is thus limited to simply describing “states of mind.”63 Related to this “abiding-in-self” and “passing-beyond-self” is another formula Schleiermacher gives of the relation between a feeling of “self-caused” (Sichselbstsetzen) element of life and “nonself-caused” (Sichselbstnichtsogesetzhaben) element. This is derived from the common experience a person has of consciousness of their “unchanging identity” vis-à-vis their consciousness of the “changing determination” from other influences. The latter, variable element cannot come from what is self-identical, so this means that two elements comprise our consciousness at all times—a self-caused element and a nonself-caused element. While the “Other” is necessary from the awareness we have of the nonself-caused, in the “immediate self-consciousness” the “Other is not objectively presented.” So there are only these two elements—the “existence of the subject for itself [and] . . . its coexistence with an Other.”64 It is not possible to eliminate the “coexistence with an Other,” since the “indefinite agility” of a person’s consciousness depends upon a prior receptivity for its “direction,” whether the person expresses this “original ‘agility’” (ursprüngliche Agilitat) in thought or action. Because this is so, the element of “receptivity” is the primary element in the human consciousness. Once again Schleiermacher returns to the idea of the primary human faculty being only “receptive,” and it is little wonder later if he sees the whole of redemption and sanctification as being only more receptivity to the sole power of God. Still at this point it has no historical referent of the past whatever, so there is no explicit need to “corroborate” what history cannot prove. That need arises only as he makes important alterations of his definition of “religion” and becomes more focused on Christianity. But in the early parts of The Christian Faith that corroboration has not yet been established. What are his alterations? First is his equation of this “feeling” of the Whole, not just with a feeling of “abiding-in-self” or “not-being-self-caused” but now with the “feeling of absolute dependence” or “immediate selfconsciousness,” with the Woher or “Whence” of one’s becoming or being that is very particular—even a “God-consciousness” or consciousness of the Christian “God.” So it is no longer merely a receptive capacity or even a negative of not knowing what a person’s cause was or of simply knowing that they were not their own cause. It now was one specific named lack and named cause or empowerment. From the very start of his alteration of the idea of “religion” in speaking of the difference between an “abiding-in-self” and a “moving-beyond-self” Schleiermacher articulated that there was thereby an “antithesis” (Gegensatz) that plagues the human consciousness, the antithesis between Feeling and the

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other two faculties of Knowing and Doing.65 Further, he insists that in itself Feeling is neither an actual moment in time nor a thought and neither does it have any antithesis. These occur only as it combines with the Knowing and/ or Doing. The antithesis between Feeling and either of the other two, which in Kant were “theoretical reason” and “practical reason,” can be experienced in connection either with one’s dependence or one’s freedom, either as life enhancing or as a hindrance to life, as either a depression or a joy, and in the religious sphere it is as either “guilt” or “redemption.” If “religion” offers a universal or general power accessible to humanity to resolve this “antithesis,” then the autonomy and value of the individual in the Speeches would prevail. But Schleiermacher finds the answer to the universal problem only within the limitations of one specific mentality of just the Christian religion. What enables him to do so is his “borrowing” from the philosophy of religion to classify religions once he has established the idea of “absolute dependence” or its equivalent. With those specifics, the need for “corroboration” will be obvious. THE SPECIFIC CONSCIOUSNESS, “ANTITHESIS,” AND ABSOLUTE REDEEMING POWER Schleiermacher “borrows” at this point from the philosophy of religion to deal with actual religion, not merely ideas about it. If his analysis from ethics began to alter his definition of religion’s essence to correspond to one very particular religion, so did his “propositions borrowed from the philosophy of religion. Different Stages of Development and Different Kinds of Religion By this approach Schleiermacher distinguished two subcriteria—that is, relations between religions as involving both (1) different stages of development (which he had opposed in the Speeches) and (2) different kinds. The different stages run from crude idol worship or fetishism and polytheism to “monolatry” and finally to monotheism. The latter is the highest, which expresses the absolute dependence of everything finite upon this “Supreme and Infinite Being.”66 The lower forms of fetishism and polytheism probably come from people’s lack of a sense of “totality.” Schleiermacher also suggests that the lowest form of fetishism or idol worship is probably the equivalent of the “animal consciousness,” in which one cannot distinguish subject from object, while the form of polytheism is the equivalent of the “sensible” or “objective self-consciousness,” which is overwhelmed by multiple sensations and unable

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to form them into a unity.67 In any case, although allegedly Judaism and Islam are monotheistic, as is Christianity, Schleiermacher insists that both Judaism and Islam are still far too connected to the sensible and so only Christianity is consistently and thoroughly monotheistic. He is also convinced that humans do not return to lower forms and so no one will embrace either Judaism or Islam after experiencing the highest level of true monotheism in Christianity, just as no one will return to fetishism after becoming a monotheist or even a polytheist.68 This is all built upon his definition of religion as “feeling of absolute dependence,” which, if split between different objects of worship, is no longer absolute. We will discuss that “absolute” shortly. The other subcategory of religions is not of development but of specific “kinds,” and he here distinguishes two basic types: (1) teleological or ethical and (2) aesthetic. The latter are religions more concerned with the natural than the moral, while the former subordinates the natural to the moral. Christianity is the most moral of the religions, as he sees it. This, of course, is not from any examination of actual history but simply based upon the alleged different orientations each religion has, though we must insist that the superiority of a religion over others by being more moral cannot be based on comparing its ideal only with the actual history of the other.69 Absolute Dependence and the Immediate Self-Consciousness From Schleiermacher’s analysis of the “self-caused” element vis-à-vis the “nonself-caused” element, he connected the “receptivity” of the “nonselfcaused” with the feeling of Dependence. He emphasized that every object we can think of stands in a reciprocal relation to other objects in the world, of influence and counterinfluence, no matter how great or how infinitesimally insignificant the interdependence seems. That is, all relations in the world appear to form an interdependence, an oscillation between freedom and dependence, between being able to initiate something or being influenced by or acted upon by the consciousness of any other person or rational being. Such a state cannot produce a feeling either of absolute freedom or absolute dependence. Was it an accident the he always qualified this as “in the world”? Not at all. He asserted that our immediate self-consciousness is prior to any consciousness of any thing and does provide the feeling of absolute dependence, though this is not a consciousness of any entity at all upon which we are dependent. It does not exist in a single moment because moments are a part of the “world” and since each moment “is always determined, as regards its total content, by what is given, and thus by objects towards which we have a feeling of freedom.” It is only a consciousness of absolute dependence—that is, of not

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being self-caused70—or “the consciousness that the whole of our spontaneous activity comes from a source outside of us in just the same sense in which anything towards which we should have a feeling of absolute freedom must have proceeded entirely from ourselves.”71 But the feeling of absolute dependence from the “source outside us” does not arise from some “influence of an object which has in some way to be given to us; for upon such an object there would always be a counterinfluence, and even a voluntary renunciation of this would always involve a feeling of freedom.”72 Therefore the contentlessness of this awareness is crucial but similar to his earlier emphasis on the “Totality,” since that was also not a mere aggregation of separate parts but a consciousness preceding any ability to conceive of discrete parts or even a discreet, objective “Totality.” Nevertheless, he is convinced that the feeling of absolute dependence is a part of all of our activity, never absent from any of it; but it is a consciousness of no thing or particular, while merely of absolute dependence. This is a person’s realization that there is one relation in which they are not interdependent—namely, the very “whence” (Woher) of one’s being, which Schleiermacher then equates with “God-consciousness.”73 This is still not some “innate” idea or knowledge about “God” as if “God” could be objectified but merely a consciousness of my relation as one of “absolute dependence.” It is like a pointing beyond self, but not at any particular thing. At this level, one might think that I am in a sense “absolutely dependent” upon my parents, which is the “whence” of existence. Yet I can point to them, and they are objects “given” to my situation, so that is not Schleiermacher’s precise position. He insists that when I reflect upon anything I am removed from unity by the reflection and can doubt anything, and so the truth of religion must be attainable only in the moment of unity, not reflection. But is it really true that in the moment of doubting I can even doubt myself and my parents, or is that an exaggeration? Why must “religion” be established on that which cannot be doubted, and why must religion occur only in an atemporal fashion, whatever that would be? Yet when Schleiermacher finishes relating it to the “God-consciousness” that was in Jesus, it loses its universal status, becoming one particular God of one particular religion that occurred at one unique time in history, thereby eliminating the diversity he had praised in the Totality in the Speeches. As the (true) religion becomes less accessible through its historical particularity, it also becomes more exclusive just as it becomes less connected to actual humanity. In Schleiermacher this certainty of identity or unity seems to be grounded on a sense of an “identical” or “same” self that can be traced or discovered or experienced by me despite and within all variations of time or influences either from within or without,74 though here again there is allegedly no “con-

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tent” to this, no “essence” that is continuous throughout change, but a mere consciousness of Wholeness, or a sense of relation or unity. The key of its being an “absolute dependence” determines how Schleiermacher will respond to a variety of the traditional doctrines of the church. For example, he minimizes the Trinity as a misdirection and refuses to accept the idea of “Satan” or the “devil” since it negates the absoluteness of a person’s dependence.75 “Absolute” cannot be more than one, but how can it have a discreet predicate? From “absolute dependence” Schleiermacher then elaborates on the three different forms of consciousness he mentioned in the Speeches, the “highest” of which—the “immediate self-consciousness”—is the equivalent of absolute dependence. He distinguishes the “immediate self-consciousness” (unmittlebare Selbstbewusstein) from both an “animal consciousness” and a “sensible self-consciousness” or “objective self-consciousness.”76 The lowest level of consciousness, the “animal” consciousness, could be found in humans prior to their experiencing a stable unity in their identity or full self-consciousness— for example, before they learn to speak or later in moments in which a person has not yet fully awakened from sleep—an “unresolved confusion” between feeling and perception (that is, between a sense of absolute dependence and a sense of reciprocity), or a conflating of subject and object, an inability to be aware of discreet entities. By “sensible consciousness,” the middle level of consciousness, Schleiermacher means a consciousness by which a person can think of anything as an “object,” including not only things that can be sensed or perceived but also all forms of historical, scientific, social, and moral ideas of sensible objects that can involve the other or even the self as a possible object of thought. The “higher” form of “immediate self-consciousness” or “absolute dependence” is never really completely separate from the “sensible self-consciousness” (or “objective consciousness”), yet by itself the former experiences no conflict or “antithesis.” It is only the “antithesis” between those two levels of consciousness that affects the “immediate self-consciousness.”77 Or, put differently, it is only the split between subject and object of the sensible selfconsciousness that can dilute the singular affect and focus of the absolute dependence. The negative effect on the level of the sensible self-consciousness is of pain, since it hinders life; the positive affect on it is pleasure, in that it furthers life; and these can be experienced either in a person’s feeling of freedom or dependence. With the “immediate self-consciousness,” the pain is experienced as guilt or sin, and the pleasure is experienced as a consciousness of redemption. Otherwise, in themselves, the lower, “animal” self-consciousness and highest self-consciousness know only of unity or sameness or identity.78 This is parallel to Søren Kierkegaard’s idea of a “first” and “second” “immediacy,”

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a lower one on the aesthetic level, the highest one on the level of faith, and in between the mediated or reflective state in which ethics falls. Is the “antithesis” therefore not merely between two levels of consciousness but actually found only in the “separation” implied in the “reflection” of the objective or sensible self-consciousness that infects the higher consciousness? It is only that consciousness that clearly distinguishes separate entities, therefore, because of their separateness and difference necessarily always carries within itself this antithesis. If the sensible self-consciousness is a natural and necessary rational level for humans, why is the “antithesis” judged as negative? Primarily because any reflection implies separation, as Schleiermacher mentioned in the Speeches, so that state of separation from the unity with God implies “sinfulness.” He insists that this natural state of an impotent higher consciousness (“God-consciousness,” which exposes this “antithesis” as “sin” or “Godlessness” or “God forgetfulness”) is one in which the God-consciousness is almost totally ineffective, and so has to be activated by an outside power of absolute fullness and consistency. This is obviously a very negative description of general humanity, reflecting the “depravity” of humanity first, distortingly drawn from several Psalms by Saint Paul,79 later exaggerated even more by Saint Augustine and then Luther and Calvin—a view that is quite different from Schleiermacher’s understanding of humanity in the Speeches. But “separation” is “separation” no matter how natural reflection seems.80 In the Speeches Schleiermacher had given the impression that many people enjoy the Feeling or sense of Whole who experience no terrible conflict or “antithesis” between it and their objective or sensible consciousness. But now in The Christian Faith the higher consciousness, though universal, so not totally absent in humans, has almost zero power?81 If that were true, why would he ever have identified that with “religion” when he was trying to tell people that religion was so universal, so glorious, so indispensible? On the other hand, the antithesis occurs only within a “moment” of time— that is, only within a consciousness of discrete parts or of separation—and so cannot really exist in the “God-consciousness,” which he says is not within time per se; well, except in the actual moments in which the Godconsciousness comes to consciousness alongside the sensible or objective consciousness. Or is it really “alongside”? While Scharlemann suggests that Schleiermacher viewed Feeling is an “accompaniment of all forms of reason,”82 Schleiermacher denied that it is “simply an accompaniment,” since it can “persist unaltered during a series of diverse acts of thinking and willing, taking up no relation to these, and thus not being in the proper sense even an accompaniment of them.”83 This confusion of consciousness being within or outside time presents real conceptual difficulties. Does Schleiermacher only

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mean that the sensible self-consciousness’s influence on a person’s sense of absolute dependence comes in reflection “after” the consciousness of the unity of absolute dependence, after the “unaltered” state is past? At this point the immediate self-consciousness appears not only as an appendage that cannot influence since it has no ideas or concepts and is not within time but also may be as elusive as Kant’s “postulate” after all. It somehow connects activity and passivity, dependence and freedom, self and other, thought and action and yet is not even a distinguishable moment in time, Schleiermacher says. If Schleiermacher is correct that it is not a mere “postulate,” perhaps neither was Kant’s “freedom.” Why wouldn’t a person’s actual confrontation with another person bring with it an awareness of certain freedom as well as dependence? Schleiermacher certainly thought it did. Within any kind of shared experiences with the other, why wouldn’t each party realize a freedom within dependence that means a sense of “responsibility” if not yet as an abstract “categorical imperative”—that is, a sense of duty arising from the actual relationship? But we can perhaps go one step further. Kant, in sketching the human mind’s logical categories of judgment of “pure reason” from which a person gains “understanding, suggested that the “imagination of the soul” is somehow able to form “synthetic” wholes out of diverse and varied manifold sensations. Is there a way this can be meaningful when science has moved far beyond any idea of some Platonic “soul” that forms these syntheses? We can see that even young children can make wholes that bring together self and other—for example, if a person begins to connect another’s fist with the painful experience of their own bloody nose, and if person is able to connect this with some prior actions or words that they said or did to that other person. These may be simple and crude causal connections, but the brain makes them without any effort, which means that they may be among the most basic abilities the brain has of relating sensations, ideas, and words. It takes little formal training for a child’s brain to make such connections or relations, even long before the child has learned to associate the word “causality” with its mental configuration or classification. I said elsewhere that this may not all be due to a priori categories as Kant thought but may simply be something most people learn quickly by sheer experience of pain and pleasure. Perhaps all four of Kant’s “categories” harken back into the primal, evolving basic instinct such as sheer survival, but then became more general with naming. On a more sophisticated level, Steven Pinker revealed in simple terms the complex ability the human brain has to classify sensations or perceptions, to gather them into groups, to store them as well as retrieve them, and even to attach emotions to some of them.84 Daniel Levitin went so far as to show that the human brain is so sophisticated that it

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can classify and form varied “wholes” of music even in people who have had no formal musical training. This enables the untrained person to recognize or identify upon only the second hearing a piece of music, even if the piece is presented in a different key or tempo or when played by different instruments or with different dynamics.85 Both Pinker and Levitin note the brain’s remarkable ability to develop different schemas by which to group manifold sensations. That the “schemas are everything” could have been the key of both scientists. So it is not done by one’s intangible “soul” as Kant thought or by some innate categories or postulated “imagination” but, rather, by the amazing relating work of the variably connected lobes of a person’s physical brain, which are able to engage in that process without formal or precise signification. If a person feels it absolutely necessary to “name” “God” with some cipher, then “Incommensurable Relating” (which cannot be an object, as can “beingitself,” since the latter presupposes specific material content, whereas the former does not) would be more appropriate in describing the consciousness that, when provided content, empowers making connection in reflective and active elements in one’s life, just as “star dust” might be more appropriate in describing the “Whence” or substantial elements of one’s being—much more accurate than speaking of God as “being-itself” or the “abyss” or “depth” beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing. But my “definition” ends up being only an anthropological description, not theological, for which I would then have to insert anthropomorphisms, as we will see in chapter 4. Schleiermacher’s schema is parallel to Kant’s Idea or postulate that connected concepts and understanding or stimulated one’s will, except that it differs in that “Feeling” is not an Idea or thought or presupposition but, rather, only a less formal and nonlinguistic faculty of relating, connecting, or uniting in broad terms. Without its uniting or relating capacity, the “antithesis” could be detected as any sensations provided by Knowing and Doing that for some reason are left at “loose ends”—that is, unconnected to a greater whole and thus manifolds that somehow escaped being related to each other by a person’s uniting or relational faculty of Feeling. Such detachment from the relating work of Feeling is appropriately described by Schleiermacher as a “hindrance to life” rather than “life enhancing” and in that sense might perhaps be justifiably called aberrational, alienating, estranging, or “sin”—perhaps even forms of pathology. On the other hand, these terms should probably be saved only for the manifolds that involve social relations rather than including even all theoretical notions. One can perceive why this “Feeling” is regarded by Schleiermacher as the “highest consciousness” in its ability to draw manifold sensations, impressions, and desires into greater wholes from which meaning could then be derived. But what is not clear is why the “relating” power itself lies separated

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from thinking or reflecting. Can the brain not be the extent of “source” behind all relating, as we can see in the schemas it can devise in order to classify and maintain information? In truth, all four (rather than simply the single one he labeled “relation”) of Kant’s “categories” are schemas for “relating” data and not merely arbitrary and isolated categories existing only to satisfy a person’s “logic” in order to have a system. If the “Feeling” is not some separate reason or a mere appendix to reason but an actual function of all reason, then there is no need to exempt it from finitude or contingency vis-à-vis the “theoretical” and “practical” functions of reason. They all are connected brain schemas, not some presence of the Infinite within the finite via some mysterious language such as “spirit,” “soul,” or even “mind” as distinguished from the brain. These latter terms or symbols (spirit, soul, and mind) become metaphysical when separated from the brain and so are not valid since when the brain dies there are no more functions one can call “mind.” If Schleiermacher had not separated “religion” in this way, separating the “religious” element from theoretical and practical reason, his theology could have updated itself to the present stages of public consciousness or cultural reason, which was a key to his philosophical ethics. Even within his philosophical ethics he addresses Nature in its many changing forms and says the “ethical act” gives birth to a person as the “ethical life” involves others, and therefore a common cause or social contract, which necessitates genuine mutual equality, autonomy, and voice, which require dialogue, inclusion, respect, compromise, prioritizing of values, and agreement. It is not life in which everything is done by God, as he describes Christian ethics within “sanctification.” I am not obsessed with the “material” but only trying to find more coherence in Schleiermacher’s different approaches to human life. I am only trying to see what the “material” amounts to in our present culture in order to evaluate the ancient metaphysical language of most religions. Equivocal language or mere traditional language for the sake of tradition and authority can no longer satisfy our quest for knowledge and truth. But we must return to Schleiermacher’s schema, as he describes how the “antithesis” is addressed by Jesus’s “absolutely potent God-consciousness.” Now more than ever autonomy and inclusiveness are abandoned as Schleiermacher narrows the focus of the “answer.” THE REDEMPTION AND SANCTIFICATION BY JESUS OF NAZARETH—AND ITS PROBLEMS The chapter’s beginning quotation insisted on identifying the present Christian’s experience with that of the original disciples; otherwise Christianity

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would lose its importance, uniqueness, and credibility. This suggestion of two different historical points, the latter of which has to match the earlier or original, necessitates a historical examination of both common cultures, since Schleiermacher is aware of how time changes the common culture in which every person lives and by which they are influenced. But that is far too complex, as Schleiermacher admits, so he does not do that. He is satisfied to find a “maxim” of Jesus that explains his uniqueness without explaining that radical uniqueness within his common Jewish religion and culture. Of course, even describing the two events (past and present) in similar ways does not satisfy the demand that the present entity be the actual one originally involved—that is, the reality of the present experience being caused by the identical one from which the whole thing originated. We spoke of the trustworthy “chain of custody” that is typical in criminal law if one is trying to “corroborate” other data that seem insufficient for a conviction. One cannot simply find some possibly similar entity from a more recent time and offer it as the “original” as if it had been around during all the time that passed between the original event and the present. If this is true of a weapon in a murder trial, it also applies to specific unique elements being not merely similar but the same, even if it is an idea, emotion, or effect on the person. “Just because the Apostle Paul was claimed to have been temporarily blinded for three days by his conversion vision of Jesus en route. . .” (the claim of his blindness is never mentioned by him, but only in the Book of Acts, by an author decades later. One would think had he been blind, he might have mentioned it!) Just because someone who was suffering what others considered “demon possession” until he met Jesus and Jesus exorcised the demon does not mean that today I can assert that I had experienced a demon in my body for three years but last night when I prayed Jesus appeared to me and cast the demon out and so the experiences corroborate each other. Schleiermacher himself would not accept any of this kind of spiritualism, yet he insisted that a power from two millennia in the past had to be the same as is present today in order for the latter experience to be “Christian.” He admitted that the difference in time prevents the actual original person from being present today. Now one has to find a substitute? The “substitute” is simply a picture in the Bible that the churches preach via the Spirit? But how and why is that substitute considered the same as Jesus’s real presence? Would any person be willing to have their uniqueness reduced to a few words or even a forty-page narrative and allow that to be counted not simply as their true representation but actually the “same” as their real presence or total being? Is there no difference between a living person and a dead word recorded in a text? Does the written word come to life with a reading and therein become the “same” as a real presence of the person?86 How would a person distin-

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guish between an authentic connection between the original person and the later substitute and a merely professed connection between them? Why would the Gospel of John, written so late, depict Jesus as insisting that he had to leave the disciples in order for them to receive the Spirit who would take his place, thus enabling them to do not only what he had done but even “greater things”? “Greater things”? Things they never did and could not do in his presence they later will be able to know, say, and do in his absence—because of the Spirit? Who is actually making such a claim, and why do we suppose it is being asserted? Did no one in the early church miss Jesus’s presence or feel at loose ends or argue over what Jesus actually taught and did? Did this professed “Spirit” actually prevent the church from ever having any disagreements over what the uniqueness of Jesus was? Even the earliest church history shows those divisive disagreements. Or, perhaps more accurately, in light of all the work done by the Jesus Seminar, can anybody today credibly claim an “original” picture of Jesus that was uniformly held in all the churches by virtue of this alleged “Spirit” who guaranteed the continuity of the “presence” of Jesus into all the future? Even if Schleiermacher can be excused for not knowing about all the extracanonical Gospels, he knew of the radical differences even within the four canonical ones and simply chose to find Jesus’s “maxim” despite that. The “Antithesis” of Human Nature Minimized by Schleiermacher’s Christology How does he arrive at the “maxim”? In his lectures on the Life of Jesus, as well as his work on hermeneutics, we see a unique form of Schleiermacher’s psychological hermeneutic, tinged with Romanticist and mystical color coming probably from within his deep pietistic background. He instructs his students that to write a “biography” rather than mere “chronicles,” which simply mention many events without any coherent thread connecting them, one must have a thorough grasp of the “inner person” that is the subject. Since we cannot transplant a person into a different time period and think objective historical work is being done, we are limited to understanding the person so well within their own background that we know how the person would have responded in their own day had circumstances been different. That is quite a claim. If we are looking at Jesus as exemplary or as an archetype, as Christianity teaches, we must have a very detailed, graphic picture of his life and the circumstances in which he lived. However, since we cannot elucidate the different maxim formulations in the varied circumstances, it is enough if we can simply “apply his disposition under those circumstances to ourselves, without imposing our circumstances upon him.”87 If we worry about whether

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our asking how Jesus would have responded to different circumstances in his own day may be putting us “above the actor” or in a superior position to Jesus, Schleiermacher assures that this is not so, since we are not merely an “observer” but participating in Christ and only those “in Christ” can receive the power of Christ in which, if our picture of Christ needed correction, even Christ himself would initiate. Thus only the disciple can arrive at the true inner person of Jesus from which to distill his “maxim”? We can understand a person within their own time and place, their uniqueness vis-à-vis the common culture in which they are situated, so we can predict how any differences in their actual situation would have affected them and how they would have responded to the differences. That means we have isolated the person’s true character, their “disposition,” or even the “maxim” of their life. But Schleiermacher warns that the historical figure must be considered to be participating in the common life of the people of their time, sharing their language, concepts, values, and so forth; otherwise the Christology dissolves into a Docetism. The historical person’s uniqueness must be only how they varied from this common culture, and it must have been the historical person’s uniqueness only; otherwise the common life with its ideas and values would have been able to form anyone else into that unique person that Jesus was. Now the criteria have become impossible to test and document without examining a huge number of people in Jesus’s culture (if not all other people, since Schleiermacher will end up saying there could not be one single exception) to show it was a uniqueness possible only or at least not accidentally or providentially (?) actuated by this single “Jesus.” The psychological element in this abstracting the subject’s “maxim” is reminiscent of his position in Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies, in which he was sure through his imagination and his deep knowledge of Eleanor Grunow that he could experience all the joys of marriage to her even though they could not be together since she was married to another. This is also mystical since he spoke of the subject and object being one, by virtue of his “imagination” and “inner activity.” He also mentions his continuing connection to a deceased male friend, Okely, who years later is still “within” him, a term he uses in describing his relation with Jesus—“within” the believer.88 In either case, a person receives spiritually the benefits or answer of a continuing friendship, a direct unity spiritually, which transcends both distance as well as death. But is this not confusing memory in which the deceased person’s image is fixed by death as opposed to a friendship that is alive and changeable, a continuing two-way influence? Schleiermacher offers this entire approach in an exaggerated form rather than typical method of history or biography. He says, “there can be a representation of the individual which conforms to the idea, that is, one which

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conforms to the historical idea, which is not satisfied with externalities alone, only to the extent that it is possible in a certain sense to calculate the individual man.”89 But no biography or history deals with “externalities alone.” On the other hand, most biographies also avoid any psychoanalysis of the historical subjects, since they have no way of getting into the subjects’ heads, because they are far removed in history. Inferences can be drawn from consistent patterns of external responses of the subject as recorded, but this requires much analysis of historical detail, and Schleiermacher insists that the proper understanding of Jesus, his possessing from birth an absolutely potent God-consciousness, does not depend upon any historical details. The demand for the “perfect historicity of this perfect ideal” is done full justice if from his birth on Jesus “developed in the same way as all others.”90 But that is beside the point; it is precisely his birth as a “miraculous fact” or “marvelous appearance” (wünderbare Erscheinung)91 that is the problem. He says only too late while showing the problems within the traditional idea of the “two natures” of Christ that “we possess a far better canon in the formula that in Christ the creation of man first reaches completion.”92 But even this is a generality that has no justification. When Schleiermacher finally discloses that the proper calculation of Jesus could not have been made by anyone who had not been assumed into Jesus’s God-consciousness and therefore could not have been made by any opponent or simply neutral bystander, it becomes clear, then, he says, that the proper calculation would not be available to anyone who was not a redeemed Christian. Yet he speaks of being true historians and even of the need to examine the view of Jesus’s opponents in all fairness. But he admits that we have no documents from those opponents only the depictions in the Gospels, which we can accept as the truth because we know Christ and because Christ’s consciousness was leading those disciples to make whatever necessary corrections in their assessments of him. But then Schleiermacher even emphasizes that “during Christ’s life no one was in a position to calculate him, that as long as his disciples lived with him they were entirely unable to reach such a point on the one hand because they were always in quite a different situation—one, namely, in which they wished to appropriate him—but on the other hand also because they had not yet achieved such a knowledge of his inner nature that it could have led to such a judgment.”93 Anyone who does reach that stage to do justice to Jesus’s dignity in calculating his inner person will have done it not by their own genius, initiative, or historical or psychological acumen but totally by the directing influence of Christ as the work only of Christ.94 But this requires distinguishing between whether the relation is primarily under the power or directing influence of the individual or the power of the common life.95 This of course still operates

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within the common life shared by the people, without which Jesus’s uniqueness would not have been able to have been communicated to them. Does the idea of which is the “directing influence” resolve the problem of the complexity that exists between one’s decisions that seem to be autonomous and all the cultural input that shapes one’s reasoning? Schleiermacher contends that the true dignity of the person or his uniqueness would be seen the more his directing influence extends beyond his people and their time, enters the common life, and affects the latter, causing results that are different from what was possible under the common life. That directing influence makes his dignity the greater the less it dissipates after he is gone and shows a contiguity even “over all peoples and over all ages.”96 Schleiermacher felt he had been able to distill what Jesus’s basic maxim of life was just as accurately as Jesus’s original disciples, which was this Godconsciousness, and Schleiermacher found no evidence for its not being the power of his own entire life. Schleiermacher took the expressions of Jesus’s dignity from the Gospel of John since he saw that book as more of a continuous narrative rather than a bunch of “aggregates of individual narratives” without a real consistent continuity, as he saw the other Gospels.97 This was absolutely essential to the Christian faith. Yet Schleiermacher insisted it depended upon no single historical details.98 But his references to these passages in the Gospel of John—passages in which Jesus allegedly refers to himself in such grandiose, divine terms—are certainly alleged as historical details, even if critical scholarship today sees these coming not from Jesus but from the much later church so as to not be reliable. Is Schleiermacher trying to say that such external details have an inherent meaning only to the person who has faith and has thereby seen the “inner person” or his “maxim” and felt the redeeming effect of it? Is this not what in the work of the late erudite theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg is referred to as mere “faith in faith,” skirting the difficult historical issues, an approach indistinguishable from gullibility? This “total impression” of Jesus’s “inner person” or the “maxim” of his life, unfortunately, enabled Schleiermacher to use the least historically reliable of the four canonical Gospels, the Gospel of John, which he correctly thought was more organized than the other three but mistakenly thought had been authored by one of Jesus closest apostles, John, son of Zebedee, and so would have been providing eyewitness accounts, such as from Jesus’s empty tomb. But we know today that the book did not provide eyewitness accounts. The “impression” Schleiermacher had somehow allowed him to attribute to Jesus the actual use of the titles “Son of man” and “Son of God” to describe himself, whereas modern biblical historians for the most part are very skeptical that Jesus ever used the latter, and nearly all of them would

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view Schleiermacher’s rejection of the meaning of “Son of man” involving anything apocalyptic as totally misinformed.99 He insists that even Paul’s emphasis upon the contrast between Christ and Adam proves that Jesus is the “Son of God” in total purity and power, the “originator of a new human worth.”100 But for Paul the basic confession of the earliest Christians was a belief in Jesus’s vicarious death and Resurrection (1 Cor. 15; Rom. 1) only by which he was manifest as the “first fruits” of the resurrected new life, or “Son of God” in contrast to Adam, something Schleiermacher completely discounts. His refusal to see “Son of man” as a divine apocalyptic title or to see the “Resurrection” of Jesus in 1 Cor. 15 as the beginning of the eschaton as well as the central fact of the Gospel reveals his lack of awareness of the earliest disciples’ expectation of the imminent end and of Jesus’s “return” or parousia. He simply insists that the doctrines of Jesus’s Resurrection, his Ascension, and his Return for judgment are not “properly constituent parts of the doctrine of His Person.”101 What, then, constitutes one’s “person” if not his titles or promises as his disciples understood them? How does a person removed by nearly two millennia from a historical figure place more confidence in their own impression of the figure than in the assessment given by Jesus’s actual contemporaries who saw and heard him? Perhaps Schleiermacher cannot be faulted for being so unaware of the significance of the apocalyptic element in the Synoptics, finally completely uncovered by Schweitzer at the beginning of the twentieth century, though its discovery by Reimarus, found in the Wolfenbüttel Fragments between 1774 and 1778, predated Schleiermacher’s first work in 1799. But how Schleiermacher could have missed the expectation of the imminent end with the parousia that is so ubiquitous throughout the New Testament remains difficult to understand. The problem is simply how to discard one historical statement while embracing another when both are filled with supranatural ideas that are not subject to historical verification and, while making this unwarranted distinction, all the time insisting that historical details cannot dislodge or prove Jesus’s divine dignity. Was it only because Schleiermacher had once experienced such an awakening of his otherwise impotent God-consciousness and did so in response to the preaching of the Christian Gospel and so knew it to be the power of Jesus? Is this his pietistic allegiance overpowering his rationalism as the two battle each other? Does he substantiate this by showing that the preaching of the early church was concerned neither with an imminent eschaton nor with the Resurrection of Jesus, just as the church in his own day was not, but both were concerned only with Jesus’s own claims of his divinity based upon his “absolutely potent God-consciousness”? No, he never discloses his

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source for this selectivity he makes or its certainty. But he insists that Jesus’s God-consciousness was certainly neither the mere development of ethics from universal human reason nor mere revolutionary form of Judaism.102 Nor is it enough to say that he was the supreme “example,” since unless he was also the embodiment of the moral Ideal humanity has no assurance that it would ever be completed, unlike all other creatures.103 But the only way he avoids Kant’s negation of “embodiment” is to envision it totally exempt from any moral categories or actions, focusing only on the constant directing influence of his “absolute potent God-consciousness.” What logic forces a person to imagine an ideal (which can serve as both archetype and example) actually embodied within one single person yet not requiring any details of his interactions with other humans? That is most disconcerting. For Schleiermacher all the reported miracles that concern power of inanimate nature or purely physical effects on other humans become difficult, since he looks for the cause totally within the “dignity” or spiritual power of Christ, which is often missing in the narrative. Many of these involve details that are superfluous or questionable, but he is sure that Jesus never attempted to prove his dignity through performing a miracle. Ultimately faith in Christ came only from his spiritual effect on the people, even if they at times seemed to think otherwise.104 Not simply the “miracles” but even much other material in the Gospels show detail as if it were actual history when such a picture would have been incredible—for example, the story of Jesus’s temptations after his baptism. Schleiermacher opts for the interpretation that this was originally a parable by Jesus about himself but for the benefit of the disciples (e.g., to assure them that God would see to their needs, that they should not make a display of their spiritual powers, etc.), a parable later understood by Luke to be history, since it may have passed through several hands before he received it, stages in which no one realized it was only a parable. He says the rabbinical writings show this process quite frequently.105 Overall, the only significance that he can read out of Jesus’s being tempted is that he was like all humans in that he had to meet temptation during his entire life.106 Schleiermacher was ahead of his time in his perception of the piecemeal arrangements of the synoptic Gospels, of the processes of oral tradition, of the complex redaction of texts, and even of such things as vaticinia ex eventu. For example, he concludes the Resurrection narratives with the observation that the surprise characterizing the apostles upon hearing of Jesus’s Resurrection was substantial proof that “he had not predicted his resurrection while he was still in the course of his earthly mission.”107 Finally, corresponding to his position in The Christian Faith that Jesus was born as a “miraculous event” with his “absolutely potent God-consciousness,” Schleiermacher concludes when

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faced with historical statements about Jesus’s “Resurrection” that they are not clear, that they remain “incomprehensible, except Christ’s resurrection itself,” that this is the pattern or truth of his “whole appearance on earth. His coming was a miraculous act, but all that followed it was wholly natural.”108 Of course, we must add a caveat: “wholly natural” for whatever that could possibly mean for one who had this “absolute potent God-consciousness” from birth, as a veritable Incarnation of God, wholly sinless, when combined with the assurance that such spiritual state has tremendous power such as over psychic states of others which can even improve their physical well-being. Reason and even imagination are at a loss what to do here with “all that followed . . . was wholly natural.”109 In his Life of Jesus Schleiermacher insisted that Jesus had participated fully in the “common life” and in the Speeches that Jesus was both fully human and deity, but these assertions make little sense if they did not include assertions of Jesus’s “sinfulness” or of “God forgetfulness”—unless Schleiermacher limits the “common life” only to externals, whose merit or value can be judged not by externals but only by one’s knowing the motive or inner person. This becomes his psychological form of hermeneutic,110 to penetrate the “inner person.” Schleiermacher is sure the believer in any age can see Jesus’s “absolutely potent God-consciousness” as his only motive or therefore the “maxim” of his life, so he feels qualified to do a “biography” (rather than mere “chronicle” of multiple externals) of Jesus. Not unexpectedly, he finds Jesus’s “maxim”111 to be his absolutely potent God-consciousness as he preached about the Kingdom of God, not emphasizing material or sensible things but “spiritualizing” that symbol just as he did with the symbol of “Messiah.” He offers no other historical details that suggest Jesus’s uniqueness was only this potent God-consciousness, and neither does he offer details of what the earliest disciples believed was his uniqueness or what the majority of Jews thought that caused them to reject him. Those ought to have importance. No details in the Gospels are cited to show any similarity between what Jesus experienced as his “absolutely potent” God-consciousness and what even the “redeemed” and “sanctified” believer experienced as his Godconsciousness since Jesus apparently lacked the “common life” that all other humans experience, from which memories and recurrences of sin even the regenerate never can rid themselves, as he admitted. The Question of “Human Nature” and Ambivalence toward the “Antithesis” In religion Schleiermacher believed history was of value in seeing the origins of things but not in proving things. Yet he many times insisted that we

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“cannot know beginnings or ends,” so how could he know the origin or beginning of Jesus’s absolute potent God-consciousness, the lone miracle that he allows? He claimed it was not based on details but on a “total impression” of this Jesus “from which it follows only that there are no details in existence which could have prevented that impression.”112 Since he states only the negative—that “there are no details in existence which could have prevented that impression” of Jesus’s “absolutely potent” God-consciousness—one wonders whether a positive statement would not have been more convincing, that certain details in the “total impression” are convincing. But we have no idea of anything this “total impression” is based on and why it would be so inflexible and certain that no details could have negated it. Historians do not typically make such all-encompassing statements that “no details” could dislodge their reconstruction of the historical figure. Is there no possibility that historical details could negate the total impression Jesus made on his disciples such that they are always insufficient, or is the impression made only by faith or God’s grace, whereas the historical details are simply within a totally different sphere? But the real historical question is the total impression he made on the public given the claim the earlier disciples made that he was the fulfillment of the Jewish hope for a Messiah, yet nearly all the Jews rejected him. That surely has to be entered into any “total impression” one has of Jesus, or one is not being as historically objective as the earliest Gospel traditions that depicted the Jewish rejection en masse. The most pressing theological or ontological question points to Schleiermacher’s Docetic leaning: If Jesus had an “absolutely potent Godconsciousness,” did that not make him an exception to the universal scheme of humans who all necessarily have an impotent God-consciousness? But that’s my question, not Schleiermacher’s. My answer is, Certainly. But Schleiermacher simply labels Jesus’s possession of this “absolutely potent” God-consciousness, a Wünderbare Erscheinung or “marvelous appearance,”113 which he calls “miracle.” But he insists that it is neither a “miracle” in the sense of breaking some natural law nor a violation of accepted ontology. It means only something unique that we have not experienced before?114 Yet not only is Schleiermacher adamant that the “antithesis” of “pleasure and pain” (or between the immediate self-consciousness and the sensible selfconsciousness, or between grace and sin) is universal but also, in discussing the consciousness of sin in humans, he speaks of a “germ” of sin that persists even prior to the actuality of sin and of “traces” of sin that are present even when one has a quite strong God-consciousness. He insists that we are conscious that sin comes partly from our own being but also that it comes partly from beyond us, from something prior to us, an inherited or originating sinfulness that influences us, though we cannot exaggerate it, claiming that

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we have no actual sin that we have willed strictly on our own. Even in the strictest obedience of law, there is still imperfection and lack of motivation. So we always stand in need of not a mere Kantian ideal, but, rather, “it is only from the absolute sinlessness and the perfect spiritual power of the Redeemer that we gain the full knowledge of sin.”115 We have no active ability to appropriate the Redemption Christ offers but only a passive ability to appropriate it, as grace operates on us, enabling us to see the grossness of sin at the same time we are assured of our redemption.116 But none of this “sin” or “propensity toward sin” was experienced by Jesus even though it is the universal plight of all humans in history. Rather, Jesus’s “God-consciousness” was always absolutely potent with neither any “germ” of a sin consciousness nor inherited predisposition toward sinfulness that he simply passed on, no frustrations over trying to observe God’s law or expectations, no gradually increasing God-consciousness accompanied always by the “traces” of a sin consciousness. That seems to suggest that in the most significant human trait Jesus was not really fully human at all. Despite Schleiermacher’s arguments against Docetism, his Christ seems to end up Docetic: Jesus only “seemed” to be human. But the church painted him as only divinity on earth despite the church have declaring that Docetism was a heresy. Of course, Schleiermacher emphasizes that Jesus was so human that he had to develop as a normal human being. Yet he never sketches any particular ways in which such a normal human development took place in Jesus other than saying things like Jesus was a normal human and so was not omniscient and neither did he know all languages. Schleiermacher is only concerned with trying to explain the exceptionally potent, absolutely potent Godconsciousness that he ascribes to Jesus. That is all that has to be “corroborated” by the present believer’s faith in Christ. It has to be “corroborated” by one’s own spiritual awakening by the same absolutely potent Godconsciousness of Jesus. But why did Jesus’s God-consciousness have to be absolutely potent whereas for every other person the God-consciousness was so minimal as to be almost nil? Why does Jesus stand at one end of the spectrum and all humans at the other end while Schleiermacher still insists that Jesus was not only divine but also fully human though he belittled the “two natures” approach to Christology? How did Schleiermacher know this about Jesus? All Schleiermacher can say is, if Jesus’s God-consciousness had not been absolutely potent and constant from his pure innocence as a child through his maturity even to death, then he would not have been the Redeemer but rather both Redeemer and redeemed!117 This, of course, sounds like Schleiermacher has determined what is needed by a Redeemer and thereafter articulated Jesus to meet that decision—which was that Jesus was absolutely different from all

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other humans for all time and only in such capacity could have actually saved or assisted others. Later we will see William James acknowledging that the religious people who described their desire to be rescued from their state of “lack” did not have to be a desire for a God to intervene from some eternal world, but, in fact, their need could have been met by anyone who could have enabled them simply to have taken the next step in their lives. Schleiermacher insists that in Jesus’s life “His development must be thought of as wholly free from everything which we have to conceive as conflict” or “free from everything by which the rise of sin in the individual is conditioned.”118 Then how can Jesus be said to be fully human? Further, Schleiermacher had earlier insisted that what occurred in Jesus as the Christ could neither be absolutely super-rational nor absolutely supernatural but, rather, in order to be meaningful had to involve common reason and common human nature. But all he applies this common reason and common human nature to is Jesus’s finitude, ironically not to his participation in the most universal human problem—of experiencing the antithesis and of committing sin. Yet human finitude was never the central problem. Instead it was the universal human sin consciousness. Schleiermacher analyzes “originating original sin,” “originated original sin,” and “actual sin,” and Jesus escapes all of these. “Actual” sin does not require an act but can be present internally just as an evil thought or desire.119 But Jesus does not ever have even an evil thought. (We of course must realize that “sin” is not being defined as immoral acts or thoughts involving other humans but only as a weakening of one’s “Godconsciousness” that implanted in the person.) But how would Schleiermacher know this even then? Is Jesus miraculously exempt from the universal human problem while the church insists that he conquered that problem? We are not told how. Schleiermacher simply refocuses what human nature requires: he emphasizes that human nature itself had to have within itself the possibility of some member of the species possessing this absolutely potent God-consciousness; but more than possibility, it must contain the historical fact that it actually occurred only in this one human and yet could be neither an accident nor some divine arbitrariness but rather an integral part of the divine plan that works itself out historically.120 But why? Or perhaps one should ask whether everything, literally everything, was part of a “divine plan.” This means that, for Schleiermacher, Jesus had the perfect Godconsciousness at his birth so that he could mature then completely naturally as any human. But how would we know the way in which any human who had such a different God-consciousness would mature? Surely not merely the same way those mature who lack such an absolutely potent Godconsciousness. We have no way of judging, no criteria, but simply the old

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problem of the two opposing natures ascribed to Jesus—fully human but also fully divine.121 Yet ironically Schleiermacher opposes the “two-natures” Christology122 while he is nevertheless certain that Jesus had to manifest the perfection of God-consciousness or else the human species would have remained incomplete, with perfection only a “bare possibility,” which would be “to assert less of man than of other creatures—for it may be said of all more limited kinds of being that their concept is perfectly realized in the totality of individuals, which complete each other.”123 But to say that in humans that “perfection” was found, was historically manifest fully only one time, in only one single person, Jesus,124 paints Jesus and the human species totally unlike all other creatures, in which no single member of a species reaches perfection of the potential of the species apart from the “totality of individuals.” This was to David F. Strauss the biggest error of Schleiermacher’s Christology. It is completely unscientific.125 On the other hand, Schleiermacher never explored even how uniform those other species were, that, in fact, no single specimen stood apart as being totally dissimilar from all the others nor did their totality equal perfection. He simply implied that within their totality alone their species is completed yet insisted that in humans’ case one does not reach perfection by adding together a totality of imperfection!126 He insists, when speaking of Jesus’s perfection of the human species, that, were it not for the “miracle” of Jesus’s birth with this God-consciousness, the human species would have simply remained imperfect because one does not reach perfection by adding all the particulars that are imperfect. Yet he just used this explanation for the various animal species. How this exception could be so, Schleiermacher never explains but, rather, simply insists that, since we can never know beginnings or ends, it cannot be explained but meets the requirements of reason. That is, “since we can never properly understand the beginning of life, full justice is done to the demand for the perfect historicity of this perfect ideal, if, from then on, He developed in the same way as all others, so that from birth on His powers gradually unfolded.”127 This is a powerful statement—“perfect historicity of this perfect ideal.” Schleiermacher, of course, suggests that the God-consciousness or “inner person” can make itself somehow perceptible, though if it is only “in the ideal” it is not very easy to “understand just how the ideal can have been revealed and manifested in a truly historically conditioned individual.”128 He knew that Kant thought it to be impossible, but he felt by allowing the birth to include Jesus’s “absolute potent God-consciousness” that thereafter all the usual historical conditioning of the culture could be natural but still never defeat that God-consciousness. He thought he had guarded against Docetism, but he embraced it.

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Then, instead of trying to clarify his argument, Schleiermacher only exacerbated his problem: he attempted to mitigate this gross contradiction of the universality of “sin consciousness” or “Godlessness” and the appearance of this lone historical exception of Jesus by then minimizing the impotency of people’s God-consciousness that he formerly had emphasized as completely incapable of activating itself so as to inform the sensible consciousness. This is a huge problem that threatens to destroy the integrity of his Christological picture. He saw all of humanity as having a “sinful preparation” or “germ” of sin prior to their actual sin, all but Jesus. But in analyzing Jesus, that universal sinfulness is made insignificant so as to not have to include Jesus’s own God-consciousness as also being impotent. Schleiermacher writes, “That the Redeemer should be entirely free from all sinfulness is no objection at all to the complete identity of human nature in Him and others, for we have already laid down that sin is so little an essential part of the being of man that we can never regard it as anything else than a disturbance of nature.”129 Does this imply that the Incarnation was necessary in all of its mythologically incredible features—all over just a little “disturbance of nature” (Storung der Natur)? If the little “disturbance, (“annoyance” or “inconvenience”) in nature” was not the primary defect within humanity and the world, would not the “redemption” through Jesus be nothing more than just a “minor correction” or tweaking of the “little disturbance of nature”? At that point, Schleiermacher’s whole system—which had appeared so reasonably credible, which had begun with attempts to dislodge peoples’ feeling that they had to believe in miracles, prophecies, inspiration, mythology, and the like—suddenly exposes its fragility by his contradictory attempts to explain the necessity of redemption as well as its actual reality. Schleiermacher insisted that in Jesus the God-consciousness was always absolutely potent and that his development was completely free from anything we could conceive as conflict, such that so he progressed from “purest innocence” to complete sinlessness—that is, to the realization of such a potent “God-consciousness” that it could be called “a veritable existence of God in Him.”130 But either the impotence of God-consciousness is not really universal or if it is it must include Jesus. It is either the most basic problem in the divine-human relationship, or it is just a “little disturbance of nature.” But it cannot be both. Schleiermacher might have avoided this had he not followed the history of Christian theology in accepting Saint Paul’s idea of the absolute universality of human sinfulness based on Paul’s misconstruing many of the Psalms. Or Schleiermacher might have avoided the problem had he been consistent in his rejection of the “two natures” (communicatio idiomatum) and quit trying to both describe Jesus with both natures while admitting that they posed an insuperable problem.131 If God was “in Him,” how can Schlei-

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ermacher speak of Jesus’s “natural” or normal human development as if we all know how God would “mature” as a human? What happened to his earlier description of this impotence as a state of “Godlessness” or “God forgetfulness”? Now it is only a mere universal disturbance or inconvenience of nature. But it is not even universal, since Jesus was exempted from it. In the Speeches Schleiermacher seems to imply that other individuals might develop a similar degree of Feeling that Jesus did, that it was not necessarily limited to that one specific person, but in The Christian Faith that is a violation of his very thesis. So why is this “antithesis” so sinister, and why is it irrevocable by any power except God’s? Is not the game suddenly changed? Would it not be as logical to say that all humans suffer from not being able to fly because none of them has wings and this destroys the possibility of their having an integrated human life since flying is simply human nature but say that Jesus, as a human, flew but only because he alone was born with wings although he otherwise seemed like all other humans and flew away to heaven (or at least around Palestine) and yet had a complete human nature and he alone completed human nature to serve as the Archetype and Example? Or to say that all humans are impotent to cure many diseases and illnesses yet Jesus could cure any and all diseases although he was totally human? Or that all human bodies are too heavy to walk across a lake yet Jesus was able to do that even though he was fully human? Yet Schleiermacher would not accept any of these scenarios, for Jesus was not only the “end” or termination of any “prophecy” but was the grand miracle only in the sense of his God-consciousness, not by any spectacular naturedefying feats. But “nature defying” is certainly what his “absolutely potent” God-consciousness is by Schleiermacher’s reading. So the only exception Schleiermacher makes for this Jesus’s being completely “normal” was the way Jesus began. He thought he avoided offending science by not putting any credibility into the claims of Jesus’s Crucifixion or Resurrection or Ascension or return or his “descent into hell,” so could say these are only matters of our “belief in Scripture” as distinguishable from our faith in Jesus as the Christ. Yet Schleiermacher started the life of Jesus with this absolute and universal exemption and called it a “miracle” not in the sense of defying nature or reason but only in the sense of an absolutely unique God-man. The only exception to a universal condition is to proclaim one person in history as embodying “a veritable existence of God in Him.” We needn’t ask how such a claim of “a veritable existence of God” could possibly be verifiable. Even if we bought Schleiermacher’s exemption for Jesus and accepted the fact that his treatment could be true if Jesus really had this “absolutely potent God-consciousness,” the natural question would then arise as to how we

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could possibly know he had such an “absolutely potent God-consciousness.” If it were obvious, then why did most of Jesus’s Jewish contemporaries reject him? If it was not obvious or derived from any historical facts, as Schleiermacher assures us, but only from the experience we have in faith as he, through the message of the church, awakens our own God-consciousness in our present time, then the cart has been placed in front of the horse: one must accept Jesus by faith after which the faith will enable one to have his Godconsciousness awakened. And “faith” ends up being the same as “grace” or totally the work of God, so all one could say about those who rejected Jesus was that God did not want them included. That is a “marvelous” picture. And one should marvel of such a God. But somehow Schleiermacher wants the “marvelous appearance” or “absolutely potent” God-consciousness of Jesus to be so obvious that it is the power that itself evokes the person’s faith; it acts upon the person, assuming into itself the person’s own will. The person does nothing; God does it all, as is his position on “sanctification.” Humans cannot be described as “cooperating” with God; that is to forget that all the power and activity comes from God only. That is the final attempt at a “correlation” we have been hunting. When historical facts do not prove one’s faith, one turns to something in one’s present faith experience, and this “corroborates” the Christian historical claim. Perhaps this is not so bold as to be saying that believers have in fact been “transformed” by New Being as we will see as we examine Tillich but merely that one feels an awakening or enlivening of one’s sense of “absolute dependence” or “sense of the Totality” or “God-consciousness.” But the claim that Jesus was fully human but also the Redeeming God is made selfcontradictory instead of being “corroborated.” Schleiermacher expounds that “The Redeemer assumed believers into the power of His God-consciousness, and this is His redemptive activity.” The entire power is from God, through Christ’s absolutely potent Godconsciousness, and the only part humans play in this process of redemption is merely their “assent.” In his own words, even that is his “creative production” in us of a “receptiveness of His activity” for us “to assent to the influence of His activity.”132 More specifically, as he later discusses “conversion,” Schleiermacher emphasizes, “Everything that in any way contributes to conversion, from the first impression made on the soul by the preaching of Christ on to its final establishment in faith, is the work of Christ. These divine workings of grace are supernatural in so far as they depend upon and actually proceed from the being of God in the Person of Christ.”133 When the question is asked whether there is any autonomy of the convert, anything of the convert’s own initiative, aside from the influence of Christ’s “God-consciousness” or the being of God in Christ, Schleiermacher denies

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it even more adamantly.134 Of course, grace is not conditioned by a human’s activities, so there is no way there is any “cooperation” in even the reception of grace, no cooperation, and no autonomy. In the conversion experience, the “convert” is assumed into fellowship with Christ, the latter being always wholly active. If humans have any part in that experience it would be limited to the “free will” of the person to apprehend by one’s senses and conceptualize as the Word comes to him. But this can hardly be called human activity but only an open passivity or receptivity that has already been receptive to a “preparatory grace.” Finally, for Schleiermacher the only active human element is found postconversion since the living fellowship with Christ immediately evokes activity from the convert.135 The hearer of the Gospel is taken over by Christ’s God-consciousness, which means that whatever “feeling” of the Totality that Schleiermacher began with the Speeches is then totally abandoned in The Christian Faith as existent or discounted to nothing, all for the sake of attributing it all to the power of the Christian God’s grace only in Jesus Christ. Autonomy was cast aside for a spiritual existence as a sheer automaton for Christ, totally manipulated and “controlled” by Christ rather than willed in any way by the person themself. That the Feeling of the Whole might lead to a somewhat better life cannot be refuted, but is there any reason why this must require a single violation of the universal human nature in Jesus? Is there any real proof that Jesus was such an abnormal human after Schleiermacher has emphasized that no externals such as supposed miracles made him the Christ but only his potent Godconsciousness? Is there any reason why that same “awakening” might not take place in some quite different way? The only reason he gives is that if this is not understood then Christ is not Example, Archetype, or Ideal and therefore the basic claims of being “redeemed” by him collapse as does Christianity’s uniqueness. Usually a person’s being spoken of as an “example” has to do with ethics or morality, but with Schleiermacher it is confined only to Jesus’s being exemplary in his potent God-consciousness. But even within that constricted area, how could that be an example if Jesus, unlike all humans, had a “veritable existence of God in him”? So ethics is left in the lurch as Christology buries itself in mystery and mythology. The Importance of Defining the “Four Heresies” The final extension of the basic criteria of religion, and the one that ultimately presents the gravest problem of coherence to Schleiermacher’s theology, is what occurred in his attempt to distinguish the Christian faith from its four possible heresies, as he conceived them: Docetism, Ebionitism, Manichaean-

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ism, and Pelagianism. That is, as he explained the “faith” (the “awakening” of one’s God-consciousness) as simply the understanding that “redemption is only in Jesus of Nazareth,” Schleiermacher was forced to show why redemption was needed and how this Jesus alone was able to facilitate it.136 That required historical references and accuracy, as well as their alignment to his basic definition of “redemption in Jesus of Nazareth.” But no historical data can be supplied. It is simply furnished from his psychological interpretation of Jesus, combined with his balancing act over whether the “antithesis” or state of “God-forgetfulness” was a universal human trait that makes humans hopeless and helpless and its opposite absence in Jesus, which he dismissed as only of slight importance. These very heresies themselves would not allow him to ride the fence in that way. Ironically, he singled only these four out as if none of the other designated heresies were their equal, but that was only because he realized how dramatically any of these four contradicted his Christological position. In simplistic terms, Pelagianism allowed that humans are not totally sinful and so might be good enough that there is no need for redemption, while Manichaeanism saw humanity as too evil to be redeemed. The Ebionite heresy depicted Jesus as too human to redeem, while Docetism painted Jesus as only seemingly (dokeo) human but actually too divine to connect with humans. Humanity cannot be either too sinful or too good or else Christ can do nothing. And Jesus cannot be too human or too divine or he is no benefit to other humans. This should be sufficient to show that the whole idea of a human being divine or of humans needing to be rescued from themselves by some God is somewhat problematic. Since Schleiermacher saw the “God-forgetfulness” or impotent Godconsciousness in all of humanity as so ineffective as to be almost existent, the only answer lay in something happening to them that would “awaken” this God-consciousness from its extreme impotence. This is precisely what the disciples experienced. His “absolutely potent God-consciousness” stimulated them, awakening in them a God-consciousness to begin to transform their lives by influencing their objective consciousness, reducing the “pain” in their lives.137 But precisely how does this happen? As the beginning quotation of this chapter shows, Schleiermacher’s position is that one encounters in the preaching of the Christian communion the testimony of what others have experienced in Christ through the Spirit and the same power is present in the preaching and hence this Christ is still able to influence all later generations. When this message simultaneously merges with one’s consciousness of one’s need (i.e., to overcome the “antithesis”), faith is awakened by the Spirit, even if “redemption” is begun quite infinitesimally or as a premonition, but the assurance or certainty of ultimate or

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complete redemption is provided with the message, a certainty from that moment in which the believer is absolutely dependent and begins an inward empowerment or certainty.138 The certainty is not some “proof” such as from alleged “miracles” or “prophecies” in the Jewish scriptures; it is more personal, less historical, and therefore more certain, as certain as one’s own self-consciousness, which has been “awakened.” Though he does not refer to Descartes, it is obvious that Schleiermacher is saying that the certainty of one’s unity with Christ, after which one reflects on it, realizing what it was, could “never be false”139 since it was one’s own being empowered by God (Christ or Spirit). One knows when one has experienced “redemption” in Jesus of Nazareth. Although any references to “miracles” or “prophecies” might add to the joy of redemption, they objectively prove nothing and can be counterproductive in directing attention away from the actual “redemption.” More specifically Schleiermacher notes that the word “redemption” is used figuratively, signifying an “evil condition” or “state of captivity” from which one is released by someone else.140 The “evil condition” must be the state in which one’s immediate self-consciousness has little or no influence on one’s sensible self-consciousness, which he therefore called “God forgetfulness.” As we already noted, the God-consciousness is not totally absent but simply so impotent that it cannot influence one’s sensible self-consciousness. Schleiermacher provides a formula for this opposition—namely, that the sensible self-consciousness has a greater power than the immediate self-consciousness in any relation of the two—and since in any moment in which one or the other dominates or exists alone, again, the sensible self-consciousness has the greater power, this means the immediate self-consciousness within a person is powerless to realize itself but rather must be assisted from outside.141 This means for Schleiermacher that the crucial “awakening” was not some truth about some doctrine or ethical insight but an experience of “redemption.” It is not the inner meaning of the Virgin Birth, Trinity, or eschatology or some claims of Jesus performing fantastic miracles or fulfilling the Jewish scripture about the anticipated Messiah. The Gospel of John includes not a word about Jesus’s birth, which proves to Schleiermacher how unimportant the early church regarded that external. In fact, the “faith” of his disciples or their “awakening” of their God-consciousness by him was even independent of the claims of his Resurrection, Ascension, and return at the end of the world as Judge. Schleiermacher insists they had encountered Jesus’s Godconsciousness in various ways and had their God-consciousness awakened long before there was any premonition of a Crucifixion or Resurrection.142 This being so, the rest of the externals of his history are irrelevant. But the order of events in the narrative was determined by the editors rather than providing an actual chronological order of different levels of the disciples’

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awareness of who he was as we know from all the vaticinia ex eventu in the Gospels. If we ask Schleiermacher how he knows that Jesus’s disciples experienced redemption prior to his Crucifixion or alleged Resurrection or how he knows that Jesus actually had this “absolutely potent God-consciousness” or how this “absolutely potent God-consciousness” can even be perceived by others, nothing definite is given just as in the Speeches, no clues supply how he thinks one experiences the “Infinite” within any finite thing. With regard to Jesus, Schleiermacher simply avers that it depends upon no single historical details. When that claim is spoken, Christ’s Spirit simply works in the minds of the audience in every generation as the mission of the church. Everyone who allows that “God-consciousness” to assume their own consciousness into itself (over which one really has no control since it is only God acting) experiences the power of the true God-consciousness of Jesus, thereby corroborating its original appearance by its continued presence and power. But even one’s “allowing” this to happen—one’s “assent”—is only the preparatory grace of God. Further, the disciple never moves beyond a consciousness of sin, even within the state of sanctification,143 which means the exaggerated picture of Jesus’s “absolutely potent God-consciousness” is not necessary, “corroborated,” or even intelligible. We have already shown that what needed “corroborating” was the claim being made about Jesus, and Schleiermacher does not explain how one’s spiritual experience proves such a contradictory figure as he has painted for that Jesus. The irony was that Schleiermacher was persuaded that no spiritual religion would ever revert back to materialism or some idolatry, no monotheistic religion would ever lose any of its people to reembrace a polytheism, and, once these four heresies were openly examined and declared “heretical,” no future theology would ever again embrace any of them. As much as he belittled Docetism, that has been not only the predominant Christological posture of the church through twenty centuries now but, most ironic of all, also the most appropriate title for Schleiermacher’s Christology. Barth, however, insisted that Schleiermacher’s theology was nothing but an “anthropology,” revealing a lack of clarity, which leads us to say his theology is either anthropology by its absolute Idealism or Docetic, neither one of which the church could accept if it fully understood the options. WHAT ARE RELIGION’S AND THEOLOGY’S RELATIONS TO SCIENCE? Under Schleiermacher’s schema of the “immediate self-consciousness” or “feeling of absolute dependence” being the contentless prereflective sense of

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unity that is “piety” or “religion,” how does its separation from Knowing and Doing affect its relation to science? That was one of Kant’s major concerns, and the validity of “science” and the interaction of Reason and Nature in all their manifestations was itself a vital concern in Schleiermacher’s philosophical ethics. Is science of any concern to religion or theology, or is it part of the “antithesis” that could only be resolved by some “redemption” that was never an answer in his philosophical ethics? If denying either the objective consciousness or the immediate (or absolute) consciousness would result in making science and civilization impossible, the two must be able to coexist. Even one’s specific identity is so paradoxically independent of things by which it might become a separate object that it can transcend extreme changes or reversals through the years, as one’s body and mind change radically. Of course they do not change completely, or the memories would be gone, memories that have been kept in the brain sometimes anywhere from seventy to a hundred years, memories and DNA that provide the continuity of self-conscious identity, even though the organs, skin, and bones have changed significantly. But the sensible self-consciousness as well as the immediate self-consciousness both seem to be involved in any sense of identity of something that changes. It is never just one or the other. How could this understanding of absolute dependence or an immediate self-consciousness or consciousness of the Whole resolve the dilemma with which we began? First, a person retains their autonomy in the fact that the “objective consciousness” (of subject-object thinking) is understood as a vital part of their being as well as a necessity for all human interaction and civilization. The task lying before the person of “faith” is not one, however, that falls merely within this level of consciousness. It is not that a person must try to attempt the impossible in analyzing the degrees of validity of all the conflicting metaphysical ideas and claims of various religions—or in spending a lifetime studying the insufficient and conflicting evidence available to try to ascertain what historical events actually underlie each religion, or in having to try to articulate a feasible way to explain how a historical fact, person, or other entity could actually be divine or a manifestation of God. Those might be only misunderstandings created by a heteronomy or authoritarianism of an ancient institution that formulated the terms of discussion that are no longer credible terms. People in the twenty-first century are not open to claims about some present human being both god and man. The only way they accept such an idea is from a very old tradition that an institution taught them is not only authoritative but also infallibly divine. So it is built upon a vicious circle of presuming the unity of the Infinite and finite in order to prove a claim of the unity of the Infinite and finite. But to say as does Schleiermacher that religion is “a sense and taste for the Infinite in the finite”144 seems strange in its mixing an empirical world with an invisible and, as we saw, contentless experience

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of the Totality. The only thing that prevents its being recognized as totally vacuous is the fact that Schleiermacher says it is the Infinite “in the finite.” Yet for Schleiermacher the finite simply does not count, no particulars about Jesus except the “inner person” or his “absolutely potent God-consciousness” that cannot be empirically intuited, and neither can certain phenomena be cited as resulting causal evidence of its presence. There is simply nothing tangible to measure the claim at all. More simply put, could it be that science and faith engage the same levels of a person’s consciousness but they emphasize different levels? That is, science and religion both utilize an objective consciousness in which a person learns to apply concepts to perceptions, to abstract and generalize through reflection, and to utilize in that reflection for certain kinds of judgments that are appropriate to the objects being studied. But both also operate with some sense of the Whole or “immediate self-consciousness” even if science does not spend its time talking about “ends” or ultimate goals or the Whole. So the religious mentality emphasizes the “trust” side of experience within an unreflected consciousness of the Whole or a subjective social solidarity or finding one’s “I” in the other “I” while its contiguous objectifying concern is certainly for the welfare of the various “parts” that make up the Whole. For the Whole consists of separate parts, or it could not be called a “whole” or “totality.” If these are identifiable parts, then the “whole” is also identifiable as a phenomenon and to that degree has to have definite qualities or attributes. Otherwise the insistence on the Whole being beyond all qualities or attributeless forces the parts of it also to have no qualities or attributes. I do not believe that Schleiermacher’s reference to a person’s feeling or awareness of the Whole of which they are a part was simply a logical disconnect, that the parts had qualities but Whole transcended all qualities. In this sense, the negative theology of Maimonides or of Nirguna Brahman loses all connection with the real world without supplying the counterpart, the Saguna Brahman or a theistic idea of God. Unless religion and theology have no concern for individuals or for the world as a discreet entity of a physical environment and physical beings existing in it who shape language and therefore “ideas” and even a culture, the Whole is the totality of the parts. As Nietzsche aptly said, “There is nothing but the Whole.” But such an assertion does not turn the Whole into nothing or into something that no longer has qualities or definite empirical manifestations. Science, ethics, and law, similarly, in order to understand discreet phenomena must posit their relations or connections with other phenomena, just as one envisions specific responses or causal connections and powers. To think of separate parts or specific things or people is no more inappropriate or fictional than it is to think of one’s act as a separate act, born only from

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one’s limited freedom, for which one assumes total responsibility to various levels of totalities. The religious consciousness or faith need not be a relinquishing of this necessary faculty of objectification in human living and social organization. Thus the deeper question for Schleiermacher remains why the image of Whole or unarticulated awareness of this must come from Feeling rather than from simply being a vital part of both theoretical reason and practical reason. As one realizes the finite limits of both of these forms of reason, they still include all the qualities Schleiermacher invested in Feeling. The Feeling need not be divine or semidivine or revealed or imparted or imputed to humans because of their finite minds just because of the Feeling’s alleged passivity. Is that perhaps an unnecessary presupposition, just as “passivity” is an unjustified priority given to Feeling as if to optimize humanization, the primary answer were “passivity”? But even Schleiermacher elsewhere detects the ineptness of being only passive. On the other hand, this does not mean that the scientific enterprise can or does flourish without a sense of the Whole or Unity, that it can merely sort through discreet objects without making any judgments as to their connections to other discreet entities or making any judgments about their value or the value of the results of any research, or that it can make its judgments in a very short-sighted way. Science presupposes criteria of values, and it is assumed that they are generally agreed-upon public values, even if not discussed or articulated very often. In fact, science’s very public method manifests that it is deeply rooted in a sense of the Whole from which it derives value, even if the Whole is not always articulated or cannot literally be. But this sense of the greater Whole of which science is conscious does not necessitate a special category called “religion,” “piety,” or “Feeling.” This might evoke Schleiermacher’s and Hegel’s idea of the need for a “system” in which the connections are articulated, but “systems” can exist without redundantly articulating every conceivable tangent of interest or remote connection so long as what is included in the “system” is a pertinent part of what appears to be a coherent whole by one’s language. Within the scientific method and from a motivation probably also provided by this sense of a Totality, science is devoted to a method of conceptual objectification. Its specific claims are public, based on public reason, and it is always open to reevaluate or test by duplicating experiments. But its sense of the Whole is not allowed to incorporate irrelevant claims, absurd methods, preferential treatments, antiquated ideas, privileged positions, or absolutizing. That distinguishes its emphasis from the emphasis of religions. Everything is subject to the same ontological and epistemological paradigms, although the scientist is always open even to having to correct those paradigms. Theology

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has engaged in the same “corrections” or rereading of data or reinterpretation of events and traditions on behalf of religion yet often substitutes ontologies or makes exceptions for ontology’s universals, just as Schleiermacher did for Jesus’s “absolutely potent God-consciousness.” The subconscious “slipping of categories” was not an error made only by Descartes but also by many who want to affirm a Universal or Absolute out of relative fragments. Is it possible that there might be something that is, from our limited judgment, “universal” in common human experience without its being absolute and thereby nulling everything else? To try to distinguish science as a participatory spectator sport of callous objectification with no values, ends, or goals is simply to misunderstand natural science or human science. Its specifics, and often minutiae, are rooted in an understanding of a physical, geographical, and temporal whole, not merely in a myopic resolution of some narrow problem that is irrelevant to the majority of the world now and in the future. It is primarily in religion and theology’s insistence of inserting an invisible, supernatural being whose whole, parts, content, and method do not correspond to science. That was Strauss’s potent criticism of Schleiermacher’s Christology, that it not only offended the church but even offended science—specifically in thinking that Jesus of Nazareth was totally unique, the perfect human, in a world of very imperfect humans, which defies the way species develop together. As Freud emphasized, at least science has a certain built-in humility—that is, is open to correction and so is always tentative. Certainly science’s use of paradigms rather than thinking in terms of natural “laws” is evidence of this attitude.145 It presupposes a Whole but also does assume the necessity of our reason in judging the sensible world objectively (i.e., in as non-prejudicial way as possible)—a judgment that then merits our allegiance to those judgments or tentatively articulated, always-being-refined models and results. Faith, trust, and values are not the sole property or tools or assumptions of the religious and need not be different by the imposition of some exaggerated claim by religion that true trust or faith and values must be eternally valid, provided by God, and absolutely true, as strictly only the proper domain of religion. As Schleiermacher himself admitted, everything we know is in process, and we know nothing of actual beginnings or ends, which would imply that we never escape the relativity of our situation, even by the primal consciousness of Totality or of not being self-caused.146 By Schleiermacher’s system, consciousness of unity or of the Whole—if that is also called “faith” by the religious—involves no reflection or conceptualizing and therefore transcends all particular objects and the process of objectification. If this consciousness of unity is immediate and so is not a mere idea or postulate, as it was in Kant, then it is also not a mere logical

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connector or hypothetical power of synthesizing that one has to posit because of conflicting results arising from pursuing questions about the Absolute or God by some human reason that has its transcendental limits. It is prior to and independent of any objectifications or mere ideas, based on reality in manifold forms being related in the real world as well as in one’s mind. It is a consciousness of identity within and with the Whole, as Schleiermacher said, “in which the antithesis again disappears and the subject unites and identifies itself with everything which, in the middle grade, was set over against it.”147 But “faith” in this primal sense of identity with the Whole, while not carrying within itself specific ideas, nonetheless immediately motivates a person to either reflect or act such that at that point it utilizes content at hand to explain by this content one’s identity with the Whole. Without the content, it remains at best only a nondescribable form of mysticism. This insistence that a person possesses a consciousness that enables a person to unite and identify in a sense with “everything” of which they are also objectively conscious is very important to the Romanticist element of Schleiermacher—especially if it is understood as a general trait of human consciousness and not restricted merely to the formally religious people. But Romanticism requires the uniqueness of the particular qualities of everything, not simply an empty claim of identification with a vacuous Totality. “Faith” in this temporal form, connecting the identity with the Whole with specific thoughts or actions, turns out to describe personal trust beyond all words or explanations or objects of trust, which in this temporal stage seems based not on feeling as much as on reason and past experience. Although Schleiermacher does not put it this way, the need for an integrated Whole should become the driving power behind the pragmatism of all knowledge, that is, the need to form a whole from the various fragments (the synthesizing reality rather than mere idea), the criterion that will reconcile differences from conflicting data, since the whole thing must be consistent and integrated. This consciousness can even be revolutionary when it becomes evident that structures of civil society are often uncivil, inhumane, or not disposed to input from a consciousness of the Whole but only from a select few. But this is so only if we move past Schleiermacher’s equation of this consciousness of the Whole with contentless and transtemporal Feeling or a consciousness of dependence upon One God and only when we quit upholding any scheme that makes humans totally dependent upon some elusive external divine source by denying that humans have the capacity within themselves to awaken this “higher” consciousness or sense of unity within their own reason and thereby find the ethical life in community. Is there really any reason why the sense of a greater unity between the discreet parts has to be supplied by an unknown outside power called “religion”

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or “Feeling” rather than being simply part of the theoretical and practical reason that all humans possess? CONCLUSION: THE LIMITED SCOPE OF THE “AWAKENING” If the young Schleiermacher saw “religion” as a universal intuition of the Infinite within the finite, and if that enabled him to escape ancient and unacceptable doctrines and moral imperatives as well as escape the rancid exclusion and heteronomy of established religions, emphasizing the validity of the uniqueness of individuals and their autonomy, then that definition of religion went through rather radical revisions in his more mature, more orthodox thinking. While a certain ambiguity or lack of clarity prevailed between what appeared to be quite different approaches, his ministry and professorship continued powerfully and were only temporarily eclipsed by Hegel. Schleiermacher remained too deeply in the Pietist tradition to give in to a completely rationalistic approach to Jesus as a historical person. Historical or external facts he viewed as superfluous to a person’s genius or uniqueness, and so the “dignity” of Jesus was discovered through probing Jesus’s “inner person.” By this Schleiermacher justified using the least reliable Gospel, ignoring the Judaism out of which Jesus thought, spoke, and acted. Schleiermacher’s “psychological” hermeneutic enabled him somehow to know the person of Jesus so well that Schleiermacher simply saw his own spiritual awakening as exactly the same as that of the early disciples. This, to him, “corroborated” the claims the church made about Jesus that it could not prove merely by historical externals. However, the “Feeling” or “Absolute Dependence” or “Immediate SelfConsciousness” which Schleiermacher equated with religion was allegedly contentless, outside of time and space, and so could not corroborate the specifics about Jesus’s “absolutely potent God-consciousness” even if a person claimed to be “awakened” by the same message and power. His refusal to allow the religious element to be a part of a person’s “objective self-consciousness,” or a part of both theoretical and practical reason, left it as not confirming anything. Even his sense of Unity or Totality or Other depended upon the objective self-consciousness for any content, but he simply regarded the objective consciousness as antithetical or in opposition to the higher selfconsciousness. Although Schleiermacher illustrated how many doctrines could be explained in light of his definition of Absolute Dependence, and although he was able to avoid much of what otherwise were simply legendary, mythical, or supernatural stories in the Bible, his own definition drove him to make

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Jesus exempt from full humanity, centering the whole or Jesus’s work and dignity on a most unscientific miracle—being born with an “absolutely potent God-consciousness.” This was no less supranatural than other doctrines that Schleiermacher condemned for dividing a person’s dependence or for being only doctrines of the Scripture, not equal to a person’s faith based on their “awakening” by Jesus. The most telling criticism of Schleiermacher’s system, however, remains the criticism offered by David Strauss: that it offends both the church with its disregard for doctrines of the Crucifixion, Resurrection, Trinity, and so forth and also science with its picture of one member of a species being the absolute culmination of that species, isolated and wholly different from all others of that species. This unscientific element simply underscores the unscientific definition of “Feeling” as one of only three forms of human consciousness without seriously considering that it might actually have been only a part of both theoretical and practical reason. By so doing, Schleiermacher injected a nebulous, contentless element that he thought connected those two forms or reason and lent to them an ability to view the Whole. That may be a reality of human identity—as I have acknowledged above—but its function always involves its connection to either theoretical or practical reason. It is more obvious today in studies of the human brain that reason itself has fantastic abilities to relate, to classify, and that its “schemas” enable understanding and retrieval, which is a more realistic explanation of the power to relate manifold sensations. Schleiermacher’s position failed to match even the scientific interest he showed in his ethics, since he saw religion as able to have the “final word,” as Rorty would put it, whereas no history or science will be able to have any final word, since they address the changing world while being stimulated by that very changing world. On the more positive side, we can say this about Schleiermacher: The “corroboration” he attempted did not validate his Christology and thus lacked serving as the ground for Christian ethics; and even more so he thought Christian ethics was simply the process of “sanctification,” which was all God’s doing, which precluded humans from initiating anything. By so doing, his “Christian ethics” would remain “sanctification” but not qualify as an ethic. Hence, that would not really even qualify as an ethics. However, it is possible to see that his early writings, especially the Speeches, reveal important understandings that are necessary in any ethic hoping to gain universal acceptance. The first is that people must have or must develop a sense of the Whole or Totality—not simply to include all humans within the scope of ethics, and with all of their diverse views and religions, but to include the entire universe. Anything less would become a problem. This means valuing individuality, uniqueness, and genius even if it contradicts our traditions and identities. It means

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opening ourselves to explore truth together by mutual recognition instead of falling back on caricatures of those who differ from us. The awareness of belonging to the Whole, the empirical Totality, led Schleiermacher to a feeling of experiencing other people in very deep ways, as he suggested each of us is a “compendium of humanity:” But if the metaphysics is questionable, the ethical principles must be “freestanding.” He writes, “There are moments when, despite all distinction of sex, culture, or environment, you think, feel, and act as if you were really this or that person. In your own order, you have actually passed through all those different forms. You are a compendium of humanity. In a certain sense your single nature embraces all human nature.”148 Before religion can serve as a ground for any ethics, its claims must be realistically credible rather than based on the old metaphysics of infinity. In a religiously diverse society, any religion’s claims would have to be general enough that everyone would accept them. But that standard is simply impossible for religions that remain so attached to their particulars and therefore Absolute. Schleiermacher definitely felt Christian ethics superior to any religionless ethic, but it is simply not clear how Christianity was “ethics,” since “sanctification” was Christianity’s description, and since the sanctifying was all done completely by God. We must see if Schleiermacher’s colleague at the University of Berlin, G. W. F. Hegel, professor of philosophy, was able to do what he could not: “corroborate” the Christological claims. NOTES 1. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 362–63. 2. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 385, italics mine. 3.  This was put in straightforward form by John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity: With “A Discourse of Miracles”, ed., abr., and intro. Ian T. Ramsey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), original publication 1695. See a short critique of this work in Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion? 4.  Friedrich Schleiermacher, who studied the New Testament under Johann Semler, was familiar with the negative effect that critical questions had on faith based on alleged history reported in the Bible. Hence, early on Schleiermacher wrote, “Every sacred writing is in itself a glorious production, a speaking monument from the heroic time of religion, but, through servile reverence, it would become merely a mausoleum, a monument that a great spirit was there, but is now no more . . . Not every person has religion who believes in a sacred writing, but only the man who has a lively and immediate understanding of it, and who, therefore, so far as he himself is concerned, could most easily do without it.” Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1958), 91.

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5. The “canonical” Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) of the Christian Bible date somewhere between 70 to 120 CE. The Jataka, which supplies details on Gautama’s life even prior to his Enlightenment as well as after, dates probably to the first or second century CE (and Gautama’s life was either in the latter part of the seventh century BC or the early part of the sixth century BC). Each set of narratives of the incidents and teachings of both Buddha and Jesus was separated sufficiently to realize that probably none of the writers had known either Buddha or Jesus, even though there undoubtedly had been a long period of oral transmission of traditions about both men. In any case, all these documents came from those who were biased disciples of the two men, not from outside historians or even from opponents of the new religion. In the Christian book of the Acts of the Apostles we get a glimpse of the content of the message as the leaders of the movement were trying to convert others, and the preaching was filled with alleged historical details, not a psychological analysis of Jesus. Schleiermacher ultimately ignored this in his hermeneutic. 6.  Johann Semler became professor of theology at the University of Halle in 1752 and head of the department in 1757, remaining highly respected until 1779, when he published Reimarus’s Fragments, which proposed a “natural religion” or “Deism.” Semler’s most important work, An Essay toward Teaching Christian Doctrine Liberally, laid out a historical methodology that required studying the author’s conditioning and presuppositions, the historical context in which the documents were written, the particular interest of the author, and the author’s motivation, main point, and opposition and that required allowing for different points of view in addition to the author’s. Semler analyzed how religious traditions develop and are preserved, largely because they serve the purposes of the immediate particular religious community. He also developed an evolutionary approach to religious history, asserting that there was never any pure form and so development involves moving from obscurity to greater clarity. This ultimately led Semler to explain the idea of Messiah and Kingdom of God as Oriental forms that Jesus rejected but used to try to imbue with his understanding. Tradition has it that in being willing to hear “different” points of view Semler opposed Augustine and Pelagius, concluding that Pelagius was not the infidel he had been judged to be, but determining that Augustine’s argument was not informed of the background and was based on the Latin rather than Greek. Semler even suggested Augustine, had he lived in Luther’s time, would have condemned Luther. By 1788 Lutheran orthodoxy had been reinforced, and Semler, who had been suspect, became more conservative at the end of his life. 7.  The rationalist characteristics included (1) that truth is finally within the ethical and religious ideas, which are part of the stock of humanity itself, but (2) that truth is not a given but, rather, something to be sought. The supernaturalists sought the certainty in some given truth beyond the rationalistic critique, and they felt that they had found this in the authority of the revelation of the Bible—especially the New Testament. By the mid-nineteenth century, rationalism seemed to be winning the struggle, but then the excesses of the French Revolution and the new revival movements of Pietism caused many to turn back to the supernaturalist side. 8.  The alleged apostolic requirements of authorship for the canonical documents had lost credence years prior.

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 9. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, trans. W. Montgomery, intro. James M. Robinson (New York: Macmillan, 1959). 10. Theologians’ very unhistorical preference for reading the essence of Jesus from the Gospel of John, which had long been recognized as the least historically reliable of the canonical Gospels, had begun explicitly as early as Martin Luther in the sixteenth century. So mutual disrespect often existed between textual scholars and theologians. 11.  See Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion?, especially chapters 8 and 9. 12. Ian T. Ramsey, Religious Language: An Empirical Placing of Theological Phrases, Library of Philosophy and Theology (New York: Macmillan Co., 1963). 13. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 238. 14.  Robert P. Scharlemann, The Reason of Following: Christology and the Ecstatic I, Religion and Postmodernism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 106. 15. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 8. 16. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1971), 162–73. Compare with Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Life of Jesus, trans. S. Maclean Gilmour, ed. and intro. Jack C. Verheyden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 3–28. In Soliloquies Schleiermacher’s insistence that spiritual powers are more valid and central than anything material also combines with self-contemplation and imagination in which one is able to know another person and “experience” them spiritually in depth even though time, space, or even death separates them. 17.  Sometimes this soubriquet is qualified as “the father of modern liberal Christian theology.” But “liberal” hardly fits with Schleiermacher’s Moravian Brethren background, with his work with the “Evangelical Faith,” which involved a union between the Lutheran and Reformed churches, nor with his status as a favorite pastor in Berlin. Trying to fit such a term as “liberal” onto Schleiermacher is like trying to fit either “Classical” or “Romantic” onto the great work of Beethoven, Schleiermacher’s contemporary. Both men were both in many different ways. See the following note for details of Schleiermacher’s life and work. 18.  Schleiermacher came from a family of pastors, was raised in the Moravian Brethren church, and attended the church’s seminary in Barby. There he found certain books prohibited, including Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and it was not long before Schleiermacher requested that his father allow him to transfer to the University of Halle. In the process, he allegedly sent his father a letter describing how he simply could no longer believe in his father’s religion. While a philosophy student at the University of Halle (1787–1790), the young Schleiermacher not only studied Kant but also sat at the feet of Johann Semler to study the New Testament. Schleiermacher became aware of the new critical approaches to the Bible, but he also began exploring ethics, writing short treatises, and publishing some in 1788 and 1789. While at the university he also assisted his uncle, who was a pastor, which led to Schleiermacher’s ordination in the Reformed church in 1790, the same time he completed his work in philosophy at the university.

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Schleiermacher became a private tutor and then in 1796 was appointed chaplain at the Charité hospital in Berlin. During this period, he became a vital part of a small group of intellectuals, including the Hertz couple as well as the Schlegels, who were among the leading figures participating regularly in Henriette Hertz’s salon. Schleiermacher’s religious and ethical publications—especially those published between 1799 and 1806 (Speeches, 1799; Soliloquies [Monologen], 1800; Outline of a Critique of Previous Ethical Theory, 1803)—in addition to his earlier fragmentary ethical publications, gave him quite a reputation. From 1802 to 1804 he pastored a small church in Stolpe and took over the publications of his first German translation of Plato’s Dialogues, which he and Friedrich Schlegel had begun, which Schleiermacher then continued until his death. In 1804 Schleiermacher was appointed professor at the University of Halle. In 1805 and 1806 he published his Christmas Eve Celebration: A Dialogue, and among his teaching responsibilities he presented lectures at the University of Halle on an “outline for ethics.” Napoleon’s troops, however, overran the university in 1806, after which Napoleon closed the university. Schleiermacher lost not only his position and income but most of his possessions to some soldiers, so in 1807 he returned to Berlin. Within two years, in May of 1809, he married Henriette von Willich, the widow of a close friend, and became pastor of the Berlin (Protestant) Trinity Church, which was the Prussian Evangelical Church (which combined Lutheran and Calvinist groups at Schleiermacher’s initiative). In 1810 he assisted Wilhelm von Humboldt in founding the University of Berlin, where Schleiermacher was appointed professor of religion, and became a member of the philosophical and historical sections of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, remaining involved in all three until his death. He lectured at the university and preached at the church almost until the day he died, February 12, 1834. It was estimated that during his funeral procession through the streets of Berlin, between twenty- and thirty thousand people followed his casket. During his quarter-century professorship at the university, Schleiermacher published more theological works, including his Brief Outline on the Study of Theology (1811) and Christian Faith (1821 and 1822, 1830 and 1831), as well as A Critical Essay on the Gospel of Saint Luke (1817) and Life of Jesus: Lectures at the University of Berlin in 1832. He lectured on many different philosophical and religious topics, including a history of philosophy, hermeneutics, different classes in the Christian Scriptures (only New Testament, never the Old), ethics, theology, history of theology, theory of education, aesthetics, dialectic, philosophy of culture, and psychology, among other topics, which eventually filled more than thirty volumes of his posthumous collected works in German publication, most of which had remained unpublished prior to the collection. Several of Schleiermacher’s major religious and theological works were fairly quickly translated into English, and he became known as “the father of modern theology.” Some scholars familiar with more of his writings saw his ethical philosophy as the key to his real philosophical contribution, and English interest in translating his ethical works finally awakened late in the twentieth century. His lectures on philosophical ethics (delivered at the University of Berlin in 1812 and 1813, then

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revised in 1816 and 1817 and repeated over and over thereafter in the 1820s) were not translated into English until 2002, by Louise Adey Huish, and edited by Robert B. Louden. To date only portions of his lectures on Christian ethics have been translated into English. 19.  Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Life of Schleiermacher as Unfolded in His Autobiography and Letters, trans. Frederica Rowan, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1860), I:6, 8–11, 46–47. This reveals the radically different standards that Schleiermacher applied to his ethics and theology, since the religion demanded an explicit unity if not uniformity with what was alleged to have been experienced two millennia earlier. Here both his ethics and theology assume that highest opposition to be between the material and spiritual. The highest knowledge and highest being is that which has no external opposition but, rather, is constant and overcoming any opposition, since the latter could be only self-generated. In the ethical system, the “highest being” is not accessible; in his theological system a person knows themselves to be absolutely dependent on that “God,” since it is that God who empowers a person’s thought and activity as the person “redeemed” and being “sanctified.” Schleiermacher’s theological ethics obliterated the philosophical ethics, since in the former, in “sanctification,” God does everything and ethics need only describe this work of God. 20. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 524. Ironically, his later divisions of theology “dogmatics,” which is what he intended to write in Christian Faith, was a subdivision of “historical theology,” which should have implied as it did for his philosophical ethics that it would deal with changing entities. But the only impact it had on Schleiermacher’s approach was to enable him to focus on the most recent creeds within Christianity rather than on his idea of “redemption.” 21. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 86–90. 22.  It is easy to see different approaches when one compares Speeches with Christian Faith, and both of these with Ethics. Our only question here, though, is whether Schleiermacher corroborated the Christological claims so ethics could be grounded on the Christian religion. But its ethics dissolved into simply the “work of God,” not anything humanly possible (Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 524). 23.  Schleiermacher became a beloved pastor. He was sickly and frail most of his life, was disappointed at the rejection by his first love, and finally married, quite late in life. When his young son died, Schleiermacher was devastated—despite his Romanticist and idealist leanings, which had led him to insist in his Soliloquies that no externals should be able to disturb one’s inner life. He found real life quite different from the admired Romanticism and died only five years after his young son. 24.  Many qualities and emphases in the literature, art, and music of this age from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century were present in innumerable revolutions of style or concern. If young Schleiermacher and Hegel— like Beethoven—straddled the influence of both Rationalism or Classicism and Romanticism, embracing “classical” civilizations of the past, especially of Greece and Rome in their youth, they also manifested more of the Romanticist tendencies in youth than they did in their much later years—unlike Beethoven. The revolutions of the last half of the eighteenth century redoubled the convictions that the

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Enlightenment’s ideal of autonomy was a necessity, though in Europe it did not result immediately in representative forms of government. Security and order became more important than insecure or untried forms of autonomy and government by the people at large, which also explains the swelling of the ranks of the Catholic Church during the first half of the nineteenth century, as people preferred the peace of unity over the greater freedom of autonomy that could abort and lead to no mental resolutions whatever. For a marvelous text on the relationship between music and culture during this period, see appropriate sections in Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1941). Of course the best cultural history is Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present; 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). 25. Schleiermacher, Speeches, chapter 5—for example, p. 218. 26.  Friedrich Schleiermacher, Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies, English trans. of Die Monologen, intro. and app. Horace Leland Friess (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1926) (hereafter Soliloquies). It also lay at the heart of his Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation, trans., intro, and notes Terrence Tice (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1967). 27.  Such a term as “awakened” does not have to be passive, as if one’s waking up depends upon someone else’s actually causing it. Awakening can be completely of one’s own doing, as it was in the story of Gautama becoming the Buddha. The awakening can be the result of one’s “reflection” or of some ecstatic experience suspending reflection. However, by Schleiermacher’s definition of “feeling,” he leaned toward the passive side; as “absolute dependence” it theoretically became totally passive. That fit Protestant ideas of grace. That way it avoided uncertainty and was not earned. 28.  A “natural religion” such as formulated, for example, by Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Reimarus’s “public life” showed him praising “natural religion” as the precursor to Christianity, although his posthumous Fragments were extremely critical of Christianity. See Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Reimarus: Fragments, ed. Charles H. Talbert, trans. Ralph S. Fraser (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970); and Die vornehmsten Wahrheiten der natürlichen Religion (Hamburg: Johann Carl Bohn, 1754). The “natural” religion Schleiermacher was opposing was not a Totality but detailed with culturally specific ideas and prescribed morality. True religion lies beyond. 29. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 39, note 2, p. 103. Obviously he does not mean “taste” to be empirically actual but only a figure of speech. On the other hand, in the long quotation following this in the text, he does explain that “sense” is involved in becoming aware of the Totality or unity with or separation from any other, just as “taste” means something that one prefers. He eventually abandoned using the word “intuition” in Christian Faith. 30. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 41. 31. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 43. 32.  The “natural” elements of religion typically include doctrines of Providence and an individual’s personal immortality, as Schleiermacher sees it, which are only the “kernel of the shell” of religion; he includes systems of theology and theories of the origin and the end of the world, as well as theories about the nature of God, which

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he called nothing more than “cold argufying.” This was all beneath the dignity of Deity and not true religion. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 15. 33. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 39: “True religion is sense and taste for the Infinite.” And 36: “The contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal.” 34.  In his analysis of the otherness of “God” in Schleiermacher’s Dialektik, David Klemm shows the pattern of Schleiermacher’s thought by which he came to the position that “God” is basically contentless in the purest form of thought, arrived at by “feeling” in an experience that is somehow not really within time. See David E. Klemm, “The Desire to Know God in Schleiermacher’s Dialektik,” in The Otherness of God, Studies in Religion and Culture, ed. Orrin F. Summerell (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 92–110. This would be a good introduction to the Dialektik, which, being only an attempt to justify Schleiermacher’s theological conceptions, remains marginal for my more-narrow investigation here. 35.  This lays the groundwork for Schleiermacher’s thought as an “absolute idealism,” since there is that which cannot be questioned or dislodged by criticism—although this process of absolutizing that upon which one depends absolutely rather than simply being a consciousness of the relation or process of dependence, which takes place in Christian Faith, appears to dissolve the indivisible quality of that Unity, speaking of it as a discreet entity instead, as “God.” On the other hand, however, the “idealism” seems to be more explicitly proclaimed in Christian Faith when he says that, as he discusses objects such as “God,” “self,” and “world,” he is only analyzing them as the ideas in our minds, which followed Kant’s epistemology, especially his idea of not knowing the Ding an sich. 36. This optimistic assessment obviously overlooks all religious wars waged through the centuries. 37. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 54–55; and see the entire “Fifth Speech.” Schleiermacher’s concession seems at odds with his emphasis of the “contentless” core of Feeling as Unity and so is intelligible only as the Romantic idea of individuality needing to be a recognized, vital part of the whole. 38.  Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), philosopher of hermeneutic or historical understanding as well as Schleiermacher biographer, understood Schleiermacher’s early emphasis on “feeling” (Gefühl) not as some mystical unity with God but, rather, as the general human awareness of the invisible coherence of things, our relation to the Totality. Dilthey later expounded on “reflexive awareness” as the original form of consciousness, as Schleiermacher called it, even “intuition,” prior to any objective knowledge. This remains significant despite Schleiermacher’s later dogmatic narrowing, which we also discuss. 39. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 38. 40. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 90–91. 41.  See Masao Abe, “Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata,” in The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation, ed. John Cobb and Christopher Ives (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994); Masao Abe, Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue: Part One of a Two-Volume Sequel to Zen and Western Thought, ed. Steven

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Heine (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), 3–65; Masao Abe, “Double Negation as an Essential for Attaining the Ultimate Reality: Comparing Tillich and Buddhism,” in Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue, ed. Steven Heine (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), 104–11; and Masao Abe, “Negation in Mahayana Buddhism and in Tillich: A Buddhist View of ‘The Significance of the History of Religions for the Systematic Theologian,’” in Negation and Theology, ed. Robert P. Scharlemann (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 86–99. This is probably also the case in various forms of religious mysticism, such as Sufi belief. 42.  This underlies Schleiermacher’s view that ethics would be better approached from a description of the Christian’s life of sanctification than from any reference to the Decalogue or other moral laws; it also reinforces Christianity as the truest religion, being monotheistic and teleological. See Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 523–24; compare with 39–44. 43.  Schleiermacher and Hegel were not that far apart, since Hegel saw the same shedding of “representations” (Vorstellungen) to reach the pure notion (Begriff) through the Spirit (Geist) underlying all representations. 44. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 51. 45. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 106, note 5: Schleiermacher disclaims that his statement about Spinoza possessing the “Holy Spirit” was speaking of the Spirit in the specific Christian sense. These were Schleiermacher’s post–Christian Faith footnotes, in which he tried to dilute any possible contradictions between Speeches and Christian Faith. In note 6 he said that mythology is an idea in a historical form, which means that even Christianity would have mythology in speaking of the “attributes” of God. While the ideals utilized in speaking of God’s attributes may be correct, they are not historical, so, in conclusion, he writes, “I blame it as vain mythology when this, that is only a help in need, is regarded as exact knowledge, and treated as the essence of religion” (Schleiermacher, Speeches, 107, note 6). 46. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 236–37. 47. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 247. 48. The quotation continues, emphasizing how God responds to the resistance (between the Whole and particulars) by reconciling it all to himself by setting bounds to the possible alienation at various points. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 241. 49.  Schleiermacher says that the uniqueness of Jesus was the “great idea” that he exhibited, which was a divine element that could serve as mediator between the finite world and Deity. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 246. 50. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 247–49. 51. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 252. 52. Schleiermacher’s Speeches, 246. 53. Schleiermacher’s Speeches, 247. 54.  Barth, who in his early years had admired Schleiermacher’s theology, later in his “dialectical” years could only accuse Schleiermacher of having abandoned theology for anthropology and even accused him of avoiding the truth question. See Karl Barth, Protestant Thought from Rousseau to Ritschl: Being the Translation of 11 Chapters of “Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert”, trans. Brian Cozens (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969).

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55. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 5. 56.  Could specific religious doctrine be communicated simply through the Feeling of the Totality in Speeches? The Romanticism that enabled Schleiermacher to speak of a person’s intuiting the Infinite within the finite pushed him to the point of finding specific Christian symbols embedded even in a child’s mind. In Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation the sophisticated guests are taken aback to see a nativity scene that has been erected by the young daughter of their hosts. When they question the wisdom behind such assumed heteronomous religious indoctrination, Sophie’s parents claim they had taught her nothing about the Christmas story that would encourage her to create such a nativity scene. So was it really just Sophie’s simple, unarticulated, and natural piety or feeling that had fed her these specific details? Schleiermacher conflates the contentless “feeling” with specific content of one specific religion. The same confusion prompted him to alter his basic definition of religion, first ever so slightly, such that it was almost imperceptible, and then becoming totally Christian. Sophie’s nativity scene must be balanced over the speeches of especially Leonhardt, Ernst, and Eduard. 57.  Schleiermacher himself recognized the radical differences between the four canonical Gospels but ironically put more weight into the least historically trustworthy of the four, the Gospel of John. Now we have discovered other Gospels or fragments that may date back to as early as 50 AD, and the variety of pictures of Jesus is even more radical. 58.  Schleiermacher writes, “during Christ’s life no one was in a position to calculate him, that as long as his disciples lived with him they were entirely unable to reach such a point,” because (1) in some way “they wished to appropriate him” and (2) “because they had not yet achieved such a knowledge of his inner nature that it could have led to such a judgment.” So the reflection years later more exactly found the truth, not eyewitnesses? Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 18. 59. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 8. 60. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 8, parenthetical original. 61. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 106. 62. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 8–12. “Life is to be conceived as an alternation of the subject between a remaining-in-self and an extension-beyond-self. Both forms of consciousness [Knowing and Doing] constitute the remaining-in-self whereas true Doing is an extension-beyond-self; to that extent, then, Knowing and Feeling stand together vis-à-vis Doing. But while Knowing as having-a-recognition is a remaining-in-self of the subject, so as [the act of] of recognizing, it only becomes real through an extension-beyond-self of the same, and to that extent is a Doing” (translation mine from Friedrich Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube: Nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1960, Vol. 1], 18). This act of “recognizing” (Erkennen) involves the Kantian categories dictating to the object the qualities it must manifest to be “understood,” by which the extension-beyond self occurs. 63. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 126. 64. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 13. 65. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 8.

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66. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 34. 67. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 35. 68. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 68–70. Of course what Schleiermacher does not consider is something like henotheism or an allegiance to one god, which does not require any explicit denial of other gods existing. That is, most systems referred to as polytheistic did not split up the functions as neatly as Augustine thinks the Roman pantheon did. Rather, any god could subsume all the powers even attributed to the other gods or by having a “consort,” as one sees in Shiva. And neither does Schleiermacher consider some monism such as found in the Upanishads. 69.  It is obvious that Schleiermacher recognized he was on unstable ground in such an oversimplification when he admitted, “A general demonstration as to whether the actual historical faiths can best be classified according to this antithesis would be the business only of a general critical History of Religion.” Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 42. 70.  While this can be used to distinguish finally an “absolute dependence,” as he does, interestingly the retained consciousness of it makes sense and helps us understand the twentieth century distinction Sartre makes in one’s consciousness between the “being-in-itself,” which is utter Sameness without consciousness, and the “beingfor-itself,” as the human who has consciousness and possibilities from which to choose, a freedom to shape himself. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Gramercy Books, 1956). 71. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 16. 72. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 16, emphasis original. 73. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 16. 74. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 12. 75.  Besides contradicting a sense of absolute dependence (on which he elaborates in Christian Faith), in Life of Jesus Schleiermacher concludes after examining certain passages that he cannot assume that Christ was actually convinced that the devil existed (317). 76. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 18–26. 77. This is parallel to Schleiermacher’s picture of the relation of Feeling to Knowing and Doing in the sense that the antithesis experienced in Feeling is only an opposition to Knowing or Doing, although otherwise the sensible or objective self-consciousness would actually incorporate both Knowing and Doing, and in the relation of Feeling, Knowing, and Doing there is no parallel to the “animal” grade of consciousness, which cannot distinguish subject from object. 78.  “The confused animal grade, in which the antithesis cannot arise, as the lowest; the sensible self-consciousness, which rests entirely upon the antithesis, as the middle; and the feeling of absolute dependence, in which the antithesis again disappears and the subject unites and identifies itself with everything which, in the middle grade, was set over against it, as the highest.” Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 20. 79.  In his letter to the Romans, Paul quotes little tidbits from a variety of different Psalms to prove that there is no one righteous in the world, but that point is not made in any of the Psalms he quotes. To the contrary, they accuse their enemies of being

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unrighteous but also speak of Israelites who are righteous, something Paul fails to mention. 80.  Scharlemann later introduces what he considers the major problem of Christology, mentioning “reflection” itself as being considered by the religious person to be sinfulness. “Religion,” he writes, “views the possibility of reflection as a fall into sin and warns against it; reflection sees religion as a prereflective state which needs deliverance from its illusion. Each, in the judgment of the other, is blind to its own nature . . . A solution must appeal initially to reflexivity as a standpoint from which the conflict can be seen independently of how the two contenders see it.” Robert P. Scharlemann, The Being of God: Theology and the Experience of Truth (New York: The Seabury Press, 1981), 28–29. 81. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 55. 82. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 107. 83. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 7. 84.  See Pinker, How the Mind Works, 368, as he describes what may be a quite elementary intuition humans have about what causes pain and pleasure. A remarkable read! 85. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music, 228, among many other passages. A fascinating book! 86.  This question is even more pertinent in assessing Scharlemann’s focus on the “inscribed” word and “exstantial self,” which we discuss in chapter 5. 87. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 16. 88.  The leadership of the Reformed Church made haste to remove Schleiermacher from that locality to the small town of Stolpe finally in 1802. Schleiermacher’s key was that “imagination supplies what reality withholds; by virtue of it I can put myself in the position of any other person I notice; my spirit bestirs itself, transforms the situation to accord with its nature, and judges in imagination just how it would act in such a case.” Schleiermacher, Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies, 82. This is the method he uses in his analysis of Jesus. See ibid., 78–86. And see note 92, below.  89. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 10.  90. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 381.  91. This is fairly ambiguous, since Schleiermacher had disclaimed any belief in “miracles” per se, and he refers in this passage to that earlier limitation. All he is willing to concede is that, where one has encountered Jesus as one’s Redeemer, it is only natural to think that Jesus’s powerful consciousness could affect even the physical side of human nature or nature itself. But one can call such “miracles” only in a very relative sense, because we do not yet understand all the interrelationships of the forces of nature. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 71–73. In any case, Schleiermacher insists that “miracles” do not produce faith. The real problem is that he elsewhere insists that we cannot speak of “beginnings” or “ends” since we really know nothing about them, and yet here the Christology is all based upon his certainty of Jesus’s “beginning” with an absolute-potent God-consciousness.  92. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 411.  93. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 18.  94. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 18.

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 95. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 12.  96. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 13.  97. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 37–41. Though he was aware of historical criticism and even showed an earlier form of redaction criticism, he nevertheless was naive in thinking the Gospel of John was able to give him a more authentic picture of the historical Jesus. History had to fit a person’s religious experience.  98. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 423.  99. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 422. In note 5 he belittles any thought that Jesus might have used “Son of man” in an apocalyptic as in Daniel. Instead, “Son of man” and “Son of God” had to have been used by Jesus, Schleiermacher says, to show that Jesus was truly both man and God; otherwise it results in one of the heresies he has delineated, either the Ebionite or Docetic. Schleiermacher’s failure to see “Son of God” as a term used only by the later church rather than by Jesus is all the more glaring when he sees Paul reinforcing Jesus’s self-estimate as “Son of man” and “Son of God” by his contrasting Christ with Adam. 100. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 423. 101. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 417–24. 102. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 443, 380. 103. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 379. 104.  For example, see Schleiermacher’s discussion of many different miraculous reports in Life of Jesus, 190–229, for which he reminds his students that Jesus’s audience had no great understanding of Nature. 105. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 148–55. 106. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 150. 107. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 449. 108. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 445. 109. Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith, 387, and his Life of Jesus, 445. 110.  Gadamer thought that Schleiermacher was not even satisfied with a present reader’s understanding of what original readers understood but of what the author was thinking. That is, the present interpreter can see relationships between parts and the whole even better than the author can, can penetrate behind all externals, uniting with the object “on the same level” of reflective self-interpretation,” or the “unconscious meaning of the author,” what Gadamer called “divination.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 168–73. 111.  Schleiermacher’s position on a “maxim” is confusing since in the Soliloquies he opposed such in his opposition to Kant but in his Life of Jesus lectures he used this for the key to finding the inner person of Jesus. Is it only a moral maxim that he opposed, or did he think the “absolutely potent God-consciousness” in Jesus can be a “maxim” without being a thought or principle but simply “feeling”? If so, how can one detect that “feeling” as “maxim” in another’s life? 112. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 423. 113. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 381, 114.  Schleiermacher suggests that when “spiritual states appear which cannot be explained from what went before,” especially if it is something so radical as being awakened by Jesus’s “absolutely potent God-consciousness,” “miracle” is not inap-

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propriate, though it is still a relative term since humans have not yet settled on the degree to which spirit can alter Nature. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 72. 115. Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith, 279. 116. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 271–85. 117. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 382. 118. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 382 and 383. 119. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 304–306. 120. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 378–79. 121. Schleiermacher gives an extensive critique of the confusing usage of the word “nature” to refer both to the human and divine, emphasizing that the “innermost fundamental power” in Christ “from which every activity proceeds and which holds every element together” is “the existence of God” in him (the “absolutely potent God-consciousness”) and that his “human” existence serves only as the “organism for this fundamental power” to work through. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 397. He thereby refuses to utilize the “two natures” Christology, reverting generally to his earlier idea of being able to sense the “Infinite in the finite.” 122. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 391–98. 123. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 379. Unfortunately this is one of the Achilles’ heels in Schleiermacher’s position as Strauss later pinpoints, that no species finds its perfection within one solitary specimen. That would violate our scientific knowledge. Schleiermacher actually said the concept of any animal species was realized in the “totality” and that is the crucial difference. Jesus was not the totality of the human species. But when Schleiermacher insisted Jesus had to be Example and Archetype, he felt compelled to see Jesus as the perfection of the human species. If from birth Jesus possessed an “absolutely potent” God-consciousness, unlike every person in the world, then some evidence must be supplied. Since the believer never approximates this stage of God-consciousness, Jesus as the Christ remains simply Docetic, a totally different species than humanity. See David F. Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972). 768–73; Strauss, The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History: A Critique of Schleiermacher’s “Life of Jesus”, Lives of Jesus Series, no. 1, trans., ed., and intro. Leander E. Keck (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 19–47. 124. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 44–66. 125. Strauss, Life of Jesus, 768–73. Not only does it violate the “laws of human existence,” Strauss insisted, but Schleiermacher’s reply that the ideal had to be embodied as the archetype since sinful humans cannot conceive a perfect ideal, simply has no validity (772). 126. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 379. 127.  His peculiar spiritual content, that is, cannot be explained by the content of the human environment to which He belonged, but only by the universal source of spiritual life in virtue of a creative divine act in which, as an absolute maximum, the conception of man as a subject of the God-consciousness comes to completion. But since we can never properly understand the beginning of life, full justice is done to the demand for the perfect historicity of this perfect ideal, if, from then on, He developed in the same way as all others, so

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that from birth on His powers gradually unfolded, and from the zero point of His appearance onwards, were developed to completeness in the order natural to the human race.

Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 381, italics mine. 128. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 380. 129. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 385. 130. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 385. 131. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 410–417. Unfortunately he felt forced even to speak of Jesus’s “physical excellences” while emphasizing they were really not important for Christology (Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 417), just as he at the same time showed that old traditional ideas of Jesus’s “communicated omniscience” was built upon “the false idea of a divine nature to which it is possible to ascribe a group of attributes” (Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 413). So he was torn between Jesus’s “divinity” and “humanity” but was still sure Jesus was both. 132.  “Now the being of God in Him as an active principle is timeless and eternal, yet its expressions are all conditioned by the form of human life . . . [so our becoming united with Him] is only receptiveness for His activity as involved in the impartation—only our assent to the influence of His activity.” Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 426–27, italics mine. That alone could unite the Reformed and Lutheran constituencies that Schleiermacher had convinced to merge in his Trinity Church. 133. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 492, italics mine. 134. Schleiermacher insists that as far as sanctification is concerned, anything seemingly initiated on the part of the believer is not of the believer’s doing, that one cannot even think of it as “co-operating” with God. “All that preparatory grace has already brought to pass within him of course co-operates, but this is itself part of the divine work of grace and not of his own action.” Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 493, italics mine. 135. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 493–95. 136. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 97–101. 137. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 52–76. 138. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 68–70. 139.  Admittedly this is Descartes abbreviated and no more convincing than Descartes. 140. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 51. 141. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 55. 142. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 417–24. He asserts, “The disciples recognized in Him the Son of God without having the faintest premonition of His resurrection and ascension, and we too may say the same of ourselves” (418). 143.  Here Schleiermacher seems to have combined Luther with Calvin, even as he had arranged for both Calvinists and Lutherans to form the new Trinity Church in Berlin, where he was pastor for the last two decades of his life while teaching at the University of Berlin. 144. Schleiermacher’s Speeches, 39. 145.  Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). On the other hand, Catholic theologian and ethi-

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cist Hans Küng used “paradigm” to trace various stages of development in the theology, organization, and ethics of the church itself. Where he parted ways with science was in his vague essentialism—that is, his presupposition that Jesus the Christ was the same through all of these changes or paradigms. 146.  Why any religion is caught up in trying to prove that it is not relative is itself an enigma. What tests exist for distinguishing an “eternal” truth from a “relative” truth other than one’s own attitude? Is the dialectic of the Zen koans and the Hegelian “negation of the negative” the closest we can come without filling the Absolute with content? 147. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 20. 148. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 79.

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Corroboration by Mystical Union with Christ (God)?

The question of this pursuit is whether religion can make its claims credible enough to serve as a basis for a universal ethic, both recognizing relativism as opposed to absolutism as well as valuing the factuality of real relations over mere concepts. The most central claim of the Christian faith is that Jesus was the Christ or Son of God who alone redeems humanity. The problem is that the claim conflates the natural world with a supernatural world, the finite with Infinity, history with mythology. The claim is that this event occurred in history at a particular time and place, in one specific person called Jesus. If the Greco-Roman world of Jesus’s time was quite familiar and accepting of this kind of conflation, what with its dozens of gods, goddesses, and mythical heroes who were half-deity and half-human, the Jewish faith was not. So why did Christianity, whose roots are Jewish, end up with definitions of the divine world and its interaction with history that were completely Hellenistic rather than Jewish?1 Since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that problem of how it could be true that there could be one or more humans who were actually an Incarnation of God rather than simply a spokesman for God finally began to occur among influential Christian thinkers themselves. Since the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, the creeds have stated that Jesus of Nazareth was not simply a half-human, half-divine being, but was both completely human as well as completely divine, who was not merely of similar substance (homoiousios) or essence of the “Father,” but of the same substance (homoousios) or essence. That kind of ontomythology was still acceptable in the mid-fifth century, even if it was language hard for many believers to comprehend. But their world was still filled with gods and semideities, then common throughout the world. 123

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But the world as a whole has changed since then. In the West the new sciences of the Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries moved past that old “metaphysics of infinity,” creating in theology what Gotthold E. Lessing called an ugly “ditch” between the accidents of history and the eternal truths.2 If Lessing’s brief statement of the problem was accurate, could not one attempt to bridge the “gap” either (1) by showing that certain elements within history were not “accidents” but predestined or (2) by explaining how the “eternal” is not really eternal but only common conventions of understanding or (3) by describing how the “eternal” is not really separated from the relative history but is within it? Obviously most Christian thinkers would not pursue the second course, since that seemed self-defeating, because the theme of an eternal God had been accepted for centuries. The first option was possible, but with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on human freedom or autonomy, it would have been difficult for many to accept. The third option of the eternal being in history has the same problem as the first, that it negates human freedom. That problem is central to this study. Christianity had from its beginning professed that the historical person of Jesus was a manifestation of God, and in his letter to the Colossians Paul assured his readers that in Christ “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,” through which God reconciled all things to himself (Col. 1:19–20). Paul did not explain how that occurred or how one would know it had; he simply stated it as a fact. The connection between the historical Jesus and God grew over the subsequent centuries of the Patristic era of Christian thinking, which is seen in the creeds just mentioned. The creeds and theology, operating from an analogy of being, appeared to presume that historical data could confirm the union between the historical claim of the eternal or Infinite being with Jesus. But such analogizing was a part of the metaphysics of infinity being left behind in the eighteenth century by the new sciences of the Enlightenment with their emphasis on empiricism, as Foucault showed. The empiricism of even the human element was unavoidable if not central in such altered sciences as labor and language. MYSTICISM AND MEANING ATTEMPT TO REPLACE HISTORICAL DETAIL AND METAPHYSICS With the growing understanding of the human element even in the very history of the composition, canonization, and preservation of the Bible, as well as within its diverse text, “higher criticism” or literary criticism was bound to develop that was incapable of dealing with the conflation of the two worlds of the claim—of the temporal history and unchanging eternity. That was the

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position expressed in the posthumous writings of Reimarus, which Lessing himself published. What seemed to be needed was not simply a human assertion that some human in past history had been an Incarnation (the objective side)—that is, that the asserted historical event was possible, therefore placing the eternal within the historical—but also that the human reading or hearing of the historical writings of the Bible was also influenced by, if not absolutely confirmed by, the eternal or Infinite (the subjective side) entering history. While Descartes had through his famous cogito proven the existence of one who is thinking, and while he had slipped categories to derive from this that a person could therefore know God even better than they could know themselves, Descartes notably did not apply this to a person’s reading of history, even if he thought he had rehabilitated confidence in the senses to a degree. Many leading thinkers within Christian ranks were not satisfied with conceiving of their faith based only on a high degree of probability but were, as was Descartes, looking for “certainty.” But there was already another answer to this within what has been called “mysticism,” which influenced German Idealism in its visions and presuppositions. “Mysticism” is a position that “God” or the Divine or Absolute does not have to be mediated through some person or teachings, since “God” is within the believer—as a Muslim Sufi mystic might put it, “closer than your carotid [artery].” Most major religions have had adherents who espoused this and so are referred to as “mystics.” Each of these mystics appeared absolutely certain about their own experience of God within. When we compare these mystics, we note there never has been only one single way for a person to realize this immediate access to “God.” Rather, there have been a variety of proposed ways to God—whether by chanting, meditation, self-mutilation, asceticism, dancing, drugs, or other paths. The consensus seems to be that a person finally transcends the usual subject-object framework of thinking—or is moved “out of” their normal mental state—to a state of ecstasy in which they realize their immediate unity with God within themselves. Was there a chance that the themes of “immediate access to God” and “ecstasy” could furnish what was needed, to press beyond Descartes? Two centuries prior to Descartes, Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), theologian and Roman Catholic cardinal, is reported to have had an illuminating experience at sea when returning once from Constantinople. His political and religious position notwithstanding, he eventually wrote the treatise On Learned Ignorance in which he proposed a Christian form of mysticism. When the relativity of historical judgments in general and the questionableness of attempting to reconstruct history so as to discover the “divine” or “Infinite” element became obvious by the end of the eighteenth century, with Kant’s critiques,

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Christian theologians and philosophers of history sought to “corroborate” those unproven claims by avoiding the question of the historical reality of what had been claimed and instead focused entirely on its meaning. After all, Kant had insisted that it was impossible to make intelligible a historical claim of the actual embodiment of the moral Ideal, and he thought the Ideal was quite sufficient to motivate morality. This turned away from “externals” to the meanings of words and symbols and to the process of thinking itself—to the beginning of speculative idealism in Johann Gottlieb Fichte. But it also left the possibility of being influenced by a mystical union of the human and Divine, especially if the human vehicle could discover that union to be the very process of thinking. The spirit of competition between two colleagues at the new University of Berlin, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), stimulated their search for answers by “corroboration.” Although the young Hegel had written treatises speaking of “feeling” (Gefühl) as well as of “imagination” (Phantasie) and of “heart” (Herz) as so necessary in the ethical world, when he joined Schleiermacher at the university he quit using the term “feeling” and opined that Schleiermacher, in emphasizing “feeling,” was simply removing reason from religion. Hegel was reported as also suggesting that, if “feeling” were religion, then dogs would be the most religious. But, more to the point, Hegel was convinced that if Christianity continued to speak of God “revealing” himself in Christ, then a revelation had to be intelligible and understood by those confronted by it, which raised the importance of reason (Vernunft) and understanding (Verstand). Hegel’s mystical unity with God countered the immediacy to God in Schleiermacher’s definition of “feeling” (Gefühl) based on Pietistic heritage, by connection through Spirit (Geist) or Mind. This immediacy is so certain that it can ignore external or historical factuality, transcending them—which was a vital part of Hegel’s “mysticism” and Christology, seen most explicitly in the following: Considered only in respect of his talents, character and morality, as a teacher and so forth, we place him [Jesus] in the same category with Socrates and others, though his morality may be ranked higher. But excellence of character, morality, etc.—all this is not the ne plus ultra in the requirements of spirit—does not enable man to gain the speculative idea of spirit for his conceptive faculty. If Christ is to be looked upon only as an excellent, even impeccable individual, and nothing more, the conception of the speculative idea, of absolute truth is ignored. But this is the desideratum, the point from which we have to start. Make of Christ what you will, exegetically, critically, historically—demonstrate as you please, how the doctrines of the Church were established by councils, attained currency as the result of this or that Episcopal interest or passion, or

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originated in this or that quarter; let all such circumstances have been what they might—the only concerning question is: what is the idea or the truth in and for itself? Further, the real attestation of the divinity of Christ is the witness of one’s own spirit—not miracles; for only spirit recognizes spirit.3

Hegel based this on the firm conviction that in our dualistic world the physical or sensible is quite inferior to the spiritual or mental and that in the Incarnation the actual sensible entity of Jesus changed into an insensible entity and the relative or historical changed into an absolute and eternal being.4 Whether or not Nicholas of Cusa’s mystical thought had any influence on Hegel, we shall see in chapter five how it, as well as how Hegel, influenced Scharlemann’s work. But we do have a masterful book by Cyril O’Regan that explains in detail how Hegel utilized other Christian mystics—Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme, and Joachim de Fiore—explaining the book’s title, The Heterodox Hegel.5 Hegel, a Lutheran Christian philosopher, was certainly aware of the gap between lay understanding of the faith and the new critical approaches, which is to say, the understanding between natural, unreflective certainty assumed by most Christians and the differing positions of theologians and philosophers, whose inquiries into Christian thought seemed to the layman only an unnecessary perversion.6 Hegel stood in a tradition of that unreflective religious certainty being challenged by the Enlightenment’s opposition to superstition and mere opinions, which for many critics included “revelation” and “authoritarianism,” especially the church’s doctrines about Christ and the Trinity. Meanwhile, a variety of positions were being staked out on the degree of truth that Christianity bore, as different scholars sought the eroded certainty in a plethora of forms or saw Christianity’s theoretical limits in its lack of the certainty it alleged (Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, and many others). Hegel was convinced that religion had to involve ethics, and his early dreams were to locate a ground for an ethical structure (Sittenlehre) within the Christian religion that could be understood and that would be a national or people’s religion (Volksreligion), and he might be a “leader of the people” (Volkserzieher), in service of unifying the people. Pessimistic though his conclusion to Spirit of Christianity was, that church and state could never be fused together had been born of the reality of the German situation of that time, in which Hegel had sensed that the common people themselves were being left as the status quo was simply reinforced by church and state.7 Nevertheless, he remained persuaded that human reflection naturally leads to religion, which includes ethics, and so somehow the ethical ideas within the religion had to influence the state. Any diversity within the people would require that the ethical and even the metaphysical ground be put in universal terms, which meant that the early, pictorial representations

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(Vorstellungen) of Christianity would have to yield to such abstractions or pure concepts, but at the same time, this would not be a negative judgment on the representational stage, since the truth was deeply inside them. Thus Hegel would not pit the unreflective stages of religion against speculative reason. Instead he insisted that truth could be accessed in both that “natural” or uncritical stance as well as by way of speculative reason, but the latter, he said, could make it more explicit, thereby enabling people to realize conceptually their unity or identity with “God” as Absolute Spirit. This unity was everything. Hegel was convinced that God was Spirit and that Spirit was a united divine and human process and so it was a matter of universals naturally being found in particulars or concrete manifestations and so representations themselves could not be wrong. But the very movement of thought is the passing-over (Übergehen) or elevation (Erhebung) from the finite or sensible objects through reflection to the Infinite, and this “elevation” is the “fact” in the human spirit that is religion generally.8 Among humans collectively, it could form particular stages of thought, which is all to say that God was bringing about a greater realization in maturing humanity through Spirit and its dialectical work, now able to engage in speculative reason or reflection on reflection itself. If “revelation” was important to Hegel, so was “freedom.” Any denials that God was beyond human knowing would nullify the whole idea of “revelation” to Hegel. God simply had to be knowable. The lack of freedom within the structures and dogma of the church were a burden he felt compelled to resolve; otherwise the ethics grounded in the church’s theology would not be suitably general to serve in structuring politics or government. He discovered that certainty within speculative thought, combining his Lutheran heritage with the Christian mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Joachim de Fiore, and Jacob Boehme. The mystic immediacy he articulated seems on the one hand much more focused on an explanation of how the mind engages such a state than does the mysticism of Saint Paul, but its basic presupposition of the inner dwelling of God in the believer and its consequent ability to transcend all the other “wisdom” of the world is quite strikingly similar to Paul. In the end, neither was able to make his present explanation of Christology universally intelligible to ground a universal ethic. Hegel felt compelled to utilize speculative idealism in order to make the whole credible, something initiated by his predecessor in the chair of philosophy at the new University of Berlin, J. G. Fichte. In the process, however, Hegel set it beyond the reach of the ordinary convert to the religion, ultimately leaving his system unable to be criticized, even as Saint Paul refused to be criticized in his theology by others simply because he was certain he had received it all immediately from Christ. This was an absolutizing in both cases, likely unintentional but nevertheless confusing to those both men influenced.

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At this point, perhaps a brief note on the original Christian mystic, the Apostle Paul, is helpful. In fact, it is quite necessary, since no writer of the Christian scriptures was as important to Luther as Saint Paul, and Hegel had promised he would always remain a Lutheran. In Hegel’s time, however, the mystical element of Saint Paul had not been elaborated but, rather, was awaiting the work of famous Albert Schweitzer at the turn of the twentieth century. But mysticism was present as an influence even in subtle ways, as we saw at the beginning of the chapter on Schleiermacher, where he insisted that one must today be able to have the same experience as those early Christians lest the religion loses its credibility and connection with its original form. Hegel’s mature position was also that the truth must be the same both in the first-century Christian experience and the nineteenth-century Christian experience, even if there is a vast difference between those who took all the representational terms as literal and the speculative philosopher who takes none of them literally. That became a very difficult area. If the experience was not the same by virtue of having an identical history or some historical certainty even of that Jesus as the Christ, then what would corroborate that claimed uniqueness of Jesus by the present believer’s experience or reason or Spirit? It will also have to clarify the connection or correspondence between the unreflective truth in the “representations” and the reflective or even reflexive truth that Hegel claimed (Begriff), which Flay analyzed closely in his analysis of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which we must cover. We saw how Schleiermacher sketched the picture of Jesus, and we will see Hegel’s understanding of Jesus as well. But even more significant for Hegel is Saint Paul’s mystical understanding, which is not found in the gospels. Hegel was Lutheran and emphasized three key terms—Incarnation, Spirit, and reconciliation—based entirely on Paul. That justifies a little review of Paul as a mystic. THE FIRST CHRISTIAN MYSTIC: THE APOSTLE PAUL Following Albert Schweitzer’s landmark study of the life of Jesus, Schweitzer performed a similar service in tracing both the history of interpretation of Saint Paul as well as one book explaining Paul’s Christology as a form of Christ mysticism. For Schweitzer, the key to understanding Paul was his ubiquitous terms of Christ being “in me” or “in you” and of my or someone else’s being “in Christ.” It is not the typical God mysticism but serves in the same way as a “Christ mysticism.”9 The mystical union with Christ was facilitated through the Spirit (pneuma) as the new power of converts, coming from “outside” oneself, but related to one’s own innate “spirit” and individuality

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(Rom. 8:14–17). For Paul it seemed to be a quasiphysical, spiritual union— that is, visible-invisible relation, beginning with one’s identification through baptism with Christ’s death (negation of finitude, either one’s existence or one’s attachment to this world) (2 Cor. 5:14–15) and being raised to a spiritual new being over which death would no longer have any power (resurrection) (Rom. 6–8). The Spirit—through which this minimizing of the value of the visible or material existence proposed to dissolve existing as well as potential conflicts between individuals and even between cultures (Jew and Gentile) to form a new worldwide creation (Col. 1:24–27; Rom. 16–25–27; Eph. 2–3, as “pseudo-Pauline”)—brought about a “reconciliation” or “redemption” of the whole cosmos with God, which reconciliation was the key to all new human relations (2 Cor. 5:18–20) as well as the telos or culmination for God as “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:24–29). Paul’s emphasis was on the individual’s realization of this certainty of life and meaning, which elevated one’s thinking into seeing the greater depth of life and the history of the world and religion as God’s own history with humanity and the cosmos—or his self-revelation. Religion was thereby freed from static cultural forms that divided and from a focus on empirical particularities, and through new symbols, rituals, and even language one could transcend the exclusiveness and provincial judging of others who differed (Rom. 9–11). The individuals voluntarily formed a spiritual community by their common faith, a worshipping, ethical community of unity in which each should be treated by others as an indispensible part of the Whole (Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 4:1–5, ch. 8). If God was disclosing himself as the God of all people, then history would continue to bend that way, showing continually greater spiritual realization of this unity and truth. It bridged between common certainty and philosophical method in the sense that its wisdom was not a wisdom merely of the world (i.e., philosophy), and neither did its wisdom crave miraculous feats or signs that defied wisdom of nature’s regular operations (1 Cor. 1:18–25). Instead the certainty was found in the spiritual wisdom seen in the Divine self-emptying (kenosis) of the Crucifixion, by which Christ served as ethical example as well as archetype of humanity (Phil. 2:1–13). One’s own self-maturation and self-disclosure grows the more one grasps God’s self-disclosure in Christ and in history (Phil. 3:4–21). Though Paul’s mystical bent seemed to be esoteric or elitist with its own language (1 Cor.2:6–3:4) as almost simply another Gnostic form, his mystical bent was based on common human experiences and so was accessible to all, even if Paul often revealed a lack of confidence in other Christians’ spiritual attunement. Yet he claimed a new dimension of Reason or Spirit that involves deeper kinds of analysis and understanding, a level of Spirit questioning all of

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our values, even appearing as foolishness to the “world,” as it turned many of the world’s values upside down (1 Cor. 1:20–2:5; 3:18–20). The conversation between God and his Spirit within us (as in prayer, Rom. 8) was a reassuring prolepsis of one’s final culmination of redemption or reconciliation. Sin or alienation is not mere violation of another’s commands (e.g., God’s) but also a violation of one’s very self-integrity, a powerful self-estrangement (Rom. 7). Paul spoke of the human being as essentially spirit-driven, with one’s mind knowing and discovering the good; and when one is led by the Spirit rather than law, the “good” is finally a reality, not of one’s being perfect but of finding one’s life “in Christ.” As ethically empowering, Spirit, like love, was superior to law in the same way as union with Christ, or being an adopted child of God, offered more than being a slave child.10 The religion of Judaism, Paul thought, though true in its time, was built around law, which enslaved, and around a discomfort with one’s place in the world vis-à-vis others, in which one had to depend upon God, as external being, to intervene. Greater than this law was the promise or prolepsis, even to Abraham, and later the prophets, of a time coming when the law would not be an external coercion but would be written within one’s being, in one’s heart and mind, a sort of “theonomy” in which one does what God wants but does so from internal promptings of grace of one’s realization of one’s unity with God through Christ rather than external heteronomy or explicit commands.11 Hereby, “love” goes far beyond faith and hope (1 Cor. 13; Rom. 13:8–10) (through being not simply a looking toward the future but a look toward “what is” in present relations between people) through the Spirit, enabling one to live more ethically than is possible by external law. The ethics requires a reciprocal recognition or honoring of the other’s interests in Phil. 2 in which one’s voluntary self-emptying is an “imitation” of Christ, the necessary equalizing despite differences that enables diverse people to be reconciled. It conquers blind “fate” by spawning a change of attitude, a realization of alienation coming from oneself rather than being thrust irrationally upon one. Thus one is willing to relinquish any apparent self-interest, to self-empty, for a greater unity with others, as one comes to the realization that God’s work is in creating a new Whole rather than creating egocentric opposites. This means also that one cannot base one’s ethics upon some assumed status at birth that exempts one from considering the condition of others. “In Christ” one finds real freedom,12 which is not tied to external conditions, although its spiritual power may certainly affect external and cultural conditions. One is “in the world” but not “of the world” in the sense of focus on self-comfort and egoistic obsession; that is, one is “transformed by the renewing” of one’s mind (Rom. 12:2). “Freedom” is not merely freedom “from” but freedom “for” one’s mission or “freedom” to assist others or

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“freedom” for a greater unity with others. It is not a privilege of simply a select few—whether of race, sexuality, or economic status—but a transcending power by which one is able to “be all things to all people” or move through all oppositions (dialectically) taking the best of each side into a greater synthesis or new unity. The basic antithesis of sin and righteousness is overcome by God “consigning” or “imprisoning” all people to disobedience “so that he may be merciful to all” (Rom. 11:32, italics mine). This was God’s plan or “mystery,” “hidden” for generations, to unite humanity by bringing “Gentiles” in with the Jews, and so representatively encompassing the whole of humanity. Even though Paul never spoke of any firsthand knowledge of Jesus— which put him at a disadvantage with those who had been personally selected as “apostles” by Jesus in the flesh—he focused on Christ that was within him. Is this the reason we learn almost nothing about Jesus from all the letters Paul wrote? He insists that the faith is not built upon a mere assertion by a person that they have the “Spirit” but only if that person is willing to say “Jesus is Lord” (1 Cor. 12:3). So Jesus was necessary but only as a “beginning point,” a point of confrontation and existence, a confession, an inner empowering. But for Paul this needed no historical details of Jesus’s pre-Resurrection life if Christ is living within each of us. In addition to this mere “beginning,” Paul mentions only two traditions he knew about Jesus: One concerned the “Last Supper,” which he mentions in 1 Cor. 11. The other is Jesus’s Crucifixion and Resurrection. These are the pillars upon which the “gospel” or “good news” rests, as he says in 1 Cor. 15. Paul’s list of alleged post-Resurrection “appearances” made by Christ do not correspond with any canonical gospel. Even here he does not speak of this apparition as “Jesus” but only as “Christ.”13 “Christ,” of course, comes from a Greek word that is the equivalent of the Hebrew word that means “anointed” by God, a “Messiah.” Questions within Judaism emerged about the “Messiah”: (1) When would he come, and what would he accomplish for the Jewish people? And (2) what actual person would this Messiah or “anointed” one be? The term “Messiah” dates back to the postexilic days (late sixth century BCE), in which Cyrus of Persia allowed Jews to return from Babylon to Jerusalem under the leadership of two “anointed” by God, two “sons of oil,” Joshua ben Jehozadak, the high priest, and Zerubbabel, the new governor. Haggai and Zechariah revealed their expectations that the “messianic age” would dawn once the temple was rebuilt and the cultic services restored, but such peace, power, and prosperity did not follow the reconstruction. Messianic expectations, nevertheless, continued from time to time. But Paul is not concerned with any of that history either. “Christ” to him was more than any “Messiah.” Paul also knew these Jewish expectations and

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hopes were of little concern to Gentile people, and very few were attracted to Judaism’s legal cultic regulations, even among those who were impressed with its monotheism or ethics. Although the whole setting of the origin of the community of disciples of Jesus was the idea that Jesus was, in fact, the awaited “Messiah” who would restore Israel and vindicate them, Paul passed by this entire cultural-religious background, reading the Jewish past as embracing a greater plan in which all humans would become the “chosen” people rather than simply the Jews. His authoritative development of the meaning of the “Christ” brooked no challenges in any of the churches he established. He was absolutely certain. But his Christology was not a once-for-all-time finished product. We may receive different emphases in different letters of his, as the “system” is not congealed yet, though several facets seem permanent because of the way he defined his ministry. But he never presented it as open to debate or even changing in his mind. Paul used “Christ” more as a proper name than he used “Jesus,” rather than using it as a title, but he designated kyrios, or “Lord,” as the supreme title bestowed on Christ, and up beside his “kenotic” (or selfemptying) Christology of Phil. 2:5–11, he also articulated the “victorious” Christology of Col. 1:15–20: He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or power—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church, he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

This is a picture of absolute paradox—or complete reversal of fate or the ultimate reconciliation of two worlds. Paul’s Christology was not only a contrast to the church’s later Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds, it was also more a subordinationist or adoptionist Christology than what those creeds articulated. And there is no explicit “Trinity” in Paul’s words but, rather, more a Tritheism or hyperbolic modalism in his variety of descriptions. The ground for his Christology was manifest only in the “Resurrection,”14 not the Incarnation. Otherwise, Paul said nothing (and probably knew nothing) about Jesus’s “Virgin Birth” or Jesus’s “baptism” and identification by John the Baptist or Jesus’s “Transfiguration” or the famous confession as Caesarea Philippi, nothing of the Cleansing of the Temple or Jesus’s raising several people from the dead, nothing of the Sermon on the Mount or Jesus’s trial, and never any

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mention that Jesus’s primary form of teaching was by “parables.” Of course, Paul’s letters also contain no words of Jesus himself professing to be the Jewish Messiah. The whole of his Christology was a mystical “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” In the only other tradition about Jesus that Paul mentioned, the narrative of the Last Supper, his primary concern in writing the Corinthians about this was to upbraid the people for their desecration of the meal, a meal of sharing and fellowship in which many were not sharing their food, which made a mockery of the Lord’s Supper and the unity it presupposed and promoted. Paul said this failure to share their food was their failure to “discern the body.”15 They were dividing that “body” (church) not only in not sharing the meal but in numerous other ways.16 Paul’s “authority” remained completely subjective from any other person’s perspective. But within a few years, Christians themselves were relocating geographically. Some of them, or some distraught Jewish “teachers,” heard of his positions, and so he was eventually challenged deeply for forging new ideas about this Christ and God’s plan that he said God had hidden for ages and was just now disclosing by Christ’s work through him in the Gentile world.17 Paul’s audience had to accept his divine vision to ground his authority, but there were no objective criteria he offered other than his mystical claim and personal life. It was a subjectivity of mystical unity that he preached, but he had problems honoring others’ subjectivity and mystical unity with Christ. He often called them out for their mistaken notions and unethical actions,18 as if only he knew the truth. That truth was singular, and he was willing to anathematize anyone whose “gospel” differed from what he himself preached.19 This is confirmed by his continual insistence in his letters that the new Christians should “imitate” him as he imitated Christ.20 Does this mean they could not imitate Christ on their own and yet allegedly possessed the same Spirit as did Paul? Finally, even Paul’s talk of “Spirit” is not definitively articulated, since he usually spoke of “spirit” as divine but sometimes as a basic human capacity21 or even as an “elemental” power that is in opposition to the religion.22 He was living in days in which many people believed that “spirits” could be external powers that could decide on their own to inhabit a person’s body or decide to leave it. Many believed that some people could actually “cast out” or exorcise these evil spirits by certain ritual acts or formulae, and in this sense the mentality was fairly current all over the world in its varied cultures and religions. Paul’s usual designations of “Christ” and “Spirit” were as quite different entities, but on occasion he explicitly stated that Christ and “Spirit” are the same.23 He even spoke of the “Spirit” having its own “mind,”24 and he prayed for the Thessalonians that their “spirit, and soul and body be kept

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sound and blameless.”25 So the relation between “soul,” “mind,” and “spirit” is not clear, and the relation that any of them sustains with the “body” is even less clear. Today most people in their everyday lives have moved far beyond this mentality. They do not think external spirits can take over a person’s body at will or be cast out by some method of exorcism. We measure death most accurately by the brainwave, which shows the death of one’s brain, rather than by merely measuring one’s breathing or heartbeat. We recognize what we call “mind” the inner workings of the brain in its evolved supercapacity of classification of data, cross-referencing of data, storage and retrieval of data, emotional attachment to data, and ability to utilize the particular configuration of the human mouth, jaws, and tongue to make sounds we call “language” because they communicate with others of our species the data or explorations within the brain.26 Just as emotions, even if spoken of as coming from one’s heart, actually come from one’s brain, so too with ideas, speech, and bodily activity, as the different brain lobes interact with each other via the nervous system and affect the entire body in interdependent and symbiotic relationships.27 But such was unknown to Paul, and research into the human brain was just beginning in Hegel’s day. No one is to be blamed for living at a particular time that to a later generation seems limited in understanding. But to think such incorrect scientific assumptions of the earlier time should prevail continually in the future would be to stop thinking or stop being responsible. Perhaps Paul’s inability to explain his mystical unity with Christ to everyone’s satisfaction is the way mysticism is usually encountered by others. We will see whether Hegel was able through speculative reason or mystical unity with God to provide the certainty of the Christological claim made by the church by a new form of consciousness that actually can transcend all negative conclusions from historical research while nevertheless being the same experience today that it was for the earliest, unreflective Christians. That is what the third alternative was—discovering that there is no ditch between the eternal principles and accidents of history, since the eternal is actually within the historical, as Infinite Spirit is within each human’s spirit as a unity of the idea or reality. But how could the Infinite be within the finite or the eternal be within the temporal? HEGEL’S EARLIEST THEMES AND METHODS As most thinkers, Hegel’s ideas continually evolved. His earliest religious writings, from 1793 to 1795, show him still strongly under the influence of Kant. “Pure reason” or “universal reason” carries with it a sense of universal

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duty, as pure autonomy, the inner law of freedom to hear one’s own voice of one’s own heart and conscience, which is “a power enabling one to prevail over the inclinations and even over the love of life itself,” and this is the same as “divinity.” Even his Life of Jesus of 1795 is still strongly Kantian, but in his works of the following five years after 1795 Hegel attempted to reconcile God and the world, to explain the relationship between revelation and reason, and he was overwhelmed by what has been called the “pantheism of love.” He then described Kantian morality as just another form of heteronomy.28 From the outset of his writings, Hegel was concerned with making Christianity credible in a time when its criticism had become quite strident. He became convinced that much theology or Christian philosophy was on the wrong track, painting God by either a “natural religion” approach, not needing revelation, or at best a “revealed” “God” who was nevertheless unknowable and unobjectifiable, so a contradiction in terms. He insisted, as had his predecessor, Fichte, that no religion is based merely on reason. Rather, he said, reason must be used to find the truth behind the “revealed” dogma or symbols or pictures. One must discover what the dogma means rather than simply be offended or persuaded by a pictorial representation of truth. This requires, as Fichte realized, a speculative use of reason rather than mere reflection of tangible objects. Further, the present Christianity seemed miles away from the “freedom” Hegel perceived in the Greek religion. This prompted the question of why both Jesus as well as the early church were so “authoritarian” or “positive.”29 The “Positivity” of Jesus and the Church Hegel denied that Jesus wanted a “positive religion.” He saw Jesus as Kant did—as teaching a moral religion of the responsible use of freedom rather than a statutory or positive religion. Jesus’s highest principle was to love God with all one’s heart and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, but Jesus did not advocate casuistry. Although Jesus emphasized freedom, he was forced by the mentality of the audience, the Jewish people, to put it in an authoritarian form lest they not accept it. Jesus could help the people find freedom only by supplanting revelation with the new revelation of God. But that became self-defeating. Ultimately this meant Jesus opposing the law (Torah) in order to provide them freedom. But the authority of the Torah prevailed, and Jesus was crucified by that which he opposed. Hegel felt Jesus had really had no choice. As Hegel saw it, as the church began to expand in number, it faced the same problem Jesus had; so it retained and even transposed the content into authoritarian forms. Thus Jesus’s alleged claims to divinity and the later

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church’s faith in miracles, as well as its emphasis on eschatology, were all later degenerate forms thought necessary for the faith of morality or free responsibility. But it all backfired, and the church became as “positive” or “authoritarian” as Judaism had been, a perpetuation of a “slave” mentality. Hegel found this stifling of freedom vis-à-vis the Greek mentality, with its free imagination, to be extremely offensive. The need was to restore freedom of imagination to relieve the enslavement of the church’s dogmatic laws. The freedom in the Greek system came the closest to perfection, where free responsibility did not have to be reinforced with extravagant claims, threats, and superstitions. Christianity would be much better off if it were able to restore such a freedom, but Hegel admitted people would find that uncomfortable and resist it. While he felt it necessary to concede that the authoritarianism’s actual content is not wrong, its positive manner of being reinforced is a distortion of morality, which is real religion. He still did not get Jesus totally off the hook. But Hegel noted some of the atrocities of Christianity through the ages that came from its “positivity” or “authoritarian” stance and implied that such authoritarianism has grown worse than its scope in early Christianity. Despite the church and state both having some ethical control over their citizens, in the case of the church it must be realized that the individual’s freedom must be more extensive, since belonging to the church is voluntary. The “Spirit” of Christianity Probably within a year of publishing The Positivity of the Christian Religion Hegel abandoned Kant, and in The Spirit of Christianity30 he faulted Kant for thinking that ethics or religion is basically an imperative that requires stifling one’s inclination. For Hegel, the new key was “Spirit,” which can both be used in individual lives as well as be used as a term for the mentality of a given people. “Spirit” can describe either the destiny or fate of a people, or it can describe the people’s utilization of its freedom. Hegel forms his notion of the “Spirit” of a group by what he perceives to be embodied even in outstanding individuals of the group, so he thought he could speak of the “Spirit of Judaism” as well as the “Spirit of Christ” and the “Spirit of Christianity” from his view of a single individual. He assessed the Spirit of Judaism as an antagonism between humans and nature, a religion that felt compelled to depend upon a “God” outside of itself to regulate its cosmos. On the other hand, the Spirit of Christ stood against this “slave mentality,” with a summons to freedom and love rather than to law. Unfortunately, those disciples representing what became the Spirit of Christianity, in distinction from the Spirit of Christ, engaged in an apotheosis, incapable of moving beyond the physical or bodily existence of Jesus to embrace the universal spirit.31 This

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simply spawned another authoritarian religion that missed the universal and Absolute Spirit. The Spirit of Judaism originated in the history of Ancient Israel, and here Hegel’s focus is on Noah, Nimrod, Abraham, and Moses. Following the Flood, Noah attempted to reconcile idea and reality or nature and man by turning his ethical ideal into a real Being. This Being or God was on his side and would restrict Nature’s violence or possible ill effects upon humans. Nimrod, on the other hand, attempted to reconcile idea and reality by looking to humans as the power that could turn the other realities into thoughts—or keep the unity between the real and ideal by force himself. Abraham, in contrast to Nimrod, manifested “the spirit of self-maintenance in strict opposition to everything.” He saw unity or reconciliation of society—whether between humans and God or between humans and Nature, or between his family and other groups—as impossible. His mentality, as an embodiment of the people’s Spirit, formed the Spirit of Judaism, a Spirit of mastery that is unable to admit equality, freedom, or love. This universal enmity ultimately meant that everything was an object and that, since objects have no rights, there is no room for the spiritual. Existence was merely animal or physical dependence, with no connection to the eternal; life was a thoroughgoing passivity that was cowardly and less than human. Hegel says God had to do everything for them since they could do nothing for themselves. Given their slave mentality toward God, no person had any rights. The few times the nation experienced freedom of spirit and the beauty of other peoples and the cosmos and celestial bodies, the accusation or indictment was leveled against them that they were being unfaithful to their covenant God, that they were engaging in apostasy. This mentality of universal hatred meant to Hegel that humanity was never developed in Judaism. Hegel belittled Abraham, whose journey to Mount Moriah to offer his son in sacrifice to God only confirmed the fact that for him, as a slave of God, he could do anything, including killing his son. “His heart was quieted only through the certainty of the feeling that this love was not so strong as to render him unable to slay his beloved son with his own hand.”32 Abraham had no permanence to other people or to a place but only to his relation to God, a mastery mediated by God. His descendants continued the same opposition to everything but found their leaders who would mediate between them and God—whether Joseph, Moses, or others. Moses perpetuated the same slave mentality and absolute dependence upon the Lord for his mastery over others, which ground had been prepared by Joseph, who’d had to resort to tricks to retain the people’s allegiance. The one time Moses attempted to be independent, in hitting the rock to try to get water, he lost his

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chance to enter the Promised Land. Even the later prophets and eventual messianism were unable to save the Spirit of Judaism, since the passivity of the Jewish Spirit could only recoil against itself. So Hegel asserts that humanity was never developed in Judaism. When existence is no longer decent, when humans revert to ideas in which to place their hope, the ideas can offer no hope for a slave mentality. Religion, as Hegel sees it in his Spirit of Christianity and most of his later words, is the unity of idea and reality. Judaism, in Jesus’s day, though existing with a multiplicity of different thrusts, could not exhibit this unity, since it was uniformly “positive” throughout; that is, there was no distinction between worship, moral laws, or civil laws. They all came from without, from the ideal, as commands. Therefore it was not possible for Jesus to stand against only a part of the Jewish spirit. He was forced to stand against its totality, and it naturally recoiled on him to kill him. Jesus stood above the bondage to objective commands that typified the Jewish spirit. He profaned those ideas that had become sacrosanct (e.g., the prohibition against violation of the Sabbath, as well as ordinances on cleanliness) in order to point to something higher. Hegel suggests that Jesus might have opposed the legalism of the Jewish spirit by attempting to show that the objectivity of the universal moral command does not eliminate its subjectivity (i.e., one’s own reason); therefore, the positivity of the Jewish spirit could be viewed in more Kantian terms if heteronomy is balanced by a degree of autonomy. Hegel, however, insisted that in an extreme form such as Kant’s, in which the objective God outside an individual person is made inaccessible, the reason of the individual themself becomes God, and thus one type of slave mentality is simply traded for another. For Hegel, Jesus manifested a Spirit raised above morality. His morality was not universal inasmuch as the universal is always regarded as alien and objective. True subjectivity and true religion, however, is found in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, in which he showed followers how they could “fulfill” the law while annulling it as law—that is, by embracing love rather than mere commands. He who loves does not need to be reminded of duty. Further, Jesus shows them they should not regard themselves as “righteous” just because they have suppressed inclination. Inclination and reason are united rather than opposites. Reconciliation stands above the universal duty to not kill; love is above the mere laws mandating dutiful marriage; the lex talionis eliminates estrangement by asking that hearers be willing to surrender their rights and be reconciled through love. “Love” is defined by Hegel as what “is” rather than what “ought” to be. So, as Jesus said, people would fast when they lost a loved one not because of duty but because of the fact of what “is” in their

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relationship of unity or love. Wealth, as Jesus saw it, presents a problem, because it creates a mutual competition and disunity since it involves multiple interests or rights. Law, whether universal and objective (whether heteronomous or autonomous), includes punishment when it is violated. The trespass or difference between the concept and reality cannot be undone by ignoring the difference nor by pardon nor by substitutionary punishment nor by the punishment of the offender himself. If law and punishment cannot be reconciled, they can be transcended if fate can be reconciled.33 Fate presupposes that the hostile power of life is the power of life made hostile by oneself, separating concept from reality. But anyone suffering from fate can find reunion with the offended through reconciliation via love, since love reveals the whole of life rather than the mere fragments that law addresses. Fate can be transcended when a person realizes that they can transcend the hostility of fate by willingly asserting their freedom to renounce their rights, refuse to judge others, and ultimately, if necessary, renounce life itself. In such unity of will and reality the person realizes their true life. Reconciliation, in canceling lordship in the restoration of the living bond, produces the highest form of freedom.34 The connection between symbol and that which is symbolized exists only in the realm of thought and so is an objective bond. At the Last Supper the bread and wine, as eaten and drunk, are only symbols of other symbols— Jesus’s body and blood—which can be thought of as having an analogical connection with the disciple’s ultimate fate. But that would be to ignore the subjective element of life or the conceptual difference between universal objectivity and individual subjectivity. In the Last Supper, therefore, there is something more intended, a “mystical aspect,” as Hegel called it. What Jesus was evoking through his spirit was a unity or love between the disciples. As they confront and experience the transient nature of both the elements and Jesus himself, the corporeal or objective is made transparent to the unity of spirit that is given predominance (not in thought but in reality). Obviously the bread melts away in the mouth, and Jesus dies on the Cross. In thought there is no unity between this and what it promised; but by the Spirit the experience of the disciples was that of laying hold of life in the midst of death, discovering the Infinite through the transparency of the form of the finite.35 Both Schleiermacher and Hegel understood reflection to be only a part of the whole, subsequent to and a finitization of the infinity of the experience of life itself. The predicate “was” in John’s prologue indicates that the author understood that Jesus’s spirit was more than contained in the concepts of “in the beginning,” “with God,” and so forth. Jesus’s contemporaries rightly perceived his spirit when they accused him of making himself equal with God by calling God his Father. Only Spirit recognizes Spirit, and this recognition

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is not a recognition of the object by the subject, since “there is no such cleft of objectivity and subjectivity. One is to the other an other only in that one recognizes the other; both are one.”36 But, Hegel insists, the Spirit of Judaism as a slave mentality could not accept a man claiming to be equal to God.37 Hegel emphasized that “All thought of a difference in essence between Jesus and those in whom faith in him has become life, in whom the divine is present, must be eliminated.”38 Only Spirit recognizes Spirit, only Divinity recognizes Divinity. Thus when Jesus praised Peter at Caesarea Philippi for confessing him as the Messiah, saying that this had been revealed to Peter by the “Father in heaven,” it was like saying that the divine in Peter had recognized the divine in Jesus. Although in the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks of his uniqueness, he just as often tells his disciples that they are one with him as he is one with the Father. When at Caesarea Philippi he begins to speak of his Crucifixion and departure, they cannot understand that only by absenting himself from them personally can they finally understand their Spiritual connection and quit focusing on his personal, bodily existence. Hegel insisted that to be human is to have the Spirit and that just because one is finite does not mean one is different from either Jesus or God, for both finite and infinite beings are united by Spirit. Spirit is their essential identity, not material bodies. “Faith” is the knowledge that spirit has of other spirit, which may differ only in degrees of power, since the stronger spirit draws the weaker into itself.39 Hegel’s view was that, despite Jesus’s attempt to get his disciples to realize their unity with God via the Spirit, they turned to his finite individual form and mistakenly exalted it. They confused what was actually Divine in Jesus, placing it in his finite or individual physical form, minimized their own Divinity, and thereby established this personal bodily risen Jesus as a self-contradictory object of worship. Jesus had done everything possible to try to teach them that they should not distinguish his individuality from their own, that they should not exalt his personality as a human, that they should not see anything in him that they did not see in themselves, that they should grasp the spirit of the whole instead of focusing on individual parts or finite bodies. Jesus finally promised that upon his taking leave of them they would be on their own with the same Spirit, a realization of Spirit that they could not have without his departure.40 But even that could not move them beyond their positive image of Jesus, his individuality, such that even in the Resurrection they were incapable of releasing the finite form of Jesus and seeing it all as Spiritual. The “one essential [in the religion of Jesus] was love of God and one’s neighbor and being holy as God is holy.”41 They missed the power of pure love and Spirit and preferred an image, turning a finite man, Jesus, into God.

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Since it is only through an apotheosis that he became God, his divinity is a deification of a man present also as a reality. As a human individual he lived, died on the cross, and was buried. This blemish—humanity—is something quite different from the configuration proper to God. The objective aspect of God, his configuration, is objective only in so far as it is simply the presentation of the love uniting the group, simply the pure counterpart of that love, and it contains nothing not already in love itself (though here it appears as love’s counterpart), contains nothing which is not at the same time feeling.42

The disciples missed “God” as the love uniting them and saw Jesus only as distinguished from themselves. He had preached of the “Kingdom of God” in which there is a living bond of love that unites the believers, and he had commissioned them to baptize converts into a mystical union with God, and he saw the symbol of immersion as a “fantastic symbol” in the fact that when one is plunged into the water there is no multiplicity or differentiation in the water. All restriction and finitude is temporarily left behind, and he is one with the Infinite, though he subsequently comes back into a world of multiplicity or objectivity as a new creation with a new self-awareness. When one can conceive of God as Spirit yet only as outside or different from oneself (as human), then a choice is forced: one either sacrifices the intellect, or one has to deny the unity between Jesus and God.43 The Jews who did not convert chose the latter; the church that succeeded Jesus chose the former. Either way, it was a failure to realize the actual unity between God and humans through Spirit. As Hegel admitted, even the humiliation as a form of “a servant” would not have been an obstacle had the disciples been able to see it all as simply part of the human “veil” the divine nature had taken to show the unity between God and humans, but the veil was destined to pass away.44 To the contrary, the disciples forced the human form onto God as permanent, even in the Resurrection from the grave. The “sad need” the disciples felt for a “mundane reality” is connected with the church’s “Spirit” and fate.45 The answer to Hegel, of course, is the Spirit that God and man have in common—Geist, which is also translatable as “spirit” or “mind” in English.46 God is not outside humanity, and neither is God embodied just within one particular human body. Jesus’s disciples, failing to understand the Spirit that they had in common with him, could not extricate the Spirit from Jesus’s body and his alone and, thinking they were doing a service to him, declared his divinity, involving a resurrected body. But as Hegel insists, “the nondivine object [the body], for which worship is also demanded, never becomes divine whatever radiance may shine around it.”47 This “miracle” in their eyes, supplemented by a plethora of miracles they then attributed to Jesus as well as by “prophecies” of his divinity, only increased the unintelligibility of the claims, since their use of prophecies only

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confused the connection between the alleged original prophecies and the incidents in the life of Jesus; and miracles, to Hegel, are a conjoining of opposites, spirit and body, in the harshest contradiction. In his words, “divine action is the restoration and manifestation of oneness; miracle is the supreme disseverance.”48 By combining the man Jesus with the glorified and deified Jesus, their longing for a finite God became an “unquenchable, and unappeased longing.” It could only remain unsatisfied as a desire for an objective, personal individual God whose actual union with them escaped their consciousness and never allows religion to become a perfected life.49 The church’s focus on the individual (i.e., Jesus) determined its “fate,” where it thus found itself in a state of isolation and exclusion rather than of inclusion. It could not retreat to admit that which to Jesus had been the most obvious truth—that “only a modification of the Godhead knows the Godhead,”50 meaning that Peter and all the rest participated in the Godhead just as Jesus did. Although the Hegel who understood the disciples’ error in this apotheosis is radically different from the later Hegel for whom the Incarnation holds a central place, for whom Spirit actually was the outworking of all history rather than simply the opposite of everything finite in the world, even then for Hegel the death on the Cross could not involve the death of God but only the death of the finite God—that is, only the man Jesus.51 For Hegel, God has no essential unity with any mortal but only with a passing unity, a unity of divine self-negation that is only a necessity for the full self-realization of God or the Absolute. Spirit cannot die, and, since God is Spirit, God cannot die, by definition. The obvious reason here is that, if human reflection is God’s self-reflection, as in the later Hegel, to allow God to die on the Cross as Geist or Spirit would be to allow Spirit and therefore reason itself to perish, dissolving not simply religion and theology but all thought. But how could Spirit or mind in one individual dissolve Spirit or mind universally? “Death” is therefore for Hegel only something pertaining to finite or material life, to the material or substantial world. Spirit always transcends this for Hegel, so God’s unity with Itself is neither jeopardized nor altered by its taking a temporal finite form, since it “returns” to Itself, as does all thought after it objectifies itself in concreteness. Does this mean Spirit or mind in Jesus did not die, or was all the talk about Jesus’s death really inconsequential? Can Hegel have it both ways? We have to postpone judgment until we conclude an analysis of The Phenomenology of Mind. The problem here lies in two of Hegel’s suppositions: (1) the absolute separation between “spirit” and “body” and (2) the distinction between the finite and the Infinite, which somehow are known—and are known to be essentially spirit. So it all comes to the schema of finite individual bodies on the

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one hand, which remain always distinct from each other, and finite and Infinite spirit on the other hand, which remain always identical in quality though present in different quantities. For Hegel there is an irresolvable opposition between different bodies as distinct from each other and, as well, between spirit and body, which are also distinct from each other,52 whereas the spirit feels only unity between its finite and Infinite manifestations. So Hegel castigates the attitude of the Christian community for missing the uniting power: “The need to unite subject with object, to unite feeling, and feeling’s demand for objects, with the intellect, to unite them in something beautiful, in a god, by means of fancy, is the supreme need of the human spirit and the urge of religion. This urge of the Christian community its belief in God could not satisfy because in their God there could have been no more than their common feeling. In the God of the world, all beings are united; in him there are not members, as members, of a community.”53 Hegel is emphasizing that the spirit of early Christianity ended up almost identical to the Jewish spirit, despite Jesus, in that its focus was on the concrete or individual form rather than on the Divine Spirit that unites the world. It was on the Wholly Transcendent in its absolute otherness or dissimilarity to everything in this world, including humans. With such myopia, the church’s belief in God became another particular religion with a particular god and a chosen people rather than a unity of the whole of the world in Spirit. But Hegel’s absolute opposites of spirit and body could only be articulated prior to the discovery of the evolution of the human species that came decisively through Darwin a few decades after Hegel, an evolution that cannot separate consciousness and reflection from the development of the size of the brain—for example, in homo erectus and eventually homo sapiens sapiens. This now-antiquated opposition of body and mind, this assumption that “mind” or “spirit” (Geist, in German) was somehow the “most real” and independent of the individual human body rather than a function of the brain, stood behind Hegel’s rejection of anything finite as the ultimate answer. To him, even in his Phenomenology of Spirit, the Spirit simply embodies itself in a physical carcass, becoming the “inner” person or the “individual” but whose external or bodily features cannot manifest the “inner” person. There is no room left in such either/or schema for brains as actual and vital parts of bodies, evolving over millennia and so finally becoming capable of chemical connections that store impressions and forms—capable of classifying and connecting single impressions and composites or modules of information, capable of emotions, of recalling such a plethora of information in which the brain within a social group even enabled the group to develop and utilize language to communicate these impressions more effectively than mere bodily gestures and arrive at consciousness and reflection even of consciousness. To

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assume that this is simply found within the body as a “given” or to assume that it came from some larger or Transcendent Power or Purpose is to prefer mystery and invisibility over the actual given. So Hegel had to reject elevating the finite Jesus to divine status, had to reject both “inclination” and “duty” as finite concerns in ethics, had to minimize any manifestation of the ideas based on empirical or sense data, despite his emphasis on the historicization of Geist. He thus spoke disparagingly of the Jews, who could not find the idea of God within their own consciousness to be acceptable but, rather, always retained an objectified and therefore finite God, externalized, a lawmaker God, over them as “master” so as to resolve their inability to love or accept others or to feel comfortable in this world, which resulted in their attitude of “universal enmity” and “genius of hatred.” This authority that demanded obedience was so strong in the Jewish faith that it could be held up as an example in the story of Abraham, who was willing even to sacrifice his son to God just to obey God. The authoritarianism had to become dominant even in Jesus’s teaching because of the attitude of his audience, the Jews; yet even so most of them naturally rejected Jesus’s message that other people are more important than God’s Torah and that the Kingdom of God is within oneself. Hegel uniquely discounted the Jewish Spirit even in his later Philosophy of Religion inasmuch as Jesus’s “inner” person is not Jewish; neither does the Jewish Spirit of monotheism carry any weight with Hegel. But the ancient historical situation in which Jesus existed was not quite as simple as Hegel’s caricature would make it out to be, and his early reduction of Jesus to a preacher of Kant’s morality or even a “love ethic” is only a slight notch above Kant, just as his understandings of Jesus’s usage of the terms “Messiah” or “Son of God” or “Son of man” as self-designation is totally uninformed from Jewish usage and New Testament criticism, overlooking the fact that Jesus’s very frame of reference was in fact the Jewish religion, not later hellenized Christian theology. Hegel neither shows awareness of the politics and diverse interests at work among the early disciples nor shows awareness of the extremely different pictures of this historical origin—Jesus—and Jesus’s actual teachings. Why? Instead, Greek religion was part and parcel of the Enlightenment veneration that Hegel retained even as a Romanticist. Hegel felt comfortable with the Christian religion only to the degree that he could read it as originally having at least the embedded essence of the universality of religion, of inclusive love, even if it quickly reverted to a “positive” or authoritarian religion rather than the religion of the world. The same problem that caused the clash between Jesus and the Jews as a whole accounts in Hegel also for the “fate” of the church itself, since it too, although accepting Jesus, as he admits, propagated a master-servant ideology, diminished its own owning of the Spirit, and

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with that the true power of love, developed a positive or authoritarian image of Jesus that conflicted with the Spirit itself, and made worship and doctrines totally contradictory in its focus on the individual Jesus and his history. Hegel concludes by saying that the only reason the early Christians failed to realize that they were not finding life in subscription to doctrines was because they were not as aware as we are today of the distinction between that which is spirit and that which is body. Hegel’s “reason” is simply no longer scientifically accurate. What we find absent in Hegel is how his picture of its origin fits any semblance of the actual history as we now know it, as well as any explanation of how all this colossal failure survived and who, and by what means, anyone found its real truth, which Hegel thought was so obviously missed by all of the earliest Jewish Christians and non-Christian Jews. He seemed to imply that behind all the wrongly emphasized individual and sensible impressions and claims was the implicit Spirit that was the real driving and sustaining force, only gradually moving the people away from the crude representations to purer thought. But it was the other way around, with church history revealing a developing materialistic, hyperbolic, ahistorical, mythological picture of Jesus, Mary, and its dogma and sacraments in the following millennia. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT (MIND) Even though Hegel’s Spirit of Christianity had been carefully constructed by its author, as he rewrote and altered elements within it, within eight years he felt the need for a more precise presentation. Influenced by Fichte, Hegel realized both a weakness in his depiction of the early church and the need for a complete system of thought, and so he published his monumental Phenomenology of Mind in 1807.54 Its organization was logical and seemingly complete by his particular aim, though his language varied from a fairly common conversational tone to extreme abstractions building on other abstractions, with the inner connections not always unambiguous.55 Hegel’s desire to supply certainty not only to sciences but also to philosophy and especially to religion and ethics was as sincere a driving force in his life as it had been in Kant’s and Schleiermacher’s. Hegel’s abstract system had its parallels also in Kant’s Critiques as well as in Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre and his lecture notes on philosophical ethics. As opposed to Kant, Hegel’s ethics or morality, and the moral community (Sittenlehre), even when constructed on “love” or “unity” vis-à-vis Kant’s “imperative,” always stood in a subordinate role to the Absolute Religion of Christianity and its philosophical truth, especially regarding the Trinity.

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Differently from Schleiermacher, Hegel insisted that only speculative reason could reveal the deeper truth and certainty for Christianity, not the contentless “Feeling” proposed by Schleiermacher. But this required that he quit using the word “feeling” (Gefühl), which was prolific in his Spirit of Christianity, just as Schleiermacher had been forced to abandon the word “intuition” or “sensation” (Anschauung), which he had used in his Addresses but later viewed as too pro-Kantian if not utterly confusing. Different from Kant, there is no modesty in the “mature” Hegel’s not being able to prove the connection between one’s morality and God, as Kant said, responding to the maxim “as if” it were God’s, since God really cannot be proved. Hegel had decided that God could not be God or Absolute if God could not know itself and enable all humans to know it as well; and, if it were Absolute, it would be all-inclusive, as being “in-itself,” needing no other. To know itself, however, which means self-realization, it would have to become other than itself, being “for itself,” while still being “in itself.” Yet to be “for itself” means “being for another,” so it “is immediately turned back into itself and is at home with itself (bei sich)” (i.e., with or in itself).56 The Subject itself, and consequently this pure universal too, is, however, revealed as self; for this self is just this inner being reflected into itself, the inner being which is immediately given and is the proper certainty of that self, for which it is given. To be in its notion that which reveals and is revealed—this is, then, the true shape of spirit; and moreover, this shape, its notion, is alone its very essence and its substance. Spirit is known as self-consciousness, and to this self-consciousness it is directly revealed, for it is this self-consciousness itself. The divine nature is the same as the human, and it is this unity which is intuitively apprehended (angeschaut).57

As object to itself, the Absolute would necessarily not be absolute, not Infinite, but conditioned and finite. But if the “Spirit” is self-consciousness, and that is simply a reflection of one’s inner being, and if the philosophical concern is primarily that which is Absolute, then does one discover within this self-consciousness one’s own absoluteness? It is not mediated but immediate, present in the very notion itself. Here Luther and Hegel are sure that God—as God is in himself 58 —is both known by humans and known certainly by humans, although for Luther, God was still the totally Transcendent Absolute. Its Lutheran transcendence, however, became also permanently immanent by Hegel’s equation, but he remained Lutheran to the end, insisting that no works or actions of humans are of saving significance ever and that human works or actions are of socially beneficial significance only to the degree that they are spawned from God’s grace.

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Instead of assuming the incorrectness of the rather naive common view of “certainty” about everyday things and events, Hegel attempted to unite that position with a philosophical examination, without prejudicing either side, by investigating fairly the structure and presuppositions behind the ordinary ideas of certainty. Ideas of certainty exist also within the sciences and vary by subject matter. Thus he laid out the scope of the investigation of what he saw as the three stages: (1) “Spirit,” which involved “Consciousness,” (2) “Self-consciousness,” and (3) “Free Concrete Mind.” The latter division itself analyzed “Reason,” “Spirit,” “Religion,” and “Absolute Knowledge.” Thus he worked from the most common and natural presuppositions of certainty, those having to do with the senses, to the most speculative ideas of Spirit, reflecting only itself and thus being Absolute. In the various grades in between unscientific presumptions about sense certainty and Absolute Spirit, which is absolute truth, the reasoning subject not only utilizes observation but also places certain expectations upon inorganic forms of the world as well as organic forms, utilizes logical structures and psychological laws, and gradually begins to understand the limits of certainty. It is finally through the psychological and in his subsequent discussion of self-consciousness’s relation to its immediate actuality that Hegel finds even the observations not justifying the presuppositions of certainty based strictly upon “individuality.”59 In his attempt to explain the relationship between reason or spirit and body, Hegel engages the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology. Ultimately, even if the hands and mouth are the most obvious instruments by which individuality is expressed, they cannot provide observation any more certainty than can one’s skull, since taken by themselves they are turned lifeless. Unfortunately most talk about “mind” does decrease the significance of “mind” to such a lifeless object. Further, Hegel emphasizes, the effects of words, gestures, and the like can be quite uninformed or deceitful and so not manifestations of the “inner person” at all. “Mind alone in itself is the necessity of this relation” of conscious to unconscious reality but no “object.”60 This calls for him to examine “self-consciousness through its own activity,” and to examine individuality within association or community based on reason, by which he finally arrives at “Spirit.”61 That is, one finally realizes, as did Kant, how one’s own mind “mediates the immediacy” of objects, thereby transforming them to conform with one’s mental process (in Kant, the “categories of judgment”), and from this one eventually moves to reflect on one’s own reflection, the ontological presuppositions one senses in one’s own thinking vis-à-vis the object. As Yerkes summarizes Hegel’s plan to find the correspondence between the “primordial” or naive unreflective consciousness and the speculative philosophical consciousness, one realizes that

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the primordial consciousness was not wholly deceptive or erroneous; that the rational is the real; and that object and subject are both finite modes or moments grounded in the infinite thinking of God, and as such are already and always reconciled in Him because his own reality as Absolute Spirit “overreaches” both. This is the ultimate truth about all that finitely “is.” . . . . Human consciousness which begins with a dependent preoccupation with thinking as immediately absorbed in the intuitions of only physical objects, ends with an independent thinking about thinking as such and with an intuition of God as that purely rational reality who overreached both the subject thinking and the object thought in its thinking. He is the truth of their ultimate unity. Their mutual “otherness” is transcended or sublated (aufgehoben) in Him—at once preserved and yet cancelled.62

This is the “Spirit” of a people as we saw in The Spirit of Christianity, but now Hegel is less judgmental in his abstraction of the process or movement of the Spirit. In addition to these differences in methodology from his earlier works, Hegel now sees Spirit utilizing a “dialectic” procedure, convinced that the nature or process of thought is itself the form of life, that in thinking a person has the orderly or systematic development of life. Thinking involves in its content all the prior thought. Only the alienation between a thesis and its antithesis is eliminated in dialectic; the content of both is contained in a synthesis through “taking up” (Aufheben) the best elements that can be reconciled. The synthesis is “new,” not just an unreflective blending. More specifically, the dialectic in the Phenomenology is Hegel’s attempt to determine by philosophical questions whether or not the putative set of presuppositions unrecognized in the “natural attitude” of certainty is, in each case, the actual set of presuppositions in force by which the certainty is finally alleged or whether they are inadequate, failing to provide the proper “standpoint” because they actually failed to grant access to such an effective standpoint of the “totality.”63 I will elaborate Professor Flay’s conclusions about this way of putting the question only at the conclusion of the chapter so they do not have to be repeated. The problem is described also in Yerkes’ Christology of Hegel as perhaps “the problem” that plagues Hegel’s entire system, which Yerkes refers to as his “oscillation” between thought and sensible experience—specifically, whether the sensible experience is really presupposed by the religion’s “representations” (Vorstellungen) in their “backward” dependency, as Yerkes calls it, or the thought transforms the sensible so that the empirical elements in it are finally completely irrelevant as pure thinking takes over. The “oscillation” that Yerkes spots is found not in Hegel’s indefiniteness of the priority between experience and thought or in the valuation of thought in the Vorstellungen but in Hegel’s oscillation back and forth over the importance

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or lack of importance of the historical elements in the Christian faith. This is a subsection of the more general category mentioned and is simply not resolved in Hegel. Hegel’s attempt to resolve it results in an inclusiveness and universalism, suggesting that any precritical stages of faith and even the Vorstellungen stages of faith have “implicit” truth in them and that the speculative philosophy simply makes truth more “explicit.” That is not simply a move past literalism and theism but seems to be a reduction of the meaning of all the specifically different Vorstellungen and historical claims into one element: human unity with God. Or, approached from the side of the speculative thinking, human consciousness is simply God’s self-consciousness. What more can be said? But Hegel’s “oscillation” is found also when he attempts to speak of the origin of any reflection, whether it works from free humans and their curiosity as they gradually discover “God” or is initiated and worked out entirely by God’s overpowering their sense impressions with Spirit, pulling them into unity with Itself or at least an awareness of that unity that was “already always” there.64 This mystical unity borders on a form of monism with the words “God” and “human” superscribed on top of one another,65 and Hegel’s insistence on the obvious difference between the finite and infinite is thereby dissolved, since the “finite” for Hegel, while seeming to apply only to the physical or sensible, is of no importance, and, though he speaks of Spirit seemingly to distinguish “God” from humans, he insisted that there are no qualitative or even quantitative distinctions that are significant to Spirit, and so on the Spiritual side “finite” is not a possible part of the vocabulary but has been swallowed by the “infinite.” Finally, methodologically, Hegel presupposed the validity of the religious categories of “finite” and “infinite” as basic categories or content for all of life and all of reality while also presupposing that the essence of God or Spirit or the Infinite is to become other66 than itself while maintaining itself. In Hegel’s words, “God is self-consciousness. He knows Himself in a consciousness which is distinct from Him, which is potentially the consciousness of God, but it is also this actuality in that it knows its identity with God, an identity which is, however, mediated by the negation of finitude. It is this Begriff which constitutes the content of religion. God is this: to distinguish Himself from Himself, to be an object for Himself, but to be in this distinguishing simply identical with Himself—Spirit.”67 Scharlemann, in his discussion of the validity of the idea of the Trinity as an adequate form of approaching the otherness of God, shows that “identity” and “difference,” which depend upon a “genus” when one is understanding sensible objects, are inadequate when it comes to understanding Spirit, since there is no genus. The latter must operate more along the line of the Roman-

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ticist’s understanding of self, in which one could discover itself within others or even its opposite, or even more potently that the self “is capable of being both what it is and also what it is not.” The latter is “the mark of spirit,” Scharlemann avers. In the Trinity, therefore, the divine and human both belong to the eternal life of spirit, and so humanity is included as God’s otherness. Barth’s limiting the otherness to Jesus and Jenson’s opinion that Hegel saw God’s otherness as “world” are both seen as incorrect by Scharlemann. Rather, Scharlemann insists that Hegel saw both Jesus as well as world as moments of God’s otherness in which “God objectifies and alienates himself from himself, the extreme point of alienation being that of the crucifixion.” But he concludes by suggesting the following, which connects the idea of otherness to the “oscillation” Yerkes spotted in Hegel’s method—that the issue might rather be “how the connection is made between the historical concreteness of the man Jesus and the idea of the living God.”68 In any case, Hegel’s “oscillating” method has a tendency to think either one of two things: (1) If the primitive, unreflective faith has the truth, then the result would be that one does not need to worry about somehow developing expertise to think only about thinking’s process and structures. Or, on the other hand, (2) if the truth is really found only in the Begriff or Idea or Concept articulated by speculative philosophy, then the religion becomes a form of elitist Gnostic dimensions, confined to very few people, issuing quite negative judgment about the validity of a prereflective faith or even the stage of the Vorstellungen. Despite his lack of clarification on this, Hegel seemed adamant in his Christology, in the quotation already seen above—that Christology is really found only in the Idea, not at all in any empirical details, history, teachings, of Jesus, and so forth. In another place, Hegel states it again in very general terms, placing the position dependent upon sensuous or empirical detail in only a negative relation: “What is to have truth for spirit, what it ought to believe must have nothing to do with sensuous faith; what is true for spirit is something in terms of which sensuous manifestation is downgraded in value. Since spirit starts from what is sensuous, and attains to this estimate by itself, its relation to the sensuous is at the same time a negative relation. This is the fundamental characteristic.”69 Regarding content changes from Hegel’s earlier writings, it can be detected in The Spirit of Christianity as he speaks of the body of Jesus needing to disappear so his followers could experience him as Spirit. This is included in Hegel’s general statement in the Lectures in which he says that this sensible object “has changed itself from being a sensuous, empirically existing object into a divine object,” no longer having “anything sensuous” about it but rather being an “entirely different nature.”70 Much of his idea of content changes shows the influence of his predecessor, Fichte. Fichte elaborated

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five types of worldviews that paralleled to a degree Hegel’s four stages of Spirit; Fichte opposed superstition especially in the form of a religion of servility or appeasement of God, and Hegel moved beyond the subservience or divine commands to a religion of love or unity via the common Spirit; Fichte rejected the Enlightenment’s opposition to a “revealed” religion, insisting there was no other form of religion, and Hegel embraced revealed religion with its specific symbols, dogma, and praxis; finally, Fichte formulated an “Absolute I” in which form and matter are not blended but in which, through a dialectic recapitulation, true knowledge is attained, while for Hegel the idea and reality are “taken up” into a synthesis in which Spirit is reflecting only on its own very process. This raises an insight within his methodology in the Phenomenology of Mind that he carried throughout his entire later system: a concept of subjectivity that Mark Taylor described as being “nothing less than revolutionary”71—a “reflexive subjectivity.” In a way, this can be viewed as either a “methodological” or a “content” change by Hegel, since it affects both areas. Robert P. Scharlemann had utilized the idea of “reflexivity” prior to Taylor, and both provide good explanations for a rather difficult concept. Taylor acknowledged that the existence of this insight was back in Hegel’s Phenomenology as well as his Science of Logic, as did Scharlemann. The insight consists of distinguishing “cognition” from “reflection” from “reflexivity” (or “reflexion”). Cognition is a judgment that a subject makes regarding an object, such as something the subject sees or hears. Reflection is a judgment that a subject makes about the cognitive judgment—that is, about the thinking the subject did in that judgment. Reflexivity is a judgment that a subject makes regarding the subject’s reflective process about the cognitive judgment. At each stage, Taylor avers, the subject and object become more identifiable with each other. Asking in the reflective and reflexive stages whether or not one was correct in the prior judgment may seem to intensify scrutiny in order to be answered, and so could be certainly a closer approximation of the subject and object. The distance between subject and object could also be said to decrease inasmuch as the judgment may utilize other references or criteria for making those judgments. If, however, all that is meant is that one is scrutinizing one’s reasoning in having made the immediately prior judgment, then the limits of the reflexive judgment might indicate nothing about the validity of the prereflective or “ordinary” judgment, not at all creating a greater closeness between subject and original object. In any case, to call my former cognitive assertion true from my reflective standpoint requires that I have at least the same assurance about the accuracy of the judgments made in the reflective judgment; that is, I must know at least that much about the object, otherwise each succeeding level of judgment could simply be a judgment about a statement without re-

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gard to the object to which the cognitive statement originally referred. So one does not escape the criteria utilized at any prior stage; one cannot simply skip over them by some claim of a superior standpoint. But one must also realize that one’s concern that prompted the original judgment or inquiry was not the question about what constitutes proper thinking or its power but, rather, the object itself, and one must realize that the question about the object is not answered by a mere assertion about how properly reasonable one is able to be but, rather, by what the result was regarding the object in question, given that the inquiry at each level was appropriate to its subject matter. Taylor’s judgment that at each succeeding level of thought, subject and object become more closely identified is not based, however, on the method as much as it is based on his grounding the method on the identity of God as self-love and self-consciousness, both of which require the “other,” which is both a part of God’s identity as well as difference from everything else. This is affirmed by his citation of Hegel, who says God’s self-consciousness involves an “act of distinguishing or differentiation which at the same time gives no difference and does not hold this difference as permanent. God beholds Himself in what is differentiated; and when in His other He is united only with Himself, He is there with no other but Himself, He is in close union only with himself, He beholds Himself in His other.”72 In his later Science of Logic73 Hegel refers to this as “self-relating negativity that remains internal to itself.” Hegel can conclude The Phenomenology of Mind with the following description of the unity of being and thought in self-consciousness, the “thought-constituted” or Absolute Being: God, then, is here revealed, as He is; He actually exists as He is in Himself; He is real as Spirit. God is attainable in pure speculative knowledge alone, and only is in that knowledge, and is merely that knowledge itself, for He is spirit; and this speculative knowledge is the knowledge furnished by revealed religion. That knowledge knows God to be thought, or pure Essence; and knows this thought as actual being and as a real existence, and existence as the negativity of itself, hence as Self, an individual “this” and a universal self. It is just this that revealed religion knows.74

Elsewhere Hegel insists that this level of thinking—driven not by human will but as God’s own reflection—is a natural evolution from the sensed objects through a form of “representation” (Vorstellung) to thinking about thinking that is originally dependent upon but that is through more reflection freed from the content of the sensible objects. As he saw it, material objects are different from Spirit, and they are also different from each other, whereas Spirit is the same whether in humans or “God.” The difference between humans and God is only a matter of degree, not quality. This

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means that, the more reflection one engages in, the more one discovers the basic unity of all—Absolute Spirit. The question may well be whether and to what degree this identity of all beings via Spirit can provide certainty to questions about anything other than the process of thinking if all sensible content is transcended by that thinking. Does such a contentless “Absolute” have any value in one’s learning anything specific? What is the limit of “absolute knowledge” in the Phenomenology? Or does “God’s” own reflection evolve from needing the sensible objects to finally reflecting only on pure notion? Scharlemann noted that the Hegelian system of the Absolute in the Science of Logic, by its focus on the absoluteness of the principles of thinking, erected a barrier by our not even being able to think of a second possibility. All conceivable alternatives have already been overtaken by the absoluteness of the thinking process itself. We cannot, as it seems, even put the question of whether God is a subject other than, or outside of the edifice of absolute thinking. To say that God is not the absolute is as much a part of absolute thought as is saying that God is the absolute. The absoluteness of thought has no exit. Nietzsche later saw that the only relief from this absolute deity is the cataclysmic event of the death of this God.75

That, of course, is an inherent problem of using the term “absolute” and attaching it to some vital aspect of thinking. That does not have to stimulate a response, as some give, of Hegel’s “hubris.” Scharlemann did not go that far but noted in his brief critique of Hegel that this system of the absolute does not distinguish the “whole of thinking of being from the being of God, does not reckon with the possibility that God is other than even the absolute process.”76 Scharlemann insists that Schelling was more correct in seeing the Absolute (of the structure of being and thinking) as not God but “only the material for God’s being,” since God can both be and not be God; that is, God’s freedom is “prior to being and thinking.”77 Reflexivity itself is more accurately the thought process that serves as a material of symbol of God, just as does the Trinity, but not as the being of God, especially if one’s meaning is found in the “other,” which is not simply another entity but in one’s possibility or freedom to not be what one is. In Anselmian language, Scharlemann asks which would be judged as “that than which a greater cannot be thought”—God that can only be God, or God that can both be God and not God; the answer would be the latter, which also lays the foundation for a Christology. Scharlemann’s distinguishing of the limits of thought as symbols of God as well as the details of his explanation and what he saw as a valuable use of the “reflexive subjectivity” must be discussed in more detail

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in chapter 5, but for now we note that it shows a possible crack within Hegel’s vast intellectual edifice. In the Phenomenology of Mind Hegel takes a more receptive approach to dogma of the church, admitting that it carries truth within it. The truth is presented in representational or symbolical form rather than conceptual form. Symbols are a combination of memory of feeling with imaginative (Phantasie) pictures in the mind. For example, Christological dogma of the human and divine within Jesus is representational or symbolical of the Infinite in the finite. All specific Christological dogmas are symbols of the Infinite in the finite—or the unity of everything in the Absolute Spirit (God). But, ultimately, no symbol and no reflection provides any other meaning but the unity of the finite and Infinite. For Hegel to say otherwise would place him into the unenviable position of having to decide whether the representational forms are true or the truth lies only in the purely conceptual forms of speculative philosophy. But to choose between them would suggest that either the original disciples did not see the truth in Christianity or else those who engage in speculative reason do not, which would break the connection that both Hegel and Schleiermacher thought was so vital. It would basically dissolve Christianity by cutting it into different periods of human reflection in which their differences or contingent positions in history could not be reconciled. So Hegel assures his readers that the truth is found implicitly even within the representations—that is, within any thinking about the meaning of life, no matter how unsophisticated it may be, even in the “ordinary” life of all humans; so one always stands already within the answer to the ultimate questions. This is so since no being can be called human if it remains simply in a prereflective state, and this means that thinking naturally turns human to God. Seen in a dialectic form, “Father” (God) is the thesis; “Son” is the antithesis; and Holy Spirit is the synthesis. All recall this Infinite in the finite. So the “Trinity”78 becomes the paradigm and embodiment of the process of Absolute Spirit—not that it names some entity but that “God” is known only through the process of thought in its double negation as the Infinite becomes finite and then also negates its finitude to fully realize itself as Infinite. This mystical unity of the eternal within the historical means two that, for one who simply assumes God’s existence, the truth may be implicit—but not explicit if one is not reflecting and, even more specifically, if one has not graduated to the stage of reflexivity. Yet Hegel insists that the truth of the dogma is simply the truth of life itself, of the opposition and reconciliation in the life process of identity through sameness and difference, and that allegedly all the talk of “Infinite” and “finite” in which each is dependent upon the other, if not also is the other, is described by Taylor as “a ceaseless play in which each becomes itself in and through the other.”79

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The “revelatory” and dogmatic content of Christianity, which had become so heteronomously objectionable to many people of the Enlightenment, was embraced by Hegel as it had been by his predecessor, Fichte, as both sought to find through speculative philosophy the truth or meaning behind the symbols and even rituals. Since both were persuaded that the individual always stood between (1) the “given” of cultural norms and ideas that had societal power if not legal ramifications and (2) one’s own freedom and subjective self-identity, the relationship between the self and the others in their interdependence had to be clarified. For Fichte, the moral demand that the individual be perfect was impossible in the individual’s freedom. But if one can see oneself behind that individual existence, Fichte was sure one discovers the “absolute ego,” which is Reason itself. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit traces the psychological development of the self, moving finally to the Absolute Spirit with certainty of knowledge no longer dependent upon sensible phenomena. This spiritual process of maturation was illustrated in Hegel’s Phenomenology by his many different sections elaborating even the “ethical” relationships and concerns. In his discussion of “evil and forgiveness,” Hegel speaks of a “reciprocal recognition” as “reconciliation” occurs between estranged parties as each realizes the “pure knowledge of itself qua universal essence in its opposite,” a reciprocal recognition that he says is Absolute Spirit.80 Hegel reaffirms this in more religious language as “God appearing” in the midst of those formerly conflicting parties who have realized “reconciliation.”81 As Professor Farneth points out, Hegel is not speaking of this as “two individuals who have become one but rather one who has become two”—that is, Absolute Spirit or “God in the midst of the reconciled consciousness.”82 “The reconciling affirmation,” Hegel writes, “the ‘yes’, with which both egos desist from their existence in opposition, is the existence of the ego expanded into a duality, an ego which remains therein one and identical with itself, and possesses the certainty of itself in its complete relinquishment and its opposite: it is God appearing in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge.”83 Individuality is thereby “reconciled,” transcended, or perhaps created by the unity of Spirit that allows it but cancels it, rather than vice versa, but only those who know themselves with “pure knowledge” can recognize it as the work of God. It is no wonder Kierkegaard was offended when Hegel eclipsed the individual by the Absolute universal. This is typical of the many places where Hegel seems to be promoting a pure monism yet ends up utilizing the Christian symbols with a new interpretation to suggest something else. This is the reason some interpretations of Hegel have seen the whole to be simply a system of an Absolutely transcendent deity in which humans actually have no freedom while other interpretations insist that Hegel is really only describing

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humanity’s Infinite power in which there is no external other “God.” Perhaps both are correct interpretations of Hegel? On the subject of human freedom and responsibility raised by Fichte, Farneth’s intriguing study of Hegel’s social ethics even within the Phenomenology shows an awareness of the need for people to become self-critical enough to be able to be “forward-looking” rather than stuck in rigid traditional cultural roles that create unnecessary conflicts, even tragedies. If Hegel saw the Spirit as responsible for the stages of culture, then, Farneth points out, for Hegel, one’s participation in that Spirit also presented freedom and responsibility for questioning and reshaping the cultural norms, laws, practices, and institutions when they are inadequate or produce unethical results. But does the Spirit produce inadequate or unethical results? It seems obvious that reciprocal recognition, identification with the different others, methods of admission of failure, confession, and forgiveness that produces reconciliation can all affirm certain religious rituals within Christianity by which a society can alleviate potential conflicts as well as prevent them. Conflicts within a democratic society are unique, but domination, sheer arbitrariness, and favoritism or discrimination are explicitly prohibited within the written social contract, and so a greater sense of unity should be possible if peoples’ will to feel united with different others can match the ethical ideal rooted in a democracy’s constitution. As I suggested earlier in the examination of Schleiermacher, my question is not whether the Christian religion or any of these four profound thinkers espoused an ethic—since they all do. The question at hand is much more limited: namely, once the metaphysical or mythological foundations of the religion have made its central Christological claim impossible to verify by historical methods, since it was a conflated historical-metaphysical claim,84 can more recent attempts to somehow “corroborate” the claims from some element in a person’s consciousness actually replace the certainty lost when historical data proved inimical to the former certainty? If one of these attempts to so “corroborate” the church’s Christological claim is adequate, then ethics based on that might have to be seen as the only possible universal ethic, even if diverse religions have so far shown only an inability to compromise. But it is difficult to try to assess Hegel’s treatment of what I called “conflated historical-metaphysical” claims, since he is sure the Infinite and finite have always been united, even in the religious representations; and although some humans seem to deny his assertions that any reflection shows the universal religious nature of humans, he does not mean that all humans engage in or think about worship, rituals, and symbols that relate to some deity but, rather, that any reflection by which people seek to understand the “meaning of finite human existence in terms of an originating dependence on what is

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the ‘ultimately real’” is “the same” no matter, what it is called85 or whether or not they even realized it. So Hegel was opposed to anything resembling Lessing’s notion of an “ugly ditch” separating the accidents of history and eternal principles. The finite has the Infinite within it, and history thereby has the eternal within it, which, of course, is the unity of the Absolute Idea, nothing sensible or material. Certainly some of the ethical insights in Hegel’s Spirit of Christianity as well as in The Phenomenology have persuasive power that could be “freestanding” principles, but in neither Schleiermacher nor Hegel is there any intention to allow them to be freestanding—that is, to separate them from the Christian Absolute God. Quite the opposite of “freestanding” is Hegel’s explicit idea that religion has to provide the ground for general ethical principles for government. As a result, both “systems” remain unconvincing, as they lack validation of their “historical” claims about Jesus as the Christ by ignoring facts of past history or riding roughshod over particulars by an epistemology that has no use for the physical or facts or that cannot define when the sensible influences on Vorstellung have to be transcended and so base certainty either totally on “immediate self-consciousness” or “Absolute Spirit.” Perhaps the most bizarre example of Hegel’s finding a deeper truth by totally ignoring the historical fact is the way he explained the Crucifixion at the conclusion of The Phenomenology. The alleged event of the Crucifixion only carries with it the truth of the Divine Being becoming “reconciled with its existence through an event—the event of God’s emptying Himself of His Divine Being through his factual Incarnation and His Death.”86 The idea that God has to be “reconciled with its existence through an event” seems strange if not convoluted. Why would God need any “event” in history other than to cause humans to reflect? Why would God need to be “reconciled” unless Absolute Spirit can become self-alienated? And how would such an “event” perform the reconciliation better than simply stimulating thought? But when Hegel explains it, then the Absolute Idealism answers the question but creates new questions in the process when he states that what this means is that “God’s individual self-consciousness becomes the universal, becomes the religious communion.” And this means that “death loses this natural significance, it passes into its true conception.”87 This death means not only the death of a Transcendent God88 but also that the whole is “transfigured into the universality of the spirit, which lives in its own communion, dies there daily, and daily rises again.”89 So the truth is not of its historical factuality— even though Hegel refers to “God’s emptying Himself of His Divine Being through His factual Incarnation and His Death”—but, rather, transcends this “natural” meaning via “the imaginative idea [Vorstellung; or a fact of the

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imagination], that the Divine Being is reconciled with existence through an event.”90 Scharlemann sees the problem that Hegel is attempting to resolve as stemming from Hegel’s view of the “Protestant principle” of Luther (or “principle of the North,” as Hegel called it) as a rejecting of any identification of any finite thing and God. This principle underlying the Protestant idea of justification by faith was interpreted by Hegel as creating an insoluble problem, an “unbridgeable gap between the subjective desire for the eternal and the whole of objectivity. Faith alone is incapable of preserving the deity of God; intuition and intellect cannot do so.”91 This irreconcilability of the deity with the finite world was seen by Hegel as “poetry of Protestant grief.”92 Hegel, of course, attempted to resolve it by presupposing the identity or unity of humans and God in terms of the Spirit or mind but could not do so without creating Spirit as Absolute, which played havoc with any distinctions between finite and infinite. Scharlemann further articulated the alternatives such Protestant Principle posed. He explained how the absence of anything in the finite world to manifest the eternal led to the point of the finite itself being recognized as the only “real,” whereas the infinite cannot be objectified or seen as reality. With the human’s infinite desire for the eternal combining with the finite world’s inability to manifest the eternal, the result is nihilism. Scharlemann notes that this gap was attempted in the modern period to be bridged by altering the needed reconciliation of God with finite reality into reconciliation within merely empirical existence, but he insisted that the modern age was still unable to dismiss its consciousness of the “absolute opposition between finite and infinite,” which still causes the grief that Hegel had seen. As Scharlemann assessed it, “either the end result of the Protestant principle was a nihilism unrelieved, ending with the recognition that because God did not exist, that is, because God was not identifiable with any existing thing, there was nothing to the idea of God, or one could think of this absolute finitude as itself a manifestation of God, in the thought of the death of God.”93 Hegel attempted to do the latter—that is, show that the very thought of God incorporates such absolute finitude as its own death, thereby escaping absolutizing the proposition that “God is dead.” Scharlemann is persuaded that the way Hegel resolved it was very impermanent, since he was unable even to criticize his own perspective while making the system absolute and thus impenetrable to others’ criticism, but that at least this showed what future theology had to resolve. We will explore Scharlemann’s specific “answer” in chapter 5. Thus all thinking involves this idea of negation of negation, of emptying and refilling, of disconnection and reconnection, this difference and

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sameness, but not factuality, since Hegel insists it transcends the “natural” meaning? As far as the individual’s death, in the Phenomenology it means, as it did even in his Spirit of Christianity, that by one’s spirit one can accept one’s death “only by looking the negative in the face, and dwelling with it,” a “dwelling beside it [that] is the magic power that converts the negative into being.”94 One may certainly be able to look death in the face and reduce to a degree its negativity, but that concerns one’s idea of or attitude toward death, not the “event.” To say it turns death into “being” is still speaking only of the idea of death, not the sensible experience of the material ending of real human relationships. And the one who died has no idea of anything; that remains only for survivors. This does seem to be more what he said, a belief in “magic” if it so minimizes the significance of bodily termination of human relationships. If this denial of the significance of anything bodily or empirical is the way that one attempts to see the unity of the finite and Infinite, then it is not a unity but an elimination of the finite as well as history. Nothing counts but the Infinite or Absolute Spirit, and the “death of God” is only the death of finitude and history. Farneth is certainly not alone among Hegel scholars who are persuaded that Hegel need not be interpreted as predicting the end of history or the realization of the ultimate telos or as insisting that the final stage of Absolute Spirit has been reached in history and who are persuaded that, instead, Hegel can be read as supplying guidance for conflicts that will continue as long as humans exist, especially since Farneth’s concern was primarily Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which he emphasized that he was not analyzing a historical development. The same is true when he titles his works “Philosophy of . . . [something],” since his understanding is that the philosophical examination is a speculative analysis, not historical or dealing with mere empirical facts. While it is true that Hegel can be read this way, and perhaps wanted to be read this way, certainly many Christian philosophers who became familiar with his system seem to have interpreted the systems as being erected with the goal of supplying certainty, of speaking of the present realization of Absolute Spirit in nineteenth-century Germany, or in Richard Rorty’s words, of having the “final word.”95 Certainly one can be wrong in predicting the end, but Hegel denied he was making such predictions. One can be also be incorrect in asserting that the stage of history of Absolute Spirit has been reached in a particular country at a certain time. And Hegel did assert the latter. Certainly later scholars do not have to assign his system to his hubris, but the objections come as much from the grandiose scope of his system, which occasionally embodied “overstatements” or tried to encompass not only universal history, as they come from all possibilities of reason so as to arrive at Absolute Reason, even absorbing

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into itself the most inherently contradictory, which, as Robert Scharlemann pointed out, would leave no way of criticizing his system.96 Scharlemann noted how Hegel’s system was “dethroned” by Schelling over its narrowness and refers to Hegel’s thought as “panentheism” but faults it for not distinguishing the whole thinking of being from the being of God, which Schelling did after 1827. As Scharlemann adds from his understanding of Anselm, being-itself, or the structure of being and thinking, is not God but only the materials for God’s possible being, and God can both be and not be God in utilizing the materials. He is the freedom that is prior to being and thinking . . . [who is later] in Kierkegaard’s language known as “wholly other” than the absolute.97 This, however, did not prevent many of Hegel’s critics from embracing certain elements of his system or general schema, whether one called them “leftwing Hegelians” or “rightwing Hegelians.” Even in the present century Pannenberg, Scharlemann, Küng, Altizer, and many others, although approaching Christology from opposite positions, have utilized Hegel’s overall schema of movement in the thinking process. One of the most definitive objections against Hegel related to his minimizing history and not taking seriously enough the empirical negatives of life by suggesting that they were transcended by Spirit and were just moments in the development of Spirit, moving toward a greater synthesis: Rabbi Richard Rubenstein leveled his accusation as he spoke of religion and theology After Auschwitz. The idea of Hitler’s plan to eliminate an entire people could not be seen as merely part of the dialectic, merely a negative moment to be superseded by the “taking-up” of the best elements of it into a new synthesis, Rubenstein argued.98 Paul Tillich defined Hegel’s error as essentialism unrealistically swallowing up the universal estrangement of all existence. He claimed correctly that Hegel recognized negative elements in existence, even nonbeing, and he himself coined the terms “estrangement” and “unhappy consciousness”; further, Tillich claimed that Hegel “made freedom the aim of the universal process of existence . . . But he kept all these existential elements from undermining the essentialist structure of his thought. Nonbeing has been conquered in the totality of the system; history has come to its end; freedom has become actual; and the paradox of the Christ has lost its paradoxical character. Existence is the logically necessary actuality of essence.”99 Tillich insisted that the “reconciliation” that Hegel believed had occurred has not occurred, for reconciliation is a “matter of anticipation and expectation, but not of reality . . . Existence is estrangement and not reconciliation; it is dehumanization and not the expression of essential humanity . . . The existence of the individual is filled with anxiety and threatened by meaninglessness.” So Hegel’s system “is an attempt to hide the truth about man’s actual state.”100 This made his philosophy of nature “a failure of worldwide

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significance.”101 If one considers the increasing number of publications on Hegel over the last several decades, Tillich’s description may be an overreaction, especially since one can trace so many of Tillich’s terms and modes of interpretation back to Hegel and because Tillich’s negative description of “estranged existence” goes overboard in the opposite direction. While it is true that in the Phenomenology Hegel insists that he is not there providing a historical analysis but an analysis of Spirit in its psychologicalphilosophical development, it is also true that his entire “system” shows otherwise, even as he analyzes Spirit of various historical people, such as Ancient Israel and the Greeks in The Spirit of Christianity and his classification of the history or stages of Spirit in his lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, even without looking at his Philosophy of History in which he actually spelled out that Spiritual culmination was present in the German culture’s Spirit, the very acting of God. This focus on his historical analyses brings us to our final section, in which we explore how his “mature” works simply reinforce these earlier positions as they extend the orthodox (or “heterodox”) religious claims. HEGEL’S MATURE EXTENSION OF SPIRIT IN HISTORY Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion approach religion differently from the supranaturalist (orthodox) and rationalist approaches, since the supranaturalists felt the difference between the biblical mentality and the present consciousness as incompatible and so desired to abandon the present and restore the ancient mentality, which is both impossible and self-defeating, because it would still be mediating what is professed to be immediate. On the other hand, Hegel described the rationalist approach to the ancient mentality as simply an arbitrary selection of certain rational ideas by which to explain or change that antiquated biblical language with what we now consider its “unscientific” views, while the “God” becomes increasingly abstract—less and less central as an agent to historical events. Hegel, in contrast, saw the task of tracing the history of Spirit through the evolution of the religions as a tracing of the “history of God,” an idea many of his contemporaries thought quite naive. What made this so necessary was Hegel’s assessment that most Christians were either indifferent to Christian dogma or just dutifully handed the dogma on and that even the scholars simply restricted their scope to tracing only the history of the development and influences on such dogma rather than trying to explain their truth. Hegel was persuaded that the dogma possesses truth even though it is perceived and

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explained differently in history as one traces through the stages of the Spirit. The task of a philosophy of religion must be to elucidate these stages and truth as it becomes more explicitly rational and less sensibly determined. By assuming that any new thought of God is a new revelation Hegel attempted to create the impression that he was avoiding the old presumptuous judging of a religion as either true or false; their differences simply reveal different stages of the Spirit. But, to the contrary, his actual descriptions of the various religions present a continual negative judgment of them, of the “stage” of Spirit or their mentality, including Judaism, and usually involve contrasting them with Christianity’s superiority. He delineates three stages: (1) “natural” religion, which involves immediacy but no reflection, (2) “spiritual” religion or religion of “freedom,” a stage in which human subjectivity becomes the dominating factor, and (3) “absolute” religion, which is a unity, reconciliation, or synthesis of nature and human freedom or of object and subject. As an example of the “natural” religion, Hegel provides what he considers the “stage” of Hinduism by the expression “I am Brahma,” which he thought has no conception of the Absolute being apart from every subject.102 On the other hand, the Mundaka Upanishad’s description of Brahma sounds totally Hegelian in the “absolute” sense, and the distinction between some individuals and Brahma is only the formers’ failure to realize the deeper truth of Brahma within themselves. But that does not mean that unity was produced by oneself nor that one’s consciousness was self-generated. To the contrary, “Brahman willed that it should be so, and brought forth out of himself the material cause of the universe . . . Brahman sees all, knows all, he is knowledge itself. Of him are born cosmic intelligence, name, form, and the material cause of all created beings and things.”103 Hegel’s second stage shows a conscious separation of the thinking subject and God, and Hegel places the Jewish, Roman, and Greek religious mentalities within this stage. In Judaism, one sees one’s subjectivity within the conception of God as a power outside of humans. In Greek religion, subjectivity and freedom are seen in imagination. In the Roman religion, the Absolute is the abstract sovereign. The final stage—of absolute religion, of the unity or reconciliation of humans and God—is restricted by Hegel to Christianity, and his explanation is very orthodox. The “Creation” is God’s positing his opposite, the world. The “Fall” is the emergence of self-consciousness or one’s freedom, although it comes from outside humans. The ultimate “Reconciliation” is brought through Jesus’s death and Resurrection. The religious dogma of the “Trinity” involved the “thing in itself” (the Father); the self-negation, which meant the finite manifestation (Incarnation) of the “thing in itself” to itself (as “for

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itself”) (the Son); and the second negation of the finite self (Crucifixion and Resurrection) or return or reconciliation of one and two (the Spirit). The first stage of religion had “God” only as objective, the second stage as subjective, and finally as absolute consciousness of the Absolute as the subjective and objective are reconciled by dialectic. Hegel’s intention here, as it had been in the earlier Phenomenology, was to see if the truth within the speculative philosophical approach was also within the uncritical or “primitive” mentality. His answer in both cases is yes, but the truth is more explicit and more reasonable in the speculative answer. Finally, he emphasizes that the “absolute proof” of the Christological claims comes only by the indwelling Spirit, the inward certainty that a believer has, by virtue of the Spirit within her. So this is his “corroboration” that we have sought: the certainty Christologically comes to one either by having the Spirit within oneself or because one reaches the philosophical truth of it by realizing the Begriff (concept) provided by speculative thought.104 Notably, this is not by historical data or historical texts concerned only with insignificant details but by the inner Spirit or consciousness of the truth expressed in the Absolute of the Begriff. This also ties ancient believers with present-day believers. But it means nothing to those outside the Christian community, since the Absolute Religion is spelled out by Christian symbols only. Basically this meant that one could be Christian in the uncritical or primitive way just as credibly as could the speculative theologian, but only if one’s mentality were consistently that uncritical as regards one’s access to any knowledge. The primitive mentality was simply that to think something is so makes it so. But most people are not that uncritical or unreflective even in everyday matters. This takes us back to the question of “standpoint” and to the presupposition sets in each that have to be honestly examined, which include this mystical or immediate union of Spirit and flesh, the truth of which, even if non-Christian cultures or religions had some notion, they were not fully aware. Flay elaborated the problem more in terms of Hegel’s approach in the Phenomenology. If the natural or naive or primitive assumption of truth or certainty in religious matters is mixed with more sophisticated criteria, such as ontological or epistemological presuppositions in other avenues of one’s thought, then that creates an inconsistency or cognitive dissonance. Flay’s final conclusion was that Hegel’s system did not work, but I will elaborate at the close of the chapter rather than have to repeat it. Hegel’s Philosophy of History Hegel’s Philosophy of History is significant to our question in this book, since—even though he formulated most of his system speculatively rather

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than from historical data, even if his influences from Christian mysticism made him “swerve” from typical orthodox teaching so that his system was to be called “heterodox”105—his system became most vulnerable when he applied it to history or the real world. He distinguished three basic forms of history: original, reflective, and philosophical. Original history is a very narrow description of what is going on at the historian’s present time and so is limited to the ideas, customs, etc. of that time; it is perhaps embellished with speeches appropriate to the characters, but it is not objective history but more like present-day news reporting over a more extensive period of the reporter’s life. The second form of history, the “reflective” form, broadens the historical scope backward or relates it to a larger whole, even of a nation or a universal scope. Hegel said that the main point of one form of this reflective history was strictly the “working up” of the materials for a history and was the historian figuring out his unique approach to the whole. A second form of reflective history that Hegel calls “pragmatic” often carries some didactic moral purpose that attempts to use one culture’s morality to speak to one’s own and so can become both offensive and irrelevant, since each culture and its history is so unique. A third type of the reflective history he calls “critical history,” which is more of a history of history or historical methods than actual history, and he himself criticizes what was being called “higher criticism” in philology (and was beginning in biblical history or biblical theology as well). He accused this of being a “pretext for introducing all the antihistorical monstrosities that a vain imagination could suggest.”106 The fourth type of reflective history is a rather fragmentary approach that takes general points of view such as in art, law, religion, a history of ideas, and attempts to try to figure out whether these relate to a nation’s annals in only an external or superficial way or stand at the heart of such. The latter is a stage leading to the basically third form of history, the philosophical. Hegel moves from a simple definition of the philosophical as a “thoughtful consideration” of history, to the necessary and common acceptance of “reason” as ruling history, to the common conception of Providence, to the issue of the ultimate design of the “world” in both its physical and psychical nature, from which he moves to an examination of “spirit,” particularly its abstract characteristics, the means spirit uses to realize its idea, and the shape of the embodiment of the spirit, which is the state. The history of the world is simply the progress of the spirit’s consciousness of freedom, which varies from nation to nation but remains the “final cause” of the world in the sense of being the spirit’s sole aim. There is much more to his explanation of philosophical history, but this is sufficient to show how it was ultimately interlaced with religion by virtue of being grounded on Spirit and freedom, just as religion was. That was why we

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said in the beginning that his purpose was to be able to formulate a general enough approach to religion, and Christianity especially, such that it could be a Volksreligion or supply the ethical grounding needed by the state, and in this sense religion remains superior to all other realms of spiritual activity, superior to all forms of purely nonspiritual or predominantly empirical entities and influence such as economic or political spheres. When it came to doing the actual philosophical history, Hegel’s method really has no use for actual events in history but only hunts for broad generalities from a philosophical bias and his theological-philosophical presuppositions about Absolute Spirit. So it becomes too “philosophical” in reading historical data, too much classifying, stereotyping, even reciting of unreliable sources or gossip,107 unfair negative judging of groups, and universalizing diversity arbitrarily under his preconceived “stages” and mentalities. His explanation of the movement from one stage to another thrives off oversimplification of the earlier stage as well as the new synthesis or stage. His ability to classify an entire ethnic group from one alleged incident or only one person in the tradition as he did even in his early theological writings with Abraham—who may be more a fictional character than real in the only sources we have—is thereby not history in any sense but rather a forcing of philosophical categories onto a very diverse culture, people, and its actual history. In fact, there is no exact “point of view” within history from which we can assume that we have the proper, correct, and total sources relating to that history, that we have heard all sides of it and so will have an unchanging truth. Notably, even Hegel himself did not exercise real critical historical method but panned “higher criticism” because of his need to focus on the “absolute” and on the polarity of the finite/Infinite and so it had to use a dialectical method to find truth not in representations or appearances or material embodiments of even some principle, which are at best only always tentative or finite manifestations of Absolute Spirit. Rather, philosophy had to push dialectically beyond to pure notion (Begriff).108 Since the notion is what gives unity to the various particularities of an idea, then absolute truth would be found in a speculative notion that integrates the totality of those individual characteristics, which continues to be affirmed even while being denied. The old Cartesian proof of the certainty of the reality of thinking even in the most radical doubt of what is thought is expanded by Hegel so that the ultimate Begriff was embodied in Christ within time and space, as the “end of the age” and the beginning of a new world, as the “fullness of God” was dawning in his actual Germany. It is not that Hegel was ignorant of details and of manifold cultures and their development; but to read any history as if one has the “last word” about what happened does not take human nature, contingency, or historiography seriously. Here Richard Rorty classified Hegel as an “ironic theorist” who could

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not overcome authority without claiming authority, even claiming the “last word,” by attempting to make future criticism of his system impossible,109 a criticism that we have already noted also came from Robert Scharlemann. The “last word” became most obvious in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of History, which, after a very detailed but derogatory picture of most earlier civilizations, ended up painting the culmination of the Spirit as the “stage” of “absolute Spirit” as being actualized in Germany in his own time. The right of subjective freedom was embodied in Christ fully such that the “end of days has fully come” and this subjective freedom “has become the universal effective principle of a new form of civilization.”110 At the conclusion of his Philosophy of History, Hegel’s purpose in presenting a theodicy is made explicit as is his conclusion, a quite nationalistic realization of Absolute Spirit with both objective and subjective freedom in the “German world”: “That the history of the world, with all the changing scenes which its annals present, is this process of development and the realization of spirit—this is the true Theodicaea, the justification of God in history. Only this insight can reconcile spirit with the history of the world—viz., that what has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not ‘without God,’ but is essentially His work.”111 If the “final word” means merely that humans and human societies have “minds” by which to determine how to live—which seems at times to be all that Hegel is suggesting, even in his Philosophy of Right—then that would not need to be mentioned. If that is all that is meant by “God,” then it needs no sacraments, and “religion” would be reduced only to the state of the mind if one referred to it as “Absolute.” But often when Hegel writes of civil society, “mind” has no adjective of “absolute,” so the question remains how a reader can detect one from the other. The usual connotation of “mysticism” is fairly dissipated in Hegel’s seeing the everyday, ordinary mediated occurrences in history as “God’s work,” unless humans themselves are incapable of reconciling themselves without some special divine power. “God’s work” seems by Hegel’s system to be confined only to those who know with certainty that “God” does not in any way refer to anything other than self-conscious humans living and thinking in the world in which they live. But that would be to break the connection of speculative certainty with the nature of the original Christians’ (such as Saint Paul’s) experience of the Spirit as well as Luther’s. CONCLUSION: THE ABSOLUTE BEYOND HISTORY AS HISTORICAL DEATH The Christological claim that the Jesus of history is an embodiment of God, which critical historians have not substantiated with any certainty or even

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high degree of probability, has been attempted via a different method of “corroborating” the claim somehow by any believer’s present consciousness. Hegel’s emphasizing his insight into the Absolute, as Scharlemann and Rorty both note, appears to eliminate all dissent or questioning. Even to raise the question of whether “God” might not be “infinite” is still within Hegel’s allencompassing definition of Absolute Spirit, and Scharlemann himself had raised the question as to whether God might not be able to both be God and not be God rather than being only the structure of being and thought.112 As Rorty notes, Hegel’s method removes Hegel above all contingency. Rorty quoted Kierkegaard who said that, if Hegel had just “prefaced the Science of Logic with ‘This is all just a thought experiment,’ he would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived . . . [It would] have demonstrated Hegel’s grasp of his own finitude . . . privatized Hegel’s attempt at autonomy, and repudiated the temptation to think that he had affiliated himself with something larger.”113 “Privatized” seems to be the key here, yet Hegel’s intention was not to privatize it, making it completely subjective; rather, he aspired to paint it in objective colors so it would not be a self-contradiction, espousing a “revelation” of God while making “revelation” unavailable to reason. Inasmuch as this religious “certainty” of the unreflective or “natural” attitude, as Flay calls it, is for many problematic, one could add that even the sophisticated, critical historical approaches to the claim about Christ have been unable to restore the certainty.114 Flay insists that Hegel’s attempt to discover the “certainty” of the natural attitude by investigating its set of putative presuppositions and “standpoint” by tools provided by philosophy, especially Hegel’s own speculative philosophy, applies not simply to The Phenomenology but to Hegel’s entire system, which becomes obvious in his other works. In this sense, even though Flay’s method utilizes primarily The Phenomenology, his result also involves our basic question as to whether Hegel “corroborated” by his speculative system what even critical history could not regarding the claims about Jesus. To be brief, Flay discovers and concludes that Hegel’s quest for certainty failed since Hegel presumed that “the referents for the principle or ground of totality and for the principle or ground of intelligibility are one and the same.”115 Once that presupposition was assumed by Hegel very early in The Phenomenology, it was never examined but determined the direction of Hegel’s quest. Flay shows that the idea of a single referent for intelligibility defies the changes of one’s experience in the real world in which different situations of a person require different presupposition sets since they require different comportments. The constant is not then in a single intelligibility referent but within one’s “I,” which can, under different configurations of totalities, adapt to the different referents and presuppositions for intelligibil-

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ity. There is no single reference that supplies intelligibility for all different totalities, but the I can remain constant in fulfilling different roles, meeting different praxical presuppositions. In a nutshell, the “certainty” is limited to the particular “whole,” which I, as subject, am addressing, and its praxical presuppositions may not be at all applicable in other wholes that I face even during the same day. Thus the “absolute” knowledge Hegel tried to construct that could encompass everything, though not for any single knowing subject, is simply a misdirection, a failure of his thinking the referent for both the totality as well as comprehensive intelligibility as a single one.116 A second area of concern that impinges on this question of a “corroboration” of the claim is the relation of perfection or absoluteness to any claims about history or humanity, especially as analyzed by D. F. Strauss’s pungent summary of Hegel’s error. It was explained in the earlier chapter as Strauss found fault with Schleiermacher, and since the same applies to Hegel, it need not be repeated here except to say that perfection of species simply does not occur in one specific member but only in the degrees that the species as a whole changes. But Hegel’s interest was not in empirical entities but only in ideas and thinking about thinking. Otherwise, he split or “oscillated” between saying that the Incarnation had to appear in a single individual and insisting, on the other hand, that the Spirit is within all humans and so the Incarnation is not pointing to a single individual. Yet he sustained the doctrines of the Trinity and the Crucifixion by referring to a single individual, though admittedly also interpreting the entirety of the empirical claims as Ideas, even if he referred to them also as “events.” But even if one accepted that both assertions of Hegel were not exclusive but could be embraced in tandem, the idea of some connection between any historical beings and Absolute Spirit was not clear. Further, in Hegel’s attempt to show that the necessary “embodiment” of this Ideal occurred only in one specific person, he simply ignored the facts about that person—for example, that Jesus was Jewish, a part of Judaism, whose mentality Hegel in fact mocked. His reconstruction of Jesus as that embodiment or Incarnation shows no critical or reflective data but, rather, is a mere reading of the Absolute into a person whose actual factuality he ignored. The first quotation from Hegel of this chapter shows his ironic view that facts of history have no relevance whatever, even in attempting to figure out who that “Jesus” was. So his reconstruction of “Jesus” is basically uninformed and uncritical, taking whatever he pleases at face value and rejecting anything that does not fit his philosophical stance. This is what he calls doing “philosophical history,” in distinction from “original history” and “reflective history,”117 since he is really only trying to prove the truth in the church’s dogma. His Aufheben is ahistorically optimistic and naive, and the Spirit never really

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appears to be contingently involved with a real world of diversity, finally culminating in especially his assessment of the stage of the “absolute” being realized in his own Germany of the early nineteenth century, if one bothers to compare that with the twentieth-century disaster of Hitler and Third Reich. The basic ambiguity of religion or the religious consciousness, articulated by Whitehead and applied formally to every form and institution in history by Tillich, is simply nonexistent in Hegel unless he takes refuge in saying that Absolute Spirit is actually covert. The Spirit produces the best, since the Spirit is that which is real as well as Ideal. But if it is invisible, hidden, or ineffective, how could it be the “work of God” and considered also to be real? His minimizing of either the ambiguity of religion or the frailty and fallibility or even perverseness of human thought and action at times overlooks the unrequited evil and injustice of events in history that preceded him and left no way to explain the horrendous evils that followed him a century later, such as two world wars and the genocide of the Holocaust, as Rubenstein argues. The very idea that the “dialectic” process is sponsored only by Spirit rather than by material or sensible causes and in its process “takes up” (Aufgehoben) only the best elements of the historical or ideational antitheses appears as a narrow presupposition rather than accepted fact or logical reason. The actual history of Christianity over two millennia, despite all the details Hegel recites, is more diverse than he admits. The presumed uniformity of faith and knowledge or presumed uniformity of the guidance of the Spirit has always been a figment of the church’s imagination. The history of the evolution of Christianity and its dogma show precisely the reverse of Hegel’s schema of its growing rationalization. Unless one measures this rationalization by an infinitely small group of scholars like Hegel, the evolution of dogma shows from the beginning a progressive accumulation of greater exaggeration and representational mythologizing to reinforce its claims and thereby preserve or intensify its authority.118 The church’s lack of change even in Vatican II and subsequently sets its mentality still in opposition to much modern science and philosophy, and its militant stand to reinforce ancient dogma has not embraced Hegel as a method of relief. Modern challenges through moral shifts in modern cultures, the extreme wealth inequality between the ostentatious opulence of some huge religious institutions and their constituency, and the church’s recent cover-up of thousands of cases of pedophilia have exacerbated the strain between reason and dogma, which accounts for a growing indifference if not hostility toward such religious institutions. The only people in the church who have seen any truth in Hegel’s approach have been an extremely few brilliant scholars who have been considered “radical”—in some cases even too radical or questioning to be entrusted with teaching church dogma.119 Hegel’s reading

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of God being realized in its Absoluteness with the ethical awareness he saw in his era in Germany was very learned but completely uncritical, overly optimistic, and mistaken. His elevation of “spirit” or “mind” over everything physical is today a non sequitur. One does not have to be a “materialist” or “physicalist” to object to Hegel’s derogatory view of the physical, as if “mind” were simply some invisible power that moves wherever it will, whether in transcendent realms or within history. We now recognize no eternal “soul” that inhabits one’s body and then leaves to live on elsewhere. Brain life and functions produce “mind” or “reflection”; brain death brings the complete and irreversible end of the person. We know that human life was not generated from some Divine Geist, no matter how that is translated, but more likely from “star dust.” We know today that the brain’s lobes receive sensations as perceptions, classify them, store them, and can enable them to be retrievable for many years, even as the brain, combined with the particular relations it has with the human tongue, jaw, and mouth, can communicate what is generated in the brain. There is no “mind” or “spirit” living outside or independently of the brain. How this change in our present-day understanding (Verstand) or reasoning (Vernunft) can be reduced to the formula of symbolizing the unity of the finite and Infinite or of humans and God or of history and eternity is difficult to fathom. The interchange of ideas, the process of examining, or even Hegel’s “dialectic” does not require some Infinite or Eternal Mind that somehow runs everything through its own “self-reflection” through finite minds. To go as far as Hegel, to insist that one cannot know the “finite” until one knows the “infinite,” seems a real stretch, not to mention that it appears by such a distinction to violate Hegel’s idea of the unity of the two, the single Absolute. Such a vocabulary, especially with its “Absolute,” seems to be no more than a mistaken reification. This raises the question of the difference between words that are used as “polar opposites” and those used as “absolute opposites.” Tillich spoke of polar opposites or ontological polarities such as “freedom/destiny,” “individualization/collectivity,” and “dynamics/form.” In those cases, the two sides are interdependent but in an inverse order: when one is reduced, the other is increased; or when one side is increased, the other is reduced. A severe imbalance can destroy both sides of the polarity. There are words such as “difference” and “sameness” that seem to be able to be used either as polar opposites or absolute opposites, although it may seem more logical to see them as polar opposites, since one can easily think two entities are “different” even when they have many of the “same” qualities, and vice versa. It can depend upon the intensity, quantity, or exclusiveness of either differences or sameness in the entities. In this way the terms seem to have a certain “porosity.” But all

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of this is simply a part of the ever-changing word usage in languages, always impermanent, not some eternal essence. On the other hand, presently tend to use words such as “infinite,” “Absolute,” or “ultimate” as absolute opposites since they imply no limits, no conditions, no competitors. For that reason Tillich insisted that the term “infinite” is only a “limiting concept” and does not point to anything that can be called “Infinite.” He used “infinite” and “ultimate” as adjectives rather than as nouns. Hegel used “Absolute” in both ways, but his usage eliminated any conditions, limits, or competition to whatever noun “absolute” was attached to, and without a noun “absolute” took on an unqualified, singular, unlimited Idea that he could personalize as “God,” which still carried a symbolic residue of ancient theism or an “external” super being. But even the Crucifixion of Christ, as the death of the Incarnate Divine Being, was Absolute, too significant to have any competition, require any historical research, or have any conditions, not as merely a physical death, which he said in his early writings, but that now, by leaving any natural significance behind, means only the idea of the “universality of spirit that lives in its own communion.”120 The Absolute, as the Infinite, seem to be all encompassing, negating anything that is relative or finite by sheer linguistic usage. Hegel’s usage of the terms still seems to need the language of theism, as did Schleiermacher’s Christology, since theism seemed persuaded that it was legitimate and real to think of the absolute or infinite in both ways, as unlimited and unconditional but also as actually not unlimited or unconditional. But names and concepts, ideas and arguments, do not create reality. They may shape certain parts of reality, but many parts are beyond any shaping or control of humans or their Spirit or mind or even brain, no matter how “absolute” it is named. All the adjective “absolute” does is put an end to the argument without any helpful answer. We know of nothing that is unlimited, eternal, and always the same and that is the power behind all being and becoming. We perhaps think we can imagine that, but it quickly shows its incredibility and surrealistic elements. Time runs in one way only, and entropy is the destiny of everything that exists. We know of nothing that is simply pure essence, if “essence” is even a workable term these days. We know of no ideas that have not been originally generated from something empirical even if then turned into surrealistic images by human imagination, either subconsciously or intentionally, and named through human brains and human tongues. Science has come far during the past two centuries, and there seems little prospect that theories about the human brain in the early nineteenth century will be credible or useful in the future. There is no question about how brilliant Hegel was, and certainly no person can be blamed for being ignorant of what was not yet discovered. But the system he devised from

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such “metaphysics of infinity,” whose very presuppositions were beginning to be questioned even in the nineteenth century, probably cannot do what he aspired for it to do, even for those who continue to think Hegel’s “Trinitarian” idea of thought’s process should still define “God” for Christians. Ultimately the problem, as I have elsewhere suggested, is not that these scholars are at fault but that the claim itself is now at fault. Once upon a time, the claim was derived from a fairly common cultural worldview, though standing on the fringes of the unreasonable. But it has progressively been outgrown. The fringes of the unreasonable aspects of the claim have grown in converse proportion to the growth of the studies of reason and epistemology in general. So if the Christological claim belonged to a theism of a transcendent God who came into history as an Incarnation, then the possibility that the claim is credible was made more impossible by Hegel. As even Scharlemann remarked, Hegel’s system comes closer to a monism than anything else. It is not expressing any clear conviction about some ancient historical event but rather only an alleged truth of an idea that one might claim to have perceived in some past event. If this is the case, then there really is no Christological claim to be verified or corroborated, since Hegel has construed the claim as a consciousness of divine-human unity that he said is “always already” present in all thinking humans. In the first Christian century the claim that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah was fairly quickly exchanged for the idea that Christ was an invisible “Lord,” and eventually that he was “Son of God,” which made no sense within Judaism. So Christianity quickly became a religion of the hellenized for whom the idea of a half-human, half-god was part of the accepted mythology of the culture. But the focus was still on the real historical event of such a person who ended up crucified outside Jerusalem. It was Saint Augustine who insisted in City of God that, although the Scriptures furnish the believer with many meanings that are “deeper” than mere history, one has first to accept these Christological claims as real history before moving to other meanings. Augustine’s Neoplatonism was not quite as completely idealistic as Hegel’s speculative idealism. While Schleiermacher may have corroborated a form of pietism in the sense that people may feel they have experienced “redemption” from that Jesus of Nazareth, there is really no explicit connection, and that ahistorical “sinless” Jesus, as Strauss and Schweitzer said, never existed. While Hegel may have corroborated a form of reflexive thinking by which one can examine one’s own reflection, that supplies no particular content to what the original object is claimed to be. If reflexive thinking is only the truth of truth, it is only about truth, as if it were “out there,” beyond anything claimed about the real world, rather than a claim made about the contingent world with

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contingent language, as Rorty notes in protest as he insists that truth is not “found” but is “made” by our language supplying indicators to others of what they can expect from us. In fact, Hegel’s goal was to move beyond any and all sensible content even within the early Christian representations. But thinking about thinking does not per se validate the reality of anything one wants to think about—including centaurs, unicorns, witches, or even jinn. Regarding the relationship between the subject and object, as relation, claiming that the implicit truth in the original unreflected intuition or even the “middle” stage of Vorstellungen is the same as the explicit truth found in sophisticated reflexive thinking could be true only if that “truth” can be reduced to the lowest common denominator—namely, the unity of the finite and Infinite. But the “reflexive” thinking about thinking would need to include thinking about the thinking involved in the lower stages of reflection in the “representations” in order to “reduce” the space between subject and object as Taylor thought. Yet Hegel’s emphasis is to leave behind the concerns with anything empirical, to quit allowing them to inform one’s judgment. To do so may convince oneself that one has escaped any negative details turned in historical studies to “reconstruct” that historical Jesus or that one has found the truth of one’s own private mystical unity with God; but it remains only a thinking about thinking, thinking or analyzing the structure of language and its usage and logic—not any further thinking about the original object in question. It remains restricted even to one’s thinking about what one thinks about others’ thinking or thinking in general. It remains only an extension of AugustinianCartesian certainty, of “being” and “thinking,” which means it is a “reflexive subjectivity.” But the relationship with the object is still what it was before. One has simply slipped categories or ontologies by a sleight of hand. It does not appear to enable the subject to realize that it is the same as the object, as Hegel thought. His idea that “only Divinity recognizes Divinity” leaves one speechless. If, in fact, it may be possible that the real problem is with the ancient claim—that it was a conflation of history and myth, of aspiration and alleged facts, formulated in very unscientific days by many people who were barely literate—then how can one expect such a claim to withstand centuries of change with the new sciences propelling us over the past three centuries into worlds heretofore undreamed? Could we not come closer to espousing a pre-Copernican or pre-Einsteinian world since the religious claim is that it is absolute, much more all embracing than those great, though limited, scientific discoveries? But we do not even contemplate ignoring modern science—except in religion. Despite Farneth’s and other Hegelian scholars’ brilliant explanations of Hegel’s ethics, Hegel himself was convinced that the ultimate ground of his

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ethics was the Incarnation from which all future history was empowered, and he understood the human relation to God to be strictly Lutheran-Christian terms as forensic justification. It needed not be more than an Idea, if an Idea could insist that some event embodied that Idea, of which Hegel was sure. And he insists that it always already was, but at that point switches to the Idea of Incarnation, as minds went through various stages and articulated the best they could of what they thought. This is the oscillation that Flay found problematic. Judged from this side of his critics, including Feuerbach, Marx, and others, but also this side of World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, and now the growing irrational nationalism and racial hatred of the twentyfirst century, the religion—which allowed both wars, which converted the church in Germany into a political arm of Hitler, and which turned a blind eye on all the night transports of Jews to their “death camps,” all, as Rubenstein suggests, as a part of a “Christian” war as the “Solution,” that is, to eliminate the Jews as the “potentially disconfirming other”—that religion of Christianity and even its Idea of Incarnation lost its credibility just as surely as Judaism’s idea and claim of being the “chosen” of God in history lost its credibility as Rubenstein said. Can either people still espouse that which has lost it credibility? When modernism in theology accentuated sameness over difference and asserted, as did Hegel, that “God” is both Absolute and wholly immanent within the present culture, then if it is “totally present in the present, what is, is what ought to be.”121 That means human ethics as well as ethical judgments are swallowed up by the Absolute God or Spirit. This is the inherent nihilism of mere self-reflexivity in Hegel that supplies ambiguity about any need for ethical reflection. The eternal principles are not discovered easily within the accidents of history, but Lessing’s “ugly ditch” remains. The certainty found in isolated instances of individualistic mysticism are no match for a religion that provides unlimited power to a whole culture by convincing it of the certainty that it, as a whole culture, manifests the Spirit of God or is the very act of God. Hegel’s assessment of the politics of his age and the culture of Germany was so negative in his early writings that one wonders how it changed so radically in his later positions as to appear as a complex but very orthodox Lutheran theology and how Hegel could come to see it as the actual “work of God” taking place in Germany. Between Hegel’s time and the emergence of the Third Reich, Nietzsche saw German philosophy, politics, culture, and ethics as quite decadent and feared its anti-Semitism. By the turn of the century, Christian Hegelian theology had persuaded many that this was the time of the dawning of God’s “kingdom,” of the reign of “God” on earth—or was it to be only Die Christliche Welt—ultimately for Aryan Christians only? Germany’s

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quest for more resources led to World War I, which ended up setting the German economy back even further with the reparations it had to pay for the war. Certainty was gone, and cynicism set in, often accompanied by a lack of sense of direction. The war itself convinced many Christian theologians that “God” was certainly not involved in “history” or ushering in the Kingdom in Europe. The voice of religion had proven mistaken and so lost its authority to make such promises or even offer ethical advice. Young “dialectical” theologians such as Barth, Tillich, Bultmann, Gogarten, Thurneysen, and others could no longer buy either the liberal theology or the ethics of their mentors. Meanwhile, Marxism, as a “left wing” of Hegel’s thought through Feuerbach and others, began to change the landscape of Europe as well as its thinking. Hitler’s way out of the chaotic mess was to find a scapegoat and then rally the nation to protect its “Fatherland” against its enemies—if necessary, by another war or mass extermination. Marxism, socialism, liberalism, and the universities were blamed for the upsetting ideas, and the Jews were blamed for the terrible economy, which ignited World War II. Looking to past history seemed too painful to offer hope. If one honored the orthodox symbols and dogma, then it was shattering to see their credibility being challenged by science and the acknowledgement of myth within them; but all the Third Reich needed from Christianity was its sacred authority in the merged church and state. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit was supposed to be running the present history, but the speculative reasoning did not become a convincing argument to restore the fading certainty about the symbols that had been seen so literally for generations. Christian theology had become more difficult for scholars after the discovery of the eschatological element in Jesus’s teachings, the discounting of “reason” by existentialist philosophy, and the dissolving of the authority of the scriptures and creeds that carried such unintelligible claims about God intervening in history. How could the words of humans become the “Word of God,” how could the Infinite be detected within the finite, or how could any ethics based upon such a claim of Absolute Spirit have any credibility after World War I, then World War II, then the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Even in the years prior to World War II, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brother had responded in a letter to Dietrich’s discovery of racism in the United States by saying that, fortunately, Germany had no horrible ethical problems like that. Certainly not! Shortly thereafter the “Jewish problem” and Hitler’s “Solution” were explicitly manifest in the brutal Kristallnacht of November 9 to 10, 1938. The nationalism’s eclipsing of real Christian principles by a political surrogate to do Hitler’s bidding as head of the German church ended up costing even the Bonhoeffer family very dearly, as Hitler’s SS seemed to have the last word even in their case.

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The “love,” sacrifice of one’s rights, mutual recognition, reconciliation, and other vital ethical principles that Farneth draws even from Hegel’s Phenomenology can certainty be “freestanding,” isolated from the theological and religious base. But they simply were not in Hegel’s schema. As Farneth illustrates, Hegel reinforced the religious base of the ethics by grounding them on specific Christian rituals. The very anti-Semitism that was already present in Hegel’s early writings was utilized as the Third Reich even took over Christianity in Germany so as to add divine authority to its “reason,” eclipsing all of Hegel’s noble ideas and absolutizing itself. Christian sacraments were simply no match for lethal anti-Semitism. This was far removed from anything that could be called the “work of God” in Germany’s history, an expression Hegel had coined. The dominant religion had failed to prevent such inhumane transformation of a culture, threatening the entire world. This face of fascism has since resurfaced again and again, as national leaders around the world absolutize themselves and demonize their political opposition. They have learned to shamelessly exploit and manipulate the sacred symbols of the dominant religions of the country to punish the “enemy,” where the “enemy” is simply anyone opposing the leader. When the “representation” of primary religious symbols such as “God” or “Christ” or “Allah” or others becomes a bit questionable cognitively, and where reflection itself has dislodged much of their credibility, it is easy for the symbols to be reappropriated by political leaders with huge promises of wealth and peace, and the average person has little power to reject such repristinating schemas to recapture the ancient ways, the secure life, the eternal verities, through clichés. Few were able to argue with Hegel’s system without being judged as atheistic, just as few in Germany were able to stand against the “Leader” (der Führer) who combined politics and religion in the most sinister possible absolutizing. Christianity was still primarily utilized in its “ordinary,” barely reflective status, but losing some of its pictorial or literal meaning and credibility with the coming of the new sciences. The politics and economy were being challenged by the revolutionary Marxism in Europe, and the German spirit was as depressed as the economy, what with having to pay reparations for the earlier war. Scholars were split on how to read Hegel, which was not simply their own fault. When Christian theology could no longer point to an embodiment of its Ideal, even in the past, and when its most recent iteration was Hegel’s and his successors, then one had to separate history from ideas, giving priority to ideas. The earlier Christian-alleged embodiment of the Ideal was reduced to a mere image of an image, not a real history—an image that itself was now equated with “reality,” no matter how imaginative the images were and how much they opposed a common human decency. When image

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has become reality, as we saw Taylor emphasizing, the danger is that many will think that “what is, is what should be.” Is the ignoring of modern scientific understanding in order to make ancient views of Christianity credible simply due to the heteronomy of the religious institution and structure with its confusing claims, which is part of one’s personal identity? Or are there possibly other forms of “corroborating” the Christological claims? In the following two chapters, we move all the way into and through the end of the twentieth century with two of the most brilliant Christian theologians to find their answers to these questions. Tillich’s and Scharlemann’s intent was to provide intelligibility to the Christian symbols in a nontheistic form, since they were aware of the demise of credibility in any theism. If Hegel had been erudite—sophisticatedly bright, with almost encyclopedically vast knowledge, as well as command of complicated language—then Tillich and Scharlemann were both as brilliant. If they could not accept his absolutizing and identification of the structure or being with God, then they conversely could not abandon his “negation of negation” as the movement of thought, retaining some meaning to “Trinitarian.” But they did at least write in a more disarmingly clear language than Hegel did, and it was slightly easier to detect their tightly woven development of ideas. NOTES 1.  Of course Saint Paul conceived himself to be Christ’s “apostle to the Gentiles,” with God’s new plan being to unite Jews and Gentiles into a new creation, but there may also have been prior problems with “empire building” in Paul’s day, even in Galatia (e.g., Pergamum) as well as in Italy (Rome). 2. See Foucault’s Order of Things for his explanation of how the new human sciences especially left behind what he calls the “metaphysics of infinity” (317 and chapter 7). I have elsewhere shown that this “gap” Lessing noted has not been “bridged” from a historical approach, as I examined the historical dimension of the Christological claim from both a historian’s (John Dominic Crossan) and a theologian’s (Wolfhart Pannenberg) approach in Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion? 3.  G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. T. M. Knox, and The Philosophy of Right, trans. J. Sibree, in Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 46: Hegel, The Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of History, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins, (Chicago, The Univ. of Chicago Press) 306–307. 4.  See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols., trans. E. S. Haldane (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), III:117–18 also 116. 5.  Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel, SUNY Series in Hegelian Studies, fore. Louis Dupré (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 6.  Joseph C. Flay, Hegel’s Quest for Certainty (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 6–17.

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 7. James Yerkes, The Christology of Hegel, SUNY Series in Hegelian Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 26–27.  8. Yerkes, Christology of Hegel, 56.  9. Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. William Montgomery (London: A. and C. Black, 1931). 10.  Gal. 3–5. Even if one’s appeal to be “circumcised” is of no value, neither is one’s appeal to not be circumcised; what is significant for Paul is one’s being “in Christ” as a “new creation” (Gal. 6:15). 11.  In Gal. 4 Paul describes the old relationship as being “minors” who had not yet realized they were actually “heirs” of God. As minors, they were “enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world,” but when the fullness of time (kairos) had come, God “sent his Son” to “redeem” those enslaved to the law and these elemental spirits, by which Spirit they could cry “Abba! Father!” 12.  Gal. 5:1; Rom. 8. The “freedom” is promised not only to those “in Christ” but also to the “creation,” as it also groans with labor pains awaiting its freedom from the “bondage to decay.” 13.  Is this because “Jesus” did not belong to the “new” but to the “old,” which he implies in 2 Cor. 5:16–17? “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view, even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation, everything old as passed away; see, everything has become new.” Is it because Paul no longer thinks of “Christ” as a “human”? He never calls him “Jesus” alone. 14.  In addition to 1 Cor. 15, and many other references to Christ’s “Resurrection,” in Rom. 1:1–6 Paul connects the Gospel to history as well as his personal divine mission to the Gentiles. 15.  1 Cor. 11:17–34. 16. Of course, “transubstantiation” and “consubstantiation” were articulated as dogma only in the sixteenth century, even if by the ninth century there was debate over a form of “real presence” that some felt, based on the centrality of grace in the “sacrifice” on the Cross. See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1971), 167–71. 17.  Col. 1:11–2:7; Eph. 2:1–3:13, as pseudo-Pauline. 18.  2 Cor. 13:5. 19.  Gal. 1:6–9. 20.  1 Cor. 4:16, 11:1; Phil. 3:1; 1 Thess. 1:6, 2:14; 2 Thess. 3:9. 21.  1 Cor. 2:11. 22.  “Elemental spirits” in Gal. 4:9; Col. 2:8, a “different spirit,” which opposed Paul’s Gospel (2 Cor. 11:4). 23.  2 Cor. 3:17. 24. Rom. 8:27. Here “God” is not only one “who searches the heart” but also “knows what is the mind of the Spirit.” If “God” and “Christ” and “Spirit” are One (2 Cor. 3:17; Col. 1:19; Phil. 2:6), then it should certainly be hoped that God knows what is in his own mind. If, on the other hand, this is speaking of God reading the “heart”

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and “mind” of the “Spirit” within a disciple, then the prayer ends up being simply Divine introspection and conversation of God only with himself. 25.  1 Thess. 5:23. 26.  We know that brain size determines certain capabilities, which implies that even skull size determines much, as human brains and skulls are compared to those of other species. And we know how much the size of brain and skull of our species has enlarged over the long evolutionary period, enabling greater capacity of thought and speech. So with the particular configuration of the mouth, jaw, and tongues, even though certain other species have limited communication through parallel organs or have other organs of communication with their species. 27. See Pinker, How the Mind Works; and see Levine, This Is Your Brain on Music. 28.  For this earliest period, see G. W. F. Hegel, Three Essays, 1793–1795: The Tübingen Essay, Berne Fragments, The Life of Jesus, ed., trans. intro., and notes Peter Fuss and John Dobbins (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). 29.  He analyzes this in The Positivity of the Christian Religion, in Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1975). “Positive” had been used in a different sense by Schleiermacher as he claimed that religions did not simply evolve from earlier forms but, rather, experienced a “positive-individual” element in the sense of new ideas, content that was not found in the preceding religion. Hegel, of course, was torn, admitting that Jesus resorted to authoritarianism to get his message across, and so decided there could also be a good side to positivity, with nothing really wrong with it unless it eclipsed one’s freedom. On this point, see Yerkes, Christology of Hegel, 18–26. 30.  Based on The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate by G. W. F. Hegel, in Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1975). 31.  If they really had the Spirit, then how did they so easily miss the Spirit’s work in them? 32. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 187. 33. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 228. 34. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 241. 35.  Hegel elaborates on this theme in Phenomenology of Mind, 780. 36. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 265. 37.  The Jewish contemporaries saw only an absolute difference between humans and God, and so as they confronted Jesus, “They saw in Jesus only the man, the Nazarene, the carpenter’s son whose brothers and kinsfolk live among them; so much he was, and more he could not be, for he was only one like themselves, and they felt themselves to be nothing. The Jewish multitude was bound to wreck his attempt to give them the consciousness of something divine, for faith in something divine, something great, cannot make its home in a dunghill. The lion has no room in a nest, the infinite spirit none in the prison of a Jewish soul” (Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 265). This is Hegel’s unscholarly diatribe against Judaism, casting doubt on his ability to understand even Jesus as typically Jewish. To Hegel, Jesus had no background

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or common ethnical understandings, so Jesus’s “inner” person was even much less historical than was Schleiermacher’s Jesus. 38. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 268. 39. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 239. Hegel’s usage of “faith” here is true faith— the faith of one who realizes the Spirit within themselves rather than a faith in an external or outsider God, such as the faith of Father Abraham. When Hegel indicated that likeness does not require a similar quantity of the attribute that is common (the “likeness”), he is speaking in terms of there not being a similar power or potency, which was also Schleiermacher’s approach. What Hegel fails to explain is how Christ’s Spirit could be so totally misunderstood by the Spirit of the earliest followers and still be the same Spirit. 40. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 271–72. 41. Hegel, Positivity of the Christian Religion, 177–81. 42. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 292–93, parenthetical original. 43. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 264. 44. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 293. 45. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 294. 46. In the German, as in English, “spirit” can carry all kinds of connotations, such as intellect, intelligence, wit, imagination, genius, essence, consciousness, or even ghost. Nietzsche even knew the term to designate alcoholic drinks (which is very common usage today) when in Twilight of the Idols he belittles D. F. Strauss for caring more for his “spirits” (referring to beer as a “fair brunette”) than his own “spirit,” when the first instinct of spirit is “self-preservation.” Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 507. 47. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 295. 48. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 297. 49. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 300–301. 50. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 266. 51.  One can only ask what happened to his “inner person,” his Spirit? 52.  Hegel’s division of “mind” or “spirit” from “body” no longer carries any scientific justification. “Mind” is a function of the material brain lobes, which are a vital part of the body, such that when the body dies, whether from heart attack, cancer, brain hemorrhage, or other cause, there is no longer any functioning brain and thus no longer any “mind.” Inasmuch as anyone still seeks to find the “psyche” or “soul” as some consciousness that transcends the death of the body, including the brain, it simply is contradicted by science. For a more modern discussion of the relation of mind to brain to body in the quest to decide what a “human” or “person” is, see David DeGrazia, Human Identity and Bioethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). DeGrazia’s criticisms emphasize that the person is neither merely a quantity nor a narrative but, rather, a functioning mind (therefore conceptualizing brain) within a human-animal body, which, in its development, had a presentient history (as embryo) as well as possible postsentient (or nearly so) history, in extreme cases of dementia. As accurate as is DeGrazia’s understanding, even it may be superseded in the future, though “mind” and “brain” are likely to remain interchangeable.

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53. Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 289. 54.  G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967). 55.  Late Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty describes it much more severely than I do here: I used Hegel’s word [dialectic] because I think of Hegel’s Phenomenology both as the beginning of the end of the Plato-Kant tradition and as a paradigm of the ironist’s ability to exploit the possibilities of massive redescription. In this view, Hegel’s so-called dialectical method is not an argumentative procedure or a way of unifying subject and object but simply a literary skill—skill at producing surprising gestalt switches by making smooth, rapid transitions from one terminology to another . . . [He] constantly changed the vocabulary in which the old platitudes had been stated; instead of constructing philosophical theories and arguing for them, he avoided argument by constantly shifting vocabularies, thereby changing the subject.

Rorty, Contingency, 78. 56. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 759. Hegel is not distinguishing the being in itself from the being for itself as Sartre as a movement into consciousness and therefore freedom but rather insists that, within the very content of the notion, utilized by the “for itself” is its immediate existence and intuition of spirit, which connects it or makes it similar to the divine. For Sartre, all consciousness is possible only by the “for itself,” so even if there is some residual longing to be beyond the anxiety of the freedom of the consciousness of the “for itself,” it could relinquish neither this consciousness nor freedom, and any desire to combine the “for itself” with the “in itself” would simply eclipse the other. Of course, for Sartre, even the “in itself” is a part of temporality, even if not limited by finitude, so if the “in itself” were “God,” it would not really be eternal or transtemporal. Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 57. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 759–60, parenthetical original. 58.  Recall that Kant’s position was based on his insistence that no “thing” can be known, as it is “in itself” (Ding an sich), but only as one is related to it phenomenologically. Understanding requires a priori categories, but Kant insisted that it is not understanding until an empirical experience matches those categories. So “God” as commonly conceived can never match these categories or at least is kept exempt from such scrutiny by devotees. Therefore “God” cannot be “proven” or “understood” but only “postulated” by “practical reason.” Hegel assessed this as being un-Christian. 59.  Not only do the mouth, hands, and legs not make the “inner” person visible, but acts, such as using language and laboring, become the possession of others rather than being retained by the individual and can easily express too much by being preoccupied with the inner, being isolated from the outer, or can express too little of the inner by a preoccupation with the outer. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 340. Hegel saw this “ambiguity” meaning that “observation” must yield its place in such analysis, as the investigation turns more to analyze reason and spirit themselves. 60. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 338–72. 61.  Of course, Hegel referred to Spirit in the earlier examinations that also utilized “observation,” but it is only when he enables the reader to realize that the proper

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“standpoint” for assessing whether certainty is actually accessible and can be articulated is within Spirit reflecting itself rather than any kind of “observation” that one sees its absoluteness. See note 66 below. 62. Yerkes, Christology of Hegel, 75, emphasis and parenthetical mine. 63.  Professor Flay’s investigation of Hegel’s Quest for Certainty is focused, critically analytical, and clearly written. See pp. 25–29 on this dialectic procedure and how it is approached under the various divisions of the Phenomenology. Whereas the “natural standpoint” with its unrecognized but putative presuppositions typically used includes “objects of knowledge, the goals of action, [and] the surroundings involved in that goal,” the “absolute standpoint” of the philosopher Hegel hopes to find also within the “natural attitude” includes “contextual, epistemic, and ontological presuppositions” within the relationship between the knowing subject and what the subject wants to know, a relationship also constituted by the “praxical presuppositions which are actually in force in the situation” (Flay, Hegel’s Quest, 26). To this must be added Flay’s clarification that “Every presupposition held as a belief or possible belief is merely putative until it is established that the belief is either warranted or unwarranted” (23). 64.  On the side of its being initiated by “God’s” activity, Hegel writes, “in the highest Idea religion is not a transaction of a man, but it is essentially the highest determination belonging to the absolute Idea itself.” Also, earlier in the work he writes, “but God is present, omnipresent, and exists as Spirit in all spirits. God is a living God who is acting and working. Religion is a product of the divine Spirit; it is not a discovery of man, but a work of divine operation and generation in him.” Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, I:206 and 33, respectively. 65. Scharlemann admitted this when he explains that Hegel’s innovation was that he comprehended that any thinking one does about “God” actually participates in or takes part in the reality of God rather than being a reflection in which “God” remained an external or objectified entity in some way. Scharlemann notes that this was certainly a form of mysticism and monism, which distinguishes Hegel’s theology from the typical deism of the Enlightenment as well as from the “‘dualistic’ hue of the supranaturalist tradition.” Robert P. Scharlemann, “Hegel and Theology Today,” in Inscriptions and Reflections: Essays in Philosophical Theology, Studies in Religion and Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 83. 66.  The theme of the otherness of God takes an even broader theological turn in the work of Scharlemann in chapter 5 of this book. 67. Hegel, Lectures, II:327. 68.  Scharlemann, “Hegel and Theology Today,” 88. Scharlemann’s answer to that is in chapter 5 of this book, an answer that is built upon the instantiating power of speech, in which the ecstatic I is able to hear their own voice in the inscribed voice of Jesus, which transcends any specifics of history, an answer that extends the other in both directions. 69. Hegel, Lectures, III:117–18. 70. Hegel, Lectures, III:16. 71.  Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 38–40.

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72.  Taylor, Erring, 39–40, quoting Hegel, Lectures, III:18. 73.  Quoted in Taylor, Erring, 40. Find the original passage in G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, fore. J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1969). 401. 74. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 761. 75. Scharlemann, Being of God, 10. 76. Scharlemann, Being of God, 87. 77. Scharlemann, The Being of God, 87. 78.  Rather than the “Trinity” being explained as the natural movement of thinking and the “double negation” as “Trinitarian thinking,” the Trinity could be only a novel way of describing that put into currency a new vocabulary, as Rorty suggests. He writes, What Hegel describes as the process of spirit gradually becoming self-conscious of its intrinsic nature is better described as the process of European linguistic practices changing at a faster and faster rate. The phenomenon Hegel describes is that of more people offering more radical redescriptions of more things than ever before, of young people going through half a dozen spiritual gestalt-switches before reaching adulthood . . . The German idealists, the French revolutionaries, and the Romantic poets had in common a dim sense that human beings whose language changes so that they no longer spoke of themselves as responsible to nonhuman powers would thereby become a new kind of human being.

Rorty, Contingency, 7. Rorty notes that Hegel’s historicist perspectivism made him aware of the problem of one’s vocabulary necessarily being superseded by another and then another, but he “ducked” the problem only to the degree that he talked “as if Absolute Knowledge were just around the corner, and as if language were just a dispensable ‘mediation’ which the final union of Subject and Object would supersede” (112). 79. Taylor, Erring, 114. In writing’s creative and destructive negative power, the “eternally recurring” drama of boundaries and limits between difference and sameness, of finitude and infinity, puts interdependent forces in ceaseless play. The problem is that when one thinks “finitude,” any number of adjectives present themselves, but when one thinks “infinite,” one draws a blank. The idea of becoming oneself in and through the other was not a new thought in Hegel, since even Schleiermacher had claimed that one becomes a person only in the ethical act. In chapter 5 of this book we will discuss how the idea of the otherness of “God” is profoundly explored by Scharlemann. 80. Hegel, Phenomenology, 677. 81. Hegel, Phenomenology, 679. 82. Farneth, Hegel’s Social Ethics, 82. 83. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 679. 84.  In Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion?, I show that Crossan’s and Pannenberg’s attempts to prove the Christological claim by historical method are unverifiable either by a lack of metaphysical proof or by historical intelligibility and proof. Pannenberg himself was a Hegelian in his gargantuan efforts, which should reveal the fate of using Hegel’s historical understandings to achieve the goal.

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 85. Yerkes, Christology of Hegel, 62.  86. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 780  87. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 780. “The death of the Divine Man, qua death, is abstract negativity, the immediate result of the process which terminates only in the universality belonging to nature. In spiritual self-consciousness death loses this natural significance; it passes into its true conception, the conception just mentioned. Death then ceases to signify what it means directly—the nonexistence of this individual-and becomes transfigured into the universality of the spirit, which lives in its own communion, dies there daily, and daily rises again.”  88. For example, as suggested by James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, vol. 1, The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997), 124.  89. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 780.  90. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 780.   91.  Scharlemann, “Hegel and Theology Today,” 89.   92.  Scharlemann, “Hegel and Theology Today,” 89.   93.  Scharlemann, “Hegel and Theology Today,” 90.  94. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 93.  95. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. By “final word,” Rorty emphasized the relativity or contingency of language, which means as language changes, one’s own best insights and innovative descriptions will be criticized, just as one criticized the scholars who preceded one, so no one will ever have the “final word”—a theme that runs through Rorty’s book.  96. Scharlemann, Being of God, 10.  97. Scharlemann, Being of God, 87.   98.  Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Rubenstein faults Hegel particularly for minimizing suffering, for calling it part of the dialectic in which the best parts would be “taken up” in the new synthesis, or saying the negative would be taken into the universal positive. Rubenstein argues that Hegel failed to consider a situation in which an “entire group or even all of humanity is obliterated” (157–58). Of course he later preferred Hegel’s system of “continuities,” preferring Vernunft to Verstand, and this panentheism or mystical pantheism in Hegel he combined with the Jewish mysticism or Lurianic Kabbalism and its “En-Sof” and the Buddhist symbol of Sunyata (296–306). See Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion?, chap. 10.  99. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), II:24. We will have to see in the next chapter whether or not Tillich was able to transcend such Hegelian optimism himself, since his Lutheran theme of simul justus et peccator seemed to dominate with his warning about people trying to save themselves by their morality. 100. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:25. 101. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:99. 102.  His description of Hinduism in Philosophy of History is extremely negative— basically a dream world that, in its crude form of pantheism, can do justice neither to

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the finite nor infinite but defiles both and whose depiction of “incarnation” is absurd. See Hegel, Philosophy of History, 219–33. His descriptions of their culture is filled with exaggeration, showing terrible judgment. 103. Anonymous, The Upanishads: Breath of the Eternal, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1975), 60. 104. Hegel, Lectures, III:113. 105. O’Regan, Heterodox Hegel. 106. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 156. 107.  Hegel often recited groundless, stupid gossip or unsubstantiated opinions to describe a whole culture, such as when speaking of India and China. He could easily perceive the errors in Egyptian religion, which blended the mythical with the historical, yet he exempted Christianity completely from the same error. Christianity, which he nearly always had to hold up in contrast, he insisted, knows its God as Spirit within humans, which is far superior to other religions. This actual judgmental way he treats religions in his Philosophy of History dispels any false notions about even his Philosophy of Religion eliminating judgmental categories when viewing other religions. 108.  Rorty suggests that Hegel’s use of “dialectic” was his way of “substituting” it for demonstration as a method of philosophy, which suggests that Hegel was more interested in “dissolving” rather than “solving” inherited philosophical problems, such as the correspondence theory of truth. “It is changing the way we talk, and thereby changing what we want to do and what we think we are.” Rorty, Contingency, 20. In fact, Hegel’s changing of the vocabulary began in The Phenomenology of Mind, as Rorty sees it. He thought of The Phenomenology as “shockingly autonomous” in its day, and, similar to Remembrance of Things Past and Finnegan’s Wake, it had no antecendently available criteria by which it could be assessed. The fact that contingency is not allowed to intrude on Hegel’s schema places him in the same category as “ironist theorists” Nietzsche and Heidegger, theorists whose concern is not for the little things or particular things but for the big things or universals. Similar to ironist novelists, they are historicists, but unlike ironist novelists they must feel they are writing not simply about their past but about the past of something greater—the species, the race, the culture; they must write about the ineffable or absolute sublimity. Rorty, Contingency, 100–101, 134–35, and note 34 on p. 134. 109.  Rorty suggested that Hegel was an “ironist theorist,” who, in contrast to a “ironist novelist,” is continuously tempted to try for sublimity . . . continually tempted to relapse into metaphysics to try for one big hidden reality rather than for a pattern among appearances—to hint at the existence of somebody larger than himself called “Europe” or “History” or “Being” whom he incarnates. The sublime is not a synthesis of a manifold, and so it cannot be attained by redescription of a series of temporal encounters. To try for the sublime is to try to make a pattern out of the entire realm of possibility, not just of some little, contingent, actualities . . . [and he wanted] to make clear that because the realm of possibility is now exhausted, nobody can rise above him in the way in which he has risen above everyone else. There is, so to speak, no dialectical space left through which to rise; this is as far as thinking can go.

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Rorty, Contingency, 105–104. Rorty’s assessment of Hegel is similar to Scharlemann’s. 110.  G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, 84. 111. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 369. 112. Scharlemann, Being of God, 87. 113.  Kierkegaard as discussed in Rorty, Contingency, 78. 114.  I make this point in chapters 8 and 9 of Clark Will Humanity Survive Religion, discussing the monumental attempts of both a historian (Crossan) and a theologian (Pannenberg). 115. Flay, Hegel’s Quest, 252. Robert P. Scharlemann put it slightly differently, that “even if, as in Hegel, a system is able to take account of positive and negative content in a universal scope, it is frustrated by its inability to get a perspective on its own perspectival conditioning of that content.” Robert P. Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt in the Thought of Paul Tillich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 178 (emphasis mine). 116. Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, 249–67. 117.  In the introduction to Philosophy of History Hegel defines what he is doing: “Original history” is not involved in any reflection. The historian’s “aim is nothing more than the presentation to posterity of an image of events as clear as that which he himself possessed in virtue of personal observation, or life-like descriptions.” In “reflective history,” Hegel says, the historian is not restricted to his own particular time and space but, rather, enlarges the scope to an entire people or country, a sort of “universal” history, or does a “pragmatic” history or “critical” history or even a prephilosophical sort of reflective history. Finally, a “philosophical history” approaches historical data with reason as its sovereign, assuming that the “history of the world” has itself presented humans with this “rational process.” It does not become indifferent to historical data or treat it from some a priori but “strictly adheres to its data.” It, however, sees reason as “substance, as well as infinite power; its own infinite material underlying all the natural and spiritual life which it originates, as also the infinite form—that which sets this material in motion” (153–57). Ultimately, as he uses “spirit” rather than “reason,” Hegel asserts that the very essence of spirit is activity; it realizes its potentiality, makes itself its own deed, its own work, and thus it becomes an object to itself; contemplates itself as an objective existence. Thus is it with the spirit of a people . . . in rendering itself objective and making this its being an object of thought, on the one hand destroys the determinate form of its being, on the other hand gains a comprehension of the universal element which with it involves, and thereby gives a new form to its inherent principles . . . its activity is the transcending of immediate, simple, unreflected existence, the negation of that existence, and the returning into itself.

(187, 189). So much for “adhering to facts.” 118. Only two Gospels speak of a “Virgin Birth,” with an absolute silence in the rest of the New Testament. Only two Gospels speak of Jesus’s “Ascension” to heaven. No Gospel speaks of Jesus’s “Descent into Hell,” which is merely a later creedal mutilation of “Hades” and based only on a cryptic passage in 1 Pet. 3:19.

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“Q” knew of no Crucifixion or Resurrection of Jesus. By the fifth century Jesus was not simply of similar substance with the Father but the same substance, possessing two complete natures, and he was not “made” but was the “only begotten” prior to the creation of the world, and “God” was a Trinity of equality and sameness, not of different beings nor even different modes of a single being. Once the Christological controversy clarified that Jesus had a full human nature despite the hyperbolic miracles attributed to him, mythology had to duplicate greater things for Mary as well, since she was the “Mother of God.” By the fifth century the idea of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary (aieparthenos) was assumed, as was the title “Mother of God” (theotokos). Then, as the church faced intellectual challenges, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception came, in 1854, and the dogma of Mary’s Bodily Assumption into Heaven was articulated in 1950. The church’s rituals have become more supranatural with the passage of time as its interests in maintaining its own sacramental power over humanity have increased. The original church participated in a shared meal, repeating the Last Supper, in which they remembered Jesus’s death and felt their communal unity, expecting his imminent return. Only over the centuries did this memorial feast turn more symbolical and sacramental—growing from a memorial into the “real presence” of Christ (which was not raised as an explicit problem before the ninth century, according to Jaroslav Pelikan). And then in the sixteenth century, in addition to some radical Reformation groups maintaining it as just a memorial as originally, it was pushed into either transubstantiation (Roman Catholic) or consubstantiation (Lutheran), in which that “real presence” was “with and under” if not the original flesh and blood of Jesus. That is not the Spirit reflecting on Spirit but a process of literalism turned to mythologizing, which is the actual reverse of Hegel’s entire system of the evolution of religions. Similarly, the structure of the institution itself has progressively claimed greater and greater authority and power through such nineteenth-century means as the Syllabus of Errors, the dogma of Papal Infallibility, and the Protestant doctrine of biblical inerrancy, a position against science and reason. 119.  For example, Robert Scharlemann and Thomas J. J. Altizer were both called “radical,” and Hans Küng, who embraced Trinitarian process elaborated by Hegel in his book on Hegel, The Incarnation of God, was forbidden to teach Catholic theology shortly after Vatican II. For a brief introduction to Scharlemann’s positive view of Hegel, see Scharlemann, “Hegel and Theology Today,” 80–91. 120. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 780, 762–785, esp. 780. 121.  Mark C. Taylor, “Postmodern Times,” in The Otherness of God, Studies in Religion and Culture, ed. Orrin F. Summerell (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1998), 183. Taylor is describing two different forms of “postmodernism”—the former as simply a continuation of the determination to find “totality,” or its determination to remain Hegelian in that sense, and so this conclusion about it applies also to the “totality” sought by Hegel.

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The Absolute as Depth of Being: The Priority of Accepting Oneself

Literary critic and novelist Susan Sontag wrote, “Once the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness—that of the seemliness of religious symbols—had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer acceptable. Then interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to ‘modern’ demands.”1 She warns within the article that “interpretation” can be used to do anything one wants with a text. Religions usually insist that the most ethical life and humane life is accessed by responding to and/or imitating that religion’s “answer,” which appeared centuries ago, whether that answer was a particular belief, specific knowledge, or an individual person or event. That is the reason the leaders of religious institutions feel a need to “reconcile ancient texts to ‘modern’ demands.” While some have felt they had to restore the mythic consciousness, many more are aware that the human mentality cannot return to ancient ideas without creating terrible cognitive dissonance. While the religion will have arguments to offer someone to try to proselytize, once a person is a part of the group, the “answer” is quickly understood as being unquestionable. It becomes Absolute. Many families simply assume their children will also embrace it without being provided arguments in its favor, so the belief is simply passed on to the next generation as unquestionable or Absolute. The belief becomes a part of a family’s identity and often this is even the way an entire group or culture can be seen: it is simply taken for granted that each new generation will embrace the same religious identity without questioning it. While most areas of knowledge build upon an accumulation of past discoveries and developments in thinking, abandoning positions that no longer are explained by those methods, the replicating degree of ideological and often unreflective attachment to an ancient way of thinking and acting advocated 189

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by religions is matched by no other human discipline. However, by the end of the eighteenth century the radical political, economic, social, philosophical, and anthropological changes in knowledge that comprised the Enlightenment had caused the more independent Christian theologians2 to recast their vision. Genuine new questions were being asked that needed answering; they could no longer be ignored. The Absolute was eroding under very natural questioning and curiosity. What had been called “lower criticism” of the Bible—which had begun in the sixteenth century as an attempt to reconstruct the most authentic “text” possible—inevitably led to the next step, to what some called “higher criticism” or general literary criticism. In Christian scholarly circles, especially in Europe, many clergy, including professors, realized that the historical testimony from that ancient era was insufficient to remove considerable doubt about the factual truth of the historical dimensions of the claims made by either church or Scripture. Some abandoned Christianity altogether. Others lost their jobs when they tried to approach the subject honestly. Others such as Schleiermacher and Hegel realized that they had to overcome the dislodging historical conclusions by finding a certainty about that past that could be “corroborated” by some element of the believer’s present thinking or action or the believer’s general present understanding of reality and our world, or in the believer’s possession of some “divine” power.3 By the fact that both Schleiermacher and Hegel saw the Infinite immediately within the finite in some form, either Feeling or Reason (Spirit), they both showed mystical traits, and mysticism has usually been described as knowing that which is unseen and being able to say nothing about it. But they also both continued within what was losing credibility by other human sciences, which Foucault called the “metaphysics of Infinity.” Why one had to have “certainty” rather than “probability” was not clarified until Tillich did so in the twentieth century. But “certainty” was the obvious aim of these two nineteenth century scholars whom we’ve already examined in chapters 2 and 3. Schleiermacher felt he could claim it by the words “immediate” and “passivity”; Hegel actually used the words “absolute knowledge” and “certainty” over and over. Yet both men finally resorted to accepting most of the traditional dogma of Christianity in their “mature” or “later” theologizing, so much so that the autonomy they championed in their earlier years was actually eclipsed by their reading of their corroborative method and their systems were absolutized pretty much in harmony with the recognized creeds. Their focus was shifted to a defining of the “meaning” of “Christ” in the believer’s consciousness rather than elaborating its past historical existence, even though both have to have Jesus as a starting point.

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By the beginning of the twentieth century an even greater number of Christian scholars were trying to minimize the “Jesus of history” and sketch the whole of Christian theology out of the “Christ of faith.” But there was always the nagging question about that history: Even if the “Christ of faith” implied that actual history could not provide certainty or saving faith, history nevertheless was important in its particularity. The religion had come from somewhere. In fact, that similarity between the faith of a present Christian and the faith of the earliest Christians or some other connective corroborated that claim about Jesus of Nazareth who started the process, even if history could prove little about him, and it was insisted on in our first quotation from Schleiermacher in chapter 2 and was present in Hegel as well. For those trying to “corroborate” the claims by faith or spirit, history’s importance was reduced to making probable a point of origin for the faith, but the certainty was provided only by the believer’s personal faith, spirit, or God-consciousness. This was true of the profound views of both Schleiermacher and Hegel. The point of origin for Schleiermacher was the exceptional historical fact of Jesus’s having been born with an absolutely potent Godconsciousness, totally unlike every other human, which was only corroborated by that consciousness awakening the believer’s God-consciousness. Despite Hegel’s attempt to trace the actual historical development of the manifestation of Absolute Spirit, the only significance of the ancient past was in the particular point of origin of that fully manifest and experienced “Spirit.” Anything else could be demythologized or even rejected as unscientific or incredible. The “corroboration” depended only on connecting that unique moment of the “origin” with one’s own personal experience, even if two millennia separated them. Yet it could not be proven as anything more than the Spirit in one, which could not be guaranteed as more than a subjective imagination or way of thinking. BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW OF TILLICH’S “SYSTEMATIC” THEOLOGY Nearly a century later theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965) followed the same pattern. But in that intervening century the world and human thinking had evolved tremendously. Hegel had been refuted scientifically by Strauss. His dialectic had been modified to be “material” or economic rather than “spiritual” by Marx. Idealism had become challenged by relativity, positivism, and existentialism just as impressionism had been succeeded by expressionism in art and music had moved from late Romantic chromaticism into atonality

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and dodecaphonic and indeterminate music. Styles in cultural expression and meaning changed almost as rapidly as clothing styles. Certainty about “what” humans are had been replaced largely by a mere “that” of their existence. The Cartesian “thinking thing” that knows God even better than it knows itself had been contradicted by Sartre’s “being for” and Heidegger’s “being there then” or Dasein. Human “origins” were beginning to be explained in less religious, more scientific terms. Einstein’s “relativity” became the key for understanding science, and the old absolutes were abandoned. The same relativity was seen in people’s different perspectives by Nietzsche, which meant that all the former values, including ethical values, had to be revaluated and false causes and antilife perspectives had to be abandoned, no matter how painful the process. If Nietzsche had announced the “death of God” via a “madman” because of the traditional theistic picture of God, by 1966 William Hamilton and Thomas J. J. Altizer had accentuated such an idea and reality (or lack of reality) in founding their “Christian Atheism.” The origin of the universe was being dated further back by astronomical discoveries of other galaxies whose starlight we see, traveling at the speed of light, is billions of years old by the time we actually see it. Cures for many crippling and deadly diseases were found, and methods of immunizing the population from many others were discovered. DNA’s molecular structure was first identified in 1953. Black holes were discovered between 1916 and 1958. The United States landed astronauts on the moon in 1969, only four years after Tillich had died, but while he was still living a variety of astronauts had circled Earth. Technology had provided thousands of mechanical and electronic inventions that simplified life, alleviating much hard labor, and leisure became more of a reality in many lives by which one could recreate. Rural populations were continually attracted to urban areas for employment as even farm machinery reduced certain needs for manual labor. Literacy expanded exponentially as education was considered an essential of more democratically structured nations. In countries with different ethnic groups, under ruthless dictators apartheid, enslavement, and even genocide became more common. The United States had fought a divisional civil war over slavery, with threats of possible secessions from the Union if slavery were abolished, just a couple of decades prior to Tillich’s birth. Technology also brought extremely negative possibilities never seen before, such as the inhumane mass bombings in Spain by Germany, captured by Picasso’s famous Guernica. Nothing had a more telling effect on European Christian theology than World War I. It completely contradicted Hegel’s assessment, making a mockery of the idea of the “Kingdom of God” ever being a reality for earthlings. The younger European theologians abandoned their

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former mentors and theological heroes of the Christian faith in a “dialectical” movement that for many years was more intent to say no than yes to any of the traditional formulations. Case in point, in his strident article “Nein!” Karl Barth very publicly rejected the approach of his famous church historian professor Adolf von Harnack. But Barth was unable to answer Harnack’s crucial questions about the professed historical elements within the Christological claim. In the decade prior to World War I Albert Schweitzer’s genius had surveyed the “lives of Jesus” over the preceding two centuries and found them wanting. His conclusion was that theology stood at a crossroads: It had to choose between “thoroughgoing skepticism” or “thoroughgoing eschatology.” The latter was the most “historical” in the teachings attributed to Jesus, but since the coming of the “Son of man” had failed to occur, such a position made Jesus not only mistaken but also enigmatic rather than easily appreciated. Schweitzer, of course, had seen the significance of Jesus only as “Spirit” in Hegelian terms—a “Jesus” whose Spirit can come only anonymously to anyone, calling people to follow, and they will find only in their response, what they are being called to and “who he really is.” With such unconventional discoveries about the “Jesus of history,” it was no wonder that most theologians felt they had to pursue the “Christ of faith” if they were to engage in any Christology. Meanwhile the entire environment in which humans lived changed with the development of new forms of politics and government, new views of economics, new structures of business—especially via the legal fiction of the “corporation” and its becoming a “multinational” institution—and new means of communication, first by cables below and then after midcentury satellites above. Relations between many nations were poisoned after some began to feel somehow victimized by other nations’ exploration and capture of resources beyond their own borders or feeling victimized for having to pay reparations even for World War I. The political opposites were exacerbated by economic downturns and inequality, as sophisticated weapons advanced from gases to airplanes to submarines to flamethrowers, mass-bombing tactics, and even nuclear weapons. So World War II ended with revelation of the Holocaust and with bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events whose horrendous outcomes cannot be appreciated until one actually stands at either ground zero or sees graphic depictions of that horrendous human suffering. If the Providential Jewish and also Christian God who saves his people within history, who blesses them for obedience and curses them for disobedience, was still believable, then all these victims were deservedly punished by that God. But for more astute religious thinkers, such as Rabbi Richard L. Rubenstein, “After Auschwitz” it simply was no longer possible to believe in a

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God who is supposed to (and actually does) intervene in history. The irony was that during the postwar years in the United States the most conservative Christian groups began to grow rapidly, having judged that since the United States and Allied Forces had been victorious “God” was clearly on the side of the United States, which they felt had been a “reward” and therefore they must also be the true or most obedient Christians and being Christian was a prerequisite for the very existence of the nation. The deaths of their own children who had died as soldiers in the war were justified by calling the conflict a “holy war,” and many of them believed their children now to be in heaven. This attitude was almost a duplicate of the one held by the Puritans who had landed on the shores of North America centuries prior. This view seems blind to the suffering of other innocents in the world as well as to wholly fortuitous events, such as the weather at the time of the Allied Invasion of Normandy. In any case, all this and much more occurred in the interval between most of Hegel’s writings and those of Tillich. Tillich himself had served in World War I and had suffered as a result; and later, as a professor, he had barely been able to escape Germany before the fighting of World War II had broken out, a time when not only Jews but many university professors as well were being summarily rounded up and imprisoned. It was because Tillich’s years overlapped the power of Hegelian idealism as well as Heidegger’s existentialism that Tillich’s theology was often described in rather contradictory ways—as “Hegelian” or a form of “idealism” by some people and as “existentialist” by others. Tillich, as both Schleiermacher and Hegel, emphasized that “Christian theology is based on the unique event Jesus the Christ, and in spite of the infinite meaning of this event it remains this event and, as such, the criterion of every religious experience.”4 As with his predecessors, that event was the point of origin only—that is, in the fact that at some point “Jesus” manifest the New Being as the Christ at which time others “received” him as the bearer of New Being and therefore as the Christ. He had to be historically received as the Messiah, which was certain neither to the historian nor to the believers as a group but was only “received” by the individual believer—whether present to Jesus or later removed in time and space. Tillich admitted that what Schleiermacher meant by “immediate selfconsciousness” was almost the same as his focus on “ultimate concern”5 but nevertheless accused Schleiermacher of almost killing all theology by making “experience” a “source” for Christian theology, the latter he knew to be an unjust caricature.6 Even though Tillich shaped his own theology by reading “estranged existence” as coming from essence as did Hegel, and even though he utilized Hegel’s view of “love” as unity rather than a command,7 he was sure Hegel had “failed” because he had divinized human reason, failing to see

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reason’s limitations, neglecting individual fulfillment or destiny in favor of group destiny, thereby creating a system in which the estranged element of all existence, including Nature as well as history, is not adequately considered.8 Tillich made sure to sketch “estrangement” seriously. But unfortunately he removed ethics from the entire scene by insisting that one should not speak of “sins” in a plural sense, because there is “only ‘the Sin,’ the turning away from God, and from ‘the Grace’ or reunion with God.”9 When this is combined with his key forensic justification or simul justus et peccator, one has removed any seriousness to the idea of ethics or relations between people, collapsing it into a Christology in which, as Tillich repeated from Schleiermacher and Hegel, “God does everything.” Anything a Christian might think they needed to do is simply a futile attempt at “self-salvation.” The earliest expression Tillich used to designate his theology was “beliefful realism.” He then espoused a key he called the “center of history” but later found his way to a “correlation” theology based on existential questions and theological answers. To form a synthesis of “Hegelian” idealism or “essentialism” and “existentialism” was a daunting task. Just as intimidating was the need to provide an ontology that would be credible in the modern, scientific world but also able to accommodate religion’s “mystical” and ancient mythical claims even via the category of “paradox.” He saw the Spiritual Presence in a Hegelian sense—that is, of God or the Spirit’s Presence manifesting itself in history, transforming history toward its divinely determined telos (the Kingdom of God). He argued that “dialectic” is not logical nonsense but points to the “depth” underlying antithetical concepts, though perhaps “paradox” is more useful. Like Schleiermacher, Tillich attempted to focus on the truth of the idea of the “picture” or “image” of “Jesus as the Christ” rather than on the question of its historical facticity as the beginning point of that Spiritual Presence in its maximum capacity, though both he and Schleiermacher saw the Spirit as involved (as God) throughout history if to neither the degree nor optimism that Hegel did. Similar to Hegel’s idea of the meaning of Christ’s death on the Cross, Tillich saw it as the idea of Jesus’s negation of the finite to reveal himself as Infinite, dying as Jesus to become the Christ. Even though the Cross and Resurrection were interdependent essential symbols for Tillich, in both cases it really was only the idea that was important, and so the Resurrection is the early Christians’ symbol of reassurance that the “New Being” they had found in Jesus was still with them, which was simply a little more definite than Hegel’s explanation. Tillich was convinced that the estrangement of existence and the ambiguities that are part of actual life, even at best, are never completely eliminated, since “essentialization” is always only a matter of fragmentary realization, or conquering only in prospect, power, and principle. He believed that the

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Spiritual Presence has always been part of the world in which humans live but that the most potent power of it was finally seen in the “New Being” in the “biblical picture of Jesus as the Christ” as “final revelation.” But “revelation” requires “paradox,” as Tillich saw it. Schleiermacher, Hegel, and now Tillich all fell in line with Susan Sontag’s understanding presented in our beginning quotation: they had to make the ancient texts somehow compatible with modern demands. That “modern” element in Tillich was that, however one conceives of God, it must be “God beyond the God of theism.”10 This is Tillich’s strongest position against any literal interpretation of the Bible or the Christian creeds. His explanation in at least one place was that the God of theological theism eliminates human freedom by seeing “God” as “a being, not being-itself. As such . . . he is an object for us as subjects. At the same time we are objects for him as a subject. And this is the decisive reason for transcending theological theism. For God as a subject makes me into an object . . . [which] deprives me of my subjectivity because he is all-powerful and all-knowing. God appears as the invisible tyrant, the being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivity.”11 Richard Rubenstein says it was this idea of Tillich’s about the eclipse of “human freedom”12 that drove Altizer to formulate the “death” of the theistic God, whereas Rubenstein objected that “for me the problem of human freedom was far less important than the problem of divine justice or theodicy.”13 Does this mean that Tillich can decide how God wants to be represented? Asking this is not any more strange than asking Tillich how he felt God’s “acceptance” if God is only the depth of being beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing. In any case, Tillich spoke of “God” as the symbolical correlate of “beingitself” or “source of being” or the “Abyss” or “Depth” beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing, moving past the confining strictures of idealism, and his terms were basically taken from mysticism, most directly from Jakob Böhme. Tillich also spoke of his theontological (ontotheological) system as Christian, thereby involving a commitment to its finality as “revelation” in its declaration of the Logos becoming flesh, which becomes a foundation for theology “which itself cannot be transcended.”14 To make this credible, “revelation” and “final revelation” have to be defined by a phenomenological method that is both “existential-critical” and “intuitive-descriptive,”15 with the admission that all theology involves a “circle,” which he insisted is unavoidable, whether the system is empirical or metaphysical, inductive or deductive. That is, it always carries an a priori set of presuppositions derived from some prior experience and/or valuation with personal commitment,16 an a priori that again appears to be some form of “mystical” union between subject and

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object, which he had referred to in his early writings as a “mystical intuition.” He insisted that this “theological circle” was not a vicious circle. It is too early in this analysis to test that assertion. But the “depth” dimension, the process of “correlation,” the idea of “paradox” and other elements, strongly reinforce his mystical awareness that pushes beyond the senses and language, the latter of which I will mention only in chapter 6. Tillich gradually discovered the theme of “New Being” in the “biblical picture of Jesus as the Christ” as being more historically credible and more theologically fruitful than the rather problematic Christ as the “center” of history. Theology could avoid having to prove how this “center” of history is determined17 and why it had to be Jesus the Christ. Tillich could preempt historical criticism by seeing it all as “symbolical.” By combining it with his understanding that religion is one’s “ultimate concern,” which could also point to “God,” this corresponded with his earlier ideas of the “prophetic protest,” “Protestant principle,” and of the prohibition of idolatry as he defined idolatry in terms of one’s allowing penultimate concerns to dominate one’s life. He was able to see “ultimate concern” throughout history in all cultures, although it often got swamped by other concerns, sometimes in very destructive forms he called “demonic” structures—that is, something professing to be ultimate but that really is not. Tillich’s system was built upon his idea of “correlating” religious symbols with modern concepts drawn from ontology, existentialism, and Jungian insights. Tillich was convinced that such a “correlation” of symbols and concepts was what most theology attempted to do whether the theologian was aware of it or not. The concepts and symbols were viewed as freestanding or independent of each other in their usage by people. This was obviously his attempt to keep human autonomy in the picture yet defend Christian theology. The symbols did not have to be accepted merely because of tradition or the authority of the church but, rather, only if they could be seen as meaningful when the correlation was understood. This also allowed the tradition of the church with its symbols to stand on its own, since correlation was supposed to preclude domination by either side.18 The task of such “correlation” to restore credibility to symbols was called the “apologetic” form of theology. Tillich’s abiding contribution was his insight that theology cannot be credible if it contradicts modern science or fails to relate to the most important aspects of culture,19 and especially if it cannot be correlated with ontology. Some of Tillich’s “ontology” was derived from Schelling, Fichte, and Heidegger; other aspects were distillations of the “negatives” supplied by even Schopenhauer or by “existentialist” philosophy, including the philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche. Tillich explained that he could not accept any split between a faith unacceptable to culture and a

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culture unacceptable to faith, and so he had to attempt to interpret the faith’s symbols through expressions of the present culture. That was his intention in writing the Systematic Theology. In addition to “correlation,” Tillich built his theology especially on “paradox,” “analogy,” and what I have called a “corroboration.” He was convinced he had avoided the problems encountered by the “historical” claims with all the historical uncertainties and “unscientific” claims of the ancient tradition, especially by continually insisting that the language of those ancient dogmas and scriptures must not be interpreted literally. His most profound and sympathetic interpreter for over sixty years, the late Robert P. Scharlemann, noted how especially the “correlation” and “paradox” were used by Tillich as he attempted to cure Hegel’s defect by seeing symbols and concepts operating on these different levels. When Tillich combined this correlation with paradox, he provided a method of either faith or reflection correcting the other, and “paradox” enabled the response or thought to actually embody the temporality, which was otherwise such a problem. The one certainty for historical thinking is “paradoxical reality.” Scharlemann writes, “In the case of all other objectival realities, I understand them objectively by critically reflecting them. In the case of a paradoxical reality, I understand it only by trying to ‘catch’ my act of critically reflecting. Tillich finds there is such a real paradox, for the cross of the Christ Jesus is an object that can be understood only paradoxically, that is to say, only by the endeavor and failure included in my here-and-now act of double reflection.”20 One can hardly miss the difference between what is being “caught.” In the normal case of “objectival” realities (realities that have no subjectivity and so cannot be an “I”), such as a rock, I critically reflect the rock. In contrast, when I reflect a “paradoxical reality,” I “catch” only my act of reflecting but not the “rock.” I have thereby closed the temporal gap that occurs in normal reflection by reflecting on my reflection or reasoning about my reasoning. In the case of the “cross of the Christ Jesus,” do I only become certain of my act of reflecting on my reflection rather than certain about Christ Jesus? This is a certainty, but it seems to be hanging in midair, as was Hegel’s certainty only of the process of thinking. That is the question that has to be explored further in the final section of this chapter. “Symbol” became an ontological-psychological-theological category for Tillich of supreme importance, as he insisted that religious symbols are not “signs.” Nor can “symbols” be regarded as “mere symbols.” Unlike signs, symbols not only point to but also “participate in” that to which they point. They are born and then grow, flourish, and die within a communal unconsciousness. They cannot be created or dispensed with merely by one’s volition or initiative. They are the human community’s response in faith, whereas

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the concepts that are correlated to them are the human response by means of reason.21 Tillich’s example of a nation’s flag illustrated that any literal interpretation of the words used to describe it would be inferior to the way one is subconsciously attached to it and affected by it. For example, how would a person feel if they saw someone set out to burn that flag in a hateful demonstration against the nation? The meaning is not the “content” of the flag (size, colors, arrangement of the design) but the subconscious connection that the flag has in our minds with the reality (the nation) to which it points. That is the flag’s “participation.” But the word “participation” can mean many quite different things, and it is not clear what Tillich means. If the symbol is created in a nonintentional communal evolution and dies in the same way, then a replacement symbol cannot be simply consciously replaced instantaneously as can a mere substitute “sign.” It will be given birth only by gradually forming in the communal subconscious. Richard Rorty is probably correct in his notion that new words or vocabularies are primarily fortuitous rather than some intended development by which we cannot see in advance which new words coined by which writers or thinkers will be discovered and embraced by others to the extent that they will become the new useful tools or language.22 So with symbols. It is fortuitous. Perhaps the most important aspect of Tillich’s definition of a religious symbol is that the definition uses ordinary language in speaking of God but in a way that the usual meaning is both affirmed and denied. This suggests the literal meaning is negated by a self-transcending meaning.23 But that sounds as if it has an equivocal meaning, not certain or obvious, and fails to suggest differences made by nuances, context, or even that which remains unspoken. This is crucial when we later discuss the “criterion” of symbols or the ultimate symbol in the final subsection of this analysis, because if such affirmation and denial is true of all religious symbols, as Tillich says, then that element does not make the symbol of the Cross unique or a criterion of all religious symbols, as Tillich asserted. Every symbol does the same by its two different elements.24 Yet on the other hand, if the symbol carries with it a “self-transcending meaning,” then it is not clear why it would “die” unless Tillich means it lost that meaning. Does that imply it would now be a dead “literal” language, as Rorty speaks of? In fact, it is not at all clear what it means to speak of a “self-transcending meaning” of words. Tillich seemed to imply that old, traditional symbols could be reinvigorated, and that was his purpose in writing his system. Are the symbols reenlivened by the culture unconsciously arriving at new concepts to “correlate” with the symbols, or is it by only accidentally finding other terms that can function as “symbols” underlying the dying symbols? Tillich only says he is using “expressions of our own culture.”25 If

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we have two equal symbols, which symbol should carry on into the future? Yet when he explained symbols, he said they are born and die in a communal unconsciousness, by which it seems he was insisting they are not consciously created, killed, or reinvigorated. For Tillich, the Christian symbols had lost their former meanings in our time (of advanced science and critical studies of biology, physics, and anthropology as well as religion and psychology).26 Did Tillich hope to find new meanings, a new interpretation that required a new vocabulary while insisting symbols arise and die only in a communal unconsciousness? It is not clear how he proposed to consciously, as an individual, reinvent symbols or refill old ones with new meanings. Whatever the explanation, this is part of his legacy.27 Tillich was sure that we respond to symbols differently than to concepts. So one understands a concept but not a symbol; one responds to a symbol but not to a concept. If “being-itself” or the “Power of being” or “Ground of being” is the conceptual correlate for “God,” then for Tillich one has faith in or trusts or worships or prays to “God” (not “being-itself”) but understands “being-itself” (not “God”). Scharlemann was always careful to point this out and qualify it,28 which meant for him that when one trusts or has faith in anyone else one thereby trusts or has faith in God (which is being-itself), but since God is not “a being” one never simply trusts God or has faith in God per se. Or is it more like trusting music to be music? Or a tautology? However, at times the symbol and concept are correlative in the sense that they function as approximate equivalents but only on different levels, as this “understanding” versus “response” indicates. Yet at other points Tillich insisted that the “correlation” process was involving an existential “question” that found its correlate in a theological “answer.” Yet the irony is that he insisted that anyone who “is ultimately concerned about his state of estrangement” is “already accepted in his state of estrangement.”29 That appears to say that any “correlation” is unnecessary unless one is trying to explain their religious faith and its meaning, such as people like theologians. Or is he just certain that one can already be “accepted” or within the “answer” to one’s question or concern without knowing it? What would be required for such a person to become fully conscious of it, and would it make any difference? There are several problem points in Tillich’s system that become evident in these definitions, and I will single them out as our analysis gets more specific, but I do not want the predominant elements of this analysis to seem only negative. There remain different opinions among many scholars as to the nature of the problems in Tillich’s system, but there is also a tremendous sense of awe that most scholars have when they read and reread Tillich and see the way the many parts relate to the whole. The question of my inquiry is

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very narrow, though any judgment it reaches affects a judgment of the entire system, just as it did in the examination of Hegel’s and Schleiermacher’s Christologies. On the other hand, there is a very traditional mentality behind the presuppositions Tillich has, which he often fails to make explicit, and it may sound like he is trying to justify ancient understandings: For example, Tillich failed to even mention the human brain for fear of minimizing the mysterious, “spiritual” side of human life; he not only belittled a biologism as equating mind with the brain but refused even to equate “spirit” with “mind.” Another example is Tillich’s choice of concepts to match the religious symbols; one can understand the “Ground of being” as some creative energy—for example, resulting from the mingling of gases or other phenomena such as “star dust” as some scientists aver. But although even humans could have eventually evolved from certain cominglings of or explosions of various empirical elements, this does not in any way suggest either that (1) the “ground” or “source” of being was “beyond” existence or possessed consciousness or was infinite, eternal, absolute or “spiritual” or has any continuing or lasting influence on the specific entities that later evolved after that “Big Bang,” and neither does it in any way suggest that (2) any humans experience from such an unconscious ground anything like “acceptance.” So sometimes the correlated concepts are not really of the present world’s understandings, despite the fact that Tillich claimed to embrace some vague form of pan-en-theistic evolution. As examples of his specific symbol-concept correlation, Tillich paired up “God” as the symbol for the conceptual correlate of “being-itself” (or “source and power of being,” “abyss” or “depth” “beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing.”), and “Christ” or “Spiritual Presence” became the correlate for “New Being.” (His confusing capitalization of even concepts may point to the symbolical side more than it should.30) Within the realm of the idea of correlation being merely a question/answer relation, Tillich suggests that “revelation” is the answer to the limits of “reason,” “God” is the answer to the question of the threat of nonbeing, “Christ” is the answer to the question of the estrangement of all existence, “Spiritual Presence” is the answer to the ambiguities of life, and the “Kingdom of God” is the answer to the historical ambiguities within history, the purpose of history, and the end of history. Here it seems that the “correlation” is, unlike the first form of correlation, speaking of opposites, not correlates. Yet even here the distinction is not clear between the two types, since Tillich often insists, using Augustine as his source, that the very asking of the question is itself the answer, that one asking about their own existential estrangement cannot be asking this without revealing that they even now stand beyond estrangement (or within the answer).

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As Tillich says, one cannot describe in negative terms how separated one is from the good without knowing what the good is.31 This was Augustine or, more exactly, the Augustinian-Cartesian presupposition that Tillich discussed in Theology of Culture, and something he injected against the negativity of existentialist philosophy. Looking at these two different usages in Tillich, the first usage would seem to imply that “God” is the question, for which “being-itself” or the “abyss beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing” is the answer; yet his second usage explicitly reverses this. Probably whether the “question” is “God” or the philosophical question is “why is there anything at all,”32 or some question about “being-itself,” depends upon whether one is trying to understand conceptually or simply trying to respond in faith. But it is often not clear. Does that not mean that one does after all “understand” what is meant by the word “God”?33 Tillich certainly suggests this when he says that, in order for the symbol of “Father” to be used for God, one would first have to know what the concept “father” entailed. Otherwise, how could the terms of the correlation be so easily reversed? Surely Tillich is not going beyond the word to the reality, suggesting that one can know or understand anything as it is in itself (Kant’s Ding an sich, which Barth lorded over Schleiermacher), even if it cannot be treated as an object or as a thing in itself but an “abyss” beyond all things in themselves. If “Father” can find many attributes by public reason, what about “God,” since both are symbols, not concepts? But where in this is God the god beyond the god of theism? Of course, even merely knowing what the answer is does not mean that one has appropriated the answer, and so it may be going too far to say that one always already stands within that answer.34 This sounds like Hegel’s and Plato’s assumption that to “know the good” is to “do the good.” When, in volume 2 of Systematic Theology, Tillich prepared to discuss “existence,” he emphasized that the “essence” of volume 1 as well as “existence” of volume 2 are always, when separated (as in those first two volumes), only abstractions, since in reality they are always combined within “actual life” and actual life is always ambiguous mixtures of essence and estranged existence and the proper subject of volume 3. Does this indicate that, as negative as the estrangement is described within volume 2, there is still always the positive element of a certain amount of “essence” being experienced by the person? But it is never mentioned. If one looks closely in volume 1, at his description of “essence,” he often speaks of it as “existence,” which is a bit confusing, since he is attempting to keep the negativities of “estrangement” out of that analysis. Why does Tillich make so much out of the anxiety of one’s finitude, which is all simply a part of essence, and yet this finitude or “death” is with some

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existentialist philosophers such as Heidegger the primary problem with human existence?35 Yet Tillich does not include death when he analyzes “estrangement” in volume 2, since he wants “estrangement” to describe only the negatives that humans initiate rather than any attribute of “essence” that might include Jesus? But if God is the “ground” of being, responsible for every being’s existence, why is “God” not responsible for constructing humans so that not only must they die but also God determines that they must exercise their freedom to be human and in so doing they necessarily all will estrange themselves from God, as Tillich describes the human existence? No exceptions (that is, none but Jesus the Christ), Tillich insists. Yet he does not blame God or ontology or logic. It is simply human free choice? Universal, coincidental free choice? If there is a positive element or certain essence sustained within “fallen” existence, as Tillich implied, that might explain how he thought one “knows” or “stands” in the good even though one was asking about his predicament within estrangement, though Tillich never said this explicitly. Tillich, like Schleiermacher, on various occasions contradictorily emphasized that a full consciousness of sin or estrangement is in fact not really grasped or appreciated without looking at it in retrospect—that is, from one’s state of having been redeemed from it or by being transformed by New Being. Yet the “transformation” or “essentialization,” as we shall see in our further analysis, is for Tillich never actualized as a state but always is “in process,” until finally Tillich resorts to lifting humans away from any horizontal process or historical reality altogether to a “vertical” dimension of “eternal life” that is one’s self-transcendence or transcendence of temporality. If everything earlier was only a fragmented form of Spirit, even the eschatological process is never completed and thus never like the New Being in Jesus the Christ. But if one had been standing only within a consciousness of simul justus peccator (always saint and sinner), then one would not even be asking the question, since that is the answer. But if one is asking about still being a sinner or untransformed, either one is simply not standing in the answer or else the answer has done no good. Tillich opposed all “literalism” and fundamentalism of embracing of older interpretations that he thought so many still follow. Does this mean his new reading of the tradition should be primarily for people within the profession or students of theology? This is most likely the case for his Systematic Theology and his many other scholarly books and articles. But he also wrote popular books such as The Courage to Be, The Dynamics of Faith, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, and On the Boundary, among others, with a more limited scope or single question, and he even published books of his sermons.

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At the end of his life Tillich briefly addressed the issue of non-Christian religions for which he felt “Incarnation” was a focus, and he continued to apply his idea of the “Protestant principle” or “Ultimate Concern” to the study of political movements and finally to art in which, though he felt he could still distinguish between “form” or “style” and “content,” his priority was no longer simply the “content” but more the “style.” So the most “religious” style or form in art was that which broke existing forms or styles, that which caused one to see the “depth” underlying it, that which in his day was “abstract expressionism.” So he saw Picasso’s Guernica as the most “Protestant” piece of art in modern history.36 Style in art paralleled what was going on in existentialist literature and philosophy, so one could detect the “Protestant principle” and the “prophetic principle” as always pointing beyond the given (or content) to that which is “ultimate,” even as “God” was finally more than “being-itself” or “source of being” but rather the symbolical correlate for the “depth” or “abyss” even beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing. This captured Tillich’s idea of the most radical doubt simply driving one beyond any given content such that one experiences what one was seeking, whether one affirms or denies the content (or is surprised by the content?). This is his Augustinian-Cartesian conclusion about doubt, that one’s being cannot be dislodged by even the most extreme doubt but is, rather, confirmed by the very doubting process. In this way Tillich finally saw the symbol “Jesus as the Christ as the Bearer of New Being,” in the conclusion of Dynamics of Faith, as corresponding to his definition of “final revelation.”37 Even though Tillich insisted that revelation is never given to individuals, only groups, he emphasized that “final revelation” could occur only by an individual, since groups have no “centered self” by which they could voluntarily sacrifice themselves—and a revelation can be “final” or incapable of being superseded only if the individual or revelatory content completely negates itself without losing itself38 (which is supposed to be parallel to one’s still being even in the midst of completely doubting one’s being). In being crucified, Jesus sacrificed himself as Jesus so as to manifest himself as Christ, or he took the estrangement of all existence into himself, thereby reuniting essence and existence. The symbol of the Crucifixion or of New Being in the biblical picture of Jesus as the Christ, as Jesus Crucified, was thereby elevated not only to absolute certainty but also to becoming the ultimate criteria for any and all religious symbols. This was to Tillich not mere justification of the sinner but, more to his purpose, what he called “justification of the doubter.” Notably, although Tillich’s theology focused on ontology, thereby necessarily utilizing an analogy of being, since ontology has priority over even any epistemology and language, his Christology, unlike his theology, was not built upon an “analogy of being” but rather on an “analogy of image.”39 Al-

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though analogia entis (analogy of being) was very popular in Christian theology in the Middle Ages—and Tillich even includes it to a degree as he speaks of the various meanings of “correlation” in theology—it has now been rather discredited. To many scholars, analogy of being seemed to presume too much similarity or resemblance, almost identity, between the human and divine spheres. Or it was considered too anthropocentric, too this-worldly, such that one utilizing it was too presumptuous in thinking they could approach God as an “object” through such an analogical description. That would be for Tillich a form of an “intellectual attempt at self-salvation.” Tillich himself was aware that analogia entis cannot be used as the means by which one thinks one can attain knowledge of the divine by discovering it through the use of finite concepts, or by some “natural theology.” Yet, on the other hand, Tillich insisted that it is only by analogy of being that we can even speak of God, since everything that exists is grounded in being-itself. But why would one be speaking of God if one cannot “know” God? What is the purpose behind the “correlation”? So we must think of analogia entis even as the equivalent of Tillich’s idea of a religious symbol. The content cannot be taken literally; one must see the “depth” beyond the analogy. This means that, to avoid either such an analogy of being or symbol, one would evidently be speaking literally, but, Tillich argues, “nonanalogous or nonsymbolic” ideas of God actually have less truth than do ideas or knowledge based on analogies and symbols.40 An example of confusion on this point arises, as we already suggested, when Tillich says we must use natural objects as symbols for God and so “Father” is a significant symbol only if we know what “Father” literally means. Then it functions not as a literal equivalent but as a symbol for the symbol “God,” yet the irony is that we know of no literal equivalent for “God.” “Being-itself” is only a conceptual correlate, but all of this requires what Flay called in his examination of Hegel’s attempt at certainty a “set of putative presuppositions” that have no self-evident ground distinguishable from imagination. The question is not resolved by simply saying “God” has to be the equivalent of “being-itself” merely because we believe or opine that no being exists without “God” as its ground or similar metaphysical statements.41 Could we also say that “God” is “green itself” since nothing can be green without “God” as its ground? With this distinction in Tillich’s approach to theology and to Christology, by using only the “analogy of image”42 for Christology, could he be suggesting there is no necessary literal identity of qualities or transference of attributes such that what is spoken of on one side of the analogy as literal has to be far less literal, maybe highly symbolic or “paradoxical” on the other side? That could be the way he avoided the “two-nature” Christology that Schleiermacher had nullified. Yet Tillich already equated the analogia entis with a

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symbolical approach to God. So intending to speak of God in Christ does not explain the different treatment unless “paradox” in Christology is more than merely the “unexpected” as he defines it but, rather, is actually contradictory to one’s understanding of the ontological structure in which we live, which is exactly what we will discover. Yet Tillich insists that “paradox” is not illogical or a contradiction of ontology. Of course he is insisting that human reason does not grasp the divine or initiate the “revelation” or even create whatever the “analogy of image” might be. That is all the work of God. But Tillich’s separation in his treatment of theology and Christology actually releases the “image” of the New Being in the biblical picture of Jesus as the Christ” from fitting into the ontology he utilized in his sketch of “existence.” This is significant, since it means, as for Schleiermacher, that Jesus is not fully human in the most significant sense— never “estranged.” This must be analyzed later. The character of the type of “estrangement” portrayed in the first half of volume 2 is all human estrangement from God, never human estrangement from other humans or from oneself, even though these are spoken of elsewhere. That is, the estrangement is very carefully circumscribed to make sure it fits into Tillich’s Christological “answer” of New Being—that is, one that requires only a general statement about a vague image of Jesus’s unity with God, whose transparency to God was constant and never violated. That is the extent of “New Being,” and only elements of existence whose estrangement are centered on this are elucidated. Every other possibility in Jesus’s actual relations with other humans is ignored as simply historical questions that cannot be resolved with real certainty. This is hardly an improvement on Hegel. FAITH AS “ULTIMATE CONCERN” TO INFINITELY SELF-TRANSCEND TEMPORALITY Tillich defined “religion” as “ultimate concern,” and this is concern to infinitely self-transcend temporality. When he says that the power of human selftranscendence is “infinite,” which shows that it is rooted in “being-itself,” which is “beyond nonbeing,”43 one is not told how it could be both human and infinite at the same time nor why “being-itself” is “beyond nonbeing.” His argument is always that being has priority since one cannot have nonbeing without first having being. It would seem the other way around, unless all he is saying is that whenever one puts a negative on front of a word then that word precedes the negative part and therefore whatever it signifies must have priority over its negation. But nonbeing does not require any negation of anything. This is the asymmetrical relationship Masao Abe saw in Tillich’s

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analyses of “being” and “nonbeing” that fails to see “being” and “nothing” as symmetrical and equal. We discuss that more later. Paul Tillich’s comprehensive, systematic Christian theology of the twentieth century44 was prodigious in scope and organization, and its achievement lay in moving theology away from idealism, rationalism, and literal biblicism. That in itself is a tremendous accomplishment. Tillich revealed the limits of each of these approaches, although his own theology has been alternately labeled as idealist or existentialist primarily because he tried to formulate the problems from an existential description and the answer from idealism’s focus. Thus the basic condition of separation or alienation with its attendant estrangement on especially the psyche is “answered” by the idealistic union that is presupposed in the consciousness of separation, though he often impugns idealism. The answer does not come in some rational certainty or some literal biblical claim or description but rather in an “experience” of faith that he thinks provides certainty. So what is the “certainty” faith entails as Tillich attempted to transcend Hegel? It seems parallel to Hegel’s and actually more dependent on mysticism, which informed both. Tillich says faith, as “ultimate concern,” has both subjective and objective sides, since it concerns both myself and the other. For Jesus to be the Christ, Jesus not only must be such (objective side) but must also be received as such (subjective side).45 The one “receiving” Jesus as Christ is required absolute passion toward that which is ultimate, a state that I cannot create in myself but that can only be received and so is called “grace.” The claim of “ultimacy” of the “object” carries my attending responsibility to exercise reasonable criticism of its content to make sure it is truly ultimate. Faith, as ultimate concern, becomes the essence of religion, so religion in this sense is for Tillich the “substance of culture” even as culture is the “form of religion.”46 But how does one exercise reasonable criticism to make sure the content of one’s faith is truly ultimate? Tillich distinguishes “faith” from “belief” since he sees the latter as a propositional term, that one “believes” certain things about somebody or something. But I have shown elsewhere that this is a red herring, since no Christian ever simply said “I believe in Jesus” unless it included something about that Jesus, which makes it a proposition.47 Tillich is saying that faith is more a term of participation or commitment, and yet he does not ever equate it with “trust.” Again, the reason is fairly clear: because we learn to trust or base our trust upon specifics—neither of which he wants to admit into the circle of “faith.” For Tillich, it is a totally passive reception,48 all wrought only by God, not one’s cognitive abilities, much less some mere historical data from the past. This form of God’s operation on a person through grace is

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possible to envision as requiring a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith,” yet Tillich insists that “faith” is not a mere “leap” beyond reason. Tillich’s approach attempts to show how theology is as valid as ontology, and yet his use of “paradox,” which lies at the root of the most basic symbols, seems to border on leaping beyond reason and ontology. He tries to set out the Christian faith in such a way that would allow that tradition and our present-day mentality to each represent their perspectives independently of each other. Its historical or Christological claims, also correlated with ontology, were corroborated more precisely, as we have seen, by what he called an “analogy of image.” For Tillich, faith does not exclude doubt but incorporates it, as part of its correspondence with what he posits as the criteria of religious truth—being willing to anticipate and accommodate different perspectives without losing one’s self. Is this an absolute incorporating within itself all relativities? Faith is not produced or proven by historical evidence but is absolutely and immediately certain. Its only risk is that one might mistakenly think a certain symbol was an adequate expression of ultimacy when in reality it is not and “therein it has the power to destroy the meaning of one’s life.”49 But why would the inadequacy of the symbol not be part of the different perspectives or the relativity that the absolute allegedly includes? Yet ultimately Tillich’s articulated criterion of religious truth and the ultimate symbol, as just stated, in different words, is that the ultimacy belongs only to that symbol or perspective that denies its own ultimacy. So how does one see it as both ultimate and not ultimate? What he failed to admit—as Scharlemann also later failed to admit— was that, even if the symbol can embrace opposite responses or perspectives, those never occur together in a single individual. For a single person the symbol is either true or not true. Its universality, in fact, would likely be refused by both those individuals who accept it as truth and by those who deny it; the universality exists only when one stands removed from those with the different views, if even then. In any case, Tillich is sure that historical judgments are not part of faith since they remain always focused on the “theoretical and open to permanent scientific correction” or since they lack certainty as they deal only with “degrees of probability.” One has to ask Tillich whether or not he is suggesting that “faith” was always understood as that certain and never, even among the original disciples, measured more in “degrees of probability.” Faith, Tillich insists, as ultimate concern, despite this “risk,” has immediate certainty. But if faith provides immediate certainty, then there is absolutely no risk involved whatever. As he states elsewhere, “Only certain is the ultimacy as ultimacy, the infinite passion as infinite passion. This is a reality given to the self with his own nature. It is as immediate and as much beyond doubt as the self is to the self. It is the self in its self-transcending quality.”50

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That being the case, how could it ever be mistaken as ultimate when it really is not? So is it only a certainty of being a self but not of anything other than the self, in which the object is the subject? Then that “immediate certainty” is spoken of again: “There is only one point which is a matter not of risk but of immediate certainty and herein lies the greatness and the pain of being human—namely, one’s standing between one’s finitude and one’s potential infinity.”51 The two above passages in which I have emphasized the infinitely transcending human quality is a key for Tillich. “One’s potential infinity” sounds like a human stands between being merely human or being divine, or else being simply dissatisfied to be finite, which Sartre meant when he called man a “wasted passion,” rather than justifying Tillich’s “ultimate concern.” The “immediacy” and “certainty” and “infinite passion” are “reality given to the self,” which sounds like the great mystics such as Jakob Böhme and Meister Eckhart. If what people mean by the symbol “God” functions for “faith” similarly to how we come to “understand” “being” itself, then what is affirmed even within my very doubt as being-itself can also be called “God” in whom I have faith (a point that Scharlemann will develop at length, as we will see in chapter 5)—and that content has been given immediately rather than mediated to me, in my very being that participates in being-itself. This again is Tillich’s utilization of the “proof” found in doubt itself in both Augustine and Descartes.52 But for Tillich, ontology and religion, though correlated, still are limited in our experience: I have faith in God but do not understand God; I understand being but do not have faith in being.53 If in my consciousness there appears an unease because of limitations I experience in my life by its very structure, including death, I can nevertheless find, in the face of those negatives, the “courage to be”—that is, by God’s (read “being’s”) immediacy to me, since my “being” is more than mere “existence,” since my finitude operates with a consciousness of my “infinite potential.” But evidently that is not faith in being? Whereas many Christian theologians spoke of God as “Infinite,” Tillich confuses things further by insisting that God is beyond the polarity of finite/ infinite, that there is an infinite gap between God and humans. And yet Tillich speaks of “infinite” as only a “limiting” concept.54 To realize my being, however, is not to realize being-itself, so how to justify saying I have “infinite potential”? All that the moment of faith would do is point to the logical fact that, unless I am that source of all being, then the source that must be (if I am) for any and all beings could be what people of faith worship as “God.” But that does not create a theistic picture of “God,” an idea over which Tillich seemed to oscillate back and forth. Other than that, if all we’re talking about is my becoming aware of some “ontological courage” that balances my

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“anxiety” in the prospect of my awareness of my temporality or death but not the reality of death, then in the very asking of the question the person asking the question “is” or experiences “being” even in the very asking. Yet to ask that question or to participate in being while actually dying would invalidate the question. It only assures a person of their being in the moment of their asking, not when they can no longer hear or ask. There are many occasions in which Tillich suggests, in fact, that the “answer” is actually found only within the question (or the very act of questioning) itself, that having the very question of mortality and finitude shows one’s participation to some degree already in that which is beyond mortality or the finite; having the question about one’s suffering estrangement in existence shows that one already has a consciousness from that state of “essence” from which one has “fallen” or become “estranged” and already participates to some degree in New Being; otherwise, one could not even ask about it. And if one asks about how the ambiguities of life are to be resolved, then the person shows that they are already standing within the answer of Spirit to some degree.55 But Tillich’s answer is too confusingly concise.56 More accurately, it is not the question as content that is answered “already” but merely the reality that is questioning, which, by questioning, manifests its own “already” being. It is just Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” nothing more. But if I ask it while I am dying, the answer is itself dying. Anything implied otherwise by Tillich is mere obfuscation or reification. His “already standing” in the answer by asking the very question obviously makes all of his discussion of “receiving answers” moot, and yet he speaks of “receiving” the answer as something that one did not have or know prior to that experience.57 To speak of “faith” as “ultimate concern” allows Tillich to emphasize that all humans have ultimate concern or faith. The only problem is that for many it is misplaced or misunderstood. He further suggests that there are two main types of “faith,” the moral type and the ontological type, both of which have subcategories or more particularized focus, and either of which can contain (or lack) a connection with the ultimate. For example, the ontological type can be seen in either sacramental or humanist traditions; the moral type of faith is seen in juristic, conventional, and ethical traditions. These often are woven together in a variety of combinations. But the real question he insists is, which type “expresses most adequately one’s ultimate concern? The conflict between religions is not a conflict between forms of belief but, rather, is a conflict between expressions of our ultimate concern. This means the vital question is, which manifestation “of the divine” in the juristic, conventional, moral, sacramental, or humanist traditions is the “ultimate manifestation”?58

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But if such a term applies to concerns of a juristic or moral nature, then what do we look for as evidence that their faith is really “ultimate” concern and not merely a concern that is extremely important or of worldwide significance? Does any fisherman, contractor, beautician, cashier, plumber, chef, pilot, world leader, politician, university professor, military general, geneticist, corporate executive—and so on—make decisions by looking for the “ultimate” concern? If Schleiermacher’s idea of the feeling of the Totality seemed huge, it is still possible to think in all sizes of totalities as we suggested; but Tillich drives pass any “totality,” as “ultimate” exceeds everything finite, even the largest combinations or totalities, as Tillich prides himself on saying. Tillich speaks often of “infinite self-transcendence,”59 which gives the impression that there is “something” beyond the finite, something he refers to as “depth” or “abyss.” Is this what he means by “ultimate concern”? It is certainly not a “limiting concept” as he defined “infinite.” Or is this just religious reification? “Ultimate concern” is perhaps an easy thing to talk about, but when people really face death, if not long before, the most important concern of their lives does appear, and it is the termination of relation with the others. It is a matter of discontinuing a living relation with other finite persons, not a matter of thinking of “heaven” or “essentialization” or “infinite self-transcendence” or “God” or my own “being” or even my personal issue of whether “to be or not to be.” It is those finite relations that have given life its meaning, not some feeling of superiority over the finite, some divine destiny or “identity” with God. Does “ultimate concern” then become a hyperbolic slogan without positive content, simply a positive term used in a negative or “directing” way, like he said about “infinity,” such that one simply stands always in the negative with no power actually to conceive of or realize ultimate concern? Is this simply a form of “negative theology” such as found in Maimonides, the Nirguna Brahman of the Upanishads, and Anselm? Such a theological approach can nearly always find fault with positive forms of expression; it often takes on an aura of superiority until one asks it for positive content. Will not the Feuerbach insight then kick in, whispering to us that the “metaphysical” attributes are really only aspirational “projections”60 of the potential attributes of the human species? Tillich thinks the sense of ultimacy appears to a person at least when the person confronts the certainty of having to die, which Tillich calls “ontological shock.”61 But if the real question occurs over a person’s facing the prospect of absolute nonbeing or at least over no longer being human, then any talk of being in the very moment one dies is obliterated. So one’s prospect of not being is not answered by pointing to the being that one now is but that will soon not be. If one’s “being” is equated only with one’s hypothetical

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“essence” rather than with one’s actual existence, then perhaps it can be said that in giving one’s life for another one might find one’s “being” or lay hold of one’s “being” (or essence) in losing one’s existence. But the one thing that one never does is realize that one has died and that therefore no “realization” of one’s being has lasting power at that point. We live in the future, but it becomes the past the minute we reflect on it or become aware of it. So any consolation that one has achieved what one wanted is not a lasting impression. One’s death, at the very moment of death and from then on, is only the possession of survivors, not oneself. To Tillich, it is not the “when” but the “having to die” that creates human anxiety. This would be reasonable only if people conceived that there really were an option. However, when no option is present or ever has been, fear of death is no longer reasonable. It is like being upset that I do not have wings and so cannot fly like the hawk or that I do not have the body of a fish and so cannot swim indefinitely underwater. “Having to die” should not create any more anxiety for a human than “having to stay on land” rather than fly or spend one’s life underwater. To humans who have intelligence and selfawareness, it seems that to paint death in such negative terms is to create an unrealistic problem, hang an axe over the basement stairs that we always worry about but that we and our predecessors ourselves placed there, a problem we all come to realize is unrealistic at least by the time we die if not long before. If “acceptance” of oneself is a key to Christian theology, as Tillich proposes, it could begin here in accepting natural mortality. On the other hand, most religious people and most Christians would not be satisfied to have their religious message reduced to merely “Realize your being.” Most religious people have been taught to think that the ideal was actualized in the past and that the past must define not only their being but how they must realize it. Unfortunately the traditional eschatological promises of the Christian faith go far beyond that, promising that all the negatives of life will be overcome and that my death will lead only to a never-ending life of unmitigated blessedness. Tillich’s reinterpretation of eschatology admits that these are symbolicpoetic images that are very difficult, often based on imagination and incompatible ideas, and that somehow eternal life is neither endless time nor static blessedness but, rather, a continuous challenge and overcoming. Otherwise it is not life at all. But he also reads the “eschata” or “last things” more as “telos” or purpose, not requiring a literal ending either of the believer’s life nor requiring the end of history for one’s transtemporal realization into “eternal life.”62 But what is it to self-transcend temporality? Either the traditional message exaggerates with its promises, or there is more to the experience of faith, more content given one immediately, than

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Tillich is willing to explore. So the Christian kerygma or message has been one of acceptance of the “unacceptable,” of forgiveness of the “sinner,” of rebirth or new life. However my life may be warped or “estranged,” the “good news” is that my life can be changed or transformed precisely by faith in Jesus as Lord, or in Jesus as the Christ—or, more specifically in Tillich’s system, by faith in the “biblical picture of Jesus as the Christ as the bearer of New Being.” Is this the transcending of temporality? But it depends upon a transforming power, which is to Tillich within the “image” of Christ. What does he mean in saying that an “image” of New Being in Christ can transform a person? ANALOGY OF BEING OR ANALOGY OF IMAGE? Let me first attempt to clarify what each of these types of analogy would involve. This is the way an analogy of being works: one generalizes ontologically what traits, attributes, or characteristics the specific genus or species has and then examines the distant or presently undefined object to see if these traits, and so on, can be reasonably said to describe it as well. For example, if one were attempting to identify a recently discovered fossil by comparing it with various specimens or genera of the past, then one would examine obvious physical structures, shapes, relations of bones, or other elements or materials of the present unidentified specimen and compare them with those typical of certain genera or species of the past that have been “reconstructed” with some consensus. That is analogizing from the attributes of a specific known being to try to figure out what the unknown entity is. On the other hand, an “analogy of image” would be a situation in which one compared a photograph of unidentified bones taken by an unknown person (or even a sketch of them done on the location where they were uncovered) with an actual preserved fossil structure in a museum or even with other unmanipulated photos of currently classified fossils documented by scientists. In either case, however, the presupposition is that the “image” was of something real, was an accurate representation or mirror image of the object, and was not dishonestly manufactured or manipulated or spun merely from the imagination of some artist or child and is neither a simple visual mistake nor illusory wish fulfillment. Similarly, in a court of law the “corroboration” involving an “analogy of being” would require material correspondence of some kind. Not just any random linguistic event embodies truth about the particular thing in question. Hearsay rules serve the purpose of weeding out the nonprobative statements, of preventing dishonesty and mistakes. Whatever limited exceptions to hearsay

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exist in the rules of evidence, “hearsay” itself is much broader, since there are innumerable types of statements that can be made that have absolutely no causative connection to the facts in question, no probative value. Even when the statement may be true on its face, it still may not address the issue at hand. For example, the accused would not be convicted simply because it was reported (i.e., a linguistic event) that a human committed a crime and this accused is a human. Nor would the “corroboration” be sufficient to convict just because the crime was likely committed with a certain caliber handgun, and this person accused is said to (i.e., a linguistic event—the gun registration papers, since no handgun has been turned up) own a handgun of that caliber, which he testifies that he sold to an individual eight years earlier. Analogy of being requires a more specific connection to “corroborate” a precise claim. A mere “analogy of image” would have to clearly depict identifiable and real structures, whereas vague similarities would not provide probative value of specific identification and whereas a definite nexus would have to be established. The original image being used would have to correspond to some more tangible piece of evidence, even if a bit less detailed. If the barrel of the handgun is missing in the picture on which the serial number was etched and whose rifling pattern is therefore unattainable, then it would be fairly impossible to corroborate anything on such a picture with the essential details gone. Further, it must be reemphasized that “corroborating” evidence cannot simply corroborate its own claim, and neither can it corroborate a general grouping of disparate evidence. There must be other evidence that has probative value even though it is not completely convincing and that the item now corroborates. Further, for an “analogy of image” to corroborate some historical claims that per se are insufficient to convince, one would have to ascertain the image’s own validity: who put together the image, how trustworthy they are, what their motivations were in creating the image, whether the image has passed through other hands through which it might have been modified, and so forth. These are crucial if one is relying on “images” passed down for millennia in any religion, since in most cases the informative details came from the single perspective of disciples within the group, not from objective historians. Most religions do not claim that through a mere “image” the religion could only confirm one’s “being,” that one is alive, or that religion could only help a person realize and accept themselves. Yet Tillich’s picture of the Spiritual Presence “grasping” the believer in “power and meaning” is primarily about accepting one’s acceptance by “God,” whose conceptual correlate is the “depth” or “abyss” beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing. To the contrary, religions have all used quite detailed images to promise something very specific and historical about particular beings in the past that are seen as paradigmatic.

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They did not say that a better life would be found in hearing merely any word or symbol, nor in just any kind of response to such a word or symbol or idea. Nor did they say that they had only an image or a word picture of some person and that the image or word picture would certify itself and “transform” them even if they knew very little or nothing about the original source or person “behind” the picture. Instead, religions have insisted that the hearer needs to respond to specific teachings, ideas, or promises that, they insist, reasonably correspond to the reality from whom these specific ideas and images came. That is to say, religions usually focused on structures of real life and real people rather than on mere words or logic. The question is how one can shift the burden to mere phenomenology in its restricted sense of language or semiotics as would be the case in an “analogy of image.” Most religions also demanded that the better life they were promising in such particular terms required a heightened sense of responsibility or morality toward others, even if it meant that one needed to change one’s attitude and “character” considerably. In many religions, that was even a prerequisite to the necessary difficult move from the “profane” to the “sacred” sphere.63 Tillich describes the “analogy of being” (analogia entis) as necessary to anyone wishing to speak of “God.” It uses “material taken from finite reality in order to give content to the cognitive function in revelation, but this does not mean that this form of analogy can be used to create a “natural theology.”64 He further suggests that trying to use these “finite materials in their ordinary sense” to determine the content of the unknown “destroys the meaning of revelation and deprives God of his divinity.” One cannot analyze the finite and then project it to become somehow analogous to the infinite and call that knowledge of God.65 One can understand this limitation of “analogy of being” if applied to God since Christian theology envisions God as supernatural or otherworldly, the Absolute. Nothing relative could be used “literally” as an analogy for the Absolute, Infinite, or Unconditioned. If one feels bound to speak of “God” and is limited to “finite materials,” which have to be transcended, then one must warn that it does not mean how it sounds or the way it reads. But Tillich had already answered this with both his concept of the “symbol” as the only way one can speak of “God,” and the idea of “paradox” in which the true meaning is contrary to usual appearance or expectations.66 Tillich does find the “analogy of being” necessary when hunting for the concepts that might correlate with the religious symbol of “God.” He says that for theology the “analogy of being” is not only possible but also valid inasmuch as God is “being-itself”—or is both the power of being as well as the structure of being or the absolute.67 Again, however, does this mean those ontological concepts used will be literal or only a second

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level of symbol? Since Tillich is compelled to discuss the “question” of being to which the “answer” is “God,” and since everything participates in beingitself, the analogia entis, then, is thereby “the only justification of speaking at all about God.” What then does it mean if one speaks of “God” with the ontological terms such as “living” or “personal” or “becoming”? Tillich insists that none of these terms can be taken literally—only symbolically. That is, one can use the words as long as one understands that “God” is the “ground” of being, of life, of everything we see as personal. Regarding the question of speaking of “God” as “becoming,” however, Tillich is even more reluctant, since he is convinced that to use that germ literally “disrupts the balance between dynamics and form and subjects God to a process which has the character of a fate or which is completely open to the future and has the character of an absolute accident.” If taken as a symbol that the divine life “inescapably unites possibility with fulfillment,” or potentiality with actuality, it might be a symbol.68 Is he saying anything different from the old Augustinian contention that “God” is total sameness, eternally identical, unchanging, having no unrealized potentiality? This view is neither “theist” nor “pantheist” but rather “pan-en-theism” (i.e., God in everything or everything in God) and likewise does not solve anything, since to say that “God” is “in everything” or “everything” is “in God” still does not alleviate the tension between his idea of a perfect or completely realized being that has no unrealized potential and the idea of anything that has being actually changes. He says “becoming” must be seen symbolically of “the actualization of its potentialities,” that the “divine life inescapably unites possibility with fulfillment.”69 But what does this mean? Nietzsche describes this idea—that anything that “changes” is unacceptable—as an unfounded presupposition, quite objectionable, from which he concluded Christianity is simply a “monotonotheism.”70 When Tillich speaks of using these concepts in a “symbolic” way, or as a second-level symbol, we are never told precisely how one discovers the proper meaning by simply refusing it as literal. One usually thinks of “analogy of being” as meaning an obvious literal correspondence. To say the concept “living” must point to its symbolical equivalent that is “ground of life” suggests that perhaps all one has to do to find the symbolical correlate of each symbol is to add or insert the concept “ground” or “source” or “abyss.” “Abyss” seems to be Tillich’s preferred term, evidently because it sounds less limited than “ground” or “source.” “Abyss” is Tillich’s way of referring to the negative side of the “ground of being,” whereas the positive side he sees as the “creative” aspect. It is made more difficult, however, when he often speaks of the “abyss” or “depth” dimension as “beyond” the polarity

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of being/nonbeing. This is not resolved by making a distinction in the Greek words between what Tillich calls “relative nonbeing” (me on) and “absolute nonbeing” (ouk on).71 “Source,” “ground,” “abyss,” “depth,” and other terms are themselves metaphors or concepts, quite distinct from symbols such as “God,” “Christ,” or “Spirit.” The confusion is intensified when Tillich occasionally refers to “God” or “Spirit” even as a “notion.” This brings us back to the whole question of “correlation.” In the analysis of “being,” Tillich’s approach is to set off tensions within being, which he thinks are irresolvable, and then offer “God” as the answer, as “being-itself” or “source of being.” He examines reason, doing the same, suggesting the irresolvable conflicts or dead-ends in finite reason, and then offers “revelation” as the answer. The problem is that the answer itself is not part of the ontology, since the ontology is showing what the finite human essence is. These “answers” Tillich provides do not come from implications within the ontology but from totally outside. So, although “God” is the symbol for “being-itself,” later, when he is pushed on that, he insists that “God” is really the correlate for the “abyss” “beyond the polarity of being/nonbeing” but insists that “being-itself” embodies within itself this polarity. Yet it cannot be both ways. When discussing the correlation, the matching of question and answers, Tillich says that theology formulates the question implied in divine selfmanifestation from the questions that philosophy, the arts, and general culture imply about human existence. He admits that is a theological circle, but yet he thinks it is neither vicious nor an actual moment in time but, rather, simply the realization one has of the connection between the questions or the question/answer. “A symptom of both the essential unity and the existential separation of finite man from his infinity is his ability to ask about the infinite to which he belongs: the fact that he must ask about it indicates that he is separated from it.”72 Later Tillich repeats much the same idea, asking why humans have a question of God. It is because humans know they are finite but also are aware that they “belong” to infinity, which itself raises in them the question of why they are separated from the infinite, realizing the difference in their lives between the actual and their potential.73 Tillich tries to explain that “infinity” is only a “directing concept,” not a constituting one. There is no “infinite being,” but there is an infinite demand, so to speak—the demand one feels of realizing their unlimited potential. Understood this way, “infinity” is simply finitude transcending itself “without any a priori limit.” So the expression “infinite self-transcendence is simply an expression of humanity’s belonging to “that which is beyond nonbeing—namely, to being-itself.” It consists only of the negation of the negative element in finitude, that which “lies beyond the polarity of finitude and infinite self-transcendence.”74

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One must ask, however, where in this sketch of being human and finite Tillich explained and justified talking about humans not only as potentially infinite or having unlimited potentialities but also of having knowledge of belonging to the infinite though now separated from it, and so forth. This comes totally from the “answer” of the “negation of the negative element in finitude,” which is not embraced by his ontology at all. So “infinity” is nothing but a continual wishing or striving to negate negation but never has any ontological status? But infinity is not “God” or “being-itself” either, yet finite humans possess this potential presence of the “infinite,” which is “unlimited self-transcendence? When did human freedom insist that its desire for being in itself had to mean that being in itself was not finite? For Sartre, being in itself is a part of finitude, not something “beyond” finitude and even “beyond” the polarity of “finitude and infinite self-transcendence.” How could being in itself be infinitely outside all forms of being and nonbeing if they were all generated from it and beyond “infinite self-transcendence”? One might have thought that, since Jesus differed from God and was by the eventual creeds said to be fully human as well as fully God, such “analogy of being” would, then, still be applicable to Jesus; that is, if it were useful for theology, it would be even more useful for Christology. If essence required ontological concepts that could be used as an analogy of being, would they not also be required for any description of human existence? For example, there might be things that Jesus, as a human, did not know or had to learn. But such an analogy has been acceptable in only very restricted form to Jesus, since the Christology of the church has remained predominately Docetic. The fault lies in the formulations of creeds and/or their perpetuation as if their language would be static and intelligible for all time—since we know of nothing at all that possesses two such radically complete natures and neither of anything that is not contingent.75 But most present-day theologians would grant that the analogy of being is appropriate in that Jesus was mortal and perhaps was at times mistaken in his judgment. Tillich acknowledges that this image of New Being in the biblical picture of Jesus as the Christ does not prevent Jesus’s being totally finite. He admits “error is evident in his [Jesus’s ] ancient conception of the universe, his judgments about men, his interpretation of the historical moment, his eschatological imagination,” as well as in his “want and desire” and even his “doubt about his own work as in his hesitation to accept the messianic title, and above all, his feeling of having been left alone by God, without God’s expected interference on the Cross.”76 Tillich emphasizes that Jesus as the Christ experienced most of the typical marks of finitude, including rejection by others, lack of a definite place, loneliness, homelessness, and bodily, social, and mental insecurity, in addition to “all the tensions which follow from

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the self-relatedness of every finite person and proves the impossibility of penetrating into the center of anyone else.”77 Tillich, while allowing the Gospel of John to have Jesus claim to be “the truth,” qualifies that Jesus certainly did not know all truth about all finite objects and situations. Jesus’s poor judgment of others caused him even to select a close disciple “who contributes to his death.” But though this makes Jesus “tragically guilty,” he is never morally guilty.78 Yet Tillich limits all this as merely a part of Jesus’s finitude; therefore, although Jesus was subjected to the estrangement of existence, he was never responsible for any estrangement. How did Tillich determine this? Only by saying that Jesus was always united with God. Jesus’s picture Tillich takes literally! Tillich even suggests of Jesus, “Out of his unity with God he has unity with those who are separated from him and from one another by finite selfrelatedness and existential self-seclusion.” And later, “In the power of a certitude which transcends certitude and incertitude in matters of religion as well as secular life, he accepts incertitude as an element of finiteness.”79 Where do the Gospels suggest any of this? This is more of Tillich’s insistence that Jesus took into himself all the estrangement of existence that people typically experience and that by taking it into himself he conquered it. It all sounds quite Hegelian. But it lacks any factual or historical basis. And neither does it come from Tillich’s ontology. Tillich’s analysis of the “reality of the temptations of Christ” is one of his least critical references to illustrate the “unity of Jesus as the Christ with God.” He insists that as “finite freedom” Jesus confronted “real temptation”; if he had not, then he would not have been sufficiently a human. But he was sufficiently human and thereby represented “the essential unity between God and man (Eternal God-Manhood).” The temptation, however, must be “serious” to count. So Jesus faced the same actualization of freedom that all humans face, and yet he did not thereby become estranged as all (other) humans do. So does that mean the temptation was never “serious”? If one were to ask how that would then have been similar to the actualization of freedom all other humans experience, Tillich would answer that desire itself does not imply estrangement from God but desire “becomes temptation if a prohibition (as in the paradise story) forces one into deliberation and decision. The question, then, is how to evaluate the desire . . . Without desire, there is no temptation, but the temptation is that desire will become changed into concupiscence . . . it is wrong to have the objects of justified desires without God.”80 Does this mean Jesus never had to deliberate or make a decision? Tillich thinks that the lawfulness of Jesus’s desire was given in the “temptation” story by the Old Testament quotations with which Jesus allegedly rejected Satan. But how does Tillich know that “desire” for something has power to

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“tempt” only if the object of desire can be transformed into something else such as concupiscence? Or one’s desire is estrangement only when one wants the object “without God”? What would that mean, since “God” for Tillich is not a being or person but only the depth of being beyond being and nonbeing? To say one wants the “object of his desire without being” makes no sense. But Tillich elsewhere speaks of all humans becoming estranged from God when they exercise their freedom, and he insists that Jesus exercised his freedom as all humans do. Yet Jesus did not become estranged from God in that choice for freedom? Then was he not fully human after all? From what criteria does one decide that it is more accurate to include this highly mythical story to sketch the “image” of New Being than to exclude it by reason? Why would one think the best treatment is to interpret it not as irrelevant and outdated mythology but as existentially symbolical when it obviously feeds into a Docetic Christology? If Tillich were trying to illustrate “temptation” to a real human, then why did he not examine narratives about Jesus’s alleged interactions with actual people rather than his interaction with a mythological figure? Why not ask whether Jesus shared the typical Jewish racial discrimination against Gentiles or whether he neglected his familial duties or whether his ego was too grand or whether his claims were absurdly narcissistic or whether his healings were believable or often ridiculous or whether his promises to help others went unfulfilled and made them politically vulnerable? These were more real and “existential” areas than Jesus’s temptation story. But Tillich evidently was persuaded he would be conceding far too much even by limiting Jesus’s “real temptation” to “serious temptation” to having even otherwise justifiable desires fulfilled “without God.” That is “concupiscence,” which he is sure Jesus as the Christ did not have. So Jesus’s desire was not temptation, since Tillich knows that Jesus’s desire did not mutilate itself into a desire to exploit others for himself or “without God”? He explains the difference between natural self-transcendence and “distorted concupiscence.” The former “includes the desire for reunion with everything,” but “the distorted concupiscence . . . does not want reunion with anything but the exploitation of everything. . . the temptation is that desire will become changed into concupiscence. The prohibition lays down the conditions which would prevent the transition from desire to concupiscence.”81 So any method of trying to understand Jesus as Christ, any type of “analogy,” is prohibited if it implies that Jesus might ever have been responsible for any estrangement or that he ever experienced even a propensity toward such a thing. Is this perhaps reasoning in a circle? Tillich can refer to historical indicators in the Bible for admitting Jesus’s finitude but not for causing any estrangement, since the latter is never defined to involve Jesus’s relations

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with humans. In other words, Jesus was human but not very human, and never in his subjectivity was he anything like a normal human, since, as Tillich understands it, all (not just a few) humans initiate estrangement. Tillich emphasizes that “in every individual act the estranged or fallen character of being actualizes itself,” which must be acknowledged as “the tragic universality of estrangement and man’s personal responsibility for it.”82 So all humans experience the alienation they help create—that is, all humans except Jesus, who never initiated any. We shall return to Tillich’s idea of “human nature” later. But this exemption seems to create a Docetic picture of Jesus, even as both Schleiermacher and Hegel did. Even that finally seems too empirical, historical, and social for Tillich, which means it might easily be challenged by empirical data that revealed Jesus estranging himself from other people (which is so obvious in the Gospel of John), and so Tillich ultimately insists that “estrangement” is really only “estrangement from God.”83 There are therefore no “sins” in the plural but only this single “Sin.” If this is true, then one must ask why the Gospel writers have Jesus talking so much about human relations. Without knowing what is going on within a person’s mind, how would I have any idea as to whether or not a person is estranged from God, especially if anyone’s actions and speech involving other humans really do not count? Does this mean that—whatever is meant by “God”—“God” really does not care how I relate to other humans? Tillich insists that history cannot supply the answer of Jesus’s complete unity with God and that certainly one cannot describe the “inner person” of Jesus as other scholars have thought, and yet Tillich is sure that the total picture the New Testament presents is uniform in that it depicts Jesus as always totally united with God, willing to sacrifice himself as Jesus to be the Christ. The only elements of the image are this unity with God and his self-sacrifice, really nothing else. “According to the biblical picture of Jesus as the Christ, there are, in spite of all tensions, no traces of estrangement between him and God and consequently between him and himself and between him and his world (in its essential nature). The paradoxical character of his being [shows] . . . there are no traces of unbelief . . . no trace of hubris . . . Nor is there any trace of concupiscence in the picture.”84 So “estrangement” either can be detected through what he calls “traces” of unbelief, hubris, or concupiscence or, if it cannot be detected, then one can read Jesus mind. Tillich, of course, insists that historical details are unimportant in substantiating that Jesus was the Christ, which means that any supposed “traces” are superfluous, proving nothing. What is left, then, is that one must be able to read Jesus mind, which puts the theologian directly back with Schleiermacher’s psychological-historical hermeneutic: detecting the “inner person” of Jesus and his “maxim.” Further, the “essential nature” is, according

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to Tillich, only an abstraction. So, since it is difficult to see how Jesus would, as an existing being, have related to the abstract “essence” of “his world,” is Tillich saying that Jesus existed or that he was only nonexistent “essence”? Did Tillich expect that Jesus’s disciples, who were devoting their lives to his cause in his absence, would write documents revealing any deep problems of his estrangement of others? But even they, as biased as they were, certainly showed how Jesus intentionally estranged people with his speech and demands. Did he not estrange people when he accused them of being hypocrites who would see prostitutes entering God’s kingdom before they ever did or when he accused them of being legalistic and insincere, when he accused them of being “children of the devil,” of insisting they eat his flesh and drink his blood, of asserting that he was even before Abraham lived, and when he said their acts of devotion were superficial and only for show? How could these be anything other than the intentional estrangement of others? When Jesus visited Jerusalem for the last time, he caused chaos in the temple. He later instructed his disciples to get swords and to pose as rebels, and he made disrespectful remarks to his judges and engaged in what the Jewish authorities had to see as blasphemy. Was this not estrangement? Even Jesus’s role in inciting the authorities to arrest him remains exempt from “moral guilt” by Tillich, who claims it was only “tragic guilt.” So even if Jesus intentionally aggravated his adversaries to the point that they killed him, enabling them to become morally guilty, his “personal center” was never removed from absolute unity with God. No estrangement by him—period. At this point, one realizes that Tillich left ontology, biblical narratives, and history behind long ago and was talking only about an image, which, because of the abandonment of an analogy of being and a refusal to examine anything tending to be empirical history, finally bears no resemblance at all to either actual or even imagined humans. It goes far beyond even the imagination of those editors of the Gospel “image.” Or is Tillich deciding in retrospect, after deciding that Jesus is the Christ, that he therefore could simply not have caused any estrangement? That would explain much more, but that is reasoning in a circle from one’s individual experience, and Tillich belittled Schleiermacher for almost ruining theology by doing just that. Tillich can make these sweeping generalizations about “the biblical picture of Jesus as the Christ” without giving any specifics whatever while, in the face of other specifics, in the next breath, deciding that anything that is a “rationalization” in the biblical picture must be rejected, including the idea of Jesus’s “sinlessness,” the “empty tomb,” the “Virgin Birth,” and “the bodily Ascension.” These he sees as mutilations of the symbolic character of the biblical witness, occurring where earlier Christians took a symbolic-existential symbol of Christ and ruined it by making it into an alleged rational, objective

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thing.85 But Tillich does not explain why he was willing to accept the “Resurrection” but not the “Ascension,” since the existential or symbolic character of either one is not obvious. Of course, if Christ’s Resurrection means only that the disciples could still feel the New Being present in their lives, then what is to say that they could not have felt that way in speaking about Christ’s Ascension or his sinlessness? How did the Crucifixion escape, since it presented much more difficult theological problems? Thus Tillich appears to follow Hegel in holding that the “empirical” statements about Jesus or Christ themselves mean nothing. Only the “existential” or “symbolical” meaning can be used as a source for Christology. His picture of Jesus the Christ having such absolute unity with God and never really being tempted (although temptation and sin, as Tillich thinks of them, are absolutely universal as a human experience when the person commits a “free” act) indicates that Jesus really has no “human nature.” Tillich, of course, anticipates that objection and so equivocates on what the term “human nature” can mean. It can mean a human’s “essential” nature or a human’s nature as estranged in existence or as an “ambiguous” mixture of essence and existence. The question is in what sense Jesus had a “human nature.” Tillich’s answer is that it is only in the first sense—as “essential” human nature.86 This, of course, means that Jesus did not exist, even by Tillich’s own standards, since to “exist” is to have a real human nature, which involves both the “ambiguity” Tillich covers in describing actual life in volume 3 as a mixture of “essential” human nature (volume 1) and estranged human nature (volume 2). This is crucial. The reader must recall this, since Tillich insists that even both volume 1 and volume 2, in describing “essence” and “existence,” are mere “abstractions.” So Jesus fits into only an “abstract” picture—neither of actual human life nor of authentic existence? Is it that the “abstract” image has transforming power and so one can avoid any empirical details that the early disciples thought were proof of Jesus’s being Messiah, since these must always be subject to historical verification that can never provide certainty? So Jesus’s actual life is not “ambiguous” and had no real existence and so was only an idea or image. This seems a strained logic just to protect Christology as “certain” rather than as “probable” or “possible.” On the other hand, once Tillich decided that “God” can never be objectively known, then we must say that, if Jesus is the “final revelation” of “God,” then Christ cannot be objectively known either. Nothing can provide certainty of a “rational-objectifying character”; only “existential-symbolic” certainty can be attained. Since “God” does not “exist,” could one also say that “Christ” does not “exist” or that “Christ” did not ever “exist”? Or can that escape being restricted merely to a Cartesian-Augustinian certainty that one is and therefore

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“being is”? But Descartes was talking about one’s “existing” in thinking, not some strange “being” that is not “existing,” which Tillich is proposing. But if it is Cartesian and all that is proven is the thinker’s own existence by virtue of their thinking, then why would it be called an “Incarnation” or “revelation” rather than an individual-existential certainty of their being? When one is working with the “biblical picture of New Being in Jesus as the Christ,” how does the analogia imaginis (analogy of image) operate without a “rational-objective” vocabulary? Tillich seems to imply at the outset that there are no ontological implications. Otherwise, why would the analogy of being have been rejected? But there have to be ontic points of contact that might serve as a base from which one could reason analogically ontologically. Does one reason analogically from simply any image or picture without the image having any ontological implications?87 Is Tillich using “image” to include what we think of as “imagination”—that is, a freewheeling consciousness that need not utilize actual ontological constructs? But even the allegedly “seen” UFOs years ago had definite rational-objective qualities, even if only imaginatively. To what does this reduce Christology? Tillich’s view of the symbol of Crucifixion as the criteria of all religious symbols in its self-negating, and transcending power will receive a more consistent inquiry from Scharlemann, which we will examine in chapter 5. Tillich conversely gives the opposite impression that there appear to be many ontological implications in the way he actually used the analogy. This suggests on the surface that there is some kind of similarity or correspondence between a reality—some being—and an image. Does his dissolution of the “empirical” data mean that the being in question presents no image or that the image itself has no being (or just has “being” but no actual “existence”)? Certainly that’s not what he intended to do. But how does a human being exist in the world yet leave no possibility of “empirical verification”? Or why would what is claimed as a person’s most significant attribute be impervious to testing whether or not it is of “rational-objectifying character”? Does Tillich think an image, like a portrait or photograph, can truly represent the reality of its chosen subject? Of course. It is fairly common knowledge that it can do so. But we also know that portraits can fail to represent their subjects accurately, that photographs can be manipulated even to the point of intentionally misrepresenting their subjects, not to mention all the mutations or dissimilarities that can occur to the images by sheer accident or the mere lapse of time. It is instructive that when Tillich raises the question of the nature of the image of Jesus as the Christ he contrasts the image of a photo with both impressionistic and expressionistic portraits. He first insists that even the photo does not escape including certain subjective elements in the image, though he does not suggest how that is the case. The opposite of

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the photo’s realism, Tillich insists, is the impressionistic or “idealistic.” The latter image is a projection, for example, of the highest ideals of the greatest religious minds during the days of the Emperor Augustus. Neither the photo nor this idealistic image is what the Gospels present, he argues. Instead, the Gospels are best understood as the “expressionist” style, which means that they try to push behind the mere “surface traits” to present a picture of the “deepest levels of the person.” This expresses “what the painter has experienced through his participation in the being of his subject. This is what is meant when we use the term ‘real picture’ with reference to the Gospel records of Jesus as the Christ.”88 But the question of verification arises when one asks how a viewer could decide between a true portrait and a wholly fictitious one if the present viewer never saw the subject firsthand and had no other pictures with which to compare it. One could view a portrait of a centaur and be overwhelmed with the “deepest level” of the being in the portrait, a real pushing beyond mere “surface traits” of a centaur. But does it not still remain total imagination? So with harpies, Cyclopes, jinn, and Satan—all of which have benefitted from graphic, in-depth portraits painted by writers over centuries. Are they real, or is one going to ask a question about that which is “empirical,” which Tillich placed off limits? Or is the only concern with what each image could “mean,” as the approaches in chapters 2 and 3 of this book? By ignoring the “empirical” details, Tillich says we have a powerful existential participation in the biblical picture of New Being that is both concrete and universal. It is so profound that, even though we presently may know other people better as far as having better historical documentation of them, by our participation in the biblical “image” we “do not know anyone better” than we know Jesus as Christ.89 Now we have rejoined Descartes, but Descartes was only speaking of one knowing “God” better than himself, not of knowing some other human better than one knows oneself. What would be necessary to say that? Does Tillich mean that to think about the person behind the photograph and to be interested in learning more about him than merely seeing this photograph is illegitimate, just like one’s seeing the “image” of the Jesus as the Christ and wanting to press behind the image to the actual historical Jesus? Illegitimate? Tillich simply insists there is no such “image” “behind” the biblical image of Jesus as the Christ in the Gospels.90 The actual history of the intricate redaction of the texts proves quite otherwise. What about a real person behind the biblical image? What details are important, if any? Is the intent by an artist, writer, or photographer to ignore all details except the “inner” aspect of the subject? How would that be done, and how would people who know that person identify the actual person with the subject in the portrait? Does Tillich imply that those creating the image were

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consciously trying to provide an image that would “transform” all viewers? If this is implied, would we not approach it very suspiciously and guardedly? Or were the writers trying to assure believers that their faith was not misguided? Or was any “transforming” power of their verbal image an unintended result? Or did they assume that all those who were “believers” had already been “transformed,” and were simply confirming in their mind the validity of their transformation? But if these details that they provided were unnecessary, as Tillich insists, then they were actually detracting the people from what “faith” is, by Tillich’s definition. Who measured that transformation that occurred, and how much of a transformation was it? A case in point would be the author’s declared intention as the author or final editor of Luke and Acts, for whom the empirical details seemed quite important, but his details are being provided only to other Christians, who, by Tillich’s standard, need no reassurance, since they have already experienced the transforming power. So all the authors of the Gospels were mistaken about what they were doing and simply confused the picture for everyone? But, of course, to say that we know Christ better than we know anyone else—parallel to Descartes’ expression about knowing God better than we even know ourselves—is to say that what one knows in each case is really only one’s existence or thinking; it was not knowing some other at all. Here the Christology is simply trying to articulate Tillich’s mystical vision, but mystics had admitted their visions cannot be described. Of course one can say that the “Gospels” of the New Testament were written with this bias—either to convert people or confirm their conversion. But would a viewer not be more open and receptive to a photograph or image that did not have such an intention? Is not the purpose behind a photograph more to remind a person of what the one in the image was actually like, cherishing memories or even exploring more specifics about the subject if the viewer is not acquainted with the subject? But, then, in the second case Tillich identified with impressionism, that of the projection of a mere ideal from the best minds of the age, what would be objectionable about such an image?91 The real question Tillich did not answer is why the viewer could not be said to “participate” in either the photograph or the idealistic portrait but only in the expressionist portrait. And there seems to be no reason. If Tillich’s later criticism of art suggests that abstract expressionism is the most “religious” style because it possesses no features of representation but drives one past all forms, then one has to realize that this subjectivism also dissipates any sense of unity of interpretations or meanings, and it is not clear that Tillich really is proposing such disintegration of what he considers a united biblical image of Jesus’s absolute unity with God. Here Tillich’s criteria do not fit the precise criteria that he uses in his extensive examination

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of art, even when he later articulates his reservations about expressionism’s ability to function without any semblance of representation at all.92 Tillich’s conclusions about the image of New Being and one’s participation in it—and the fact that Tillich insisted that there had to be a reality that preceded the image or it would have shown signs of estrangement within it—are reminiscent of Descartes’ failed argument for the existence of God. Descartes’ argument was that the image in my mind is so perfect that it simply could not be an idea that I received from thinking about myself or even some composite picture of other humans, and since there must be some reality from which a picture of perfection could emerge, then that reality must be God. This is precisely Tillich’s logic. Feuerbach’s answer to this is that it is a matter of projection of the species consciousness, and Freud labeled it “wish fulfillment.” It becomes obvious that, to Tillich, the differences between even the synoptic Gospels and the Fourth Gospel have to be seen as inconsequential, and he simply does not deal with the extracanonical images of Jesus that Crossan and other scholars have subsequently examined and that were not available to Tillich.93 Tillich confines his “image” to the canonical Gospels, but his actual simple image comes entirely by the writings of Saint Paul, especially in his understanding of the cleavage between “faith” and “knowledge,” his idea of forensic justification, and his avoidance of references to the historical Jesus. That is Paul, as we saw in the previous chapter. While Paul’s truncated view of Jesus as the Christ was built around only the risen, mystical Christ who alone validated his own unique ministry—a view almost totally devoid of anything in the synoptic Gospels—and it seemed to satisfy Martin Luther, this view hardly suffices for Christians in the twenty-first century. Having Saint Paul determine one’s Christological method today is like seizing upon a writer who was never an acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln, and who, basically unfamiliar with the details of the president’s life, is convinced that Lincoln came from Mars or some other planet in outer space and appeared to the writer. From this unverifiable event, the writer claims Lincoln’s otherworldly attributes have transforming power for everyone on Earth but that one simply has to receive that “image” of Lincoln by faith, not by any cognitive questioning.94 The writer has one ontology for this world and a different one for “Lincoln” from outer space. Tillich himself utilizes two different ontologies. So where is there any assurance of a possible corroboration? Is the assurance of a corroboration to be found within the author’s or editor’s training, ingenuity, dedication, concentration, choice of sources, technique, and style or even within the intention of the author, painter, photographer, biographer, or X-ray technician? Surely each of these and innumerable other factors are important, but none of them alone and no combination of them guarantees

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that the product of the image will corroborate completely what the subject is or claims. Perhaps, then, that assurance of corroboration comes from the subject itself; that is, she has such overwhelming or magnetic bearing or inner power that no one painting a portrait of her could fail to convey accurately her actual traits and qualities, and the image painted is a living extension of the subject’s personal power, as if it is living. So the portrait of the Madonna? Or of the book describing Abraham Lincoln? But then we suddenly are faced with the problem of isolating what the image itself actually conveys from the total background of our viewing (our “standpoint”) its here and now particularity, as well as the background, spoken and unspoken, of history’s prolific accretion of information, admiration, veneration, reinterpretation of earlier data, itself embodying untold legends and myths—which our culture has perpetuated—but also all the conflicting images from ancient times—so we cannot be certain that the portrait does any more than suggest a certain “type” person. Perhaps the assurance of some corroboration can be found within the particular form or method of “imaging” that never misrepresents, never provides “false positives” (which, for example, so many women experience in their mammograms) such that perhaps within the machine or the camera lens or whatever imaging device is being used or type of acrylic paint or specific size brushes being used or the specific vocabulary of the writer lies the connection and guarantee of certainty? What form or style might that be in art—abstract expressionism, impressionism, realism, or pointillism? In music—jazz or pop or soul or classical or late Romantic, in modes, keys, or atonality? Could it really ever be claimed that nothing in the method or genre of writing canonical Gospels could be a misunderstanding, a misrepresentation, an exaggeration, a misconstruing, an intentional omission, an arbitrary arrangement giving unhistorical impressions or could be clues that the author had a definite “agenda” coloring the image provided or that the image was even sheer myth? To claim this would be to deny the obvious historical reality of the actual process of the writings and their redaction. Tillich left behind this type of research, and it left him behind with his mythological-existential Christology rather than any symbolic Christology that had rational meanings through its empirical analogies. Fundamentalists in all religions, of course, resolve this as a nonproblem, since they hold that the precise image itself, the very form it took, was all totally inspired by God. They and (ironically) Tillich agree on the singularity of that picture, which is a giant problem, even if Tillich thought their idea of plenary inspiration absurd. Of course, both end up resorting to the option of the traditional teaching of the church, which means sheer heteronomy, but it is a heteronomy that knows no way to accommodate actual diversity in those

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original images, does not know how to be inclusive, to be self-critical, to ask genuine questions about why reasonable people rejected the claims of Jesus as Messiah that today are part of our culture’s common reason. One must simply assume an imaginary uniformity of a single image to agree with Tillich. But Tillich insists that the “analogy of image” means that the image is itself the product of the reality—that is, that there is a causal connection in both directions. The image guarantees the source or subject it reflects, and it empowers a transformation in the present person of faith. So the image could not have come into existence without the reality that gave it birth? This is Tillich’s adamantly repeated position. However, is this to say nothing of the role of the present hearer of such message or recipient of such image? When Tillich thinks about the original disciples, he states that Jesus would not be the Christ had he not actually been the Christ as well as been “received” as the Christ.95 But we are not informed of what caused people to “receive” him as such either originally or in subsequent years. For Tillich to explain that would serve as an explanation also as to why the majority of those who met Jesus did not “receive” him as the Christ. Tillich joins Schleiermacher and Hegel, however, in refraining from such explanation. Does this mean that the subsequent image is self-validating, even though it is so dissimilar even within the various canonical Gospels? And even though it becomes extremely exclusive? The only answer remaining for Tillich is that the original reality had “power to transform,” a power that it somehow transferred to the image itself such that from then on the image itself has the same power to transform any and all hearers or people who confront the image.96 So the image is itself the link between the past and our present, and the present believer’s transformation corroborates this. There is the supposed “corroboration” of the Christological claims that historical research could not prove to be certain. Once one is persuaded that the image has the same (though derived) power to transform as the reality that lies behind it, then the historical reality behind it evidently becomes dispensable, even a moot question, though proven by one’s present “transformation.” This was Schleiermacher’s same approach. But how does one decide that there is a transformation at both ends of the history that is the same transforming power? And even if it were so, which Tillich avers it is, then that original reality need no longer be of any concern, as it would not matter who empowered the image so long as the image works, so long as it functions on others in a transforming way. One thereby, not surprisingly, becomes immune to any historical details surrounding that original source, which in this case is the “Jesus” behind the image. This is precisely what Tillich sketches as he denies explicitly that there is any image of some “historical Jesus” behind the Gospels’ image that scholars think they can

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uncover in their search for the “historical Jesus.”97 But they are not looking to reconstruct only a single prior image. Rather, they are looking to see if there is a real person who fits the image. We shall see later that Tillich simply says that the image has power to transform those who are transformed by it. In fact, it mattered not to Tillich if this “New Being” was only experienced in one of the disciples or Gospel writers rather than in Jesus. Tillich is positive that New Being was present in someone at that time, since otherwise the Gospels would have shown traces of “estrangement” within themselves.98 Does this mean that an imperfect person cannot by imagination write convincingly of perfection or a true Ideal? Of course, if one accepts the Christology of all the Gospel writers and Paul and others as being absolutely the same, then it is no problem to accept the caricatures that the Gospel writers give of the majority of Jesus’s peers in their rejection of him—that they were all insincere or demon possessed. But this approach presumes a uniformity and obvious truth from the beginning that is only the fiction of the later defensive church. The question remains, is there really anything supplied by the present believer’s experience that “corroborates” anything? That is, what is the “transforming” that connects the original source with the image and thereby transforms for centuries to come? What is transformed into what? And must there be an actual “transforming” for there to be any “corroboration,” or will only a mere promise or prospect or even mere hope for a transformation in the future be sufficient to corroborate the image and historical reality of the past? So the concern of our investigation of some “corroborating” factor is not a focus on the “intent” behind the image. Rather, Tillich turned it into the function of the image, the question of its “transforming” function. That becomes the real question. But is not this image itself the sum total of the original evidence for the claims it is making? In a court of law, “corroborating” evidence is simply evidence that adds to the present evidence. It is never the only evidence. So how can it also serve as its own corroboration? If inadequate original empirical evidence needs to be corroborated by a second source, then it has to be an independent or second source. It cannot merely corroborate itself as the only but certain source. To think otherwise is as mistaken as some historians regarding the redaction of the Gospels: they suggest that two Gospels’ containing a somewhat similar pericope is more likely an indication of the historical truth than if just one Scripture were to contain it, even if both Gospel writers copied it from an earlier text. On the other hand, if the original evidence is thought to corroborate its own claims (which is nonsense)—which really means that the evidence is so strong that it needs no outside corroboration—then the original source or image was adequate as a basis for faith after all, which is to say that its

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picture of New Being is sufficiently historically convincing, despite Tillich’s denigration of history. But, Tillich insists, faith does not deal with “more or less” certainty or with degrees of probability, as typifies historical research. Faith is absolutely certain. The real question is whether or not faith deals with history at all. He is saying that “faith” is not “corroborating” anything historically. But if the “image” is what creates the faith or is the object of that “faith in” and yet the actual human of whom that is the “image” is unimportant, then we are back to Tillich’s idea that “faith” is certain only of one’s present faith, allegedly because it is “New Being.”99 Thus Tillich says faith guarantees faith, just as a transformation transforms. Yet when Tillich examined in detail the New Being experienced in the believers’ actual life, there is no real correspondence, much less what he called an “identity” of New Being between oneself and that image of Jesus. The only “connection” is because the person today who has “faith” claims to be a Christian and “calls Jesus the Christ,” which “is based on the continuity through history of the power of the New Being.”100 So anyone who “says” they are a Christian or says “Jesus is the Christ” has this New Being? This brings to mind Scharlemann’s very title “Does Saying Make It So? The Language of Instantiation in Buber’s I and Thou,” which we will discuss in the following chapter, in which calling any “you” “God” makes it “God.” It is doubtful that in either case the certainty moves beyond the subjectivity of the speaker or that it says anything more. That returns us to the nagging question in Tillich: Faith makes one certain of what? His explicit answer is that “faith can guarantee only its own foundation—namely, the appearance of that reality which has created the faith . . . This alone faith is able to guarantee—and that because its own existence is identical with the presence of the New Being.”101 That’s the alleged “corroboration,” even more explicit than Schleiermacher’s statement quoted at the beginning of chapter 2. But is the “reality” that “appeared” in this faith only one’s own being, not someone historically and causally prior to or “behind” the image? Tillich states that faith of a person in that image or the biblical picture of New Being in Jesus as the Christ guarantees only that New Being was found in someone prior to the image, as I noted earlier, be it Jesus or one of the Gospel writers or someone else, whoever; but it does not guarantee the actual correct name of which individual. The name is very minor compared with the disconnect between the actual past and the present that he only presupposes. In this remark, however, Tillich is using the analogy between the original reality or cause of the image and so is reading analogy here backward in history from the image to that which caused the image.102 But the question about that correspondence cannot simply be presumed by the present reader.

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It evidently creates such a vague image that the resulting “faith” cannot even be sure of which human being actually had that New Being but only can be sure that someone had it. That has to be the most bizarre thought—that faith can absolutely guarantee something in history that historical method cannot even test. It is no wonder Pannenberg called Tillich’s system a mere “faith in faith.” But Tillich’s system is actually able only to place the certainty in the believer’s own being, in the commitment by faith and nothing more. The function of the symbol seems to have simply replaced the ubiquity of Spirit in Hegel, assuring not what one is thinking but that one feels “transformed”—or at least “accepted,” or at least is “being” when one might conceivably not be. That is, Tillich insists that the “certainty” that New Being existed in this one behind the image, whoever it was prior to any image, is due to the present believer’s “participation” rather than to “historical argument.”103 Such is the certainty of “immediacy” of faith vis-à-vis the “mediated” and only “more or less” probability of historical judgments.104 Faith’s only certainty is only of the believer’s own being. But Tillich speaks of “transformation,” which creates an even greater problem for Tillich, which we must address shortly. This graphically illustrates that the problem is deeper and simpler than Tillich admits: the claims of Christianity, as many religions, combine what cannot be combined, a historical person or event and a mythology or gross supranaturalism, a person or event temporally and spatially concrete yet universal, a contingent or finite and temporal existence infinitely transcending. Christianity tries to combine historical reality and mythology, a basic problem at the heart of most religions: they combine what cannot be combined, supranatural elements intervening in actual nature or real history. Many of these ancient ideas are best explained by Freud’s Future of an Illusion: they are mere wish fulfillment, nothing more. Tillich wanted to be more credible than that, however, and so felt it necessary to detail an ontology. But he sketched his epistemology and ontology in such a way that at crucial points he could see a “dead end.” In these spaces, he “answered” all the problems of finitude by inserting, from far beyond his ontology and epistemology, some mysterious, paradoxical, or mystical idea that he can justify only as the “abyss” beyond all time and space as well as beyond being and nonbeing, whatever that could be: “No special trait of this picture [of New Being in Jesus the Christ] can be verified with certainty,” he writes. “But it can be definitely asserted that through this picture the New Being has power to transform those who are transformed by it . . . A picture imagined by the same contemporaries of Jesus would have expressed their untransformed existence and their quest for a New Being. But it would not have been the New Being itself. That is tested by its transforming power.”105

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“NEW BEING” VERSUS “OLD BEING”: DIFFERENT ONTOLOGIES, SO NO SPECIFIC TRANSFORMATION Tillich thinks “New Being” is a concern in all religions inasmuch as all religions confront in some way things consider to be negative within human existence. He distinguishes “historical” from “nonhistorical” views of New Being in the various religions. The “nonhistorical”—such as Brahmanism, Buddhism, and classical Greek religions—posit this “New Being” as possible only by transcending everything finite, which thereby affirms only the Ground of Being. Tillich sees the “historical” view of New Being in Ancient Persia, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which envision a transformation of historical beings but do not require obliterating all the particulars of history. It occurs through a historical process—involving individuals (bearing it only in relation to groups), family, nations, and the church—as an actualization that is “unique, unrepeatable, [and] irreversible.”106 He claims that “New Being,” which “points to the cleavage between essential and existential being,” is “new in two respects: it is new in contrast to the merely potential character of essential being; and it is new over against the estranged character of existential being.”107 This means for Tillich that, in principle, nothing can supersede it as the “aim” of history even though history has not yet literally ended.108 Yet he speaks of this as giving “history a center,” which explains the “already” and “not yet” of its eschatology.109 However, at the very point where there is supposed to be enough sameness or similarity between what occurs to me in the moment of faith or in a continued life of faith and the claims about the reality of that person, Jesus the Christ, I discover too much dissimilarity for it to convince me. In fact, the description of the New Being as it occurred in this Jesus as the Christ appears so very unlike anything I have ever experienced, or could think of achieving, that I see none of those characteristics in my life. Tillich appears to use two different ontologies, one for humanity, the other for Christ, basically for the same reason as Schleiermacher—that is, to release Jesus as the Christ from any responsibility of causing estrangement or sin. Inasmuch as Tillich is unwilling to say that all humans born in the future will have a choice of activating their freedom as essence without falling into estranged existence, estrangement is not a universal “coincidence” (as he calls it) but precisely an ontological necessity. Tillich tries to alleviate this conclusion, which is virtually a death sentence within the Christian faith, by trying to reassure us that sin is neither an “ontological necessity” nor a “logical” one: “He [God] creates the newborn child; but, if created, it falls into the state of existential estrangement. This is the point of coincidence of creation and the Fall. But it is not a logical coincidence; for the child, upon growing

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into maturity, affirms the state of estrangement in acts of freedom which imply responsibility and guilt. Creation is good in its essential character. If actualized, it falls into universal estrangement through freedom and destiny.”110 But Tillich is saying it is universal. If universal, there are not exceptions to it. Therefore it is not mere “coincidence” if there is no alternative. If there is no alternative, then there is no freedom. So where is the “logic”? On the one hand, he says God’s “creation is good in its essential character.” But “if actualized, it falls into universal estrangement.” So nothing in creation should have become “actualized” as existence? But it necessarily is actualized; otherwise it cannot be treated as absolutely universal. What “actualizes” it? What is creation’s essential character? Is “essential character” its potentiality? But if so, how does potentiality produce actualization if actualization means “existence”? He calls the “transition from essence to existence” the “original fact,” not sequentially but in that it “gives validity to every fact.” This “transition,” he says, is “actual in every fact,” and “We do exist and our world with us. This is the original fact. It means that the transition from essence to existence is a universal quality of finite being.”111 How does this “transition” from mere essence or potentiality to existence and actuality occur? Tillich does not say. But he is convinced that “in every individual act the estranged or fallen character of being actualizes itself. Every ethical decision is an act both of individual freedom and of universal destiny.”112 Is this estrangement inevitable ontologically or predetermined by God since he continually speaks of it as a combination of freedom and destiny? Why is guilt attached to the “act” if the act is inevitable rather than emerging as a result of one’s actual freedom? Is freedom only a word but not a reality? To this Tillich simply replies, “theology must insist that the leap from essence to existence is the original fact—that it has the character of a leap and not of structural necessity. In spite of its tragic universality, existence cannot be derived from essence.”113 But he also insists it must be derived from something since it cannot be self-generating. So it is derived from nothing universal but is just a “leap” that itself universally occurs? How would one know or verify that it is only a “leap” and does not proceed from essence, or what is the necessity of separating essence and existence as opposites? It sounds like a divine trap of estrangement, since no one has a choice to not exist or to not exercise their own choice or freedom in some way.114 Or is the whole scenario justified since even “faith,” which is the answer to the problem of estrangement, is only the work of God? As Tillich insists, “faith” is not a person’s decision but, rather, “the state of being grasped by the transcendent unity of unambiguous life,”115 which is the activity of the Spiritual Presence. He calls it “the Spiritual Presence’s invasion of the conflicts and ambiguities of man’s life under the dimension of the spirit,” which

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is “not an act of cognitive affirmation within the subject object structure of reality. Therefore it is not subject to verification by experiment or trained experience. Nor is faith the acceptance of factual statements or valuations taken on authority, even if the authority is divine, for then the question arises, On the basis on what authority do I call an authority divine?”116 So God causes estrangement through destiny and resolves it through implanting faith in people? This sounds like Saint Paul, who, after blaming humans for their sinfulness, finally concluded in Rom. 11:32 that “God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all,” which seems to say that either it is God’s fault or it is ultimately of no consequence anyway, since God will be merciful to all. But why all the mythology to obfuscate a nothing? This is reminiscent of Schleiermacher’s backpedalling to say that the “antithesis” or “God-forgetfulness” that is universal and makes humans helpless is really not a big deal after all, merely a “slight disturbance of nature.” He does this precisely so that he can assert that Jesus as Christ was “sinless” or had an “absolutely potent God-consciousness.” But one cannot move back and forth between contradictory ontologies and expect the theology to be credible. Tillich uniquely uses an ethical setting to illustrate the “Fall” that is universal. One becomes a person by an ethical choice, or one “exists” (if not long before, at least) when one responds to the “temptation” of sex, since that necessary response stands “between the preservation of his dreaming innocence without experiencing the actuality of being and the loss of his innocence through knowledge, power, and guilt.” Further, “Man decides for self-actualization, producing the end of dreaming innocence.”117 The irony here is that the very instinct of human survival thereby for Tillich becomes the estranging instrument, the universal culprit?118 Now Tillich is closer to Saint Augustine than even Saint Paul, and it is no wonder that Nietzsche opposed Christianity for its “castratism” that throws filth on sexuality. All humans choose to actuate their freedom and thereby are always estranged, but only Jesus in actuating his freedom did not become estranged. Here is the alternate ontology. Is Tillich suggesting this because he knows that Jesus did not make a choice for or against sex? If Jesus did not make a choice, then he did not actuate his freedom and so remained only essence or potentiality? Interestingly, Tillich speaks of the image of Jesus the Christ as “essential” man, the true Urbild (archetype) who conquers the estrangement, and Tillich does not speak of Jesus as the Urbild of “existing humanity.” So “Christ” serves only as an image of the human “essence,” nothing more, since he never existed? If, on the other hand, Jesus, as all humans, had to exercise his free choice, then he “self-actualized” or existed so why did that not naturally lead to his estrangement and loss of dreaming innocence as it did

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for humanity in general? Tillich provides no explanation. But how could one exempted from deciding for or against his freedom “conquer estrangement”? Tillich is solely concerned with showing that New Being “existed” and endured being in a world of others’ “estrangement” from God but that Jesus as the “bearer of New Being” never himself acted in such a way to fall from mere essence to existence but always remained fully essential. We again have to ask whether this means that Jesus really never took the “leap,” never did actually “exist.” When we examined Schleiermacher, he still tried to retain Jesus as both Urbild (archetype) and Vorbild (example), whereas the way both he and Tillich exempt Jesus from being fully human eliminates both roles of Urbild and Vorbild. Tillich just asserts that New Being in Jesus simply conquered estranged being, period. Does this mean that it only conquered other human’s estrangement from God? If so, how? When Tillich, in making Jesus the exception, also needs to offer an explanation as to how Jesus did it, how he could be the only one of the entire species,119 even in its indeterminate future, who could do it— actualize his freedom without becoming estranged and falling into guilt. This criticism of Schleiermacher and Hegel by D. F. Strauss was surely known by Tillich, but we get no answer. Tillich’s scenario of one lone exception to the entire human species leaves him in the same predicament as his predecessors, Hegel and Schleiermacher. Thus the ontology used to describe universal human life is simply not the same as that used by Tillich to describe that which includes the “biblical picture of New Being in Jesus as the Christ.” Tillich slips back and forth between two different supposed ontologies, still fastened to the mythology of a vicarious death that “conquered” all estrangement for all time. What then is the “analogy of image” that can corroborate the content of that message? In speaking of it as “transforming,” Tillich’s concern is not simply that the image transforms other images to replicate itself as mere image but that its transformation is supposed to be in the believer’s actual life, as reality. Yet he insists that one’s experience with New Being is always “fragmentary” such that one is conquering estrangement only in principle and as a “beginning,” since as soon as the New Being takes a concrete form in life it becomes ambiguous.120 Further, since the extent of the transformation has nothing to do with one’s living among other humans but only with one’s relation with God, then one is only being “transformed into the state of faith.”121 The same repeats itself today, especially if Luther had any grasp on reality in asserting that the believer will always remain “saint and sinner,” Tillich’s essential theme. One is not transformed morally but remains as immoral as before, though one has learned to accept oneself through God’s acceptance or “forensic justification,” accepting the fact that one will always be both saint and sinner. But one has been transformed into having “faith.”

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Inasmuch as that was a state Tillich insists that Jesus as the Christ never experienced but is the state in which even all believers in Christ will necessarily remain, even in their “infinite self-transcending”—whatever that means—the separation or estrangement is really never overcome. Even in the depth of Eternal Life, time and change still operate, and the negatives require continual “overcoming.”122 So the Divine Life is not “immovable perfection” but “blessedness through fight and victory.”123 But what is the conflict if one must simply accept the fact that one will always be both saint and sinner? How and why speak of “victory”? By either Tillich’s Christology or his eschatology, the Ideal is not realized by humanity in Tillich’s system any more convincingly than it was in Kant’s ethical interpretation of the Christian faith. However, even Kant’s “approximations” to the Ideal seems preferable to Tillich’s abandonment of the assurance as simply poetic imagination. If life is not mere dead identity of “immovable perfection,” then continual process requires actual life and effort as we know the process as humans relating to each other. Tillich’s offering a comforting word of forensic justification is also a cynical word about human life that is not so apparent in Kant: that humans simply cannot be left on their own since their predisposition to evil is much stronger than any competing force. This is true unless one turns the “result” of God’s grace into the first presupposition, thereby creating what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” Tillich speaks of three “material” elements of faith: The first is the Spiritual Presence opening a person up to the possibility of accepting it. The second is one’s acceptance of it despite being separated from the Spirit by an “infinite gap.” And the third is one’s expecting to experience a final transcendent unity of unambiguous life with God.124 All are the work of only God. Yet the “expectation” of the “final participation in the transcendent unity of unambiguous life” never occurs unless it consists only of a sense of denial of one’s imperfection or an indifference toward that. The latter alternative, of course, would suggest that simul justus et peccator is the real key to Tillich’s entire theology, from humanity’s coming from God to its return to God, not “correlation,” “paradox,” “New Being,” and “transformation”—just the truth that the person of faith will always remain simultaneously a sinner yet justified (or justified yet still estranged?) and learn to accept it completely. But what was so unacceptable about human existence to begin with? And if all beings came from being-itself, why do beings blame themselves for not-being being-itself? And why would beingitself or “God” be justified in creating yet blaming the human beings? Intriguingly, Kant suggests that one cannot simply count on “grace” if one makes no effort for self-improvement as one’s personal responsibility.125 Kant seems to have read Paul more closely than did Luther and Tillich.

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“Estranged Being” prior to “New Being” in Jesus the Christ Here we need to work backward from the “New Being” to the “old being” or “estranged being,” since that was obviously Tillich’s way of figuring out how to describe human existence prior to Christ, and Tillich did not give a base for “New Being” in his analysis of essence. The “New Being” in the biblical image of Jesus as the Christ has two points that actually reduce to one, since Tillich insists that the image has to come from the “totality of his [Jesus] being, not in any special expressions of it.” Those two elements are (1) Jesus’s complete unity with God and (2) Jesus’s willing sacrifice of himself to retain that unity. This suggests four vital determinations: 1.  That “New Being” is not found in Jesus’s “words, deeds, or sufferings nor what is called his ‘inner life.’” These are only “expressions of the New Being,” but “being precedes and transcends all its expressions.”126 Does this mean one can experience the essence of another person without the person saying or doing anything, or is it simply that the real person is not captured by even the totality of its expressions? 2.  Tillich insists there are not different forms of “New Being” but rather only a single picture within the Bible as a whole and that any apparent conflicts—for example, between the two testaments or between the various Gospels or between the Gospels and Paul—are insignificant details. The single picture of Jesus’s unity with God even to the point of willingly dying to retain that unity with God is Jesus’s “New Being,” and it is sufficient. But the original disciples did not have a unitary picture of Jesus. Biblical scholars today know that, and they also know that they themselves have not arrived at only a single picture.127 3.  The “estrangement” that “New Being” voids can be called “sin” but not “sins,” only singular—estrangement with God or sin against God. His claim of “New Being” does not consider “sins” or alleged violations of moral laws that the plural form “sins” indicates. That limitation by Tillich immediately truncates what “estrangement” or “alienation” or “sin” can mean, since relations between two or more humans is not under consideration. Tillich does not discuss Jesus’s relations between people in this Christological analysis; it is all a discussion of the individual’s relation only with God. When he finally does explore the issue of the “centered self” or “integrated self,” possible relations with other humans are opened up, but they are totally subsidiary. His primary consideration is a relation between “God, self, and world.” Even though Scharlemann similarly was not writing on ethics, he saw Tillich’s theological and Christological shortcoming and suggested that theology needs to go beyond Tillich’s terms to include other humans.128

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4.  If “New Being” is primarily one’s unity with God to the point of being willing to sacrifice one’s own life to maintain that unity, then “New Being” could be defining a very narrow aspect of human life in one’s relation only to God. In fact, this is the case, as Tillich examines primarily the three areas of “unbelief,” “hubris,” and “concupiscence.” He insists that the biblical pictures show that Jesus never destroyed his unity with God by any of these forms of estrangement. But when we take a closer look at how they are defined, supposedly in an ontological form, Tillich uses one ontology for all humans but a different one for Jesus, as Christ, as the “answer.” Ironically, the primary ontology by which Tillich sketches human estrangement—especially his examination of “unbelief,” “hubris,” and “concupiscence”—itself fails to show a universal estrangement.129 Tillich uses those categories only to sketch Jesus’s avoidance of “falling” or “yielding” to these temptations but without any credible historical data to back it up. In between is his insistence that nineteenth-century idealism or essentialism is a misreading of reality—that existentialism best captures the universal estrangement of humanity, the conflict and inhumanity seen in the symbol of “the Fall” in the book of Genesis.130 But that picture contradicts the inevitableness of estrangement, unless the whole scenario is the idea that God created existing—and therefore “fallen” or “estranged”—humans but did so only because God also planned to save them from such a plight by becoming Incarnate and implanting faith in their hearts, and thereby counting them just even though they are estranged, and the whole picture is a charade. God did it all: humans are simply manipulated beings for God’s glory or amusement? From Tillich’s perspective, if Christology were to be the universal “answer,” it had to have a universal problem to cure. Thus human inevitability to estrange itself from “God” was presupposed, which seems not to be a “correlation” but, rather, seems to be theology or Christology dictating ontology. Since the conceptual correlate for “God” is “being-itself,” what would estrangement prior to the “New Being” look like in these three forms of “unbelief,” “hubris,” and “concupiscence”? When Tillich defines “unbelief” with regard to Jesus, he says it would be the “removal of his personal center from the divine center.”131 When he describes it as separate from his analysis of the image of “Christ,” he says it is the “state in which man in the totality of his being turns away from God.” But in the next sentence he uses the conceptual correlate of “being” and says that “in his existential self-realization he turns toward himself and his world and loses his essential unity with the ground of his being and his world.” He does this in his “knowledge, will, and emotion.”132 This seems a shifting back and forth between a very personal,

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anthropological, and anthropomorphic being called “God” as a “symbol” to a very conceptual form of “being-itself” or “ground of being.” Is it really true that most if not all people (except Jesus) “turn” themselves away from such a “ground of being,” thereby losing their “essential unity with the ground of being”? “Losing essential unity” with the ground of being means losing being, which would suggest one loses one’s being while being? One turns away from being while being? Would that not mean losing one’s existence? Or does Tillich really think one can lose essential being and still “exist”? That would make “essential being” not very “essential.” The only way out of this problem is if Tillich is talking only about one’s attitude, not one’s whole being. Is the real problem that there are many who deny or intellectually turn against the idea of a personal, supernatural being such as the usual meaning for “God” while they still certainly affirm “being” and its power or ground, whatever that might indicate? Yet Tillich himself insisted that “God” does not exist, is not “a being,” even “a god,” but rather is “God beyond the God of theism.” It may be quite common for beings to deny or turn against a specific, personal, supernatural being called “God,” as even Tillich did. But it is not remarkable that the pictures of Christ’s not being “estranged” show no evidence of his denying being while he is still being, since few if any humans do so. If there is no evidence of “unbelief” in the biblical “image” of Jesus the Christ, then there is really nothing “New” about it. If one is using ontological categories to try to determine reality, then that idea of universal or very general “unbelief” as turning away from the source or power of being while actually being seems impossible. What then about “hubris”? Tillich defines it as the “self-elevation of man into the sphere of the divine”133 universally experienced. He insists that all humans have a “hidden desire” to be like God, no longer weak, finite, ignorant, insecure, lonely, or anxious but “like God.”134 What evidence is given for the sweeping generality of all humans? Tillich first used the symbol “God” and then switched to “concepts.” Without minimizing the negatives he uses here—such as “ignorance,” “weakness,” “insecurity,” and so forth—is it really a fact that all humans are unwilling to admit not being infinite in power, knowledge, self-assurance? Do all humans really want to be “God”? This amounts to a universal denial of one’s finitude. I have yet to meet anyone who is the least bit reflective who really seriously thinks they are not finite and quite limited. For one to seriously fall into Tillich’s description would classify the person as a megalomaniac, suffering under a great delusion. So the universality of this form of estrangement is also a non sequitur. If one says the image of New Being in Jesus the Christ does not include hubris, then this is not really “New” at all, since most people do not suffer under the delusion of this form of estrangement.

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Finally Tillich summarizes “unbelief” and “hubris” by saying that the former is one’s removing “his center from the divine center,” whereas the latter is one making “himself the center of himself and of his world.”135 He suggests that people estrange themselves in these ways because they are tempted, since humans participate in both finitude and infinity. Would it not have been sufficient to say that many humans manifest a certain egocentricity at times that hurts their relations with other people? Where is any evidence that humans all participate in “infinity,” which he elsewhere calls only a “limiting concept”? But he moves to the third form of estrangement. If one feels “separated from the whole,” then it is natural to desire “reunion with the whole.” Yet if one allows this desire to take over, then the form of this estrangement is called “concupiscence”—“the unlimited desire to draw the whole of reality into one’s self.”136 He provides specific examples of this, including unlimited sexual desire and the need for “self-assertion,” but acknowledges that Freud’s idea of the “libido” and Nietzsche’s idea of “will to power” are not in themselves concupiscence. They can become such if they are completely unlimited and “when they are not united with love and therefore have no definite object.”137 Is it true that all people have this desire to take the whole into themselves but with no object in mind nor love? This, again, sounds more like a rather rare pathological state than a universal problem of all humans. But then Tillich adds that this desire is to encompass the whole by oneself “without God.” Here again he is talking in very theistic, personal terms, which he has denied have any meaning. If “God” is “being-itself,” how could anything be experienced “without God” or without being being involved? Can one really turn one’s back on “God” if “God” is the “source of being” or refuse to include or share one’s sex object with “God”? Tillich’s mixture of symbols and concepts is confusing at best. If Tillich presumes a universal estrangement based on these three possible relations with God, he has presumed too much—not from an ontology but from his unique Christological presuppositions. There is no indication that it is even probable that these three dispositions are universal in humanity. Nor can one presume Jesus was not estranged in these three ways unless one has tremendous detail about how Jesus talked, acted, and thought. But how could one know these things?138 Transforming “New Being” Based Only on Analogia Imaginis On the subject of Jesus and “unbelief,” Tillich is sure that Jesus never removed his personal center from the divine center, that even in his Crucifixion, as he feels forsaken by God, he nevertheless turns to and cries out to God.139 On the subject of “hubris,” Tillich cites the Caesarea Philippi confession by Peter, that Jesus is the Christ, to which Jesus quickly adds that he is about to

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suffer a violent death, which is proof that he is finite. Or, as Tillich defined “hubris” as desiring to be “God,” is that what Jesus’s reply meant, that he not only was not God but neither even had the desire to be God? To this Tillich adds the kenotic Christology of Phil. 2, in which Paul combines “the divine form of the transcendent Christ with the acceptance of the form of a servant.” Finally Tillich adds that in the Fourth Gospel Jesus is reported as having said that those who believe in him do not believe in him but rather in God who sent him.140 Do these Christological formulations actually have anything to do with the real Jesus? So Jesus did not think of himself as divine; then what was the “unity” with God that Tillich thinks Jesus was so intent to keep intact? Then, on the issue of “concupiscence, Tillich refers to the tradition of Jesus’s “temptations by Satan,” insisting that he resisted exercising his unlimited divine power for himself.141 In general, “regeneration” or being a “new creature” means that faith replaces unbelief, surrender supersedes hubris, and love takes over in place of concupiscence.142 Thus Jesus was not “estranged” in these areas even if he suffered from the “estrangement” of others. But we have already shown the fallacy of thinking that these were universal categories of estrangement. To speak of what one is painting as real life by illustrating it with the myth of Jesus’s temptations by Satan is simply a utilization of literal pictures that Tillich himself ridiculed endlessly. However, in volume 1, as Tillich described finitude or “essence,” he enumerated the “ontological categories” of time, space, causality, and substance and the three ontological polarities of individualization/participation, form/ dynamics, and freedom/destiny. These are polar opposites that depend upon each other to exist, whereas absolute opposites involve a “zero-sum” relationship, in which enhancement for one side deprives the other. “Finitude” is essential, whereas “existence” is the absence of the essential. Finitude itself is not complete but can be answered only by the “being” of “God.” Thus Tillich is willing to admit Jesus’s finitude but does not see it as searching for or lacking the “answer” of “God.” He concedes that Jesus could have experienced certain elements of finitude such as “anxiety,” since it is a natural disposition from one’s awareness of being finite, of facing death, and of losing those four “categories.” But “anxiety” is natural and has nothing to do with “estranged existence,” and, if anxiety is not resolved, the prospect of finitude’s end or death leads only to “despair” over guilt—which Jesus certainly never experienced. In general, Tillich leaves the “categories” behind, giving a brief note on one of the ontological polarities, the one of freedom/destiny. Since his presupposition throughout the Christology was that Jesus had complete unity with God, even to the point of dying to retain that unity, one would have expected Tillich to say that these polar opposites were kept in complete balance,

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which he does. But he goes further, explaining that one’s freedom is “imbedded in his destiny. Freedom without destiny is mere contingency, and destiny without freedom is mere necessity.”143 So in Jesus, freedom and destiny are united such that there is neither necessity nor contingency. To reinforce this, Tillich asserts that human freedom and destiny is the same for all humans in the fact that the divine destiny is determined by divine creativity but through human self-determination. He goes so far to say the “Fall” of humans was not an individual decision but God’s divine creativity, just as the appearance of Christ was not an individual decision but God’s divine creativity. Both are “determined by” divine creativity but “through” the decisions of the individual.144 But if divine creativity had already decided or created something, how would individual human decisions have any effect? That is, what causal power lies in either side? Or is Tillich saying that they are inseparable? But if they are inseparable, why does he separate them? One might have anticipated that he would have felt a need to address Hegel’s understanding of the polarity of dynamics/form, which seemed to be overbalanced by Jesus’s authoritarian or “positive” teaching, since the early church was too impressed by the form and engaged in an apotheosis. But Tillich did not discuss this or the other polarity of individualization/participation. The latter would have required that he give specific examples of Jesus’s interaction with people, and he did not see that as important. So Jesus saves humanity without leaving any significant examples of his actual interaction with humans? That brings us back to that third element in the section above: Tillich’s refusal to include estrangement between humans as a significant element in analyzing either estrangement or Christology. One has a hard time seeing that in the biblical image of New Being in Jesus as the Christ, because most of the pericopes in the Gospels involve Jesus discussing relations between humans. That biblical picture in fact takes us back to the second issue of the earlier section—Tillich’s presumption of the singular, united, if not uniform picture of New Being in Jesus. That simply ignores reality in the text, which raises the question of the relation of the whole text to Tillich’s idea of the uniform picture. Regarding the difference Tillich draws between the presence of New Being and mere “expressions” of New Being, one answer about this distinction probably rests in his insistence that “analogy of being” is used only as a way of speaking about God, whereas analogia imaginis is an acknowledgement that this image or picture itself “mediates the transforming power of the New Being.”145 It also enables one to insist that the image is singular, unlike any analogy of being. But for some reason, this analogy of image transcends merely providing information to cognition as a form of “revelation” and becomes a transforming

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instrument beyond cognition or mere revelation. Tillich does not see “revelation” as the conveying of information—not even if through analogia entis. That which is “revealed” is only the power and abyss beyond all thinking and acting. So “revelation” is not “information,” ideas, or even commands. But without cognitive or reflective content, how would analogia entis enable one to “speak” about God—which Tillich says it does? Does the “analogy of being” also itself have transforming power, or is the analogy only a cognitive vehicle by which the image, as transforming power, functions, which would be more appropriately the noninformational “speaking about God” accomplished via the analogy of being? This is unclear. Tillich insists, on the one hand, that every moment in the life of Jesus is determined by God; that is, he is totally “transparent” to God, in all his words, deeds, and sufferings, as they are all expressions of his being.146 Yet he insists that the actual concrete details are not guaranteed by faith as empirically factual147; they are only an “adequate expression” of the transforming power of the New Being in Jesus, and that is all that faith can guarantee about the picture of Jesus.148 So now the “factual” cannot be guaranteed, while the “actual” can, which opposite we earlier noted, such that he saw them as inseparable? “Expressions” of New Being are therefore evidently not empirical, yet Tillich does speak of expressions of estranged being as being quite empirically perceptible as he writes of Jesus’s utterances, words, deeds, and sufferings, which he is sure are not estranged. If one knows from these perceptions that Jesus was not estranged, then the details of these perceptions are crucial. They do not operate simply in the estranged person’s mind, as their mind reads what is in the mind of Jesus, but rather by Jesus manifesting the New Being by actual or empirically perceived words or actions. So why was “analogy of being” too strong an analogy, even though Tillich uses “New Being” rather than “New Image,” and even though the “New Being” itself is spoken of by Tillich as “paradox,” or that which is beyond appearances or beyond that which we expect in our normal living? It cannot be a “revelation” in which nothing is revealed unless it is only a revelation of one’s own faith. Is it because Tillich assumed “estrangement” as the universal condition of existence in order to make Christ and “New Being” necessary such that any talk of essence requires only an analogy of image rather than analogy of being? That cannot be, since he discussed its significance for describing the meaning of essence and of God. Is it instead the fact that analogy of being would prove too much by making the image of New Being in Jesus “credible” or “reasonable,” which borders on “works righteousness” for Tillich, whereas analogy of image is a valid analogy but operates only for the person who has been “transformed” by the image, while for all others it remains invalid? This is getting closer to the truth for Tillich.

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So its transforming power remains entirely the work of God? That corresponds to Tillich’s statement that “No special trait of this picture can be verified with certainty.” As he reiterates, “Faith includes certitude about its own foundation—for example, an event in history which has transformed history—for the faithful. But faith does not include historical knowledge about the way in which this event took place.”149 Certitude is for the “faithful.” But how can an “event in history” be real only for the faithful but without any historical details that make it verifiable without being wholly subjective? Has it been lifted completely out of history? Or is Tillich saying that it is still in history but only the “faithful” can perceive it and historians cannot? Another reason Tillich preferred to use analogia imaginis rather than analogia entis for his Christology is that the “analogy of image” allows Tillich to fill the picture of New Being with that which is unavailable to mere “essence,” which is used in a “analogy of being” approach, since from his sketch of essential being one did not discover any transcending of the categories of finitude or any conquering of the estranged conditions of existence that are the nature of his sketch of “New Being.” For example, Saint Paul seems to think the work of Jesus as the Christ was in dying for humanity and being raised from that death, the latter of which conquers the greatest enemy of humanity, death (1 Cor. 15). But New Being is defined as being that manifests no unbelief, hubris, or concupiscence with the greatest danger lying in any threat to “God” as the ultimate power of being. “Death,” for Tillich, is not discussed under “estranged existence” as one would expect from reading Paul’s Roman Letter but only within his analysis of “essence,” from which the natural response is universal anxiety; but at least Tillich also does not believe, as did Paul, that death is the “enemy” conquered by Christ. So for Tillich the “paradox” of New Being in Jesus as the Christ is not that Jesus overcame death but only that in the minds of those who have faith in him there was the subjective conviction that he and his New Being were somehow still present with them. That is the meaning of the “Resurrection.” The paradox of Jesus as the Christ, as Tillich paints it, is rather quite limited to these elements of estrangement (unbelief, hubris, and concupiscence), which were never (seen?) in his life. But the detailed ontology of volume 1 did not involve these paradoxa, since its concern was only to abstractly sketch the “essence” of being human. And Tillich insists that “existence” literally means that one is “outside” one’s essence; that’s the “ex” in the word. Since New Being is therefore defined as essence with no unrealized potential combined with existence that is not estranged, then there is no possibility of using an analogy of being either in existence or in essence—simply because he sees existence as always estranged for and by all humans and since “essence” presents only alleged “infinite” unrealized potential for humans.

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This is quite significant. For Tillich, Jesus as the Christ (therefore also God) can have no unrealized potential, and neither can Jesus have been responsible for any estrangement. Tillich offers no proof; no ontology can supply a basis for an acceptable analogy of being when it comes to Christology—nothing except his finitude. But for Tillich the latter is sufficient. The “image” of New Being in the biblical picture of Jesus as the Christ ties essence and existence together as a “paradox.” Then is “paradox” contrary to essence or to existence? Which of the two’s (essence or existence) normal picture or basis of expectations are transcended? Of course both essence and existence involve “being” or ontology and so should invoke an analogy of being. Tillich insists that “paradox” is not any more illogical than dialectic reasoning. It is a form of speech or a claim that does not destroy the opinions of finite reason but transcends normal expectations or supersedes finite reason.150 Finally, Tillich admits, there is only one great paradox of the Christian faith, which is simply the appearance of that which conquers existence under the conditions of existence. Incarnation, redemption, and “forensic justification” are “implied” in this paradoxical event. It breaks into the context of experience, but it cannot be derived from it. The acceptance of this paradox is not the acceptance of the absurd but the state of being grasped by the power of that which breaks into our experience from above.151 What does it mean that something “breaks into our experience from above?” To simply say the paradox is not “absurd” does not guarantee that it is not. Why is it not? How does one distinguish being “grasped by the power . . . from above” from pure superstition, folk tales, and mythology? How would “paradox” defend non-Christian religions on an equal basis? Tillich insists that the problem comes only when people see the paradox as genuine contradictory elements and so they think they are asked to “accept senseless combinations of words as divine wisdom.” But, he argues, “Christianity does not demand such intellectual ‘good works’ from anyone, just as it does not ask artificial ‘works’ of practical asceticism.”152 It is interesting that he here speaks again of the futile attempts of “self-salvation,” listing two of the four types (intellectual and ascetic) that he explains elsewhere. It is also not an accident that in his discussion of the “paradox” of the Christian faith he often speaks of the personal counterpart, Luther’s great truth of simul peccator et justus.153 Tillich dislikes the traditional idea of Jesus’s “sinlessness,” since he prefers to avoid any term that might lead people to think of “sins” in the plural, as moral lapses in human relations. But he injects into the biblical image considerations that were never raised, such as the state of estrangement that humans experience even prior to actually sinning. Tillich insists that Jesus never was really even tempted to sin, never even had a “desire to sin” or “aroused free-

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dom.”154 Even what “desire” Jesus had was not a desire to yield to temptation but only a desire that always includes God within it rather than being a desire to experience the finite without God.155 And here Tillich further defines “concupiscence” as wanting to have the whole or the finite “without God” or with the finite being “alongside” rather than “within” God or the infinite. What does “alongside” mean here? How he can determine what Jesus was thinking? Either Tillich’s Christ ends up completely Docetic, as Schleiermacher’s and Hegel’s, or else the whole picture of “estrangement” is skewed beyond ontological and historical credibility. The “New Being” as a Single, Uniform Image? Tillich insisted that the “New Being” had to be real, or the biblical image would have shown “aspects of estrangement” in the image.156 Does this mean people cannot think, speak, or write of a perfection that they have never seen or experienced? No, he cannot be meaning anything so illogical. Would the authors and editors have failed to detect what the “New Being” could entail and so simply made mistakes in their depictions since they had no reality upon which to check their descriptions? Or would a sign of “estrangement” have been Jesus’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane to escape death? There certainly seems to be a huge separation between Jesus and God at that time or when, hanging from the Cross, he accused God of having “forsaken” him. That sounds like reneging on what the Apostle Paul called the divine plan hidden for ages, to bring the Gentiles into the fold of God’s people. Why would this itself not indicate “unbelief”? Would any estrangement not have been seen in any of Jesus’s terrible stigmatizing of his Jewish opponents or in his typical ethnic bias against Gentiles? Or in his instructions to his apostles to spread the good news but only among those of the “house of Israel” (Matt. 10)? Or would not his authoritarian arrogance and pride have created estrangement? Or his belittling and name-calling of his opponents in the Gospel of John? Was that not estrangement? What about his ethnic and racist treatment of the Syrophoenecian woman, comparing her to a dog? No estrangement? His intent to stir others to kill him? No, none of this. For Tillich, relations between Jesus and any other people are not the “estrangement” that is destructive. It is only estrangement from God that is important to Tillich. Tillich reiterates that the image of Jesus is simply that, although he experienced fully the estrangement of existence that others had created, he was responsible for none of it. But that generalization really seems a radical contradiction of the way that even the various authors or redactors of the “Gospel” material drew their narratives about Jesus. Nevertheless, Tillich is sure there are no signs of Jesus’s estrangement even within Jesus’s calculated irritations of the authorities so as to incur their

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wrath and finally the death these others inflicted on him. Even that was not “ethical guilt” for Jesus but only for his murderers, the Jews, according to Tillich. For Jesus that was only “tragic guilt,” which means supposedly that he simply accepted his fate or destiny157; and though he was the victim of existential estrangement, he did not produce it. Tillich is sure that no guilt affected his relation with God. If any human in our culture intentionally irritated the government authorities by posing to be a real threat to peace and order to the point that they killed the person, would Tillich really say that the person was not in any way responsible for what happened? How does Tillich decide that this action of Jesus in making his enemies guilty did not “produce estrangement” or “split his personal center”? Can he mean only that Jesus was victim and morally innocent—just miscalculated if he thought God would bring in the Kingdom if he just forced their hand to kill him? Or was it only God who killed Jesus, just the strength of “God’s will” to “save” the elect and that Jesus really feared dying? But, in any case, was there no moral guilt for Jesus? Why was the guilt of the Jewish authorities a moral guilt but Jesus’s was only “tragic guilt”? They both were convinced that they were doing the thing God wanted of them. If Saint Paul and the author of Acts are right that God had planned for Jesus to die to save humanity, then Tillich should have applauded the Jewish rulers who acceded to Jesus’s Crucifixion, assisting God in his plan. Further, Tillich believed that the ultimate criterion for a religious symbol is that its truth and certainty lie in the fact that it can accommodate both a yes and no judgment against it. Is there no moral guilt for Jesus simply because one has already decided that he is Son of God and that this death was God’s grace for humanity so it is good that Jesus volunteered himself for it? Then there should be no moral guilt for those who demanded his Crucifixion either. But Tillich does not go that far. Neither Jesus’s rejection by the people nor the conflicting pictures between the Gospels—or between the Gospels and Paul or between the image in the two testaments158—affect the “substance” of Tillich’s single picture of Jesus’s unity with God. Nor do marks of his finitude prove any estrangement—that is, his ancient conception of the universe, his judgments about men, his interpretation of his historical situation, or his eschatological imagination.159 FRAGMENTARY TRANSFORMATION WITHIN AMBIGUOUS LIFE: PARADOX TO REALITY Tillich states that it can be definitely asserted that through this picture the New Being “has power to transform those who are transformed by it.”160

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The last half of this final sentence is very unique, making nonsense of what might have said something. It is like saying, “That medicine has power to heal anyone who happens to be healed by it.” Is this phrase a mere accident or redundancy, or is there an awareness implicit here that the connection or power of the analogy is so tenuous without the actual person available behind the image, and so dissimilar from any analogy between the image and the present believer that one simply has to say “It works if it works”? Could that not be said about anything? Fragmentary Transformation by “New Being” As already stated, the extent of the “transformation” is only “fragmentary” and only in “principle and power,” though it is never culminated—never realized. It turns out be more of a transformation into having faith in an “image,” which means faith in prospects if I view the image correctly, which means faith in faith. It hinges on accepting oneself “as is” rather than thinking one can improve oneself or should be more ethical or should be more righteous. All that is the “work righteousness” or invalid attempts at “self-salvation” of which Tillich often warns his readers. Jesus’s “New Being” was characterized as “paradox” because it transcended finite reason and expectations; to the contrary, however, the Christian disciple’s “New Being” is nothing like “paradox” but only “transformation,” which is never completed within one’s finite life. If one is assured that the Spiritual Presence has given one “conquering” power of “New Being” coming from this biblical image and the reality behind it, then Tillich assures us that it does not mean one will experience some life after death or ever be anything but both saint and sinner. Within our finite existence, we live in continual ambiguity, since whenever the Spiritual Presence is realized in something “concrete,” it immediately becomes ambiguous. This means that life is a process and that any finite form it takes contains ambiguity and so is not the “New Being.” The image of Jesus was of New Being but contained no ambiguity; it was fully realized essentialization, as Tillich views it. While eschatological images seem to promise ultimate beatitude, Tillich is sure that they are not speaking of some continuing life after death. Either such a postdeath image would have to include continual process, challenges, and a “continual overcoming” to be “life” as we know it, or else one simply somehow transcends everything linear as one experiences the “eternal now” even as a historically existing human but still always both saint and sinner. This self-transcendence of contingency is totally present, completely Spiritual, and not in any way some literal fulfillment of those mythical-poetic eschatological images, as Tillich sees them. The “eternal now” or the “eternal life” is

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having “faith,” is knowing that one will never be more saint than sinner but that one is already “accepted” by God. But one must remember that “God” is not a person or a being, so how could “God” “accept” anyone by Tillich’s understanding? When people were made to look stupid by asking how one could pray to “being-itself” and Tillich’s answer was that “being-itself” is a concept and so one prays only to “God,” which is the symbol corresponding to that concept, the question is not resolved, since one hardly can pray to a “symbol,” just as a “symbol” could hardly “accept” one. This obfuscation results from trying too hard to make reasonable basic claims that merged history with myth and finitude with Infinity, claims that are based on something other than reality or reason. This results in an asymmetrical picture of the relation of being and nothing, as Masao Abe saw, with an unjustified preference given by Tillich to “being,” which we will further elaborate later. For Tillich, the split between essence and estranged existence in life is never wholly overcome, and so “essentialization” is realized only to the degree that one’s whole life process realizes it. And since one will never be perfect but will always be both saint and sinner, only a transcendence into the eternal dimension within one’s temporal contingency is the answer. He insists that “eternity is neither timeless identity nor permanent change, as the latter occurs in the temporal process. Time and change are present in the depth of Eternal Life, but they are contained within the eternal unity of the Divine Life.”161 What can this “transcendence” into the eternal dimension within one’s time possibly mean unless it is just an acceptance that one has been accepted by God, that one in a sense lives “in the world but not of the world,” that such is the extent of one’s infinite destiny? I think it is not an accident that Tillich’s most sensitive interpreter, Scharlemann, formulated his ultimate Christology using the same words, of being on one’s own “in the world but not of the world.” While this may resolve some questions about Christology, it certainly negates all concern for ethics. One has transcended both the historical data about Jesus just as one has transcended all historical data or responsibility for this world in which we live. This corresponds to his beginning discussion of how Christian theology must assume a certain “mystical” experience and therefore immediacy to which the theologian is committed.162 Yet Tillich accepts and repeats strongly Hegel’s expression that only Spirit can recognize Spirit, which means that no spiritual meaning would be available to a person if the person did not have God’s Spirit. So it seems to form a vicious circle, even though Tillich insists the “theological circle” is not vicious.163 Truthfully, even for Christology, if we set aside any concern for ethics, for Tillich, the “personal life” “behind” the “image” “guaranteed” by faith

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is only a vague projection backward from the personal life of the present person having faith, who claims to have experienced “New Being.” But there is nothing guaranteed of any earlier person. Not even the person’s name. Of course no historical details are needed with such a hollow claim. If I have been “transformed” into a state of “faith” by viewing the image with “faith,” then whatever stands behind that image is not as important as my own faith (Tillich) or spirit (Hegel). As Tillich said in a passage quoted earlier, the only thing faith guarantees is the “ultimacy” of ultimate concern, nothing else— which is to say that “faith guarantees faith” or that “faith guarantees itself,” not some object or event that I mistakenly think, for it entails no historical claim even though Tillich insists that it was a unique historical event with infinite meaning. But it cannot be without details or “facticity.” That, of course, creates a huge problem, since it completely contradicts Tillich’s earlier distinction between “nonhistorical” and “historical” understanding of New Being, making the Christian experience of “New Being” more closely aligned with Brahmanism, Buddhism, and the old Greek religions and not at all with those who saw New Being in a “historical” manner—Judaism, the religions of Ancient Persia, and Islam. Tillich’s quest for “certainty” of faith, for “immediacy” of faith, obliterated the significance of any historical items or of all historical claims. Instead, one’s potential infinity lies at hand, and “faith” is only the immediacy of one’s being, a “transformation” into a state of “faith” whereby one can have certainty that one has been transformed into a state of faith. Thus, just as the primary paradox of the Christian faith is that Jesus conquered estranged existence while being within it, so the justification by faith is the result that means “God declares him who is unjust to be just. The paradox simul justus, simul peccator points to this unconditional divine declaration.”164 Tillich then relates it once again to the question of “New Being”: Transcendent justice does not overcome evil, and neither does it actually punish evil; it merely eliminates people’s hubris or human attempts at selfsalvation or self-sufficiency. If there is any overriding maxim determinative of Tillich’s theology and Christology, it is his Pauline/Lutheran opposition to works righteousness, which determines that one cannot decide on the basis of historical evidence the claim made about Jesus, since that would be an intellectual attempt at self-salvation and justification or sanctification; neither one can actually involve a radical improvement of one’s character or morals, since that too would entice the person to take some credit himself and so would also be a form of “self-salvation.”165 Therefore Tillich finds the expression simul justus et peccator—“always (or simultaneously) saint and sinner”—to be the key to the whole.166 Yet if there is any part of one’s being in one’s “state of faith” that is similar to the New Being in the biblical picture of Jesus, then there should be some

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use for some form of an analogy of being rather than merely an analogy of image. But there truly is not. Is it simply Tillich’s presupposition—that all humans estrange themselves from God by their very opting to actualize their freedom. Yet Tillich is somehow sure that in Jesus’s actualizing of his freedom he was the lone exception in the history of the world. How does one know that? That, combined with Tillich’s conviction that the person of faith remains always simultaneously saint and sinner and is only pronounced righteous, combines to create the cleavage that forces Tillich to opt for only an analogy of image. But it also makes either analogy problematic.167 For Tillich there simply remains no way in which this nature of humans can be found in Jesus, either by analogy of being or by mere analogy of image. If there were, Tillich is sure he would not have been the bearer of New Being. Unlike Schleiermacher, Tillich cannot visualize Jesus as Example and Archetype. Jesus is simply not a sinner but a very strange combination of unestranged existence and fully realized infinite essence. Yet by “actual life” described in volume 3 (and the other two volumes being only “abstractions”), Jesus the Christ appears neither ever “actually” living nor “existing.” This means that it is simply an Idea or Ideal, not human reality. The Lutheran motto of “simultaneously saint and sinner” and the rigid Augustinian categories have no bridge on which an analogy can span this chasm between the nature of all humans vis-à-vis the nature of Jesus. If this is what is needed to create faith, it is little wonder that the historical Jesus is simply not needed for the Christian faith. Even if Tillich did not say that explicitly, that is the net result. The search for the “historical Jesus” continues without these theologians; the “Christ of faith” seems to have no relation to Jesus at all—except symbolical. Transformation or Acceptance of Reality: Simul Justus et Peccator? If it ends up not being a historical person who creates the image of New Being but rather my participation in New Being that corroborates this picture of New Being (in the historical Jesus, which makes it credible that he, as a historical figure, is the Christ, which is the very heart of the issue of this book), then what does “New Being” signify, and where do I point in my own life to see those characteristics used in that “image” to describe New Being in Jesus? Am I able to point to less unbelief in my present life of faith, less hubris, less concupiscence? Even with these reduced to a mere definition of one’s relation only with God rather than involving any other people, does that enable one to ascertain a real change in one’s life? If other people no longer really count, such that one does not have to struggle with “conscience,” as did Kant, and turn up empty there, since one could not be sure of sufficient improvement

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to be a real approximation with the Ideal, is it really different with “unbelief” and “hubris” and “concupiscence”? Or are there not other primary forms of human estrangement or alienation from each other than should be explored? Or is the actual location of the analogy only the fact that my faith is an acceptance of the faith image provided me, from which I can be more accepting of myself without any transformation at all? We have already touched on both the idea of “transformation” and simul justus et peccator. Unless one of the two is eliminated, the only transformation is into the state of faith as my acceptance of God accepting me, totally by God’s will, depending upon nothing I can do or think. That is a strange use of the word “transformation.” A closer look will verify the problem here in Tillich, which really means that no “corroboration” occurs except that I corroborate my present existence as is, which I can now accept. In his Christological analysis Tillich writes, “In the paradoxical formula, simul peccator, simul justus, which is the core of the Lutheran revolution, the in-spite-of character is decisive for the whole Christian message as salvation from despair about one’s guilt . . . [So because of] the absence of any human contribution . . . Melanchthon formulated the “forensic” doctrine of Justification . . . [in which God is] a judge who releases a guilty one in spite of his guilt, simply because he decides to do so.”168 However, this is only the objective side, and Tillich insists the subjective side is just as important, as he continues, “Indeed, there is nothing in man which enables God to accept him. But man must accept just this. He must accept that he is accepted; he must accept acceptance.”169 This occurs when one is drawn into the “power of the New Being in Christ, which makes faith possible; that it is the state of unity between God and man, no matter how fragmentarily realized. Accepting that one is accepted is the paradox of salvation without which there would be no salvation but only despair.”170 In volume 3, in his analysis of the Spiritual Presence Tillich insists that this interpretation of “justification by grace through faith” is the “Protestant principle,” which specifies that “in relation to God, God alone can act and that no human claim, especially no religious claim, no intellectual or moral or devotional ‘work,’ can reunite us with him.”171 Faith is not the cause of the justification but rather only the “receiving act,” “and this act is itself a gift of grace.”172 All one can do is “accept” the fact that one is accepted by God even though one is unacceptable. What provides the certainty that the person has been forgiven lies in the “divine act in which God declares him who is unjust to be just. The paradox simul justus, simul peccator points to this unconditional divine declaration.”173 Tillich insists that this does not mean that God accepts a person because they are half-moral or half-sinner. In fact, Tillich is sure God “rejects” any human claim of “half-goodness” or more, and the forensic justification “turns the eyes of man” away from the

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bad and good in himself and turns them upon the “divine goodness,” which is completely given to a person through grace.174 If the Spiritual Presence accomplishes all this, and not humans, then why does it remain humanity’s “ultimate concern”? It’s all taken care of. The “transformation” is proof of the power of the image of New Being in Jesus as the Christ, yet one must not hope for any changes but simply accept being totally justified by God’s grace, a state in which one quits being concerned about one’s good or evil. So, for example, Tillich explains his “analogy of image” in the following emphasis that the “ picture of New Being has power to transform those who are transformed by it. This implies that there is an analogia imaginis—namely, an analogy between the picture and actual personal life from which it has arisen.”175 The language gets confusing. What Tillich said earlier that was guaranteed is that the transformed person was transformed by the image. That was pointing to the present believer. Yet here he says the guarantee is only the analogy of the image—that is, it corresponds to the “life from which it has arisen” (i.e., “Jesus”). But how could that be, since he is not speaking of Jesus experiencing some transformation? If the analogy is simply between the “picture” and the “life from which it has arisen,” then the idea of “transformation” serves no purpose whatever. A reader either believes the picture to have its corresponding analogous reality behind it, or they don’t. But nothing is “corroborated” about any person prior to the image; no analogy can be tested. Again Tillich repeats the same confusion. “Faith,” he writes, “cannot even guarantee the name ‘Jesus’ in respect to him who was the Christ. It must leave that to the incertitudes of our historical knowledge. But faith does guarantee the factual transformation of reality in that personal life which the New Testament expresses in its picture of Jesus as the Christ.”176 Whose “personal life” is guaranteed as transformed? How was Jesus factually transformed, what would it mean, and how would people today know? Unlike Schleiermacher, Tillich makes no connection between original disciples’ experience and present disciples’ experience and shows no “transformation” that guarantees anything, no concern for any estrangement or alienation between humans, but only their “separation from God” in his insistence that one should speak of sin in only the singular since it is only the estrangement from God that is the issue. Since no transformation occurs in subsequent disciples over time because the process of essentialization remains within history always fragmentary, and the eschatological pictures of essentialization are not concerned with history but with transcending contingency into eternity while even they keep the process of continual “overcoming” in their poetic pictures, all one can say is that life does not change. The certainty of this “transformation” never being

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completed is parallel to Tillich’s description of “final revelation” and “salvation,” as he writes that “Revelation as it is received in man living under the conditions of existence is always fragmentary; so is salvation. Revelation and salvation are final, complete, and unchangeable with respect to the revealing and saving event; they are preliminary, fragmentary, and changeable with respect to the persons who receive revelatory truth and saving power.”177 He says the “revelation” therefore means that “the center of his personality is transformed.” But what does this mean? Nothing for the individual, since the meaning if found only in the “paradoxa” of revelation, which is “beyond” time and space and fragmentariness; that is, “fulfillment” is in the “universal.” This means that “ultimate revelation and ultimate salvation” are united, that “God is everything for everything.”178 Thus is the difference, then, not based on a time frame, that one is within time and the other beyond time, but, rather, is one based on an event external to the believer and the other on the believer’s own personal experience? Yet the “event” or that revelation, Tillich insisted, necessitated both the external event of Jesus being the Christ and the internal or personal event of one’s receiving him as the Christ. So it cannot be both ways. The believer’s experience remaining “always saint and sinner” does not prove a “Christ” as reality but only as a possible Ideal that never had any embodiment—certainly not enough power to “transform” the believer’s life. Mere “acceptance” of that grace through faith does not transform into New Being that in any way shows the traits of the “New Being” Tillich sketched for Jesus as the Christ. There is simply no “corroboration” of what is spoken about that Jesus by what any present believer experiences. The uniqueness of the “New Being” that appeared in the biblical picture of Jesus as the Christ stands in tension with the idea of God as “Spirit” or “Spiritual Presence” that dominates the third volume of Tillich’s system. The Spiritual Presence takes the person of faith into itself by “love” or agape. Tillich says this involves self-integration, self-creativity, and self-transcendence. Like Schleiermacher, Tillich finally has to admit that the Spirit, as God, is always present in every aspect of being and therefore has always been present in history. The ancient prophets of Israel are evidence of this in the past. But Tillich says the fullest revelation of Spirit came with the “center of history,” the single concrete act of Jesus as the Christ, at the most unique kairos, and the Absolute Spirit or Spiritual Presence has remained fully revealed since.179 Tillich is sure that this is attested in the early church in its Spirit Christology, which was later modified into a Logos Christology, such that Spirit can be realized as the power structured by logos rather than simply wildly frenetic or unreasonable. But “New Being” seems to separate Christianity from earlier Judaism as well as from all other religions as well as secular pursuits of the flourishing life. How does he deal with that apparent exclusiveness?

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THE CRITERION OF RELIGIOUS SYMBOLS AND TRUTH: THE DOUBLE NEGATIVE Tillich emphasized that the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ are the two interdependent central symbols of the Christian faith, the first being primarily historical and secondarily symbolical and the latter being primarily symbolical and secondarily historical. Nevertheless, Tillich viewed the symbol of the Cross of Christ as the ultimate symbol, as the critique and criterion of all religious symbols, as well as the truth of faith.180 Whereas reason reaches its limits in attempting to make assessments of theological assertions—whether, as Scharlemann points out, in reflection as well as in reflexivity or, in Tillich’s contrast of faith’s truth, with the limited truth attained in science, philosophy, or history—only a religious symbol that provides the answer as reality while embracing both negative and positive assessments could provide an experience or participation in the truth or become the criterion of the truth of faith. On the surface, the latter sounds illogical, so we must explain. Scharlemann suggests that, in Tillich’s explanation of the criterion of the truth of faith and of all symbols, Tillich was able to do what Hegel did not— that is, not be a victim either to one’s single perspective or some alleged but unverifiable absolute perspective. One can accomplish the same purpose as having this absolute perspective, thereby escaping the historically contingent element in all thought if one can manifest a perspective that radically negates the perspective expressed in the systematic thought itself. In this case the perspective anticipates its negation by another perspective and thereby anticipates all possible perspectives. If such a point can be reached, Hegel’s insoluble problem is attacked from a different direction and no longer remains insoluble in principle; the whole can be known—not by positive construction but by anticipation of its negation.181 One must emphasize only “by anticipation of its negation.” Tillich saw in the symbol of the Cross of Christ the idea that Jesus’s unity with God was so essential and real that Jesus maintained it even in death—or, rather, maintained it even by dying. Tillich said Jesus sacrificed himself as Jesus to be himself as Christ.182 This “transparency” to God or this complete actualization of one’s essence by giving up one’s existence was, of course, the second “stage” of the Spirit becoming “Absolute Spirit” in Hegel. Tillich has followed the same schema of “negation of negation” in the sense of the finite itself coming originally from its infinite origin—that is, by negating or “emptying” its infinity in being finite—and then in its finite form, negating that (which was earlier a negation) to realize one’s infinity in its “absolute” form. The difference is simply that Tillich nowhere equated human con-

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sciousness with God’s, as did Hegel,183 who saw human consciousness as simply the self-consciousness of God. Tillich described much more the negative element in the “estrangement” of the finite from its infinite ground than did Hegel. But this double negation did describe to both Hegel and Tillich the process of thought going out of itself and returning to itself. It could be also seen in Tillich’s description of a religious symbol in general, both having ordinary attributes taken from actual life and having a transcendent dimension. This was apparent also in Tillich’s definition of “paradox,” so any event, person, symbol or even question one is asking could be seen as “paradoxical” in the sense of having both elements of ordinary life but a transcendent dimension. This simply returns us to Schleiermacher and Hegel’s idea of one’s awareness of the “infinite within the finite.” The presupposition is that, for Spirit to be absolute, it must be able to negate itself, thus limiting itself; but return to itself, now as absolute, having encompassed every possibility of being and not being, Tillich finds this very thing is manifest in the Crucifixion. In the event of his Crucifixion or the symbol of the Cross, Jesus actualized his free choice, to negate himself as Jesus, as finite, thereby showing that he is the Christ or the bearer of New Being, once again infinite. Only by the sacrifice of himself as Jesus was he able himself to be Christ or God. It corresponds completely with Tillich’s idea of “final revelation” in which the entity revealing itself would supersede the conflict between heteronomy and autonomy, which requires two elements. It must be totally transparent to its own ground of being, and it must sacrifice itself as the medium of the revelation. The first prevents autonomous reason from losing its depth or becoming demonic—that is, promising what it cannot deliver. The second element of self-sacrifice of the medium prevents heteronomous reason from overpowering rational autonomy, and so the finite does not prevail over the infinite.184 The “transparency” Tillich is touting in his Christology is of the “medium” or Jesus, that one can see through all the particulars of Jesus the “depth” or “ground of being” beyond. This means that the “experience of truth” was possible within any confrontation with Jesus during his life but reaches its culmination and certainty in his willing self-sacrifice. Tillich mentions “depth” here, but it is not clear how he really thinks autonomy and heteronomy are surmounted or prevented by one merely seeing through the medium, since “depth” supplies nothing particular to say or think or respond to—not unless “depth” simply means dislodging the particular, whether it is autos or heteros. In concluding his Dynamics of Faith, Tillich writes, “The criterion of the truth of faith, therefore, is that it implies an element of self-negation. That symbol is most adequate which expresses not only the ultimate but also

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its own lack of ultimacy. Christianity expresses itself in such a symbol in contrast to all other religions, namely, in the Cross of the Christ. Jesus could not have been the Christ without sacrificing himself as Jesus to himself as the Christ.”185 By the Absolute’s or ultimate’s own relativization of itself in its finite form—that is, by its negation of its own temporarily acquired relativity or finitude as “Jesus”—its ultimacy is disclosed, his articulation of the general principle of the criterion within the first sentence. This showed to Scharlemann that the criterion was not simply read out of the Christian dogma or the “theological circle” that Tillich elaborates.186 It was a principle that anyone might agree with, not simply those who are Christian. But Tillich does not admit this, since he insists that this symbol is found only in Christianity “in contrast to all other religions.” In this sense, Tillich’s focus on that symbol which points to self-negation and transparency appears to be prefigured also in his earlier ideas of the “prophetic principle” or the “Protestant principle” or the definition of faith vis-à-vis idolatry, the “demonic,” and so forth. Idolatry is specified in the first part of the Ten Commandments as equating anything with God, whether a thing one makes or simply uses or worships. It is one thing to see “God” as the Creator of everything, or even as Tillich does, as “in everything” (pan-entheism), inasmuch as every aspect of being depends upon and lives by being or the source or power of being. Indeed, in this context Tillich says that any acceptance of Jesus not of Jesus as crucified is idolatry.187 This explains why Tillich, although he spoke of the Crucifixion and Resurrection as the two central and interdependent symbols of the faith, otherwise minimized if not ignored the Resurrection.188 Tillich thought it could quickly overpower the Crucifixion, and that, if it occurred, would be idolatry, since the Resurrection has no self-negating feature. This may be a clue that Tillich found in Kierkegaard’s idea of “contemporaneousness with Christ,” which to Kierkegaard meant moving away from the assumption of Christ’s glorification, back to the person who suffered even the Crucifixion. Of course, even the entity of the Cross and the symbol of the Crucifixion can become idolatry if one fails to see the Infinite beyond or the abyss rather than a single being or idea. But Tillich is adamant in his definition of “final revelation.” He states, “a revelation is final if it has the power of negating itself without losing itself. This paradox is based on the fact that every revelation is conditioned by the medium in and through which it appears. The question of the final revelation is the question of a medium of revelation which overcomes its own finite conditions by sacrificing them, and itself with them.”189

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But how does something negate itself “without losing itself”? What does “negating” mean, and what would be involved in not “losing oneself”?190 One cannot simply say that Jesus negated his finite being in order to return to being completely infinite, or where would one arrive at such a presupposed possibility of dying to become infinite? If the prospect had any credibility, why would it require any “courage”? Does Tillich mean that the final revelation involves no “conditioning” of the content of the revelation by the medium, nothing particular or historical or contingent coloring the revelation of one that is final? How would any New Being have any substance to it without particular content, and, if particular, how would it not speak of actual life, and, if of actual life, how would it escape “conditioning” the content? Tillich explains that, in order for the medium to sacrifice itself along with its finite conditions to be completely transparent to the mystery it reveals (i.e., God), it must sacrifice itself completely, which necessitates that it must first “possess” itself completely, which means that it (he—that is, Jesus) must be first “united with the ground of his being and meaning without separation and disruption.”191 Tillich is sure that this was the case in the image given us of Jesus as the Christ, again, without any historical verification. That being true, however, for Tillich the sacrifice itself releases the believer from everything finite within this image of Jesus, as the power of the sacrifice of the “medium” points only to its “depth” or God. This is the same liberation that Hegel thought he had achieved. Tillich says, “For us this means that in following him we are liberated from the authority of everything finite in him, from his special traditions, from his individual piety, from his rather conditioned worldview, from any legalistic understanding of his ethics. Only as the crucified is he ‘grace and truth’ and not law. Only as he who has sacrificed his flesh, that is, his historical existence, is he Spirit or New Creature. These are the paradoxa in which the criterion of final revelation becomes manifest.”192 This could be taken to mean that “This man is good to us only if he’s dead.” But that’s pretty cruel. But Tillich slides from the visible world quickly to the invisible or Spirit world. This causal statement about Jesus’s only being Spirit or a New Creature because he sacrificed his flesh and very existence is certainly residue from Hegel, who lived prior to science’s discovery that “spirit” or “mind” is simply the working of the fleshly or material brain. One does not become Spirit by physically dying, and neither is there some superior state of “soul” or “being” into which one is released with the death of the body. But Tillich, even in the mid-twentieth century, was still opposing what Hegel thought was too much of a materialist’s view of being human. This total release from everything finite in the “medium” (Jesus as Christ) meant for Tillich that the truth as the depth of being toward which this symbol

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points and in which it participates is affirmed even if one rejects the symbol of the Cross itself, since even it remains a particular or finite element, a historical event. That is, the symbol or medium is able to sacrifice even itself or be rejected completely but still retain the power of revealing God or ultimate concern or being the truth. The symbol is ultimate because it includes selfnegation. Does this mean that one can affirm the “depth” that Jesus as the Christ is revealing while one rejects the medium and even while one sees it as inadequate, blasphemous, or missing? So one comes to the realization that nothing in history matters after all—not even the question of whether one accepts a certain person as “final revelation” so long as one participates in the “depth” that is the “ground of being” or God. It is clearer when we realize that by “depth” or “abyss” Tillich is revealing his preference for the mystical thought and certainty of Jakob Böhme.193 Tillich says everything in the world is supported by God as the “ground of being” and will ultimately be reunited with it as one’s infinite destiny. But must the human response be to ignore everything or see through it only the infinite ground of being? Within time and history, Tillich admits, salvation and revelation are ambiguous. But since the whole of being and history is the movement of God as Spirit, it is really impossible for any being to separate itself from the “ground of being.” The Christian message “points to an ultimate salvation,” which Tillich is persuaded cannot be lost because it is “reunion with the ground of being” or “God,” which includes and empowers everything.194 As Tillich assures his readers, we came from the Infinite and will return to the Infinite. Salvation is experienced only by the “centered self,” Tillich avers, yet he contradictorily also states that salvation is not individual, for everyone and everything is so connected that the only salvation or fulfillment has to be universal.195 If that is the case, then why would one worry about the “demonic,” “unbelief,” “hubris,” “temptation,” “concupiscence,” “estrangement,” and the like? What would be the advantage of being religious or Christian if the destiny of everything is infinite self-transcendence or reunion with God? Yet Tillich continually reminds readers that human response will determine the degree of their essentialization or transformation by the Spiritual Presence, that one’s “destiny” determined by God needs to work through one’s own freedom. Does he imply human freedom can cooperate with or overpower God’s work? We need to examine his evaluation of the symbol of the Cross a bit more—his idea that it carries both the yes and the no within it. In fact, in his discussion of the Cross as the “criterion of the truth of faith,” Tillich not only says that it must embrace yes and no once but also immediately in the same context says that it is a matter of yes or no: “The only infallible truth of faith,

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the one in which the ultimate itself is unconditionally manifest, is that any truth of faith stands under a yes-or-no judgment.”196 Yet on the problem of either church or Scripture being treated as if it were “ultimate,” he concludes that the criterion of the truth of faith is valid as a criticism of all such demonic or idolatrous appropriations: “The criterion contains a Yes—it does not reject any truth of faith in whatever form it may appear in the history of faith—and it contains a No—it does not accept any truth of faith as ultimate except the one that no man possesses it.”197 But the yes or no is not the same thing as a yes and no. Further, what qualifies as a “truth of faith” unless it means simply one’s response to the ultimate (thus “ultimate concern”), which is always distinguishable from that which is ultimate, which one never possesses, which itself is the “criterion” of the truth of faith”—nothing more? He already insisted that the truth of faith within Christianity transcends all finitude, all specifics, all details, which means all content. So the truth is only “form” or “power,” never possessed, never cognitive, only existential if it transcends everything historical and cognitive.198 Yet Tillich says that the final revelation involves elimination of the “medium” and preservation of the “content.” If everything finite has been transcended, what “content” is left other than simply the negative he speaks of as “abyss,” which is beyond the polarity of being/nonbeing? But since nothing can be said of that except by symbols, the whole enterprise seems to have eliminated reason altogether rather than preserve it. It is no wonder that Scharlemann will add that the “truth” in this all-embracing symbol is simply one’s free response, nothing more—which we will discuss in the final chapter. If everything finite in the medium has been disposed of, what, then, is special about the “image” of this Jesus as the Christ? Tillich claims that Christianity alone has provided this final revelation, referring to it in The Courage to Be as a “double negation” or “negation of negation”: “We could not even think ‘being’ without a double negation; being must be thought as the negation of the negation of being. This is why we describe being best by the metaphor ‘power of being.’ Power is the possibility a being has to actualize itself against the resistance of other beings. If we speak of the power of being-itself we indicate that being affirms itself against nonbeing.”199 But a religious negation of negation to lay hold of real truth is even clearer in Buddhism, as Masao Abe responded to Scharlemann’s suggestion that the “double negation” is similar in Tillich and Mahayana Buddhism. Abe argued that they are not similar, since in the realization of Sunyata the negation of negation is symmetrical and so does not give priority to being and therefore does not get caught up in reification and contradiction, as Tillich does, which can be seen throughout his system and the conclusions that everything will be

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reunited with the being of God.200 In Buddhism, Sunyata, not as an idea but as ultimate reality, negates both being and nothingness (not “nonbeing,” as Tillich wants) as mutually contradictory elements, and so ultimate reality turns out to be “unobjectifiable nondualistic dynamism transcending yet embracing all existing conflict and opposition.” Its most accurate visual symbol is a painted empty circle vis-à-vis Tillich’s central symbol of the empty Cross, which cannot move beyond its particular implications.201 Because of the reification and priority that Tillich invests in being, his own criterion, which is not a truly “double negation,” seems to undermine the possibility of a historically oriented “New Being” in the crucified picture of Jesus as the Christ being “final,” “ultimate,” or the absolute criterion for religious symbols. Its affirmation of “New Being” within the totality of Jesus’s person and whole life, especially his Crucifixion, is not a negation but an aspirational, unhistorical affirmation. If Christianity and Tillich admitted that “God” (as “being-itself” or “source of being”) died on the Cross rather than just Jesus, then Christianity would be approximating a true “double negation.” Only Thomas Altizer and others realized this, but primarily in terms of only the Transcendent God dying to make room for the Immanent God or “Total Presence,” which is also not truly a “double negation.” Nevertheless, Tillich’s insight into the possibility of a religion moving beyond its exclusivism was extremely important, and something he planned to pursue as a new theology; but he died too soon. CONCLUSION: THE ABSOLUTE AS BEING’S “DEPTH”; EMBRACING OPPOSITES The question is whether the most central claim of Christianity—its Christological claim, which cannot be made certain by historical research—could perhaps be “corroborated” by the believer’s own state of mind or faith and thereby provide a base for a universal ethic. For Tillich, this meant taking more seriously than Schleiermacher and Hegel the real negatives in human existence—neither thinking one had overcome these negatives by one’s “imagination,” as Schleiermacher did in his Soliloquies, nor minimizing the negatives as if they were already in the process of being “reconciled” by being taken up into the Absolute Spirit, as Hegel did. Even so, Tillich assumed an inherent unity of the Infinite and finite or Divine and human, as Schleiermacher and Hegel had, a unity that was broken but would be restored by God’s doing, which revealed the position of priority that Tillich gave to “being” over “nothingness.”

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We have discovered that Tillich’s alleged “corroboration” of the Christological claims through “analogy of image” is not convincing, since (1) the corroboration he offers insists only on an “analogy of image” but fails to articulate the limits of either it or an analogy of being, (2) it confuses the ontology being used, especially in its disparate treatment of Jesus from all other humans, with regard to the alleged universal estrangement that Tillich thinks characterizes all human existence, (3) it builds a fence around Christology to prevent it from any encroachment based on data from any historical or real subject, through (a) an uncritical reading of the “biblical image” of “New Being” in Jesus the Christ, (b) the exaggeration of the limited categories of “estrangement,” and (c) the use of “paradox,” and (4) the corroboration he offers reduces the “corroborating” material (and therefore possibilities) to a linguistic symbol that allegedly connects one with the truth, in which one therefore stands whether one rejects or accepts the symbol, which reduces the “truth” to no verbal assertion but merely to one’s “being” and so corroborates nothing about an ancient person. Many of Tillich’s analyses of life are much more realistic, broader, better informed from other disciplines, and deeper than most earlier theology, even if his continual references to “ultimate,” “infinite,” “abyss,” “depth,” “paradox,” “vertical dimension,” and other terms prevent his mystically derived ideas from being credible to many people—especially to those outside his particular religious or “theological circle.” By his failure to limit his use of “paradox” to the definition he supplied, Tillich did not escape the viciousness of his theological circle, and “commitment” by itself is only part of the subjective side but says nothing about the object. His basic opposition to religious “literalism” is apropos, but (1) he uncritically utilized biblical ideas and narratives as if they were either historical fact or literal, and (2) it must be recognized that most religions are constructed on a literalism, and only when the literalism is seen as incredible to the degree that the doctrines find their appeal and power diminished do people feel the actual problem with literally interpreting religious scriptures. Tillich, ironically, criticized such rationalistic interpretations as the overkill of the reason in the Enlightenment. Modern scientific understandings have made such literalism antiquarian and unrealistic, but, despite Tillich’s awareness of modern art and psychotherapy, he did not speak much of modern science’s understandings that long ago made a literal interpretation incredible or even of his view of the relationship between “soul,” “spirit,” “body,” and “mind” by which he is still positing some invisible divine force (“spirit”) as the uniting, activating element of the physical body, as Hegel did. But neither does modern science work with the “unconditional” or “abyss” beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing or with

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the idea of humans having a possibility of transcending contingency (by any way other than dying); that is metaphysics—not science and not ontology. Tillich’s considerable grasp of the history of Western thought has pushed Christian theology onto some new roads, perhaps even crossroads. We recognize that, whatever our views of a human life and ethics, they must be anchored in a credible ontology and epistemology. We also understand the inherent problem of theism, of envisioning “God” as an object, as personal, of even locatable, what with our discovery of our exponentially expanding universe. Tillich’s reason for moving beyond such a theism—that it reduces humans to automatons without any freedom or autonomy—is still pertinent for theists to consider. But that is perhaps no more a problem than continuing to speak of “being-itself” and “God” in the singular, as if a discernible or at least determined entity in itself. That perhaps is conditioned upon Tillich’s singular idea of “religion” as “ultimate concern” that cannot be anything but singular, which is probably not any less absolute than Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. So we understand why Tillich thought he needed to explain how “God” is only the “God beyond the God of theism.” But it is unclear whether or not he resolved the problems. Tillich’s idea of the “correlation” between understanding and faith so that neither dictates to the other is reasonable although often overpowered by one side or the other, and many people simply opt for the validity of one side as opposed to the other. But neither side “answers” the problem or dead end of the other. So “being” neither “explains” “God” when the symbolical side runs out of symbols or symbolic meanings for “God,” nor vice versa, and so the “correlation” is not a system of some polar elucidation but, rather, simply a possible way of relating religion to real life, even though the concepts and symbols may or may not carry symbiotic or complementary or even compatible meanings. I find no problem in Tillich’s idea that the basic intended function of religions seems to be a “unification of polarities,” as long as this is applied only to “God”; but it becomes problematic when applied to Christology.202 It is probably clearer than Tillich’s definition of religion “as the self-transcendence of life under the dimension of spirit.”203 Through his emphases we are able to see more graphically than before the dead end of historical appeals within a religion as long as the claims conflate the natural with a supernatural world, history with myth, the human with the Divine, and to see that the attempt to restore the ancient symbol as normative from our present consciousness is problematic unless one drops one side of the conflated claim. Since there appears no way to disentangle the mythical or supranatural claims from their historical elements, which are basically unverifiable because unintelligible, then the basic religious problem remains: this entangle-

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ment cannot be resolved without reducing the religion either to a myth or ideas or to simply a historical event whose meaning is not self-evident or transcending, or to one among other possibly equally important historical events. Tillich chose to embrace symbols or pictures that bridged intelligible ideas and ancient myth, but no “corroboration” of any substantial historical figure of the past occurred. If the “mystical” intuition of one’s union with God or Christ or the Spiritual Presence is, as is all mysticism, not contained in concepts, then the intuition remains truly contentless cognitively. If this is the “final revelation” that one finds in “ecstasy,” then it still has nothing to say to anyone, as all mysticism agrees. It is strange that Tillich, in his early writings, thought Schleiermacher came closer to resolving the split between subject and object than did either Hegel’s theoretical approach or Kant’s practical or ethical approach and yet Tillich still saw Schleiermacher’s “feeling” as too much an “undifferentiated mystical interpretation of all reality,” too detached from the empirical or other, and centered too much on pure subjectivity,204 when Tillich avoided that only by using terms such as “abyss” and “depth” as if they had a content when they did not, not any more than “infinite,” which he saw as only a “limiting concept.” A mystical union does not feed content into a rational schema, and both Tillich and Schleiermacher knew that. Contrary to Tillich, essentially faith, belief, or trust always can be put into a proposition; that is, one always believes that such and such is true. Even the statement “being is” is a proposition. “Jesus is the Christ” is obviously a proposition, a conceptual assertion, and not a mere contentless, existential commitment, and neither is it simply a commitment to a symbol. The statement’s having common meaning or making sense or not making sense does not negate its being a proposition. Such belief or trust in our fellow humans should be an integrating power within each person and within all human relations—that is, within society as a whole. This faith or trust, however, needs content to be relevant, a content that is not vacuously “ultimate” or totally transparent or translucent but, rather, is a content of actual human relationships that will always be a part of contingent life or temporality, ambiguities notwithstanding. To expect a content of faith or trust that is “certain” and both concrete and universal is to expect the content to be Absolute or beyond dislodging doubt. Is there no possibility of a religion that has meaning for its faithful by discontinuing such an antiquated approach that defies the relativity in which we all live? Must humans be turned into Saviors, Redeemers, Archetypes, Ultimate Examples, or Gods, or can religions see even their founders as good, wholesome examples though quite fallible? Must one always hold as the criterion of truth something that can encompass its own contradiction but still credibly

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stand? Is this preferable to seeing truth as a correspondence between what we say or promise in our contractual language with others and what the object or “result” turns out to be? There are those instances when Tillich emphasizes that a person, as a “centered self,” can only realize their own humanity or personhood in relation with other persons. It seems obvious that it is impossible to realize one’s own humanity if one never has this ego-thou relationship. Even here, however, Tillich pushes his idea of panentheism a bit too hard as he describes this relationship a little strangely as a “reunion,” writing that “one’s own humanity can be realized only in reunion with him [another person]—a reunion which is also decisive for the realization of his humanity.”205 Actually it is only a relation—perhaps a relation just now realized but not “reunion.”206 Tillich further says that, despite human libido—which pushes one to want to assimilate everything into itself (or, as Sartre calls it, to want to “possess” not just the objectivity but even the subjectivity of the other)—the personhood or spiritual dimension of the other person is an “unconditional limit” placed on each person in the ego-thou relation.207 This is meaningful ethical analysis. But then Tillich writes, “The other person is a stranger but a stranger only in disguise.” We then look for him to give us an idea—as do Schweitzer, Foucault, Rorty, and others—as to how I can identify with the person in some way so as to overcome the idea of the other as a “stranger,” so as to see the other as included in my circle of friends, and so a part of my “we” or my “us.” Instead Tillich goes to an extreme, saying, “Actually he is an estranged part of one’s self.”208 He later explains this pronouncement but changes his language, saying, “The stranger who is an estranged part of one’s self has ceased to be a stranger when he is experienced as coming from the same ground as one’s self.”209 But coming from the same ground as one’s self is not the same as saying the other is only “an estranged part of one’s self.” The other person may be a part of the world or of a group from which I am estranged, but saying this is radically different from saying that the other person is only an “estranged part of one’s self.” Recognizing mere “being” in another person does not cause one to identify with or see that they and the other person are actually just one person. This is more of the reduction of difference, the preference for sameness, and the quest for totality in a system, which made Tillich as vulnerable to criticism as Hegel, even if Tillich did not single out a particular culture that was the embodiment of God as Hegel did. But of course our question was not whether any of these scholars had an ethic but whether any their explanations of a corroboration of the basic Christological claim could provide a base for a universal ethic; and none did. Though (1) in his Morality and Beyond Tillich utilized some categories involving one’s relation to other people, and (2) Christology remained to him

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the ultimate doctrine as the Cross was judged the ultimate religious symbol, and (3) his idea of “forensic justification” was so important a “paradox” that it actually competed with the “paradox” of Jesus’s living within an estranged world but never himself being estranged, and (4) Tillich considered estrangement with God as the only estrangement that counts—despite all this, the ethics Tillich does delineate are only the work of God and thus truly “theonomy” and even divine heteronomy and so are not ethics in the true sense of the word as human free decisions on how to relate to other humans. Tillich’s system neither “corroborates” Christology as a possible ground for future ethics nor articulates an ethics for that ground. He thought his idea of theonomy transcended both autonomy and heteronomy.210 Yet he affirmed Luther’s statement that everything is done and controlled by God, writing that even “faith is receiving and nothing but receiving.”211 Therefore, by this essential sameness of Spiritual Presence at the base, or “God” being asymmetrically spoken of as the “being-itself” beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing, as well as the symbol of Cross absorbing merely contradictory opposites, no real “difference” was significant, and Taylor’s criticism of this form of “modernistic postmodernism” stands such that “when the divine is totally present in the present, what is, is what ought to be.”212 There is simply neither a need nor a place for ethics in such a schema. But, then, to what purpose does theology continue? To the contrary, a greater sensitivity to the other, a keener courage to be more inclusive, can be the way that one owns up to the other’s subjectivity, which can result in a mutual autonomy and an interdependence rather than simply resulting in one’s persuasion that God or “ultimate concern” has accepted oneself as always “saint and sinner,” which is no moral motivation whatever. I do not fault Tillich’s emphasis on one’s accepting oneself.213 But it cannot be built upon Tillich’s nontheistic picture of some universally inevitable estrangement that has nothing positive to suggest about human-tohuman relations and his panentheistic mythology of “God” (but as no particular being) pronouncing one “justified” even though one is not just.214 Such a conceptual extrapolation from a contentless “abyss” or “depth” or mystical union actually defies the contentless quality of the mystical experience about which the mystic allegedly can say nothing. Otherwise, if acceptance of oneself from another has actual content rather than mere presence, which selfacceptance would require, then the other must be real, with attributes, instead of invisible, without attributes. The obvious experience of this would be my acceptance by another human, not some mystical union I have with an invisible, indistinct power. As such, self-acceptance is a very basic idea, essential to human relations. But it is generated from a person’s being accepted and respected by other people

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rather than from hearing a human utter a mere assertion that “God accepts you.” This points to the fact that most religious thinkers also presume many ethical principles. But when defense of their particular absolute religious claims fails, it is time to see whether or not those principles can stand on their own, as “freestanding” ethical principles. Probably even many lay religious have already detached their ethical principles from the conflated claims of their religions, trying to hang on to both.215 Robert P. Scharlemann spent his entire career teaching courses on the theology of Paul Tillich, as well as courses especially examining “modern” and “contemporary” Christian theology. So if anyone could see how Tillich’s thought could be improved, it would seem to be Scharlemann, primarily. It is an extremely fascinating study that we must analyze in detail in the next chapter, and it will surprisingly take us much further beyond both theism and idealism. NOTES 1.  Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 546, emphasis mine. 2.  While Hermann Samuel Reimarus in the mid-eighteenth century saw the “inconsistency” within the biblical text as well as its contradiction with reason so much that he had to discredit Christianity in order to preserve “natural” religion, by the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century Schleiermacher attempted to discredit “natural” religion to preserve Christianity by a “corroboration” of the claims made originally about the historical Jesus. 3. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:46. Of course, neither Schleiermacher nor Hegel ever admitted that they had “postulated” this certainty. They had been critical of Kant while subconsciously utilizing his approach in order to keep Christianity, exempt from the critical methodologies developing in the human sciences. 4. To make such sweeping statements without any qualification was Tillich’s method, even when, as here, it was totally lacking in justification. 5.  “Ultimate Concern” was probably Tillich’s most famous expression, although he received considerable criticism for using it. See William L. Rowe, Religious Symbols and God: A Philosophical Study of Tillich’s Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968). 6. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:41–42. This is an obvious misreading of Schleiermacher, even as Tillich opposed the caricatures of Schleiermacher’s theology by theologians such as Barth. Schleiermacher was more concerned with human ideas than with an ontology painted as if one knew it as a Ding an sich, as he would have judged Tillich’s system; but both were involved in trying to correlate the traditional Christian ideas with reality as was then understood.

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 7. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:372.  8. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:99, II:25, I:82, 266, 99, 82. Tillich commended Hegel for introducing “nonbeing and conflict in the process of divine self-realization” and Marx for pointing to the “dehumanization and the self-estrangement of historical existence as a refutation of the liberal belief in an automatic harmony.” Yet he said that, although they did not personally experience the “fate” this estrangement should have brought, the world had since experienced it and judged them as too naively optimistic (Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:265–66).  9. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:57. 10.  Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 184–85. His argument against the “God of theological theism” is that, when people think “God” is “a being,” God is thereby “bound” by the subject-object structure of reality. In such a subject-object structure, “God” can only be object to a human and humans can only be objects to God. The latter relationship becomes problematic, since, if God relates to us only as his objects, then we are mere automatons, deprived of our free will or autonomy or subjectivity. Tillich said humans cannot accommodate this, which agrees with Nietzsche’s insistence (via the madman) that humans had to “kill God.” 11. Tillich, Courage to Be, 184–85. 12.  It comes up in chapter 5 in my analysis of Scharlemann’s theology. 13. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 249. 14. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:16. 15. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:106–18. 16. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:8–9. 17.  Christ as the “center” of history was widely accepted during the first half of the twentieth century, and even very erudite conservative New Testament scholars such as Oscar Cullmann based their Christologies on such an idea. Cullmann even proposed a symmetrical progressive reduction from creation to humanity to Israel to the “remnant” of Israel to Jesus the Christ (as “center”) and a similarly progressive expansion on this side of the “center,” from one person (Jesus the Christ) to his apostles to the Jews to the Gentiles to all of humanity, and to include even the redemption of creation. See Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time, trans. Floyd V. Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964); and see Cullmann’s Christology of the New Testament, rev. ed., trans Shirley C. Guthrie and Charles A. M. Hall, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1959). But his use of Heilsgeschichte does not clarify the idea of what kind of “history” or “story” this “salvation” is, nor its proof. 18. Both concepts and symbols had limits, and when one reached the limit of either, the “correlation” by Tillich intended to direct a person to the other for more elucidation. How that provided more elucidation was not clear, since symbols and concepts seemed on different levels. 19.  The scope of Tillich’s vast knowledge as well as varied interest cannot be gainsaid. He was not only extremely familiar with the entire history of Christian theology and its greatest philosophers but was also knowledgeable of political structures and their relation to religion. Once in the United States, Tillich became quite interested in

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psychology, especially “depth” psychology, as it was then called, and in psychotherapy. But he also became well versed in Western art, writing and lecturing on this as well. His understanding was that culture is the form taken by religion while religion is the substance of culture, and so the two must be related explicitly for a theology to be valid—which is to say, a culture’s ultimate concern inherits its form from the particulars in which it exists, and the ultimate concern so expressed is the substance of the culture. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, Galaxy Books, 1964). 20. Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, xvi–xvii, italics original. 21.  He discusses the difference in detail in Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958). See also Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:139–41, II:107–13. 22. Rorty, Contingency, chapter 1. 23. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:9. 24.  I am often surprised that Tillich did not himself realize some of these apparent problems within his schema. 25. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:3–4. 26.  The irony here is that Richard Rorty’s theory is that language, when it is useful, is metaphorical, as a tool for communicating, so parties can predict or know what to expect, rather than a representational medium or a mirror of some divine language or purpose. When it becomes too literal, there have to be explorations at redescribing through what are regarded as metaphor. Language is a continual movement. Rorty, Contingency, chapter 1. 27. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 247–48. As Rabbi Rubenstein describes Tillich’s impact on US theological students in the first half of the twentieth century as being so powerful, not just with his actual students, that one could only expect that Tillich’s legacy would be in spawning a whole generation of “radical” theologians who would press even beyond Tillich himself. That became obvious in the theologies of Gabriel Vahanian, Harvey Cox, William Hamilton, Thomas J. J. Altizer, Richard Rubenstein himself, Robert P. Scharlemann, and many others. 28. Tillich’s capitalization of words that are not symbols but concepts remains confusing. 29. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:223, italics mine. 30.  Scharlemann noted that the Crucifixion, in which the “Jesus who sacrifices himself as Jesus to himself as the Christ,” is the only place “at which being (the objectival) is also being-itself (the depth of the subjectival and the objectival) and God (objectival presence) is also God himself (depth).” This reduces the confusion otherwise between the super significance that Tillich gave to the Cross vis-à-vis other symbols. Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, xvii, parentheticals original; and see note 5 on p. xvii. 31. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:4, 9, 12, 22, etc. The correlation then appears in a multitude of lesser divisions within these five parts. For example, as Tillich discusses “being and the question of God” in part 1, in his analysis of finitude—that is, in the prospect of one’s losing one’s time, space, and causality—the question arises from where one could find the “courage” to be in light of this negation; the answer

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is obviously in “being-itself” (or “God”), which the person is actually presently even participating in. This illustrates Tillich’s insistence that the answer is found within the question itself. One has to be in order to ask. 32.  If the question is put as “Why is there something—why not nothing?” (Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:163), then Tillich really does not have an answer: he simply says that “Thought must start with being; it cannot go behind it, as the form of the question itself shows. If one asks why there is not nothing, one attributes being even to nothing.” (Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:163) Really? 33.  To follow Tillich’s idea of “God” being only a symbol seems to imply that anyone using the word feels a certain “fear and trembling” or “awe” or mysterium tremendum or super power that can be helpful or destructive, as the Absolute of Kierkegaard or Rudolf Otto’s “idea of the holy.” But the word “God” no longer evokes much awe—for example, the ubiquitous “Oh, my God!” 34.  In any case, Tillich designates three ways in which he can use “correlation”: “It can designate the correspondence of different series of data, as in statistical charts; it can designate the logical interdependence of concepts, as in polar relations; and it can designate the real interdependence of things or events in structural wholes” (Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:60). 35.  It was also a primary focus for the Apostle Paul, as he saw it the ultimate work of Christ, of overcoming sin and death and enabling others to do the same. I do not find the apostle consistent here but only important because of linking death to sin to the Torah, from which Christ freed them in the apostle’s unique “ministry” to the Gentiles. 36.  Paul Tillich, On Art and Architecture, ed. and intro. John Dillenberger with Jane Dillenberger, trans. Robert P. Scharlemann, plates selected by Jane Dillenberger (New York: Crossroads Publishers, 1987). After developing his criteria of “religious” as that which breaks all forms so as to prevent idolatry, Tillich finally admitted that abstract expressionism could go no further but probably would have to replace some abstraction with a bit of representation. 37. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), 96, 98. 38. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:133, 143; II:119. 39.  Even here I must qualify that, because although Tillich exempts Christ from any responsibility for estrangement within existence, he does the equivalent in his theology, despite his analogy of being there, by speaking of “God” in terms of “abyss” beyond the polarity of being/nonbeing or in speaking of infinity as if it were an actual state of being, equal in validity and intelligibility to those elements he attached to the essence of being finite. 40. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:239–40, 131. 41.  In this pursuit Tillich attempts to point to “God” as having the only power of being within him yet is simultaneously the “abyss” beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing and also precedes reason. This is not resolved by saying that the three terms “Abyss,” “Logos,” and “Spirit” are all necessary in order to speak of the “divine life”—by which mystical thought expresses the “depth” of the divine life with the idea of “Abyss”—or that philosophical thought expresses the structure and meaning of the divine life with the term “Logos” and religious thought expresses the “dynamic

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unity of both elements” with the word “Spirit.” How that which is the “abyss” beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing as well as reason but also the “ground” of the structure of being can be called the “divine life” is not clear. Early on the terms were used by Tillich in his mystical thought, but they do not translate from a nonverbal mystical unity to a conceptual framework very convincingly. See Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:156, 174, 79, 110, 119, 158, 216, and 226. 42.  For example, Schleiermacher spoke of the power of the “picture” in the Gospel preached by the power of the Spirit which corroborated the historical occurrence of the absolutely potent God-consciousness in Jesus of Nazareth. 43. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:191. 44. Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, of course, was much longer but was a dogmatic theology rather than a systematic theology. Karl Rahner’s was scattered through books and articles but never systematically put in a single volume, and the same can be said for Hans Küng: many profound books but no condensation within a single “systematic” work. 45. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:97. 46.  This was the theme of Tillich’s Theology of Culture. 47.  As I explained in Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion?, this is a red herring of oversimplification. Tillich’s framing of the “biblical picture of New Being in Jesus as the Christ” is not a nonpropositional statement but, rather, the statement, “I believe that Jesus is the Christ.” 48.  Here again is Tillich’s idealism, quite similar to Schleiermacher’s and Hegel’s. 49. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:117. 50. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 16, emphasis original. 51. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 17, emphasis original. 52.  There are times, however, when Tillich does not place Descartes on a par with Augustine but, rather, sees Descartes wrestling only with the historical nature of objects rather than with the historical notion of oneself and one’s thinking. 53.  This distinction that Tillich used so profusely sounds cryptic and so probably is best explained by Scharlemann’s distinction between the “subjectival” and “objectival” categories in thinking. The “subjectival” indicates any entity that can be an “I” or that has consciousness, whereas the “objectival” is that which could never be conscious as an “I.” Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, x–xi. In this sense, when I think “God,” I as a “subjectival subject” am thinking of my relation to a “subjectival object,” whereas when I think “being,” I could be thinking of it as only an “objectival object.” In its “subjectival” capacity, I never can “understand” it completely without obliterating that freedom or subjectivity; I can only respond to it, have faith in it or not. If it is, for example, a person, and if I can also relate to it in a way in which it is an “objectival object” for me (now my relation to it is “I-It” rather than “I-Thou,” in Buber’s terms), I have depersonalized it. Sartre’s insistence that humans “are” their freedom is his way of saying that one may desire to experience another person not simply as an object but also in their “subjectivity”; but he thought the latter impossible—or else that there was no real freedom (Sartre, Being and Nothingness). But that would leave the other as a depersonalized “it.”

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54.  This is ambiguous in Tillich, since he not only refers to humans’ infinite potential but elsewhere also emphasizes that there is nothing infinite, that such a term is not and cannot be thought of to be constitutive of anything (Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:190). It is a “directing concept”; that is, “it directs the mind to experience its own unlimited potentialities” (emphasis mine). Yet he can say when a human actualizes their freedom that they inevitably fall into estrangement by that act of freedom— which seems the very opposite of having “unlimited potentialities.” But then he even says, “Being-itself is beyond finitude and infinity: otherwise it would be conditioned by something other than itself . . . Being-itself infinitely transcends every finite being . . . There is an absolute break, an infinite ’jump’” (Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:237). This appears to create a polarity of “finitude/infinity” and so makes “infinite” a meaningless term if there is that which is “beyond” or greater than that “infinite,” which, by definition, has no limits. 55. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:206, II:114, III:223. 56.  If a child of eight years of age heard her parents speaking of graduating from college and so she asked about graduating from college, would her parents be able to assume that she is “already standing” within that answer? Or if she comes to them and asks, “What is it to die?” would they think she is “already standing” within the answer? 57. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:60–64. 58. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 66. 59.  Tillich speaks of essentialization being realized in “degrees” yet as somehow culminating as a transcending of temporality (Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:410) or as a “transtemporal fulfillment” (418) or as a “return to the eternal” (415). Yet he insists that the “eternal” is neither timelessness nor just some indefinite future. Rather, he says, it is a symbol of the meaning of the relation of the temporal to the eternal. In these eschatological symbols it expresses the “fulfillment of creaturely existence in the eternal” just as in considering the past it expresses the “dependence of creaturely existence” (395). The “eternal” is always now not because God’s relation to time is some simultaneity but because God is able to anticipate as well as recall the past and because any human “transition” into that state is not a moment in time but a realization within time of one’s infinite identity with God (394–423). See also Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:107: “The self-transcendence of life never unambiguously reaches that toward which it transcends, although life can receive its self manifestation in the ambiguous form of religion.” 60. Tillich’s usual criticism of Feuerbach’s idea of mere “projection” was that Feuerbach overlooked the fact that one has to have a screen on which to “project.” If that means being has to be for a projection of any form of being to be “projected,” then that is answered not by a screen in front of the projector but by the being who is “projecting.” See Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957). 61.  This “metaphysical” or “ontological” shock comes especially when one is hit by the natural anxiety of “having to die,” losing one’s time, space, causality, and substance, which Tillich also describes as one’s “anxiety about the lack of necessity of his being.” Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:166, 193–204, esp. 196.

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62.  See Tillich, Systematic Theology, IIII:394–423, or see note 53 above. 63.  Mircea Eliade described the difficulty portrayed in many ancient religions as being like even dying to the “profane” world in the tough process, dying with the hope of being reborn in the “sacred” sphere, close to the gods and power. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968). 64. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:131. 65. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:240. 66.  One cannot say that a word used to describe a human can adequately serve as an analogy by which one can speak of “God” merely by capitalizing it. The relative cannot be transformed into meaning something absolute by suggesting that it is simply using a common noun and placing an extreme adjective or “modifier” in front of it that forces the noun to be expanded past its relative meaning, as Ian Ramsey thought (see Ramsey, Religious Language). Neither does it mean that one can use dialectical language in such a form of equating opposites that the “light dawns” and one sees the “truth” that is “beyond” the thesis and antithesis (Hegel and Barth). That is not taking the “Absolute” seriously. 67. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:239. 68. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:246–47. 69. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:247. 70. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 479–80. 71. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:188. 72. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:61. 73. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:206. 74. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:190–91. 75.  Modern medical science operates off knowledge of organs, chemicals, functions, and so on, that are common to both human bodies and to bodies of rabbits, mice, frogs, and even fruit flies. But this is empirically derived. To decide that there is “God” and that this “God” is invisible and not subject to empirical testing but nevertheless is not only real but the “most real” and that there is nothing about this God that is mere potential but is all perfection quickly sets up a situation in which “analogy of being” begs the issue and manipulates the process of analogizing. 76. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:131–32. 77.  All Tillich’s description of these marks of Jesus’s typical humanity are completely uninformed by critical historical approaches to the Gospels, and most are speculated generalizations without any specific proof (such as homelessness, loneliness, and mental instability) or obvious references created by the later church (Jesus’s “reluctance” to accept the Messianic title and his feeling of desertion by God during his Crucifixion) rather than having any real connection to the historical Jesus. 78. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:133. 79. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:134. 80. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:128–29. 81. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:128. 82. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:38–39.

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83. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:225, II:45 and 49. He insists that the estrangement that is primary or even “only” is falling away from one’s source or “God,” and so “there is only ‘the Sin,’” “the turning away from God.” 84. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:126. 85. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:127. 86. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:147. 87. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:115–16. Despite classifying the most religious “style” of art as abstract expressionism, Tillich did express concern finally as to whether it had reached its limits, implying that some identifiable forms or content were needed for expressionism to distort. Klaus-Dieter Nörenberg saw Tillich’s analogia imaginis as encompassing the analogia entis (and presupposing the latter) while also being much narrower or more specifically related to history. He suggested that Tillich’s view of the historical particulars of Jesus as inessential and Tillich’s ultimate reluctance to allow history to verify the symbol (especially of the Resurrection) creates great Christological, eschatological, and ontological problems. Klaus-Dieter Nörenberg, Analogia Imaginis: Der Symbolbegriff in der Theologie Paul Tillichs (Gütersloh, Ger.: Gütersloher Verl.-Haus G. Mohn, 1966), chaps. 8–10. 88.  Somehow, in his mind, Tillich must have distinguished this from the possibilities of a photo that still has subjective elements in it, and especially from the analysis of historians who try to discover the most accurate picture empirically, or even others like Schleiermacher and Hermann who sought Jesus’s essence in his “inner person.” But in the present participation in that image in the text, why would the most accurate picture of what the various Gospel writers are saying be one that somehow overlooks all their details, thinking that one has improved upon their distractive data that is unnecessary? Does one today better understand Jesus than they did? 89. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:116. This is strikingly parallel to Descartes’ assertion that we do not know anything as well as we know God when we begin with the realization that even in our strongest doubt we nevertheless are. And this “we nevertheless are” seems to be the point at which we left the diving board for the deep water of thinking that this somehow proves God. 90. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:102. 91.  Interestingly, Tillich does not give an explicit reason for his rejection of the “ideal” image but simply immediately suggests the “expressionist” image as superior. The latter breaks through surface particulars. In his early work, “breakthrough” was one of his mystical terms. 92. Here Tillich vacillates between Hegel’s Vorstellungen and Begriffe, unable to agree that the essential truth was found in the Vorstellung by which people took details literally. But Tillich still needed something tangible for the abstract concept to negate, something that, in its negation, would nevertheless still exist powerfully. We will see in chapter 5 that only Scharlemann resolved this problem. 93. I analyzed John Dominic Crossan’s work in Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion? 94.  This may sound absurd, but it is not an inappropriate comparison, since the ontological and existential categories are so tailored by Tillich as to be reduced to his

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general maxim—that Jesus was so united with God that even his death only suggests that he was the Christ, not that he was just now New Being, and that it does this totally without the “Resurrection,” although Tillich speaks of it as interdependent with the Crucifixion. Resurrection was the fact that Jesus’s disciples, after his death, realized that they still had New Being. Tillich insists that it was not merely that the disciples still experienced New Being but that death “had not pushed him into the past,” that “the man Jesus of Nazareth is raised above transitoriness into the eternal presence of God as Spirit” (Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:157). But what does this mean? Is it more scientific than saying someone might have imagined that Jesus was still alive and the various later conflicting Gospel accounts of his “Resurrection” made nothing intelligible about any postdeath reality? Tillich was extremely ambiguous, unless all he meant is that the disciples could still “accept” themselves since that was the extent of “New Being.”  95. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:97.   96.  This matches Schleiermacher’s quotation at the start of chapter 2 regarding the “corroborating” fact or experience.  97. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:102.  98. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:115.  99. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:114. 100. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:136. 101. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:114, emphasis original. 102. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:107. 103. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:116. 104. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:114. 105. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:113–14. 106. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:87–88. 107. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:119. 108. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:120. 109. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:88. The motif of “center of history,” an earlier organizing principle for Tillich’s theology, is carried over into his Systematic Theology at very few points, with the motif of “New Being” largely replacing it, and here it seems totally out of place, since he has transcended the historical or its having any “center” by his “eternal now,” discounting any import of historical events. 110. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:44. 111. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:36. If existence is the original “fact,” as the transition from essence to existence, therefore, Tillich says, this transition is “actual in every fact.” Actuality and factuality or facticity are not thereby distinguished from each other. Scharlemann will construe Tillich’s Christology by making them independent, as we will discuss in chapter 5. And see note 147 below. 112. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:38. 113. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:44. 114. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:38. 115. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:129. He is so opposed to “works-righteousness” that he insists the Protestant principle is correct when it held that “in relation to

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God everything is done by God” (III:135) and that justification comes through grace, so to say one is “justified by faith through grace” has things backward. 116. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:131. 117. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:36. 118.  One can see why Nietzsche protested against the life-negating ideal of Christianity. 119.  Tillich seems to ignore D. F. Strauss’s criticism of Schleiermacher and Hegel for their total violation of scientific understanding in embodying the ideal in a single historical embodiment in isolation from the rest of the species. Tillich has done the same thing. 120. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:107–10. 121. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:114. 122. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:418. 123. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:405. 124. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:133. 125. Kant, Religion within the Limits, 36, 40, etc. On page 40 he says that whatever “supernatural cooperation” one may receive, “man must make himself worthy to receive it, and must lay hold of this aid.” The reason one is judged guilty is because it was in his power to become better or more moral, and that does not cease with one’s faith. This continual sense of the moral duty is a profound wonder to Kant, the “original moral predisposition” that all men have. (44). He insists that one must be able “to hope through his own efforts to reach the road [to being a moral person] . . . by a fundamentally improved disposition . . . [and] be adjudged morally good only by virtue of that which can be imputed to him as performed by himself” (46, emphasis original). Finally, “‘It is not essential, and hence not necessary, for every one to know what God does or has done for his salvation’ but it is essential to know what man himself must do in order to become worthy of this assistance” (47, emphasis original). 126. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:121. 127.  See works by Crossan, Funk, and others of the Jesus Seminar. Even the history of Q Gospel shows diversity rather than uniformity in different locations. For the diversity of Q Gospel itself, see Burton L. Mack, The Lost Gospel and the Book of Q - Christian Origins, (San Francisco: Harper, 1993). 128. Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, 201–202. Scharlemann’s criticism speaks of correcting Tillich’s ontology, so he is not including God. Therefore Scharlemann says that the twofold ontological structure of “self” and “world” needs to be threefold—“self-world-other self.” So when “God” is added in (though not a part of the structure but the foundation of it), it would be increasing from three to four, as I suggested, using Tillich’s terminology (which did include God within the number). Even Tillich’s Morality and Beyond revolves around a person being their essential self who is overcoming “estrangement” not by self-improvement but by being pronounced just by God when they are not just. So the simul justus et peccator is always Tillich’s key, here moving “beyond” morality to one’s essence by grace. Paul Tillich, Morality and Beyond, Religious Perspectives, vol. 9 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 78.

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129.  Saint Paul distorted various Psalms to create the universal sinfulness for the problem his Christology would resolve, while Tillich did it by switching ontologies. Neither is convincing. 130.  Tillich suggests that the “tragic-universal” character of existence can be found in a variety of cosmic myths, including the Bible, but its most consistent picture of the transition from essence to existence is in Plato, then later in Origen, and a humanistic form is found in Kant. Its meaning is that “the very constitution of existence implies the transition from essence to existence” (Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:37–38). 131. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:126. 132. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:47. 133. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:50. 134. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:51. 135. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:51. 136. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:52. 137. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:53. He faults Nietzsche for not articulating “the norms and principles by which the will to power can be judged” (ibid.). How could he miss Nietzsche’s primary principle of life affirmation rather than life negation or the principle of being inclusive, honest, and admitting real change? 138.  The other three areas of Tillich’s definition of “estrangement” and “New Being” include (1) the difference between the “expressions” of New Being and its prior being within the person, (2) the single, uniform picture of New Being in the Bible and Christian preaching, and (3) the omission of “estrangement,” including relations of humans with each other. These will be addressed in larger context within the following sections. 139. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:126. 140.  John 17:8; 13:20. 141.  Tillich, Systemic Theology, II:126. 142. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:177. 143. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:130. 144. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:130. 145. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:15. 146. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:135–36. 147.  In the following chapter we will find Scharlemann being even more specific, insisting that Christology is based on the “actuality” (Wirklichkeit) of that Jesus the Christ but not any “factuality” (Tatsächlichkeit). See Robert P. Scharlemann, “The Argument from Faith to History,” in Inscriptions and Reflections: Essays in Philosophical Theology, Studies in Religion and Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 190. 148. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:115. 149. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 89. 150. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:57. The idea of “paradox” merely “superseding” common reason is parallel to John Locke’s distinction of “above reason” vis-àvis “contrary to reason” or “according to reason.” It whittles out a special exception for faith so that certain ideas or doctrines can escape being unreasonable. 151. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:57.

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152. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:57. 153. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:57, II:178, III:226. 154. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:35. 155. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:128–29. If “being” is the correlate of “God,” then would not every person’s desire for any form of being also thereby “include” “God” within it? That is, is Tillich’s assertion that Jesus did not sin even in being tempted toward a desire of being fulfilled without God saying anything more than one could say about any person’s desire, since all desire involves being? 156. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:115. 157. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:133. 158.  Most serious is the diversity of the canonical Gospels’ images of Jesus, and closely behind this is the actual diversity in the totality of fragments of Gospels (around twenty) that we have today, and the question of which are most reliable. There is no unified picture that all of them manifest. The “Jesus Seminar” saw it more probable that Jesus was an itinerant “wisdom” teacher who opposed the exploitation of the peasant class, so many members emphasized Jesus’s egalitarianism. 159. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:133–34. 160. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:114. 161. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:418. 162. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:9. 163. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:9–10. 164. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:226. 165. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:226. 166.  Tillich emphasizes that “there is nothing God rejects as strongly as half-goodness and every human claim based on it. The impact of this message, mediated by the Spiritual Presence, turns the eyes of man away from the bad and the good in himself to the infinite divine goodness, which is beyond good and bad and which gives itself without conditions and ambiguities . . . This transcendent justice does not negate but fulfills the ambiguous human justice.” So this destroys what justice requires being destroyed, the terrible human hubris (Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:226). “Human justice” is not perfect, but it is far better than thinking the ethical concern is a form of hubris, and people must turn away from the “good and bad” in themselves—to an invisible, indefinable realm. 167. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:226, II:92. 168. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:178–79. 169. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:178–79. “Indeed, there is nothing in man which enables God to accept him.” If “man” came from “God,” (as Tillich insisted), why is there “nothing in man” that God finds acceptable? Whose fault would that be? 170. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:178–79. 171. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:223–24, italics mine. 172. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:224, italics mine. 173. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:226. 174. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:226. 175. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:114–15.

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176. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:107. 177. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:146. 178. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:147, italics mine. 179.  Kairos reflects Tillich’s earlier structure around the idea of Jesus as the “center of history,” whose obvious problems Tillich allegedly avoided by the focus on “New Being” but show up here as if they were undisputed facts of history, probably so he could retain his insights about the difference between kairos and logos. 180. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:153–65. 181. Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, 178–79. 182. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:134. 183.  Tillich’s idea of “theonomy” comes close to equating human thinking with Divine thinking, but since the law and therefore also ethics are totally emptied of meaning by his insistence on grace, acceptance, and simul justus et peccator, then the near-equation becomes inconsequential. As he says, everything is done by God. 184. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:148–49. 185. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 97–98. Is Tillich only saying that one may have such a strong self-image that to be faithful to it may require one’s death? It sounds more like a sacrifice of one’s bodily existence to oneself as eternal soul. But that takes us back to Plato and Socrates, not to the biblical image of Jesus as the Christ. 186. Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, 177–78, 192. He writes about Tillich’s idea of this inclusiveness of the Symbol of the Cross that “It contains a yes because it ‘does not reject any truth of faith in whatever form it may appear in the history of faith,’ and it contains a no because ‘it does not accept any truth of faith as ultimate except the one that no man possesses it’” (quoting Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 98, 105, italics original). Why this position of Tillich’s is less “absolutistic” than Hegel—which Scharlemann thinks—is quite questionable, as each swallows up all other objections or perspectives within its more-overarching Absolute. At this point Scharlemann also felt confident that Tillich’s “image” of New Being or picture of Jesus was valid as a religious symbol because it was a realistic picture of a “real person” (Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, 196). But it simply is not, since it has no human traits. 187. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 98. Schleiermacher insisted that the disciples’ awakened God-consciousness that came from Jesus’s potent God-consciousness occurred long before any anticipation of Jesus’s Crucifixion. 188.  Tillich speaks of the symbol of the Cross as only one of the two interdependent central symbols of the Christian faith (Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:153–65). If they are the two most central interdependent symbols of the Christian faith, then how can it be that the symbol of the Cross by itself would be the criterion of religious symbols or truth? That is, Tillich notes that the symbols of the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus are both reality (or “event”) and symbol, but “in the minds of the disciples and of the writers of the New Testament the Cross is both an event and a symbol and . . . the Resurrection is both a symbol and an event” (II:153). He acknowledges that, without the symbol of the Cross, the Resurrection would be simply another “miracle story” and that, more pertinently, without the symbol of the Resur-

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rection, the Cross would be only a tragedy (ibid.). To Tillich, a “miracle story” would be idolatry to him, whereas a “tragedy” would not. 189. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:133. 190.  Just because a dictionary shows both positive and negative meanings of a word—such as Aufhebung—does not mean that any single entity or action necessarily contains both positive and negative assessments. To push the latter would make any science absolutely impossible. Of course, different people can have different perspectives, but that does not mean that all perspectives are of equal validity, nor that any person actually holds to both at the same time. 191. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:133. 192. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:134. 193.  James Luther Adams, Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science, and Religion (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1965). This includes influence from Jakob Böhme, Joachim of Fiore, and Meister Eckhart and is seen in Tillich’s use and definition of “abyss,” “depth,” “ground,” “unconditioned,” “ecstasy,” “inexhaustibility,” and other terms. Tillich saw a new form of mysticism in expressionist art, such as Picasso’s. He attempted to distinguish it as in polar relation with sacramental elements, such as myth and ritual. Its distinction, he contended, was that it was the desire for unity without any form at all, which he admitted could border on the demonic. See Adams, Paul Tillich, 32, 39, 90–93, 190, 200–201, 230, and 235–37. As early as 1912 Tillich published a work on Schelling and mysticism. Tillich later saw abstract expressionism as reaching the end without actual representation of some kind, which is more directed at works by Rothko, Pollock, and others more than Picasso, since the latter’s paintings had strong but distorted representation. 194. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:147. 195. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:147. 196. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 98. Significantly, in Scharlemann’s exposition of this crucial passage of Tillich’s, he quotes it as “any truth of faith stands under a yes-or-no [yes-and-no] judgment.” Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, 178. Is the bracketed part the way Tillich meant it, but failed to see the problem in using simply “yes-or-no,” or did the editors change Tillich’s “yes-and-no” to a “yes-or-no” because they failed to understand Tillich, or did Scharlemann clarify what was not clear within Tillich’s own thought, or was it just an insignificant linguistic slip that really didn’t need to be “corrected”? I believe Scharlemann was clarifying what either Tillich, or publisher had confused, since Scharlemann sees this crucial in delineating how Tillich moved the truth beyond the (vicious) circle of faith. 197. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 98. 198. Buber, in discussing the “Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,” emphasized that redemption is always a possibility but never a possession. See Martin Buber, The Writings of Martin Buber, selected, ed., and intro. Will Herberg (New York: Meridian Books, 1965). 199. Tillich, Courage to Be, 179–80. 200. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:147; III:415-416. See also note 201 below. 201.  As Masao Abe insisted, “emptiness” is not a doctrine but an experience that negates even the idea of emptiness. He says it is similar to Jakob Böhme’s Das Nichts,

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and yet, “being beyond the one God,” its Sunyata is not “oneness” as a universal principle but, rather, is identical to individual things, giving them their identity. “The universal and particular things are paradoxically one in the realization of Emptiness, which goes beyond the understanding which sees all things as reducible to the one.” Abe, Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue, 76–77. This is not the place for an extensive comparison between Tillich’s conception of the relation of being to nonbeing and God’s role with Mahayana Buddhism’s concept of Sunyata (emptiness). But Abe is convinced that they are radically different, since Tillich gives being priority over nonbeing, creating an asymmetrical polarity, a limited form of “double negation,” of negating only the negation of being rather than also negating the negation of nothingness, a “slantwise transcendence” rather a “straightforward transcendence,” involving a reification that precludes the polarity from yielding real “Wondrous Being” (Abe, Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue, 104–111, plus other chapters). See also John B. Cobb Jr. and Christopher Ives, eds., The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation, Faith Meets Faith Series (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994). 202.  See Garma C. C. Chang, The Buddhist Teaching of Totality: The Philosophy of Hwa Yen Buddhism (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 116–17. Chang emphasizes that the “Sunyata doctrine of Prajnaparamita is exalted by Mahayana as the most important teaching of Buddhism.” He clarifies, however, that it is not some historical appearance or historical personage. Such unification of opposites, such “emptiness” signified by Sunyata, is not a concept, not a being, and not being at all. It is nothing that can oppose other things, since it is no thing at all, and it is “inherently against the construction of any concept that is Svabhava-bound” (118). And since all concepts are Svabhava-bound, it is only experienced. Perhaps this is the equivalent of Tillich’s insistence that nothing we can say about God is literal or a concept. It is all a symbol, with the exception of the statement just made, that “nothing we can say about God is literal.” But if that is said about “God” as Ultimate, then any Christology adopting that as the criterion of true faith engages in idolatry. 203. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:96. 204.  See Adams, Paul Tillich’s Philosophy, 13, 73. 205. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:261. 206.  In the same context, Tillich speaks of an individual’s being grasped by the Spiritual Presence, as an unambiguous though always fragmentary self-identity, and he uses the idea of “reunion” here, a reunion one has with God. He writes, “Whenever the Spiritual Presence takes hold of a centered person, it reestablishes his identity unambiguously (though fragmentarily). The ‘search for identity’ which is a genuine problem of the present generation is actually the search for the Spiritual Presence, because the split of the self into a controlling subject and a controlled object can be overcome only from the vertical direction, out of which reunion is given and not commanded. The self which has found its identity is the self of him who is ‘accepted’ as a unity in spite of his disunity” (Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:260). The terms “reestablishes,” “reunion,” and “vertical” are terms without any justification or clear meaning. 207. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:40.

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208. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:261. 209. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:262 210. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III:261–62. And see also I:85. Tillich says that under the conditions of existence “there is no complete theonomy” but rather a continual conflict between autonomy and heteronomy, which, though “essentially united,” within existence try to destroy each other and reason itself. In theonomy, “autonomous reason unite[s] with its own depth. In a theonomous situation reason actualizes itself in obedience to its structural laws and in the power of its own inexhaustible ground.” He also calls it “the directedness of the self-creation of life under the dimension of the Spirit toward the ultimate in being and meaning” (III:249). He can strangely refer to “obedience” here while protesting that “theonomy” should never be taken to mean that a church seeks to impose on a culture some divine law “from outside.” Instead, this is not “outside,” since it is a matter of Spirit, and so “Spirit fulfills spirit instead of breaking it” (250). “But theonomy can never be completely victorious, as it can never be completely defeated. Its victory is always fragmentary because of the existential estrangement underlying human history, and its defeat is always limited by the fact that human nature is essentially theonomous” (250). “Human nature is essentially theonomous” yet estranged from one’s first free act, which Tillich emphasizes. So much for human nature and its alleged “essence” if this is true. 211. Tillich, Systematic Theology, III: l34–35. 212.  Taylor, “Postmodern Times,” 183. Taylor concludes that such erasing of the signifiers offers “God” as a mere “human projection constructed to ground the world of appearances. If, however, the ground itself is apparent, then everything is superficial and all reality is virtual reality. In the absence of anything other than what is, there is nothing to fear—and nothing for which to hope. Ideality and reality become one in the postmodern world of simulation.” 213.  “Indeed,” Tillich writes, there is nothing in man which enables God to accept him. But man must accept just this. He must accept that he is accepted; he must accept acceptance. And the question is how this is possible in spite of the guilt which makes him hostile to God. The traditional answer is “Because of Christ!” . . . It means that one is drawn into the power of the New Being in Christ, which makes faith possible; that it is the state of unity between God and man, no matter how fragmentarily realized. Accepting that one is accepted is the paradox of salvation without which there would be no salvation but only despair.

Tillich, Systematic Theology, II:179. 214.  Actually, the “faith” has no transforming power as Tillich had claimed unless it simply enables one to feel more “accepted” “as is,” which stands at odds with the Apostle Paul’s theology, which insisted on crucifying and leaving one’s old, immoral self in the past by adopting a new, more moral behavior toward other people. Did Saint Paul did not understand “Christ”? 215.  To a degree, it is obvious that both Schleiermacher and Hegel did this, although they remained dedicated to Christian theology and its ethic, which they felt was completely superior, and they separated from any human-motivated ethic attempting to control “nature.”

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Chapter Five

The Absolute as Relational Truth: The Instantiating Words of Unity

Martin Buber’s famous words still ring with profundity: Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations. Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence . . . When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing; he has indeed nothing. But he takes his stand in relation . . . As experience, the world belongs to the primary word I-It. The primary word I-Thou establishes the world of relation.1

Religions are concerned with relations. This means they are also concerned with words, especially “relational words.” But religious ideas and experiences involve words that can be understood in many different ways by people. In fact, we even speak of different relations that one can have with a religious organization or with its teachings or with its sacred texts. For example, the late Robert P. Scharlemann wrote, “Religion views the possibility of reflection as a fall into sin and warns against it; reflection sees religion as a prereflective state which needs deliverance from its illusion. Each, in the judgment of the other, is blind to its own nature . . . A solution must appeal initially to reflexivity as a standpoint from which the conflict can be seen independently of how the two contenders see it.”2 The question is whether the future of any religion whose metaphysical absolute professing to be based on a particular supranatural historical person or event that has not been able to be substantially verified by historical research3 can somehow find the lost certainty in some form of “corroboration” via the consciousness of everybody, or a new meaning of “faith” or a new dimension of “reason,” and thereby be a universal base for ethics. But the appeal of 285

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the claim would have to be inclusive, not just something that was believable only by those within the religion. If there is this other way to “restore” the certainty lost by historical reflection or by contradictory historical details, and if the religion’s claims are reasonable enough, then it might at least provide an ethical starting point for our present divisive world. The reason the claim could not be proven by historical research was quite simple: the claim conflates history with mythology—or history with metaphysics, or the finite with the Infinite, or the visible with the invisible— whereas historical method works with the details of empirical people and events. On the other hand, to try to base a global ethic on the metaphysics or mythology of one single religion would be impossible for two reasons: (1) most religions believe that their metaphysical entities or deities intervened within a particular historical setting, and (2) the purely metaphysical ideas of any single religion simply do not correspond at all with those of other religions or the views of the nonreligious. During post-Enlightenment years, some of the leading Christian theologians began to see if religion could be defined more generally, or if the “meaning” of the unique claims made by the Christian faith could satisfy without being dislodged by some historical negative data. We have examined fairly closely three of the great theological systems of the past two centuries. After Tillich’s monumental work, the prediction of many was that there would never again be a “systematic” Christian theology attempted by an individual because of the unbelievable demands of knowledge that it requires. That almost proved true, although Wolfhart Pannenberg’s erudite Systematic Theology appeared even in English prior to the end of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, it also was unable to provide any real relief, since its validity depended upon the future end, even as its key of “Resurrection” was an event that offered no reasonable explanation. Meanwhile, there have been many other theological series done by individuals such as by Jürgen Moltmann, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, and many others. But since our question has focused on whether a religion could offer an ethic from its most essential doctrine, and that obviously involved Christology within Christianity, perhaps the most innovative radical approach of the present to Christology can supply what others could not—even though it is not a comprehensive “systematic theology.” The title of this chapter suggests the way the evidence will lead—not to a “corroboration” of Christological claims, as it was being conceived, but to what Scharlemann calls a “third” possibility. That is, a word—thought, spoken, or inscribed as either a concept or symbol—could be experienced as a manifestation of the absolute in its nonfactuality, which, in turn, in its actual but nonfactual nature can be both instantial as well as all-embracing or totally inclusive of all possible responses to it, of all “relativization” of human ex-

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perience and its manifold different human perspectives. This takes seriously (1) the diversity of perspectives, (2) the otherness of “God” through instantiation, (3) the otherness of the self through ecstasy or exstantiation, and (4) the impossibility of proving factuality of that all-inclusive other. That moves the discussion far beyond a possible “corroboration” of a particular entity to the meaning of words, even if language is only a human convention. But we must continue with the original question until we see if and how structures of thinking and speaking have changed it. Even more so than in examining the thought of the theologians in any of the previous chapters, in order for any evaluation of this approach to be credible, the analysis and the specific line of argument of Scharlemann’s approach must be thorough and clear. To make it easy to understand is another thing. The late Robert P. Scharlemann (1929–2013) was recognized as one of the foremost, intrepid, empathic, and profoundly analytical interpreters of Paul Tillich’s theology for half a century. Scharlemann’s earliest work on Tillich likely explained the latter’s system better than Tillich did himself. Although embracing much of Tillich’s method, Scharlemann was respectfully able to see points that needed to be clarified or points that were even somewhat contradictory and that would best be explored in different ways. He did both, continuing to lead other Tillich scholars in professional groups and publications of Tillich’s huge corpus, plumbing Tillich’s encyclopedic insights and comprehensive knowledge for a deeper understanding of his unique thought; he also moved more into some of the problem areas and updated as new areas especially of language impinged on the discipline. From his first professional articles, it became evident that Scharlemann was extremely interested in language—not just theological language but also how theological language compared with nontheological language. Most of his publications are about “being” and “language,” even with deep analyses of the copula “is.” Scharlemann presumed no authority on his own but placed authority only in the scope, sequence, and reasonableness of the argument, whether it was in his or others’ writings. He said that what he was articulating wasn’t really novel but was already the common way people thought or acted, even if they did not know all the reasons why. He wrote to be understood and so usually composed fairly simple sentences. But the depth and profundity of the development of his argument or thesis was always distilled to the point that it almost precluded anybody’s ever summarizing his thought without doing terrible disservice to it. It is therefore with even more trepidation and respect for this very unassuming original thinker that I try to help others understand a small portion of his thought; otherwise, if I myself am unclear to the reader, I hope the reader will be stimulated to consult Scharlemann’s works themselves.

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So far as the central claim of Christianity concerns Jesus as the Christ, that makes the Reason of Following the most directly significant of Scharlemann’s writings, but it is simply a Christological capstone built upon his earlier theological and Christological writings. When we get to that point, we necessarily must try to show how his line of argument proceeded and hung together, which is very complex and detailed. At the end I will offer a short critique or summary of where the Christian religion stands by his analysis and how it relates to the question of possibly grounding a universal ethic. THE “CORROBORATION” VIA SYMBOLS: QUALIFYING TILLICH’S APPROACH Before we go further, we need to be reminded that, in analyzing Tillich’s system, Scharlemann wrote that Tillich was mistaken in thinking that faith could prove the “factual existence” of a person “behind” the “image” of New Being in Jesus the Christ. Scharlemann said that could be shown only by historical research. At the time, he also said he did not think Christology needed such a historical proof: One must reject the claim that faith can guarantee the factual existence of the person portrayed by the picture. Such an existence cannot be guaranteed. It can be ascertained only by historical research into the records of the nearest witnesses and into the tradition which contains the collective memory of the church. Such research has concluded that the existence of Jesus is most probable. But even when it so concludes, we have to insist that an opposite conclusion would not of itself destroy the power of the picture to elicit a response, just as we insist that the present conclusion is not sufficient to found a response to the picture. The picture elicits a response if it has power to do so; when it loses that power, it no longer elicits a response, regardless of how much we wish to maintain that it should not lose that power.4

There is little doubt that Jesus (or someone by another name who is pointed to by the biblical image or the name) ever existed, as Scharlemann says. But that is not what is doubted. Modern research doubts the mythological or metaphysical claims made about that Jesus. It doubts the hyperbolic and unrealistic picture itself; it doesn’t doubt that there was ever a real person behind it. It merely doubts, whoever the person was, that the picture was a true picture of him. That is the nature of the doubt encountered in most religions if their founders are attributed supranatural qualities. The people wonder whether the picture or image or claim about their founder, event, or basic principles is a grossly hyperbolic figure or a conflation of reality and mythology. So long

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as we keep straight what is really at issue here, we can continue and admit that, of course, a picture that we have been told will elicit a response will do so only as long as it has power to do so. But who told us it would, and who created the picture, and what kind of response confirms the picture’s validity? What is it that empowers the image, and how and why, and does the picture have to be a “true” picture of that which it professes to represent? If it must, then how would we ever determine that? How could any response be either appropriate or inappropriate if the picture cannot be determined as factual if it was recorded as if it were historically factual? But Scharlemann pushed the issue further. In his conclusion to Reflection and Doubt he insisted that the image need not be of a single person and could even be fictional, since all that is “guaranteed by faith” is the “factual existence of a person portrayed by the picture.” This term, “factual,” he will later narrow down considerably, insisting that the being of Christ was “actual” but not “factual,” which we will note shortly. Other than this, Scharlemann emphasized, one cannot know what is “behind” the picture. “The only thing behind it as a symbol is the depth it expresses, not another reality, not even the person of Jesus as a historical man embodying the divine depth.”5 Here again we encounter the nagging problem since Kant’s time—that an “embodiment” of the ideal, whether simply an ideal person or a moral ideal, is neither intelligible nor provable. Scharlemann agrees. “Faith,” he writes, “would not be able to guarantee that the reality behind the picture was an actual person rather than a composite or an artistic creation . . . [It] could have come from someone’s, or some group’s recognition and creative expression of the truth that new being is present even in existence.”6 Five years later, in 1974, Scharlemann clarified this position a bit in “The Argument from Faith to History,” published in Religion in Life in response to criticisms that Tillich’s Christology had received for abandoning historical details. After Scharlemann gave a brief analysis of two of these critical positions, he developed a different way of looking at the issue built around the acceptance or rejection of a symbol as religious, and he distinguished between historical “actuality” (Wirklichkeit) and “factuality” (Tatsächlichkeit). He distinguished between a person A for whom the “figure is not a [religious?] symbol” and person B for whom it is. In Scharlemann’s precise words, If the biblical figure of Jesus as Christ is actually a religious symbol, B must ask whether the figure is presented in the biblical narrative as an ideal construction or as an actual man. Clearly he is presented as an actual man. Though there are mythical traits involved, no one would say that the biblical narrative speaks of Jesus as though he were only a mythical image or a constructed ideal. Since that is so, B cannot maintain that he does not know whether Jesus as Christ was a historical reality . . . [he] cannot both maintain a symbolic relation to the figure

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of Jesus as Christ and also deny that the figure was a historical man, for such a denial would deny the symbol . . . [and] he also sees that the denial is a contradiction of his being B as such.”7

The second and third sentences here are very questionable. Anyone outside the Christian faith would totally disagree. So does it all come down to the assertion that one cannot doubt a religious symbol if one already accepts it as their own primary religious symbol? But that would say nothing more than did Tillich’s limitations, which said this image has power to transform anyone’s life who is transformed by it, or would say that faith can guarantee for B that there was some man at some time who was the Christ; but only historical research, which is unimportant, could show that it was “Jesus of Nazareth” or someone else. Scharlemann continues: “Faith, or the state of being B rather than A, guarantees one kind of historical fact but not another kind.”8 To distinguish further, in the following sentence he adds, “It guarantees the historical actuality [Wirklichkeit] but not the factuality [Tatsächlichkeit] of the Christ figure.”9 Scharlemann further confuses the problem by saying that “the historical actuality is as certain as the religious symbol of Jesus as Christ . . . [which as] symbolic for B, B is as certain of it as he is of his own being.” Notably, here he does not say his being “B” but simply his “own being, but, again, the issue is not whether B is or not but whether and why Christ is a religious symbol for him and how that is connected to his own being. To this Scharlemann adds, “Such a certainty we may call ‘absolute” but not ‘unconditional.’”10 There are many difficulties here, and anyone “deconstructing” would want to ask on what basis the biblical picture originally became a “religious symbol” for B, which Scharlemann does not address. “Faith” is simply selfevident? Or is it not communicable, as Kierkegaard drew it in his construal of the story of Abraham being commanded to offer his son as a sacrifice to God? This is an especially important consideration, since Scharlemann elsewhere later repeats that story to construct the “uncommon singularity of the I” and emphasizes the difference between “fact” and “truth” in the “knight of faith’s” evening meal. This “knight” had imagined, despite his poverty, that his wife was preparing “calf’s head” for dinner when her preparation was factually only something akin to hash. When the knight ate the meal, Scharlemann emphasizes—knowing that he was pushing Kierkegaard further than the latter intended—he even tasted “calf’s head” “in truth” (“actually”??) though factually it was merely hash.11 So the distinction is not simply between the two German words, especially since most dictionaries present almost verbatim definitions for them. The distinction seems to be only in one’s “faith” or “imagination” by which the image becomes a “religious” or “transcendent” symbol that Scharlemann

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pushes as historical actuality but not factuality. Its “actuality” remains strictly subjective in this explanation, and even if at that time Scharlemann was implying it was objective reality, by the time he published The Being of God seven years later, he was able to admit subjectivity back into the relativization of religious symbols by hanging onto an objective “depth” dimension of reality and truth that embraces any subjective opposite interpretations of religious symbols. Such was the function of “reflexive” thinking. This will become more meaningful as we progress through Scharlemann’s explanations. Nevertheless, a question surely remains of his idea that a religious symbol that does not paint the subject entirely in mythical or ideal terms is therefore validating whatever strange historical claims it makes. Surely the prolific incarnations in Hinduism of various deities are as “historically actual” as this picture of Jesus, who had a miraculous birth, performed miracles right and left of earth-transforming nature, and was finally raised from death and went back to heaven. But of course Scharlemann does not choose to honor those pictures, because they seem too literal, too unscientific.12 Scharlemann prefers to focus on the Crucifixion within a mythology of its being the symbol uniting humans with God, embracing a theistic idea of “grace,” from which he can also utilize words allegedly used by Jesus (though historically dubious by modern research) that can be interpreted to embrace that single “historical actuality” without resorting to things that are mere “facts.” This was uniquely Luther’s approach to the four Gospels when he insisted that the first three (the “synoptic” Gospels) provide only “facts” of what Jesus said and did but do not provide what they meant, whereas only the Gospel of John tells the reader “why” Jesus did and said these things. That, of course, was sixteenth-century thinking that no longer holds any credibility today, since biblical scholars recognize both sides as an unjustified caricature of the documents. Thus the nagging question is how much “myth” or unjustified alleged embodiment of an ideal must be present to disqualify a picture of the subject’s being human. Or, to put it conversely, in what ways would a symbol have to paint the subject in human terms to provide certainty that the subject was human? Certainly Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Tillich avoided the most universally generic human terms that they themselves had furnished to describe the “need” for Christ or reconciliation. Obviously the church struggled with this for centuries and still is, with the Docetic side, although officially condemned, remaining the primary thrust of the church’s Christology. Christianity’s most unique claim was that God had become human or that a human had been revealed as “God”—that is, they were “Christological” claims. And so it is this area on which we have to continue to focus our question of whether, once those claims cannot actually be verified with certainty

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by any historical research, there is a form of consciousness (perhaps “faith”?) that can “corroborate” the claims. As we examine Scharlemann’s later works, we shall have to see if he consistently refrained from any need for “facts” of a “historical Jesus” behind the biblical image or if he saw the “picture” itself as the problem (as we are indicating) when interpreted theistically and whether his novel Christological and theological insights actually did confirm a valid Christology not needing a factual “historical Jesus.” In any case, being and language played a huge role in Scharlemann’s thinking and writing, as he pushed Tillich’s idea of the “god beyond the god of theism” much further than even Tillich did. Scharlemann’s conclusion appears to solidify the “relativity” of all particular truth while defending a “depth” of truth that can embrace all contradictory standpoints or claims and so is universal. Whether any religion would actually accept this conclusion is debatable. Within Christian theology, in any case, this conclusion must turn the focus entirely away from the traditional theistic Christology, providing a different starting point for any question about any religion’s ability to articulate an ethic for all of humanity. But this is getting ahead of ourselves. I can only sketch the bare outlines of Scharlemann’s complex arguments—but hopefully sufficiently so that we can see what he called a “third” alternative to an absolutism and relativism or between an exclusivity and universalism. “WORD EVENT,” “REFLEXIVITY,” AND “REASON OF FOLLOWING” In common usage, words signify, symbolize, or point to something, whether a physical object, imagined object, or to feelings, emotions, desires, or other “things”—that is, to anything that can be “objectified” in thought—which, of course, requires a language. If one claims to be speaking about something that cannot be thought of as an “object,” in common usage, people would believe that the person was only saying it was something that could not be sensed or that gives no empirical sensations or impressions to one. If a person indicated that they expected their speaking to “create” something, again, most hearers would understand that to mean that the speaking would create something not empirically perceptible. If one claimed not only that certain speaking was about something that cannot be objectified but also that one’s very speaking was creating something, then the typical way of interpreting that would be to say that the speaking is creating a very subjective attitude or thought, certainly nothing “objective.” It is doubtful that one would try to absolutize such a product of one’s thinking and speaking.

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Both of these elements have become widely utilized in Christian theology, though usually not combined in the same statements. For centuries theologians have argued that God is not an “object” and therefore is not objectifiable. Hegel interpreted this to mean that God is therefore unknowable. But this contradicted the idea that God “revealed” himself. So Hegel insisted that God must be knowable and is so as Spirit in its manifestations in one’s very thinking as well as in the communal Spirit evident within history. The collapse of the latter claim provoked even more inquiry into the question of whether or not God can be both ineffable and knowable. If not as an “object,” what then? On the other hand, with the erosion of the Christological certainty via historical research, and with the loss of “certainty” that precritical Christians had enjoyed when they formerly thought they could take literally at face value everything in their Bibles, much attention became directed at the “Christ of faith” as well as at the act of “preaching the Gospel.” Many became comfortable thinking that the “corroboration” between the Christological claims of the Bible came through the effect that this preaching of the “Word” had on their own lives. This was what Tillich called the “transformation,” although in Pietist circles, as well as the more conservative groups in general, the “effect” was thought to be much more radical and empirical. Here we can recall William James describing people who were “converted,” “reborn,” and later depicted their rebirth as their complete overhaul or breaking with former vices, such as drunkenness. Many collapsed in seizures in the brush arbors as the Spirit invaded them; others spoke in tongues; others began to handle poisonous snakes to prove that they had God’s power and protection within them. In that sense, the words spoken that led to these transformations could be seen as a “word event” or “speech event” in a causal sense. The words caused a real event to occur. We do not usually see each sentence that someone utters as an “event” shaping a new reality. Yet we know that this is true, even when the creativity or shaping does not occur visibly or immediately or is quite minimal in size or affect. It can happen when words speak truth as well as when they lie or misrepresent. How many wars have broken out over some words about the enemy attacking or even preparing to attack us without our provoking it? Or think of the creative power of the relational words “I love you” and their possible long-term consequences—again, whether they are spoken sincerely or not. If we return to the last half of the nineteenth century, the words of a slave owner in one of the Southern states of the United States would be a “word event” if he had actually freed his slaves, telling them, “You are free to go.” Or, on the other hand, whenever a law-enforcement officer grabs his

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handcuffs and says, “You’re under arrest,” it is also a word event creating that of which it speaks, and we do well to not challenge it. This means that certain spoken or written words actually create “relation,” as Martin Buber said in the quotation that opens this chapter. But such created relations are limited, and Buber was not suggesting that it created entities—only relations between beings or possibly entities, such as art. We will see Scharlemann’s usage of this creative power of speech in his analysis of Buber’s I and Thou both with regard to how one sees the other to whom one is speaking or what one means in what one calls that “other.” This is especially significant in that many people pray to God as a “You” rather than an “it,” while Christian theology has continued to emphasize that what we mean by “God” is beyond knowledge and description, beyond any form of objectification. This drives us to ask whether God “is” without being an object in any form, even as another “I,” or whether there is some way in which God actually is that other “I,” instantiated by one’s calling it “You” or “Thou” or “God.” It requires also that we ask whether the relation established by the thought or utterance of the “You” is an actual or only an imaginary relation. Or does that make any difference? We will also note how important “word event” is in Scharlemann’s analysis of the “reason of following,” in that the words one hears the other speak, in which one can identify oneself or hear one’s own words, “instantiate” what is being spoken. Through ecstasy, when the person hears this voice as their own, they are experiencing their “exstantial I.” This, Scharlemann says, is possible in hearing “Follow me” as not just the other’s heteronomous words but my own words, to follow myself. It is also possible that, in hearing the other say “I am the Resurrection and Life,” I also hear myself saying it, therefore about myself, instantiating that very thing. This, Scharlemann suggests, is an answer to what Heidegger thought was the one thing one can do but never does do as “I.” This probably sounds very mysterious and so will have to be explained at greater length. I mention it only to introduce part of Scharlemann’s interest in words. Words, because of their creative capacity or instantiating capacity, can be referred to as “phenomena,” even though long ago “phenomena” was often restricted in people’s minds to only material objects. I have used the term “word event” rather than the less inclusive “speech event,” since Scharlemann sees this instantiation occurring even by the power of “inscribed” speech or words in a text, not just in the aural sounds as they are pronounced. This unique phenomenon is not just one kind of kerygmatic (Gospel) proclamation by a preacher or pastor; this is the power that any inscribed words can have, given the right circumstances. Again, this creative power of inscribed words is not just restricted to theological language; one can see it as a general possibility of very nonreligious

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words. Finally, we need to reiterate that neither Buber nor Scharlemann is saying that by uttering such relational words—either an “I” or “You” or “world” or “tree” or “painting”—is any of these things thereby materially created. They already exist. What is created or even consciously re-created is the relation between those items and the speaker. The second element, that of “reflexive” thinking, is much more difficult to explain. But as can be seen by the Buber quotation opening this chapter, to Scharlemann it is the answer to overcoming the gap or problem between uncritical and reflective thought religiously. Put simply, uncritical thinking does not ask if the concept that one has in mind corresponds to the object; the thinker just takes for granted that it does without ever questioning it. It is one of the givens of public reason within any culture. But in the course of life most people find certain claims made or designations used that they feel do not match the purported object they are supposed to fit. In raising the question about that possible inappropriate word or claim, one separates oneself from the object in order to examine both percept and concept. There eventually comes a point in such questioning at which one feels that the “gap” between the subject and its object cannot be crossed because of the temporal process of thinking and changes in both subject and object occurring in that time, as well as the spatial problem of the many different possible perspectives from which the subject could view the object, all of which would be different, whether slight or radically different. At that point, “relativism” offers itself as the result, unless one can close those gaps. This is where “reflexive” thinking comes in. We encountered this marginally in Hegel, but now Scharlemann distinguishes the “reflexive,” seeing it as the only way to avoid being swallowed by relativism. He distinguishes reflexive thinking from “reflection” in that it is another level of thinking, but thinking only about one’s thinking, further removed from the unreflected assertion but still concerned with it. As an example, in a “literal” or unreflected statement, one would say, “This is a tree.” In the reflective position—that is, after one weighed the possible correspondence between the traits or predicates of both the object as percept and the concept in one’s mind—one could say, “This is a tree is true.” In the reflexive paradigm, one would issue a judgment on the reflective judgment saying, “‘This is a tree’ is true is true.” The “literal” experience is speaking of a direct object; the “reflective” experience is speaking of a “reflected” object; and the “reflexive” experience shows its “connection to object consciousness and reflection and also its reflexive character.” Reflexivity serves to show that “a true statement about the object [in the literal or prereflective consciousness] is also a true statement about reflection.”13 It is likely that no one is saying that “reflexive” thinking actually creates entities that did not already exist. Reflexive thinking simply changes the

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focus of the relation between the self and the other, now examining the self’s thinking process. But is it really suggesting that any unreflective assertion and reflective assertion can be united or true? What is it in reflexivity that unites the unreflective and reflective, when they both feel at such odds with each other? We will need to examine this more closely as we progress, especially since Scharlemann also insisted that what reflexivity does is simply unite thinking and being of the one who is thinking14; but that itself says nothing about the “object” (whether a rock or tree or painting or “Jesus” as a historical person) that was the focus in either the unreflective or reflective approaches. This is crucial. Finally, from the time of Greek philosophy, two forms of reason were recognized: theoretical and practical.15 These dominated the inquiry into knowledge until in the eighteenth century, and aesthetic reason was recognized as considerably different from the other two.16 At the heart of the differences between these three forms of reason is again the “relation” of the knowing subject to the other or “object.” One can see this very easily when contemplating even the relation the knowing subject attempts to establish, whether the degree of objectivity or neutral relation, or the difference in the subject’s “observation” of the other, and so on—if one compares scientific experiments, moral codes, and artistic styles. These pursuits’ primary interest is not in assuring that one’s thinking is identical with one’s being but, rather, concerns what their “object” is that they are examining. But why a separate “reason of following”? Scharlemann is attempting to make Christology credible and so suggests that if it is a unique form of reason with qualities of its own rather than simply an offshoot of theoretical, practical, aesthetic, receiving, or technical reason then we should be able to “identify its characteristics and compare them with those of other forms of reason.”17 He is convinced that it is distinct from these other three forms of reason (theoretical, practical, and aesthetic), that it cannot be “reduced” to any of the three. But this requires “clarification” of the “universality of the self contained in the meaning of ‘I’; the being of the self that appears in the connection indicated by the copula between the ‘I’ and a particular person; and the capacity of the self to be outside itself, its ecstatic capacity.”18 That is the order of Scharlemann’s method of developing the inquiry and will be explored as we later examine the Reason of Following in greater detail. The first considerations are more decidedly theological considerations but still must be understood prior to getting at his specifically Christological method because of the relation he sees between God and Christ.

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“GOD” AS INSTANTIATED BY “NAMING” OR BY DOUBLE NEGATION To understand the idea of “God beyond the God of theism” that Tillich tried to capture, Scharlemann utilizes several different approaches. Once again, by “instantiate,” Scharlemann is speaking only of a relation being instantiated or created by the speaking, but the referents already are. His references to Anselm are frequent, utilized in trying to clarify Buber’s relational thought, qualifying Nicholas of Cusa’s idea of “God,” and addressing the “unthought” in theology as a form of “deconstructing” or “destruing” from the thrust of Heidegger’s thought in philosophy. Buber’s I and Thou as Instantiating Relations: “Does Saying Make It So?” In this chapter’s beginning quotation from Martin Buber’s I and Thou, Buber made it quite plain that there are “basic words” (Grundworte) that although intending to point to a particular thing also possess an “instantiating capacity” or that serve more graphically in creating a relation. The pairs, “I-it” and “I-you” (“I-Thou,” as translated originally from Buber) are such relational words. Each assumes an “I” that relates to an other, either as an “it” or a “you.” If it is an other that can be “subjectival” or its own “I,” then if “I” view it as “you,” then I am recognizing that subjectival element. If I regard such a one as only an “it,” even though from its own standpoint it is an “I,” then I have depersonalized it, treating it as only an object. One cannot, of course, think one half of a relational pair, such as only “I,” without thereby involving also either an “it” or a “you.” The relation is a polarity between either “I-it” or “I-you.” “I” or “it” or “you” can exist alone, but they would not be thought or spoken of using such terms until they are confronted by or are in some close proximity or contiguity (either in actual presence or even thought) with an other whose presence makes possible a relationship between them. Only then does the question of relationship arise. In both cases involving human subjects, there is mutual interdependence and mutual realization of being either considered to be a person or of being depersonalized. Buber, of course, also spoke of a human being’s relationship with “God” as an “I-Thou” or “I-you.” “You” did not mean that other with whom one was relating had to be another human or even conscious. The “you” might even be a tree, an animal (such as one’s pet), or even a work of art. As Buber saw it, when the other grasps me in its power of exclusiveness, then it is no longer experienced only as an “it” but as a “you.”19 Buber saw it as an immediate

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experience of the “presence” of the other, not merely its existence. The tree, of course, cannot reciprocate even if I treat it like a “you” or even if I talk to it as a “you.” So too with the work of art. But both the tree and the artwork can become a “presence” in which one is removed from the usual subject-object framework in which nonhumans are treated only as objects or “its.” So, only insofar as the other can relate to us in its subjectival “power of exclusiveness” can the relation between us be immediate rather than mediated. Going beyond Buber, I would suggest that this can occur in other living creatures, such as with one’s pet, which enjoys being talked to as a “you” and treated that way rather than merely treated as an “it,” in which latter case it might never even be spoken to at all. A unique relation is created if the other has presence sufficient to impress one with its exclusiveness. Scharlemann utilized Buber’s insights to emphasize the instantiating power of these relational words. My saying “I” does not create my being, and neither does my saying “you” create your being. But my saying “you” does instantiate our relation. There is, of course, always an “I” if there is a “you” or an “it,” and vice versa. So, as Scharlemann emphasizes, these are relationalinstantiating words, not substantial or material-instantiating words. They are utilized here by Buber only to speak of relations, relations between entities that already exist on their own. Scharlemann also emphasizes that, when I am grasped by the exclusiveness of the other, I am no longer concerned with the figure of the other but with its exclusiveness or presence, an immediate presence as a whole, as a “you” that cannot be simply divided into separate parts. While that may be true, the “whole” of the other is completely determined by the specific contents and relations between its various parts. “Presence” is not invisibly perceived, even if it can be imagined. Scharlemann sees parallels between this function of language in Buber and this function of language in Hegel’s Science of Logic: as Scharlemann summarizes them both, “to exist immediately means to exist in the word that names the thing or presence.” He emphasizes that this is an immediate relation, since it is not mediated by any concepts, which means that “the you meets one as a whole, not as a divisible unity,” and this is true even of one’s relation with sublinguistic objects such as the tree. There is no separate element in the tree, such as a “soul,” that causes one to see the tree as a “you” but only the power of exclusiveness residing in the whole tree that “grasps me.”20 But for Scharlemann to say that this has a presence and grasps me even without my being conscious of its separate elements or concepts by which I identify it is probably pushing the “whole” beyond credibility. My experiencing visually the whole person does not mean that I do not notice if the person is bald or has two front teeth missing or is seven feet tall. Without the factual parts there is no “whole.” Even with my cat I am not impressed with

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its exclusive presence without being impressed with the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice, the shape of his head, the length of his body, his total white fur, the unique way he stretches, and so forth. I cannot think of him without thinking of these and many other “parts” of the “whole.” Jumping ahead, this is anticipating the Christological position Scharlemann takes that Hegel had earlier—that Christ is not dependent upon any historical or material facts about Jesus at all, which I am suggesting he has not hereby established any ground for arguing. Scharlemann points out that the epistemological problem of the dualism between self and world, the Cartesian split of two forms of being—thinking things (res cogitans) and extended things (res extensa)—was modified by Buber as only two attitudes, two postures, or two forms of relation, but within a single reality of the world. But Buber also insisted that, for this “relation” or instantiation to occur, one must speak with one’s “whole essence.” Buber insisted that he was not talking about something supranatural or extraordinary but of everyday actuality.” He meant simply that one must speak the words in “such a way that the speaker’s understanding, will, feeling, and sensibility are activated together.”21 Scharlemann conceded, however, that one may become conscious of this speaking with one’s “whole essence” only in retrospect as one examines one’s prereflective speaking. Does this reduce or negate “sensibility” that Buber mentioned? Nevertheless, the primary difficulty that Scharlemann felt Buber had not resolved was how to distinguish between the “you” as another person and the “you” as “God,” since Buber wanted to use the same term or relation of “I-you” (“Thou”) for both. Scharlemann explained Buber’s “four marks” by which the temporal you could be distinguished from the eternal you: (1) that God is the you than can never be turned into an object, whereas temporal yous can be thought of as mere “its,” (2) that God is the eternal you implied in every you, and so every relation one has with any you includes the eternal you, (3) that the relation with the eternal you is both exclusive and inclusive, and (4) that the eternal relation is paradoxical and so cannot be resolved by reason but only lived.22 Scharlemann notes that Buber “consciously took a position against every notion, mystical or other, in which the ‘I’ is ultimately absorbed in or identical with God, which implicitly precluded any idea of Christ’s identity with God, but was obviously opposing any mystical identification of ‘I’ and ‘God’ as well as any Docetic view of the temporal ‘you.’”23 He also questioned Buber’s refusal to allow the word “God” to stand on its own; Buber always makes the word “God” depend upon the word “you.” As Scharlemann explores ways in which any “you” can be distinguished from any other “you” (formal, material, personal, and temporal), the difference

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created by time seems to be the most obvious distinguishing feature. He then delineates a fifth way, which is simply that the words themselves are different since the “I” in the “I-it” relation is itself different from the “I” in the “I-you” relation. Obviously, if the same object were being considered, then the “I” would be distinguished as having two different attitudes or postures toward the other; but that would not be the case if the other involved different entities. Finally, Scharlemann suggests that the difference is between one pair involving a finite “you” and the other being an infinite “you.” This, he insists, can only be dialectically grasped through speculative reason in which “every you and every it bear the eternal you in themselves as their origin or their coming to be at all.”24 It would seem from Scharlemann’s other writings that he would opt for this idea of the eternal “you” being within all particular “yous.”25 But here he argues that under such a view the eternal “you” would not be a “genuine you whom we encounter, but, as it were, the framework in which the relation to you or it takes place at all.”26 He states that this also was not acceptable to Buber, because Buber was insistent upon maintaining a “genuine dialogical relation between the human I and the divine you,” although Scharlemann expressed doubts that the dialogical principle could be retained if the difference between the one and many could not be shown how it was to be understood.27 Scharlemann’s suggestion that he thinks Buber failed to take was to treat the word “God” as one treats the “I” and “you,” as itself instantiating, by which the difference between the words “temporal” and “eternal” is solved. Scharlemann speaks of the “Doubting Thomas” who, when acknowledging the risen Jesus, says, “My lord and my God.” “My lord” was the temporal, and “my God” was the eternal, so within the singular presence both identity and difference are maintained. Scharlemann cautions that “It is a real difference only if the instantiating capacity of the one word is equal to that of the other; it is a real identity, because it is one and the same physical figure, and one and the same time, that evokes the two words.” If that is the case, then the saying “it” establishes the world of objectivity, the saying “you” establishes the world of exclusive relation, and the saying “God” establishes the world of the eternal.”28 He summarizes: “Through the saying of the word ‘God,’ what is shown is the ‘not’ of every it and every you, as well as of I—God is not this or that or any other one, and not I either. But, at the same time, God is not nothing either, so that the presence of the eternal is not only the negative that is shown upon any it, you, or I but also the negative of that negation in turn.”29

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God as “Not-Other” or the Double Negative in Nicholas of Cusa Scharlemann’s short article on the “not-other” in Nicholas of Cusa further develops the theme of “God” not merely being the “other,” or even being the “Totally Other” of the “dialectical theology” of Barth, Bultmann, Gogarten, and Tillich, but, rather, being the “not-other” or that which both negates and embraces the dualities of our thinking.30 Scharlemann notes, in comparing Anselm with Nicholas, that Barth recognized Anselm’s term (“than which nothing can be thought greater”) not as a definition of God but as a name as a rule for thinking. However, Barth seemed unaware of the ambiguity—that is, how “God” who is supposed to be other than the whole structure of thinking or being is actually distinguishable from that structure. This distinction is crucial for Scharlemann. He concludes that Nicholas transcended this mistake by “formulating the identity of being as a double negative.”31 Nevertheless, Scharlemann is concerned that Anselm, Nicholas, and Barth all show some “obliviousness of ‘God’” or, in a Heideggerian sense, a “forgetfulness” of being in the metaphysical tradition. Despite the development of Nicholas’s line of argument pointing out that (1) the “not-other” has priority over any “other,” since the other depends upon the “not-other” but not vice versa, and (2) knowledge depends upon definition while “definition” must define itself as well as everything else, and what it defines is nothing other than that which is defined, which is itself nothing else than nothing else— despite this, Scharlemann says, “nothing else is nothing else than nothing else.”32 How this relates to the question of “God” is that, if “God” can fit the position as the “beginning” as the “not-other” or “nothing-else” does, then it would express the pure identity of being. Nicholas avers that “God” does so fit such that the “circle of definition” is complete: the subject, predicate, and connection between them are all designated as “not-other,” which is true only because other and “not-other” are not in opposition but in an asymmetrical relation.33 Even more important for the theological question, however, is whether even a mental vision of such is “of anything at all, if it is to transcend all distinctions.”34 At this point, Scharlemann reminds us of Heidegger’s idea of the “forgetfulness of being” in the Western metaphysical tradition and notes that perhaps the most obvious thing forgotten is that not all words are confined to mere intentionality. Some “bring into being the reality that they mean,” or they have “instantiating” power, as we saw in Scharlemann’s analysis of Buber’s “I-you” and “I-it.” If Descartes went too far in emphasizing the “thinking” part of the “I’s” being that is made certain in one’s thinking, he was not wrong if that was limited simply to the certainty of the “I” being itself. Scharlemann more explicitly says the word “I” “is what brings into being the reality of selfhood, or self-consciousness. In actual fact, the ‘I’ is then beyond

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form and nonform, beyond existence and essence, because, strictly speaking, one cannot ascertain what it is without simultaneously ascertaining that it is, but only where and when it is . . . [so] the basic definition of the self is ‘“I” am here-now’ or ‘“I” am this-one-here.’”35 Scharlemann attributed Karl Daub’s discovery in 1833 of the “being of God in the word ‘God’” as parallel to Descartes’ discovery about the “I.” This means that when the word “God” is used “with an understanding of its meaning,” this “instantiates what the name refers to.”36 Now “instantiation” means more than creating a mere relation. Scharlemann emphasized that this is all meaningful only within the human capacity to think of “reality as it shows itself at all,” or as reality or the thing “shows itself as reality” to our “everyday thought.”37 So this is not merely mental pictures much less imagination and not a mystical flight from reality. From this Scharlemann concludes a more complex form of relations that are accomplished or are “instantiated” by words: The appearance or existence of God is existence as other than deity. God is real as nondeity, that is, as the otherness that is manifest upon any self and any thing in the time when the word “God” is active. As active, the word shows the nihil omnium, “the nothing of all things” that is in omnibus as the negation of nothing. Hence, what the name of God turns the mind to is not a far-off unnamable entity beyond all known entities but any and all mundane entities, each of which and all of which can be the reality upon which God is shown by the word “God” and as which God is God . . . What the word “God” effects is the instantiation of the not-I, not-this, and not-anything-else either (non aliud); what the judgment about the name of God (“God is non aliud”) accomplishes is an understanding of the being of God as the “sheer openness that is the relation of mind to reality in unity with the sheer givenness that is the relation of actual reality to the mind.”38

Heidegger’s “Unthought” Applied to Theology via Anselm It is a real break with any “theism” to say that the “being of God” is the sheer openness that is the relation of mind to reality in unity with the sheer givenness that is the relation of actual reality to the mind. Scharlemann makes the break with theism even more obvious in his article “The Being of God When God Is Not Being God: Deconstructing the History of Theism.”39 In Heidegger’s attempt to deconstruct or “destrue” (as Scharlemann coins it, so as to contrast “construe”), the history of ontology ends up as a “genealogy of the ontological concept of temporality” as the meaning of the being of human existence (Dasein). Heidegger traces this construction by his “destruction” back through the subjectivity analyzed by Kant and Descartes, through the Scholastics, to Aristotle and Plato, finally stopping with ancient Greek philosophy.

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It was here that ordinary language or an everyday understanding was used for the first time for the conceptual definition of being.40 But to define the being of things this way stimulated the question of what it means. This eventually turned the question back on to what it means to use the word “is.” Although Greek ontology understood being as related to time, it did not conceive of time as the basis of being or the meaning of being but rather as another entity. Heidegger was aware that being and time may appear as entities but are really not but, rather, “involve a contradiction in the concepts defining them because the difference between time and other entities, like the difference between being as such and entities, remained unthought.”41 Alongside this temporality of being, Greek philosophy understood the human being as the thing that can talk, and since talking presents, it generated a gradual awareness of the relation between language and being, which we now recognize as the “word” itself becoming perceptible by what it instantiates, words as the presence or the making present of being. Somewhat parallel to what Heidegger saw as the “forgetfulness of the meaning of being” (its temporality) in philosophy, Scharlemann noted that in theology there was also a forgetfulness of the “unthought”—namely, of the “otherness of God.” The problem with the “analogy of being” is not simply that it was to give too much control over deity or thinking about deity but, rather, that is was incapable of dealing with the “unthought difference between God and being.”42 What is forgotten is neither being nor God, but, rather, it is the question of the meaning of being and the question of the symbol of the otherness of God that is forgotten.43 We can see that this has been “forgotten” precisely when it is considered nonsensical to ask the question “What does it mean for X to be what it is?” or the question “What does it mean for God to not be God?”—although it is not. Heidegger saw that the forgetfulness of the meaning of being was apparent in the fact that the concept “being” gets discussed as a particular view or position rather than as something that “we can do.” On the other hand, we should see it as the “possibility most one’s own.”44 In theistic thought, the Creation is often seen as distinguishing different types of beings or different entities, whereas, Scharlemann says, what is unthought is whether the “whole” of being includes all these entities (that is the where of being);—so, for example, whether the world “is the being of God when God is not being deity” or whether the “world is itself a moment in the being of God” or the world is “the being of God in the time of not being.” Scharlemann thinks that the Trinitarian conceptualization, on the other hand, can be understood “as one in which the very being of God incorporates its own otherness: to be God is both to be deity and to be other than deity,” but it also sees time in the being of God by distinguishing when God is not being God.45

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Just as we can forget that an “I” “may be other than the person who speaks,” so “God may be other than deity” as well. “Forgetting being shows up in no longer asking what the meaning of being is; forgetting God shows up in not ascertaining the God that is other than the ‘I’ of ‘I am here’ [Dasein], or that the God of ‘I am here’ is God’s being God when God is other than deity.”46 This points to the “depth” of selfhood and the depth of the symbol of “God.” Hegel may have resolved the “spurious problem” of the “infinite,” which was seeing it in opposition to the finite by seeing the Infinite with a double negation—that is, not simply not the finite but not the opposition between the Infinite and finite, as he conceived it dialectically, merging the two or “reconciling” them. But Scharlemann says that even Hegel did not properly “think the difference between God and the infinite.”47 For this Scharlemann turns to Anselm’s formula once again. Scharlemann illustrates the “referent” in the symbol “God” as “otherness,” as in the story of Moses and the burning bush. So we can ask ourselves what it would mean to us to have such an experience. Then he suggests that perhaps that event only occurred one time and that “God” who was revealed there is now absent. From this he says that perhaps the purpose is to be gone for a while and later return and that in the meantime what is experienced is “freedom.” In such case, then, “any repetition” of the words “I am” would themselves “present God.” This may all be pointing to the end of theism—“the annunciation of a real otherness that can be seen after the Enlightenment.”48 By Anselm’s insight, the theistic God is not God, since there is always a greater (e.g., the whole of being). Scharlemann points out that, if Hegel’s answer for the quest for certainty was that the history of philosophy involves a thinking of what prior thinkers had thought, taking it into oneself and self’s own thinking, then Heidegger’s answer was that the “power of earlier thought is not in what past thinkers have already thought but in what they left unthought.”49 Anselm has reminded us of the theologically “unthought” by his formulation that elicits the natural question regarding which would be greater: a God who can be only God or a God who can both be God and not be God,50 which is quite beyond theism and includes atheism as well, although Anselm did not intend that conclusion. In summary, Scharlemann notes, A deconstruction of the theistic pictures, therefore, obliges one to rethink that origin which appears in the picture, as in the metaphysical tradition, at the point where the contradiction is uncovered—the point where, if we think of being as such, then God is not God. I have suggested that the formula for reconstructing that appearance is “the being of God when God is not being God” a formula that includes time and negation in the being of God and that opens thought to

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deity existing not as a transtemporal or metaphysical entity but as an actuality in life and history.51

Scharlemann again uses the idea of the “instantiating word” in The Being of God: Theology and the Experience of Truth and especially in The Reason of Following, which we will include when we discuss the other two main themes of “reflexion” and the unique “reason of following.” “GOD IS”: TRUTH AND REFLECTION; REFLEXIVITY AND THE DEPTH OF TRUTH In The Being of God, Scharlemann explains first what is meant by “truth,” especially when one speaks about the “experience” of truth, acknowledging that although it is more of a problem for theology than other fields of inquiry, given the unempirical nature of the study as usually conceived and the limited nature of “reflection,” even modern science no longer thinks the inquiring subject’s “standpoint” can be wholly neutral. In the second chapter, he sets forth the question of what might be meant by “God is.” The intricate discussion of both chapters emerges even in the final two chapters of the fascinating book, so it is those two to which the majority of space must be given. Truth and the Schism of Reflection God is usually understood as infinite, so by its very definition no one can point to it or it cannot “exist,” since it would be beyond possible judgment. The very structure of a subject having to judge whether a certain thing or being is “God” excludes the possibility. Scharlemann uses Abraham as an example, suggesting that either in his call by God to leave the Ur of the Chaldees and journey northwest or in his call by God to sacrifice his son, if he had ever asked himself whether it was really “God” calling him to do these things, then he would have had to deny it, since reflection rules out such a human judgment.52 As Scharlemann sees it, dialectical theology under Barth and Bultmann apparently ignored this and so was still convinced that somehow the “word” could be recognized as coming from God even if God could not be identified with anything else in the world. But this is a self-delusion overruled by the very structure of reflection itself. Scharlemann thinks Tillich attempted to escape it by insisting that “God does not exist” and by emphasizing the prophetic principle and Protestant principle, which prohibit identifying anything in the world with God. The question is how the kerygma can actually present the original person offering the power and what criteria one has for deciding whether any such

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offer actually comes from “God.” If one hears someone say that “God is love,” then there is no criterion that can be provided by which to ascertain if the words came from God. That is the “schism of reflection.” On the other hand, Scharlemann thinks that, if one hears, “Jesus is resurrected,” that is “a language in which the power to be one’s own self on one’s own makes its appearance” and so is “on a par” with physical sensations one receives upon hearing an assertion about a sensible object. “As kerygma,” Scharlemann says, “Jesus is resurrected” is not the assertion whose truth is to be tested against reality. For the words represent the “in-itself” of the real power to which the existential assertion “I can be the self that I am on my own” makes reference. The assertion to be verified is this one: “I can be the self that I am.” It is true if, when I hear announced to me “Jesus was raised from the dead,” I can appropriate the power and actually be the self that I am. The statement about Jesus gives what the statement about the self projects.53

This idea of the “authentic self” is from Rudolf Bultmann, to which Scharlemann adds the idea of “being fully on my own” in the world, explaining that I now “can be the self I am” or can now be “in the world though not of the world.” Whereas Bultmann had emphasized that the kerygma calls one to be an “authentic” self by living out of God’s resources rather than by trying to live only out of one’s own, Scharlemann seems to imply that I can live “on my own.” Or is this all dependent upon what Tillich emphasized—that one can finally “accept” that God has accepted oneself with the doctrine of simul justus et peccator? Scharlemann insists that this is not a mere psychological change that occurs, though that may also happen, but that the “announcing person, the keryx, is as such external to the recipient as is the reality of an appearing object. Both are data, or donations, to experience.”54 So the assertion becomes “true” not when tested against reality but if, when I hear it, “I can appropriate the power and actually be” what it says I am.55 Scharlemann insists that “Jesus is raised” is not a statement that contains an object or reference that one needs to ascertain. It is, rather, a declaration that actually “presents” that very thing mentioned. This, of course, moves the instantiation idea further down than with the discussion of Buber, since there the presence of the thing is a given that needs no verbalization but simply exudes an exclusiveness. Scharlemann continues, saying that this presents or donates reality, which is only a projection or anticipation in other assertions; it makes available reality not heretofore possible but perhaps desired as possible existential reality.56 But how is the phrase “Jesus was raised” saying anything about my possibility or my reality that is “otherwise only existential possibility”? How is

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it a “projection of reality made through other assertions” and enabling me to actually live an authentic life on my own? Why is a reference to someone who is alleged to have lived two thousand years ago an enabling power to me? Scharlemann answers: “‘I can be the self that I am’ is true because it corresponds to what happens when I hear announced to me ‘Jesus is resurrected.’”57 But what is it that “happens” to me? Is Scharlemann saying that listening to the kerygma of the Resurrection is a way of ascertaining whether what has been said about human possibility is actually so? This act of listening to what is announced by another person is, in the kerygmatic framework, what the act of beholding an object through our sensation is? Unlike a general statement, Scharlemann insists that the kerygmatic announcement instantiates or presents that which it announces. He can go so far as to say that, in the kerygmatic announcing, “we are presented with the living Jesus” if we hear it as enabling us to be who we can be.58 So the “statement about Jesus gives what the statement about the self projects.”59 But does that depend on my ability to hear the words in that special way, or is it something about the words themselves that provides them the capacity to get me to hear them correctly? Are they words encouraging me to develop my potential or only words encouraging me to accept myself as I am, the self I already am? This is not entirely clear in Scharlemann. Is it really saying more than Tillich’s assertion that the image of New Being has the power to transform those who are transformed by it, which is the same as saying that I need to accept myself since God has already accepted me? Scharlemann admits that this does not explain how the identity between self and Jesus the Christ can be, but it nevertheless does occur such that the “I am” attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, when repeated by the self, reveals the self’s “participation in his [Jesus’s] being.”60 Does this not appear to be pushing the Cartesian certainty too far in identifying a present person’s speaking with an inscription about a person of the past in referring to such as a “participation in Jesus’s being”? This “I Am” that both Altizer and Scharlemann utilize so much originates from the old story of Moses meeting God prior to the Exodus, and as Buber himself said, the “I Am” that God provided as answer to Moses’s question of whether or not God would actually show up if he challenged Pharaoh was not some Greek idea of one’s eternal being but merely the equivalent of “I will be there.” That throws the expression into a whole different light. But, then, even this is unnecessary, since no human seems presumptuous enough to articulate the words “I Am” or “I am the Resurrection and Life” in speaking of themselves. Crucially, in a footnote Scharlemann raises the objection that many would have to his interpretation that any person hearing the kerygma has died and

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was resurrected, that Paul’s statement saying just that in Col. 3:1–2 was only a metaphor. But Scharlemann replies by rhetorically asking why this would have to be understood only metaphorically. He adamantly argues that it would not have to be if the words’ “textuality” enables them to “be there with” the one who hears the words in as real a state as if it were other human beings that were “there with” them. Scharlemann insists that, if they can be “there with” us in a similar capacity, then they are “as real” an “existence” as any fellow human being would be, even if different in temporality.61 But is anything the words say true as long as they are “as real” as would be the existence of fellow human beings? Does “real” here mean, as earlier in Buber, that it must have “presence” that is “exclusive,” or are there other criteria that the words must also meet, such as scientific reasonableness? Another expression Scharlemann used to show this instantiation or donation of what is spoken of was the phrase “God is love.” If it is given only as a “general statement” vis-à-vis reality, then it only projects or signifies a referent, whereas a “kerygmatic” use of “God is love” supplies, “donates,” or gives the referent to the hearer. Thus it can be really the love of God, not just the love of the person announcing the idea, if one can only hear it as simultaneously words both from the announcing person and from God.62 Here it seems that the “announcing person” is outside oneself, but in The Reason of Following the announcing person is one’s own “exstantial self”— that is, one’s own voice discovered via ecstasy, coming through the other. But how would one go about determining whether the “love of God is really presented” in such announcement? How would that differ from the love of the other person speaking? From this process, one might presuppose that to speak of the “death of God” takes for granted the reasonableness of earlier speaking of the “existence” of God. But Scharlemann sees this as simply the emerging of reflection out of the religious or unreflective mentality in its awareness “that no one, not even the one taken to be God in the flesh, is God.”63 Finally, Scharlemann insists that Pannenberg’s emphasis that history manifests the existence of God via the Resurrection of Jesus neither flows from nor verifies Pannenberg’s definition of God as the power determining all reality and therefore overpowering death. Thus any assertion from reflection claiming that “God exists” in the sense of someone or something possessing divine attributes is simply false.64 Scharlemann’s fuller Christological explanation is that, when Saint Paul says God was “in Christ reconciling the world,” it does not mean that divine properties or deity is present in Jesus. It means only that Jesus is the person who reveals what it means for God to be God—that is, to see it in an “unsurpassable” way—that the significance of Jesus is not his deity but that he is “the place at which the deity appears in its deity.” Whether “God is Jesus”

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is determined by “whether in view of the man Jesus we can understand what it means for God to be God.”65 It would be verified if Jesus’s ministry and career manifested itself as a reconciling of the world with God, but Jesus would still be only the place where God manifests itself in this particular way. A second way in which “God is” is used is in seeing the phrase as pointing to “the manifestation of the event underlying all events,” which Scharlemann claims suffers from a lack of clarity.66 The “experience of truth is related to two aspects here: whether theological language manifests the one in the many, and which events, if any, disclose the be-ing of the one who is.”67 This means that in significant “events which hold our attention, stay in memory, and awaken an interest in seeing more of the same” we are able to tell the one “underlying event to the extent that what we understand it to be saying can be seen to agree with what we perceive” to be occurring in these particular events.68 Whether to say that “God is” in such cases has any clear meaning is questionable. To make such an assertion about an event is not valid because of some external authority such as the Bible. It can only validate itself through what it discloses. Gerhard Ebeling emphasizes that to use the term “God is” in such a case changes the context, disclosing an element that had been hitherto hidden, and the term gains its credibility only if it expresses the human situation more accurately than a “technical approach” does, which means to Scharlemann that it thereby calls on us to “be the ones we are, to be identical with ourselves, but fail to do so, and one in which we are called upon to put reality and the mystery into words.”69 Ultimately, Scharlemann insists, one must learn how to use “God is” properly theologically as well as how to speak of being. More than this, one must not use “God is” for events that can be adequately described without it—that is, where using “God is” actually adds nothing independent to the assertion. Further, to use “God is” must be an assertion that transcends the particulars of the situation to express its universality.70 This universality is likely the most important quality Scharlemann adds to the proper use of “God is,” in all events. If the assertion remains tied to historical or physical details, then it cannot be universal. That explains Scharlemann’s example of Moses’s encounter with the burning bush. Scharlemann insists that proper theological speaking means having no regard or concern for whether or not any real event actually occurred, much less whether the accounting in the story should be seen as literal.71 Theological language deals with universals, not specifics, and yet, for some reason, the “assertions” that theological language ends up using are often very specific but without any clear meaning. For example, when he later refers to the burning bush episode, Scharlemann uses the inaccurate alleged quotation from the “voice” (of Yahweh) within the bush, “I am who I am,” which does

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not at all convey the Hebrew meaning—only a hellenizing of the Jewish scriptures to make them more Christian.72 Scharlemann asked why few “critically minded” people today engage in such talk, wondering if perhaps they feel that it lacks universality or simply that the language lacks a capacity to interest people. He thought perhaps Ebeling’s explanation had some feasibility when he suggested that the basic “situation of man” has been pushed into the background, “abandoned to silence.” In any case, the question also remains as to which kinds of events are more apt to disclose the be-ing of God. En route to this question, Scharlemann notes that no experience in the twentieth century shows a need for a second narrative or language involving more than human agents than the Holocaust. In his obvious preference to equate “God” with only “being” rather than with “nothing” or even with both and neither “being” and “nothing,” Scharlemann gives rather unfair caricatures the deep insights of Rabbi Richard L. Rubenstein and counters what he saw as its negativity with Philip Hallie’s book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed.73 Hallie’s story is of a small community of Huguenots in and around La Chambon, France, who kept more than 2,500 refugees safe from harm by the Nazis. The subtitle of the book was How Goodness Happened There. Scharlemann speculated on whether the agency behind the event could have been more accurately “God was” there. Certainly he could see that the agency was not simply identified with all the names of the villagers, and so he understood this to be something “supranormal,” just as he judged the Holocaust itself. In any case, it points to an ambiguity in any possible use of the phrase “God is” or “God was” when speaking of certain events.74 Ironically, this reluctance to identify any events with the name “God” was also seen in George Picht’s observations at the end of a semester teaching fourteen students in a course titled “What Is Theology?” None of the fourteen students even attempted to answer what “God” signifies. Picht felt this confirms that humanity has created a situation in which the only honest response to questions about “God” is to be silent.75 But that was Rubenstein’s exact response. Finally, Scharlemann shows that Altizer’s Self-Embodiment of God blends the three themes at play here: self-identity, the nature of language, and the being of God. The question of identity (“Who am I?”) and the question of meaning (“What does it mean for me to be the one that ‘I’ am?”) appear to be answerable neither by tradition nor by reflection. But Altizer sees “silence” (which was how Kierkegaard saw Abraham in his “faith”) not as a valid option but as a “temptation.” To opt for silence is to risk losing one’s identity in something else, thereby losing meaning. To speak is to actualize one’s identity at the risk of losing one’s destiny—or, regarding words, “when everything is put into words, nothing is said.”76

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Therefore Scharlemann insists that, if silence prevails, then theology is at its end. Rather than follow a “phenomenological reduction” of self-world relations, of which Scharlemann speaks, Altizer sees the whole as a movement from plurality to unity—that is, attempting to show the unity of the subject in the plurality of subjects and the unity of the speech event in the plurality of speakings.77 In a nutshell, Altizer sees the process of language, of speaking, and of hearing as the “self-embodiment of God.” “What is taking place when voice speaks is that God embodies deity as other than itself.” In Altizer’s words, “The pronunciation of the name of God evokes a special presence . . . that can be called forth by no other act of speech.”78 “God” is the “beginning” of language, and the word itself can only be spoken “in exile,” that is, of its “otherness,” so only speech about God makes God’s otherness manifest as world. The “absolute beginning” is therefore the real subject of language, the very being expressed in the “I am I.” This “pure identity” says everything and nothing but is the “unsaid” in the ground of every “I am.” Thus “the identity and meaning sought are the ground and end of the being of God as a transcendent ‘I Am’ which negates and judges the hearer—‘the hearer who hears ‘I Am’ in the voice of call [i.e., as the sound in the voice of speech itself] does so only by way of the act of self-negation . . . as an immanent ‘I am,’ which every different hearer is able to say on his own.’”79 The ambiguity of saying such a “God is” is due not only to the different ways in which the words are heard but also to the basic attitude followed by each of the two languages at play. Scharlemann emphasizes that the “language of the one” (theology) aims to be universal, to let things be what they are and let things happen as they happen rather than trying to make them fit theology’s desires or ends. This, as he sees it, corresponds more closely to pure science than to either technology or art. Yet, ironically, he notes that technology’s emphasis on altering things from the way they are to make them more useful is based on a deep understanding of the “innermost being” of things.80 Uniquely, this ability or potentiality to be something other than what they are, is, of course, parallel to the potentiality of God to be “other.” In any case, to see “God is” in events seems ambiguous in modern times. The third way of seeing the “God is” is present in the identification of “God” with any person—for example, “God is this one here.” This form is seen clearly by some as true and by others as false. Scharlemann established that symbolic assertions are true by two tests: (1) “whether different languages, or order of discourse, express the same time in that both of them state the meaning and both of them show the reality of the symbol” and (2) “by whether the same language expresses different times—the same words both produce the expectation about the symbol and also record the interest elicited

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by it.”81 The need for the two languages or orders of discourse arises from the fact that, in a theological assertion, such as “God is this one here,” one is involving two different “referents”—“God” and a human. If the symbol is asserting “God is Jesus,” when the “figure of Jesus” evokes the interest behind the question “What does this mean?” then the figure had the capacity to “point beyond its literal appearance” to resolve the question of meaning, moving the focus away from the first referent, “Jesus,” to the second referent or language about “God.” The biblical picture of this “Jesus” obviously carries a certain historical truth, to the extent that his person and career match the critical picture we get in reading the documents.82 But, Scharlemann insists, this “figure” that these documents provide us themselves raise this interest or question, “What does all this mean?” which is no longer a question about history but about meaning, as the figure of Jesus, as the first referent, itself becomes a “signifier of another referent,” “God.” The question then becomes whether or not the first referent can be seen as both “Jesus” and “God,” as Scharlemann illustrates by the ability one has of seeing the log in the fireplace as both a “log” as well as “tree.”83 But where does one really discover those who articulate the critical historical picture actually transcending the question of history only to focus on meaning, as if the historical question is no longer relevant? The second criteria involved not two different languages that unite but, rather, the question of whether within a single language the assertion that “God is this person” would correspond at different times, the time of the manifestation of the appearance as well as the time of the assertion. This is largely the question of whether God’s being other than God “makes sense of the career of Jesus” or by the same words. More specifically, does the career of this Jesus correspond to the expectation that what it means for God to be God is to be other than God? If the primary view behind the religion is the relation between God and humanity, and especially of overcoming the alienation between the two, then if Jesus’s career carries this reconciling character, a reconciliation that corresponds to the “otherness” of God, then the assertion that “God is Jesus” appears to be true.84 This all requires the focus on the “meaning” of what it is for God to be other than God (that is “unsurpassable greatness” in being reconciling) and the “meaning” of Jesus’s career as being reconciling. But is not all of this a much later retrospective view of Jesus that perhaps has no actual relation to any man in that first century, a view that gave no weight to the actual rejection of that Jesus even over much less extravagant claims? But Scharlemann insists that the “figure of Jesus” elicits interest the same way a dinner of calf’s head aroused the interest with Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith” we spoke of earlier. This “knight of faith,” while on his way home for his dinner, imagines what meal awaits him. He dreams of a calf’s head

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with all the trimmings, just as he imagines many things on that walk home that are merely imaginings, not reality. When he arrives home, he does not have a calf’s head awaiting him but a meal quite inferior. But in his faith, he nevertheless eats calf’s head. Scharlemann had already prepared for this by emphasizing the symbol conveying different levels of meaning or referents rather than being literal. So the knight of faith knew he lacked the means to have such a sumptuous meal as calf’s head, but he imagined it anyway. When he ate the meal, the taste or meaning of the meal matched his earlier imagined “calf’s head.” So, “despite outward appearances,” he ate what he expected, “calf’s head,” and so was able to “get in truth what he has given up in fact.” It was literally even “contrary to actual fact,” since he factually ate only hash.85 This “receiving back” what he had given up distinguished him from the “knight of infinite resignation,” who would have simply resigned himself to settling for hash “with the satisfaction that infinite resignation can provide.”86 This is more of Scharlemann’s distinction between actuality and factuality that we viewed earlier. Scharlemann was aware that he stretched the story past Kierkegaard’s intended usage but suggests that doing so can reveal that “two different things might be manifestations of the same being, and hence of how expectation and interest might agree with each other despite the difference in objective appearances.”87 This pushes the possibilities far beyond the agreement or correspondence between the anticipation or projection and the actual encounter with the referent, which Scharlemann emphasized was common to “truth” not simply in “mundane” affairs but in theological criteria as well. Already he had suggested that the “image” of Jesus in the Bible provides only a bare outline of a picture, but even that is left behind once the image is sufficiently odd enough to provoke one’s asking, “What does this mean?” From that point forward, one does not look any further at historical or physical details.88 Then we see here that the meaning might easily be found to be totally contrary to the image. So the agreement or correspondence that Scharlemann spent so much time elaborating just evaporated. It has not yet been answered whether there is any limit whatever on “truth” if imagination can be valid in such extremely opposite ways, taking the opposites for truth. This pushes us forward to “reflexivity,” which Scharlemann will emphasize as the resolution of this problem of reflection; but there the referent changes even more radically, confining itself only to one’s thinking process, not at all to the first referent as is here involved. Would the story of the knight of faith and his imagination have been different had he ended up eating fish instead of calf’s head? Or simply bread? Or weeds? Or mud? If a person actually did live as the knight lived, would not most people consider them mentally ill for thinking that what was imagined was reality?89

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The common element in the anticipation and the experience is completely missing unless it is only that the same man was involved, or the same “God” as other-than-God, but that was not Kierkegaard’s or Scharlemann’s focus in the story. It is about what was anticipated as the meal and what it turned out to be. As in Kierkegaard’s story of Abraham and his “sacrifice” of Isaac, Hebrews’ author emphasized that Abraham received back what he was willing to give up, but there is nothing in the story of such an attitude or ending, just as Kierkegaard himself never “received” back Regine Olsen after he gave her up. But back to the Jesus image: Scharlemann engages in this analysis to show that although the statement “God is Jesus” seemed credible to the “reflective” (or was it only to the not-reflective?) person of faith, actually the “God is Jesus” can and has been and is still given two contradictory verdicts: true by Christians and false by most if not all other people. Scharlemann insists that this does not mean that some see the truth while others are blind to it, and neither does it mean that those who think Jesus was not God are actually “anonymous Christians” (since that is still a presumption of Christians’ superiority in faith or reason), and it does not mean that those who consider the assertion are less reasonable or use invalid thinking. They simply come from a different viewpoint, and “reflection” cannot supply anything to resolve the schism it produces. This is true even of the Anselmian “rule” of thinking as it points to a place at which thinking cannot be separated from real being—that is, at an idea “which cannot be merely an idea . . . [but rather] opens thought to the real referent of thinking” which is being.90 Even here “it is obvious that not everyone does so believe him or understand the assertion that ‘God is . . . that than which no greater can be thought’ so any ‘God is this’ can be experienced both as true and as not true.”91 Scharlemann sees the Anselmian argument as revealing the instantiation of that of which it speaks—that is, God. But was “God” already there or actually placed there by Anselm? Or is the creative power of instantiation limited only to relationships as in Buber, or perhaps only to the realization or articulation of relationships that already exist or are, no matter what one thinks or says? Scharlemann seems to answer that, when one speaks of God with the understanding that “God” indicates “that than which a greater cannot be thought,” then “it points out a place at which thinking cannot be separated from real being . . . an idea which cannot be merely an idea, and thus it opens thought to the real reference of thinking.”92 But Scharlemann elsewhere emphasized that this was only the identity between one’s own being and one’s own thinking, as we saw earlier, not that it is stating something about some other being. He nevertheless insists that to think “God” can be proven by reflection is “deluded,” since the “notion of God is an infinite idea to which nothing

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can ever correspond.” He continues, “The reflective experience connected with the assertion that something is God is always ‘atheistic.’”93 Scharlemann calls the relativity of reflective judgments the “schism” from which only an understanding of “reflexivity” can rescue theology. But reflexivity says nothing about any being other than oneself thinking: “As far as reflection can see, one can only conclude that the answer to the truth of ‘God is Jesus’ is clearly a double one. The assertion is ascertainably true and also ascertainably false, depending on the reflecting subject; both faith and nonfaith experience truth.”94 Reflexivity, the Depth of Truth, and the Relativity of Religious Symbols If the last question as to where the “essence of God” appears—that is, in “Jesus”—receives through reflection both true and false judgments, equally valid, then reflection is split apart. The only answer appears to be to turn to “reflexivity,” which is reflection on reflection itself. If literal or precritical thinking of a mundane object uncritically relates percept or intuition to a notion or concept, or the singular to the universal, placing the “is” in between the two, then reflective thinking synthesizes meaning and reality, or time in language, relating understanding and apprehension, resulting in phenomenon (truth) whereas reflexive thinking relates the phenomenon (truth) to itself, or reason to itself, exploring its “depth” or “self-transcendence, as a form of deeper reduplication. The “literal” stage simply accepts the appearance with the cultural meaning supplied by the common language game. The “reflective” stage asks how I can know this is the truth. The “reflexive” level asks, “What is the truth about truth?” Is this pointing to the impossibility of there being an absolute perspective such that the only “truth” one can hold onto is its “depth,” which shows it to be able to embrace this lack of an absolute perspective, the relativity of all life? We earlier presented these different forms of judgment with the assertions made about trees that Scharlemann used to illustrate the differences. If it is asked how this analysis is pertinent to our inquiry, recall that the question we are dealing with is whether—after a religion’s conflated historical-metaphysical or historical-mythical claims have been shown to be uncertain if not even unintelligible by historical research—there is a form of consciousness that can corroborate the claims that are immune from the negatives or limitations of historical verification and so would form a ground for a common or universal ethic. The split within “reflection” itself is revealed when one examines the attempts to utilize a critical awareness of historical method, as we showed elsewhere in juxtaposing the work of John Dominic

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Crossan and Wolfhart Pannenberg.95 To a large degree, that same inherent problem with “reflection” was seen in especially the work of Schleiermacher (chapter 2) and Tillich (chapter 4) of this present inquiry, although they attempted to transcend it by altering ontological structures when they tried to align the different languages of the physical and metaphysical. The image of Jesus received an ontology completely contradictory to the ontology in which all humans were presupposed to live within, which exception allowed Schleiermacher and Tillich to see Jesus as the Christ as revealing the Infinite in his finitude or having a wholly transforming effect on people of faith, though the transformation never reached its goal. Hegel (chapter 3), of course, abandoned reflection for the most part with his reflexive “speculative” philosophy, yet his applications of his philosophy to historical specifics diminished the validity of the reflexivity, despite his calling it “Absolute Spirit” or the “work of God in history”—that is, unless the Absolute actually did take up into itself even its own rejection and denial. But when Tillich suggested this, it was conditioned upon the being still being, despite absorbing its opposite or its own negation. But to say “Christ” still is or survives his death as Jesus is to slip back into mythology if one is speaking of anything other than the disciples’ or Jesus’s acquaintances’ memory. This does not carry any “presence” with it, unless ideas can suffice for “presence.” The question is whether Scharlemann’s position can remain “reflexive” or “speculative” in an even more consistent form or if it dilutes itself by reverting to reflection as it lifts particular historical elements or inscribed “words” into the realm of certainty. If he accomplishes this “corroboration” or “speculative” feat convincingly, it will have transformed the need for any actual “corroboration,” which may be the only way to solve the problem of the Christological assertions. At this point, however, reflection has left Scharlemann’s historical references to Jesus both true and false. Can reflexivity resolve this or move beyond it? Does it retain any content other than one’s being? As Scharlemann sees it, “reflexive thought completes the course of thinking,” even if one does not go as far as “after thinking,” which is an inversion, which is “to think of our thinking of being as the being of God for our thinking.”96 Scharlemann is persuaded that, on the reflexive plane, the truth that was split by reflection into meaning and reality now appears in the “depth of truth” as the inclusion of both the true and untrue rather than their mutual exclusion. Their contradiction of each remains, due to the nature of the limitation of language, the elusiveness of universals and their presuppositions, the subjectively diverse possible standpoints or perspectives, the finitude of the human brain, and the ever-changing understandings of what we consider “reality” to be within our existence, but at the reflexive stage these opposites are retained and thereby “relativized.”

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We noted in chapter 4 that Tillich spoke of the “dimension” of “depth” and “abyss” as well as the dual elements in all religious symbols in their use of “ordinary materials” while pointing to a transcendent or infinite referent, since he was convinced that the “depth” or “abyss” indicated its priority to or being “outside” of the ontological structure. He justified this as the symbols’ innate nature of not only serving not only as pointers or signifiers but also “participating” in that to which they point. Scharlemann corrects the focus of this picture, insisting that the “depth” is not outside the ontological structure but is merely within the “otherness” of language and the “otherness” of God as seen by Anselm. Scharlemann adds the elements of instantiation from Anselm and explicitly from Karl Daub and an explicitly different level of thinking (reflexivity) that could accommodate the reflective split he and Tillich both saw, and upon which Tillich had proposed his idea of the Cross being the ultimate religious symbol, the criterion of all religious symbols, which Tillich did without either equating it with speculative idealism or explicitly calling it “reflexivity” in distinction from “reflection.” Scharlemann has a more phenomenological approach to ontology than did Tillich, and so it provides a clarification of the symbol of the Cross that moves even further than Tillich’s view in its declaration of the “relativity” of all religious symbols. Reflexive thought deals not with sensible objects or even with evaluating whether meanings match the reality but, rather, is concerned with that which grounds both truth and untruth or asks whether there is truth in truth, beauty in beauty, justice in justice, and so forth. Karl Daub’s focus on the connection between God and language—especially upon how “word” was central to both and had instantiating power in Christian theology, as we noted earlier—was extremely important to Scharlemann in formulating the “depth” of symbols and truth, even if Scharlemann thought it was incorrect for Daub to call this “speculative” thought.97 Scharlemann asserts that the reflexive judgment formulates the notion that when the thinking process as such which is always a thinking of being and which is named by the word “GOD,” is transformed from pure activity into an object, the result is the object that the word “word” refers to; language. Conversely, when language is translated into the pure activity which it embodies, the result is the thinking process as such, which “God” names. A reflection on language leads to the thinking of being, and the communication of the thinking of being leads to the word “God.” “God” names the one whose being is thinking—he is not a person or a thing.98

The words “God” and “word” instantiate, as we have already seen true of “I” and “thou” and “this.” But unlike them, “God” instantiates the negation of the subject, and so “it therefore drives a subject first out of itself to some object—‘God’ as ‘not-I’ opens my eyes to what is other than I, and what I see

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first is some object as ‘this.’ But ‘God’ also instantiates a ‘not-this’ and hence it urges me to look still further. It instantiates a continual opening, related to whatever comes into view, but never filled out by anything. ‘God’ thus actually instantiates the dynamic openness of being in the world.”99 No person or thing fits as the “referent” for “God,” but the word “word” itself does. Both “word” and “God” are “signs of a sign, or names of a name.” “But word also is what it signifies. Hence, the literal referent of the word ‘God’ is finally, the word ‘word’—the phenomenon of language, and the word character that the name ‘God’ instantiates in everything.”100 Further, “God as word” means that either “God” or “God is God” “are capable of being inscribed upon things (the ‘word character’) so as to ‘re-sign’ them, or turn them into symbols of the essence of God.”101 However, in reflection on language’s “identity” with the meaning of “God,” “reflexivity” itself splits between people “here” and “there,” as some see the identity while others do not.102 But, Scharlemann answers, the “truth of truth” that is the pursuit of reflexivity is not found merely in the medium of language but in a “reflexive dimension in reality which corresponds to the reflexivity of the self and which is grasped by the very division between reflection here and reflection there.”103 This unity of subject and object utilizes what Scharlemann calls a “third language,” which involves a “second level” of religious symbols. To illustrate this, he refers to Tillich’s understanding and evaluation of the symbol of the Cross (as a “second-level symbol) as it relates to the criteria of the truth of faith. On the subjective side, Tillich held that faith is true if it expresses ultimate concern, which implies it creates passionate reply, action, and communication. This determines whether a symbol is still a “living symbol” or manifests anything at all. On the objective side, faith is true if its content is really ultimate. The symbol’s truth implies an element of self-negation in that the most adequate symbol is the one “which expresses not only the ultimate but also its own lack of ultimacy.”104 This double side of the symbol is true, however, of all religious symbols by virtue of Tillich’s idea that they utilize ordinary language to express a transcendent concern. The “lack of ultimacy” describes the ordinary objects utilized in the language—that is, if they are taken literally as the ultimate dimension, which they are not. The expression of the ultimate is the transcendent referent of the symbols. In this sense, the Cross is not any more a self-negation within a self-affirmation than many other religious symbols.105 The mere voluntary sacrifice of a person’s life, whether by death on a Cross, hanging, or other means, does not per se create a transcendent dimension or cause it to become the criteria of all symbols. The significance of the Crucifixion allegedly derives from who the one was who negated themselves,

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and when Scharlemann cites the “reconciling” and compassionate mission that Jesus had, it was not an ephapax or once-for-all-time event; people often sacrifice themselves for others in various ways. Tillich insisted that Jesus would not have been the Christ without sacrificing himself as Jesus to himself as Christ.106 This statement is simply saying that Jesus had to remove his human existence in order to be the Christ. But a dead person simply has not become something else; the dead person simply no longer is. Why Jesus could not have been the Messiah or Christ without going to the Cross is certainly not apparent in the Jewish tradition of the expected Messiah. It comes only from a later hellenized Christian history that emphasized the necessity of the Crucifixion. In any case, Tillich refers to this as the only infallible truth of faith: “The only infallible truth of faith, the one in which the ultimate itself is unconditionally manifest, is that any truth of faith stands under a yes-or-no [yes-and-no] judgment.”107 The yes and no are precisely the transcendent and the human elements respectively of the symbol or assertion that I just noted. Scharlemann sees more in the “yes-and-no.” He emphasizes that this is precisely the “reflexive” aspect of the symbol, the truth about truth—namely, “that no one possesses the truth, and this is not imposed on faith but is in the symbol of faith.” So he insists that the “truth of truth” or “depth” of truth uncovered by reflexivity is the relativism and different perspectives that are simply given within human existence. “The self-relativization contained in this particular experience of truth,” he further elaborates, “has the character both of an experience of truth and of an experience which puts truth in relation to its opposite. The truth about truth is experienced as the possibility of its being other than how it is actually experienced. There is no experience of truth that is itself an experience of the one and only truth, except in the reflexive form of the experience of the relativity of truth.”108 Evidently the symbol of the Cross, as a symbol of a symbol (Jesus as the Christ) or “second-order” symbol, is therefore different from other experiences of truth in symbols by virtue of its reflexivity or self-relativization.109 But could there not be many other symbols that have the same self-negation? If Scharlemann’s analysis of Tillich’s “criteria” of religious symbols as being the symbol of Cross is correct by virtue of “reflexivity,” then the relativization of religions’ symbols and beliefs can do away with the exclusivity and divisiveness of every religion for those willing to accept this. That would be a step forward for humanity. But one has to ask why the symbols of any religion would have any inevitable effect on symbols of another religion. It is not at all clear. The statement that it has that effect simply appears as a presumptuous stance of Christian theology, despite Scharlemann’s insistence that one must not think of other religious people as “anonymous Christians.”

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That is the effect of such a general allegation of a universal effect of the symbol of the Cross. There is a good chance, however, that Tillich did not intend to go as far as Scharlemann did when Scharlemann said that this relativization applies necessarily even to the symbol of the Cross itself. Even further, if the symbol of the cross itself should no longer effectively symbolize the relativity of all symbols, this possibility too is anticipated in the experience of truth in the symbol of the cross. In short, if at any time the symbol of the cross has been experienced as true, then this truth anticipates and allows all other experiences of the true and the false. The depth of truth is experienced by way of the true, but it is capable of including its opposite within itself . . . The importance of the symbol of the cross for the split in reflection is that it contains an experience of truth that warrants the appearance of both the true and the false to reflection. This experience is itself reflexive rather than reflective. The symbol of the cross is the reflexive dimension of other symbols; it is the reality which corresponds to the meaning of the proposition “‘This . . . ’ is true” is true.110

At this point, probably the most difficult assertion in this paragraph is that “if at any time the symbol of the cross has been experienced as true, then this truth anticipates and allows all other experiences of the true and the false.” How any single person’s perspective or “experience” of this “depth of truth” has power to affect all other possible human experiences with either this or any other symbol is simply not clear. Something does not become relative simply because one single person once upon a time thought they found something fairly parallel that was relative and from that single point in space and time all symbols became relative (which they were not really before??). Or does Scharlemann mean that only reflexivity and only the “depth” dimension of the symbol of the Cross enable one to find a point at which all relativity is embraced, such that, if that is ever discovered even by one person, it means, then, that depth actually is and is always true? Why is it not sufficient to suggest that within many if not most religions there are symbols that function in somewhat similar ways and that, for things to be accepted by a person as relative, the person themselves must understand and accept this insight or some other equivalent into the relativization of their own religion’s symbols? Would a Christian be comfortable hearing a Buddhist proclaim that once Buddhism’s symbol of an empty circle (or symbol of Sunyata, or equation of nirvana with samsara) is experienced as relative by any Buddhist then that relativizes all religious symbols both before and after? Scharlemann seems to suggest that once one sees the relativization of one’s own religious symbols then one can probably detect the same in other religions. But that does not translate into a general cultural agreement about

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the relativization of all religious symbols nor about one’s superiority over others by its inner self-contradiction. It is only an individual realization. Does the realization of the relativity have to begin with the Cross, which comes centuries after Buddhism’s symbols, such as the empty circle and the meaning of Sunyata? In our world of relativity, why does any religion feel a need to claim absoluteness or originality or absolute certainty at all? In any case, Scharlemann provides this as a possible path out of absolute idealism of the nineteenth century, which had been on the “cutting edge” of exploration into the Christian symbols and claims as credible. The realization of “relativity,” coming from any credible source, is bound to offer much more for human respect and world peace and a viable ethic than is the continuation of exclusiveness pouring out of an indefensible absolutism. While he finds Hegel’s “double negativity” useful in thinking about the process of thinking, Scharlemann concludes by suggesting that “in idealist speculation the reality that is given up is not gotten back; it is given up in favor of an indifference to the relation between meaning and reality and a contentment with meaning regardless of reality.”111 Hegel’s “absolute” system fails to allow for the possibility that some time in the future (or in most non-Christian cultures in the present) it may be that the figure of Jesus does not express the ultimate or elicit people’s ultimate concern. In such cases, it is only the independent meaning of the symbol of the Cross that can preserve its ultimacy via the depth of truth as embracing the opposite responses that we have seen as the yes and the no. Thus the “figure of Jesus” by itself is susceptible to the negatives of reflection, whereas the “second-order” symbol of the Cross puts it into a position of certainty, since it embraces any and all relativity or opposites. But this “second-order” symbol seems to be a biased manipulation of embracing relativity—certainly not taken seriously by most Christian communions or creeds or even by most Christian philosophical theology. Obviously this is a long way removed from a theology of theism, a belief in a literal, wholly transcendent “God” who “sent his son” to die on the Cross, raised him from the dead, and took him bodily back to heaven. The idea of the “corroboration” that we have sought is hereby transformed for anyone who can understand and accept Scharlemann’s arguments. “Corroboration” was primarily a need for any form of theism and any form of Christology that felt a need to ascertain the beginning of the claims originating around a particular man way back in history. Even the “absolute idealism” of the nineteenth century could not dismiss the historical problem entirely, though it tried by seeing Jesus as the sole exception to a universal ontology by which all humans were estranged from God, thus needing to be saved by the same Jesus as the Christ. Tillich tried to avoid their problem by removing the focus

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from an embodiment of the ideal to a symbol of the embodiment of the ideal; but the gap between the ideal and real remained when Tillich made an ontological exception for even the image, and the “transformation” that was the primary guarantee of the power or presence within the symbol was never anything more than fragmentary, not in real life. On the other hand, Scharlemann’s “phenomenological” approach to ontology—utilizing the symbols of “God,” “I Am,” the “Cross,” and others, combined with the instantiation that he explored in connection to relational words—actually makes “corroboration” not only impossible but unnecessary. All one needs, seemingly, is the religious symbol that somehow “speaks” to one and some correspondence between the symbol with aspects of being human (or connecting the human and divine), provided it also has a self-negating element. But that is not the end of the story, since The Reason of Following came out in 1991 with the explicit subtitle Christology and the Ecstatic I. SCHARLEMANN’S REASON OF FOLLOWING The remaining question—now that Christianity has been found to supply a symbol that, if it speaks to one, one can experience the depth of truth112—is whether “God” has to find me and decide to speak (which is mysterious, since Scharlemann is not talking about a theistic deity who can “speak” or even “think” other than through specific objects or thinking persons) or whether there is anything I can do to possibly facilitate having such an experience. At the conclusion of The Being of God, Scharlemann said that, since these objects and persons can be experienced as “speaking” only by an adequate theological language that people understand so that they are not thinking of some transcendent personal deity simply manipulating these objects or people or texts like a ventriloquist, much of the responsibility lies upon the religious leaders, or more particularly theologians, to provide the right language and correct understanding of it. When Tillich was asked how or where one would be able to access the Spiritual Presence, he declined an answer (which would have raised the question of how any aspect of being or being-itself actually communicates as “God” even if he called his system “panentheism”), replying that, if he could do that, then he would be attempting self-salvation. So how do I ever access this symbol of the Cross that can help me experience the “depth of truth,” no matter my response to it, since either my judging it true or false will suffice as truth? Or can judging it to be false really be “truth,” as Scharlemann said, just as judging it true would be “truth?” If that is the case, then the “truth” certainly has nothing to do with assertions about any entity, and so it seems miles removed from any Christology ever

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articulated. It seems to say only that diverse viewpoints and relativization cannot be avoided but that, just as when for Descartes, one doubted and one necessarily existed and so that being which can include the negative thinking or assessment stands in the depth of truth as uniting thinking and being. Or can I simply count on truth or Spirit accessing me on its own? Or, if it can come through the voice of anyone and any text, does it even matter, so long as I discover and actualize my true self? That is answered to a degree by Scharlemann’s Reason of Following. On the surface, it may seem that to be called or invited to follow still leaves everything in God’s hands, that I must simply await being called; then if and when I am called, I can respond, no matter what is meant by “God.” Such a view could make the religion even more inaccessible and exclusionary than it presently is—and much more absolutistic. But Scharlemann, as much as he makes it depend upon “God’s” initiative, does suggest a certain frame of mind, which he terms “ecstasy,” and the “inscribed” voice that can be found even within the Christian Scriptures, neither of which has to be seen as an attempted self-salvation in Tillich’s terms. He also introduces a slight element of autonomy into one’s response that releases one from a picture of “God” or Christianity and its kerygma doing everything or deciding everything, eclipsing my freedom. We shall have to see if these alleviate the question regarding whether the symbol of the Cross has the capacity to evoke my response. The very title Reason of Following pointed out that Scharlemann’s primary concern was now explicitly to lay a philosophical groundwork for a Christology with a new form of reason and a close examination of the “I”—particularly by its “ecstatic” possibility. “Ecstasy” had already been important in Hegel’s and in Tillich’s theologies as the subjective state necessary for the reception of final revelation—not as some uncontrollable or exotic state but merely as a state of mind “outside” the usual subject-object framework. We have already seen ecstasis in these other aspects of Scharlemann’s thought and are familiar with his idea of “instantiation” as well as with his choice to explore theology by following insights of Heidegger’s. The Self and Modes of Being Scharlemann asserts that the postidealist understanding of the “self” or the “I” is more than the Cartesian certainty of one’s being. It also includes time, space, and possibility, if we listen to Heidegger.113 Scharlemann points out that it was not until Heidegger’s Being and Time that the connection of self, time, and possibility were brought forward, especially as Heidegger projected one’s “being unto death” or one’s end, which is what I as I always can do but never do do. What we see in Descartes was also the “mediation” of certainty

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by time—that is, that “I am” when I think. So time, space, and possibility are important elements. Subjectivity, Self-Certainty, and the “Uncommon Singularity” of the I The use of the word “I” carries meaning as a word and so is a phenomenon of language, not in the old Kantian limited idea of “phenomenon” as only sensible objects but as participating in and manifesting logos. “I” “appears” when used, and, as we saw earlier in Buber, the “I” always requires an implied or recognized “you” or “it” to have meaning, though that is not Scharlemann’s point here just yet. Scharlemann argues that Descartes was not interested in subjective conviction but in being able to recognize when or where the reality of “I” appears, which is most accurately obtained through the process of doubt, which can mean doubting the object in question or even doubting myself or my own doubting. The “I” remains through all of this as I assert “I.” So the very activity of thinking or speaking the “I” has an instantiating power, as we saw earlier. When I am not thinking or saying “I,” then my self could be anyone. What we see here is one’s uniqueness, not merely an emphasis upon individuality per se vis-à-vis universality.114 People have felt their “I” appear in certainty under different circumstances. Descartes was searching for certainty of knowledge. Luther, like Descartes, experienced the subjectivity of the self within doubt, even if Luther’s was less planned or expected. In both cases, certainty was experienced only through doubt. In addition to this certainty, Scharlemann points out the “uncommon singularity” of the “I” both in Luther’s torment by his sin consciousness, feeling under attack by God, and in Kierkegaard’s depiction of Abraham’s consciousness when he was commanded to sacrifice Isaac. In both cases, the loneliness of one’s “I” appeared in the attack on their consciences. They both felt completely alone and isolated—Luther feeling naked before a judging God and Kierkegaard being instructed by God to violate the most natural ethics! Neither had any mediating possibilities. By faith, Abraham was required to put his reason to death along with his ethical sensitivity. Thus the ethical expression of what he would do was that he would “murder Isaac,” while the religious expression was that he would “sacrifice Isaac.” He was forced to choose either to have a faith that he could never explain reasonably to another or to retain his reason and lose both his faith and his God. Even though Kierkegaard speaks of Abraham as an “individual” vis-à-vis the “universal” (or ethical), Scharlemann revises Kierkegaard, saying that it is as “I” that Abraham encountered this unmediated or uncommon singularity. Kierkegaard also implies that Abraham became su-

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perior to the universal as an individual, but Scharlemann says the “I” is both individual and universal and so Abraham was not superior to the universal (i.e., humanity) as an individual. Rather, the point of the story, for Scharlemann, is “the absolute singularity of the I as I appears in the individual.”115 Descartes and Kierkegaard therefore reveal two ways in which the subjectivity of the self or the “I” appears: either when I think or by experiencing my uncommon singularity. The Appearance of the I and the Subjectivity of Being These two “appearances” of the I are connected by Heidegger’s analysis of the call of conscience in his section on “being unto death.” Conscience is not an outside voice standing in judgment of one’s past deeds; rather, conscience is one’s own call to accept guilt for one’s future of “not being” in the world, which means the focus is on one’s potentiality as being or not being, most especially of one’s being able to die as “I” is something one always can do but never does do. If the character of one’s being is “care” (Sorge) and temporality is the meaning of one’s being here now, then conscience is one’s own voice that discloses and calls one to answer for “not being at home in the world.”116 My possibility of death that I can do but never do do is the possibility that “radically isolates the I from being in the world and thus makes it whole.”117 In one’s death, the I is no longer there and so cannot say “I have died,” and this therefore makes the “I” appear as a whole in its relation to its own death. I will return to this picture of Heidegger in my concluding remarks, since it is so vital to Scharlemann’s thesis that through “following” the inscribed voice of Christ one hears one’s own exstantial “I” saying “I Am” and “I am the Resurrection and Life,” thereby assuring oneself that one as Dasein has found its “whole” already in dying and being raised to new life. But at this point we need to proceed with the development of Scharlemann’s argument. The I can also appear in relating with other persons. Scharlemann utilizes the ethical insights of Wilhelm Herrmann to show particularly the appearance of the I in a relation of trust. Hermann sees the problem of ethics as the question of how one can break beyond the circle of the natural drive of selfassertion. Herrmann emphasized that this “I” can appear in an event when we meet someone who fills us with respect and trust, which creates a new value not dependent or derived from our self-interest. The value, in addition to being independent of us, flows from the free autonomy of the other and is something we feel a need to appropriate for ourselves freely. It presents to our minds the goal of “humanity” and stimulates us to form the “I” as one who so trusts and thereby can stand on its own freedom.118 Descartes’ I involved

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“actuality,” Heidegger’s involved “possibility,” and Herrmann’s involved “freedom” that marks the boundary between actuality and possibility but is not itself a state of being. Freedom is a “boundary concept” between the “I can” and the “I do.” From the side of actuality, trusting is what I can and do do but never must do, whereas from the side of pure potentiality, trusting is “what I always just do do but never have the power to do.”119 This trust is not based on weighing qualities of the person but rather on the “pure good will” encountered in the person’s presence. The “end” it brings about is neither the possibility of which Heidegger spoke, pure possibility, my death, nor the possibility of which Descartes spoke, pure actuality; rather, it is pure freedom, the end of my enslavement to natural, unlimited self-assertion.120 It is not a complete break from causality or influence from other causes but involves “something other than the whole of cause and effect.”121 Finally, Scharlemann asks whether, in addition to actuality, possibility, and freedom, there might be another possible place in which the “I” appears; he answers that it is in “following.” The I who “trusts” “is the self come into its own freedom to be on its own, whereas the I who follows is the self free to be finitely.”122 He sketches what “following” means from the Gospel of Luke, and especially the duplicated “mission of the seventy.” Disciples follow Jesus immediately, “heedlessly of social or familial ties” and free from all concerns of the world.123 They go, taking no provisions, and simply proclaiming the message of peace. Their identities are given to them only within their message of peace, that is, only “in the words in which they dwell by saying and hearing.” They are who they are only in the message they bring; they exist only as ones who speak and hear a peace in the words; they are who they are “in the words in which they dwell by saying and hearing.”124 By the “I am” in the Gospel of John125 and Joachim Wach’s analysis of the master-disciple relationship, Scharlemann adds that the master-disciple relation is built upon the master’s individual and irreplaceable character and personality rather than upon common interests such as reside in the relationship between teacher and student.126 Further, the master-disciple relationship is based on the disciple’s calling and the nature and significance of the disciple’s given mission. The “most sacred moment” comes when the master takes leave of the disciple, turning the disciple “back to himself.” There is sadness on both parts, but the leaving is the self-sacrifice inherent in being a master. The voice one is called to “follow” is, however, not someone else but, rather, the same as the one being summoned to follow. This is the “I am” “which comes from another person and can call me into being myself on my own by following it, not harbored by the worldliness of the world . . . [but it] sounds not from the thou but from the I.”127

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In this sense it is very different from trust, which always involves an other impressive enough to be trustworthy.128 “In trust we are with the other in freedom; through following we come to be whole on our own in the world.”129 But is the relation one of trust or one of following if the “I am” was God’s expression to Moses but was also allegedly repeated by Jesus in the Fourth Gospel? Later in the Reason of Following Scharlemann insists that, “When we trust anyone at all, we are trusting God, just as, when we understand anything at all, we understand being.”130 But when one hears “God” speak through any other, does it therefore always involve both trust of a definite other plus a following of oneself? Or does even my reception of the other as one I can trust require also my being in an ecstatic state? Autonomy is preserved if I hear my own voice in the voice of the other, but it is lost if the voice is not mine but instead is an external command by an other that demands my immediate and unreflected response. Are they commingled? Is the “otherness” of God such that my voice always speaks for God however I think any person or thing is speaking for God? Or if the call of conscience is my voice, as is the call to follow, and if trusting anybody is trusting “God,” then is the voice that I hear always only mine? In any case, Scharlemann emphasizes that the master had to leave so that the disciples could return to themselves on their own. This points to the experience of “ecstasy” as a being outside of oneself, a “being away from itself so that it must or can come back to itself in order to be whole” or “whole in the world.”131 But if one can reflect on it to try to determine whose voice it is, then it does not qualify for the “following” that Scharlemann is sketching, which demands immediate, unreflected following. Yet is not immediately following without reflection the very heteronomy against which Scharlemann is hereby warning? Personal and Nonpersonal Existence and Being and Existence Personal and nonpersonal existence is distinguished by virtue of the fact that understanding the being of the nonpersonal or natural thing means subsuming the particular under a general, whereas understanding the being of a person means assuming a particular to the universal. The latter points to a particular embodiment in place and time that is always unique. Personal being is comprised of a temporal and spatial unity of both a physical and psychical body, a unity that is unique per se, of which the elements of either the physical or psychical body are not the equivalent. Existence is a mode of “being in a world for me (or someone)” even though “I” and “world” are not objects but rather are “infinite” ideas in the sense that one cannot define their limits but only point to a particular temporality. It is

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read by many as both one’s “being” and “not being” in the sense that in being in the world I both am but am also not all that I could or should be.132 One can say that entities in the world exist either as objects or projects. I am never an “entity,” never “on hand” (Vorhandenheit), but always ex-ist (Existenz) as one who can “project itself upon a possibility of being in the world and thus as a “project.”133 Tillich developed the theme of the living contradiction of human existence, a mixture of being and not being what one could be. He painted it as the conflict he called “estrangement,” but Scharlemann perceptively posits the possibility that much of the not-being-what-one-could-be might be only part of one of Tillich’s articulated ontological polarities in which the opposites do not cancel each other but, rather, sustain each other, working in tandem.134 So it would not be “estrangement,” as Tillich assumed. But Tillich really only examined unbelief, hubris, and concupiscence as areas of estrangement instead of examining the ontological polarities. The “I” is a particular embodiment of the universal in the sense of a specific place where the universal can be identified, but the universal is of course not exhausted in any single individual. There the “I” of another person could exist in the world for me, but not as first person, as “I”; to me it can only be second or third person. Because I and the other can be inwardly aware of the “pure subjectivity” of one another, which Scharlemann calls the “identity of analogy,” despite the fact that we can never be the same “I” because of spatial and other differences, we can thereby “recognize the legitimacy of the demand to respect the other unconditionally as a subjectivity.”135 If one combines Descartes, Heidegger, Fichte, and Hermann, then one can say that, in addition to the self’s being certain (Descartes), the self’s being includes its being a knowing subject (Fichte), an entity with the know-how to be there in the world (Heidegger), and one who “is brought to be through the establishment of a relation of trust” (as a gift) (Herrmann) rather than from mere self-positing in Fichte.136 Faith and Understanding as Two Modes of Thinking Scharlemann distinguishes two types of thinking—understanding and faith— both of which presuppose concrete configurations of understanding and believing within the forms or structure of thinking, which is called “reason.” So reason is classified as theoretical, practical, and aesthetic or other variations. But no modern thinker has asked whether there is another part of that structure of reason that deals with the self and its relation to others and itself in distinction from practical reason. Scharlemann shows that both Kant and Dilthey felt a need for this other relating element but could neither specify what it was nor how it worked. Husserl’s concern in his Phenomenology was to show

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how this connection enabled people to know. He moved beyond positing it as the unnamed power somehow straddling intuition and reason and emphasized its obviousness simply because people do know. It is the connective between sensed object or percept and the concept, or between the singular and universal—that is, “being” that is assumed without being named in every sentence which one can call “phenomenological data.”137 This is “how” one comes to understand something, which is one form of thinking. One combines the sensed object with concept via being—and thereby understands. The other mode of thinking is “faith in God.” Faith consists of one experiencing “notice” (or specific summons of a self), which connects to “ascent” (or the universal of community or personhood) via “God.” These three elements parallel the three in understanding. This is a form of knowing or reason that is metaphysical in the sense of self-transcending, getting beyond oneself, which Scharlemann admits requires a form of identification with the other best described as a type of “ecstasy” or moving beyond one’s usual subjectobject reasoning. It is a form of immediacy of the other that is not simply empirical intuition or merely conceptual clarity but an actual connecting and identification with the specific other. The two modes of thinking, of understanding being or having faith in God, are not reducible to each other but, rather, are correlative: in thinking anything, one is thinking “being,” and in trusting or having faith in anyone or anything, one has faith in God. Scharlemann argues that not Kant, Schleiermacher, Tillich, Husserl, Heidegger, or even Georg Picht saw this articulation of these different modes of thinking and acoluthetic reason, but these great thinkers all pointed to it without recognizing it. Tillich, for example, saw that “the object of faith and the object of understanding are one” but irreducible, one as the ultimate concept (being) and the other as the ultimate symbol (God).138 Yet if they are viewed as “object,” how can either simultaneously serve as the connective between subject and object or between the percept and the concept, which is where Tillich sees both “being” and “God”?139 But Scharlemann does not address this problem. Heidegger’s distinction between “it is” (es ist) and “it gives” (es gibt) points to an “etymological kinship of thinking with thanking,” pointing to the givenness of and openness of being.140 Scharlemann notes that Picht even went so far as to suggest that, in contrast to the passive perception, there are also two other ways that one experiences the world—namely, through sympathy and through labor. The latter, labor, introduces the possibility of release from its burden via play that brings “happiness” (not pleasure). This happiness is a being released from the world via one’s anticipation of the “negligibility of the opposition between life and death,” (as the dependability of God) which produces happiness or a form

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of thanking or gratitude.141 Scharlemann explains that this consciousness of being and faith is something that everyone already has but that it simply has not been articulated within a philosophical or theological context.142 Neither understanding nor faith is superior to the other, but each transcends itself toward the other.143 Since “being” per se and “God” per se cannot be explained or defined further, even Tillich’s idea of one being the “answer” to the other as a “question” is misleading. Rather, they each reach their end of intelligibility and simply point to the other as a vehicle for interpreting them further. This is their “openness” to the other, their capacity to enable selftranscendence or transcendence toward the other, a sort of “reciprocal interpretation.” In this sense of transcendence toward the other, they are identical but simply function in different ways. But if “being” per se and “God” per se cannot be explained or defined further? And if they only transcend to the other for further interpretation, then neither can have any other meaning than is contained within the words “being” or “God,” and, then, it is difficult to see how either would provide additional grounds for interpreting the other. Nevertheless, to Scharlemann, within “faith,” the “notice” is the “ego there-now,” which has its parallel in “understanding” of being to the perception of the singularity of a thing. What we “assent” to is a form of community of selfhood, which is parallel in “understanding” to the abstract conceiving of the genus of a thing. And the connection between them, or the unity between the two, is what it means to “trust in God.” This is not a dialectic or a shifting back and forth between parts and the whole but, rather, is between understanding and trusting and is the most appropriate way of seeing fides quarens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”).144 The Exstantial Self If the two modes of thinking are configured in forms of reason—for example, theoretical, practical, and aesthetic—in which the self relates in different ways to objects, and if there is a “reason of following,” then the relation of the self to the other(s) would need to be shown as significantly different. In order to justify its forming another type of reason, it would need to be included within systematic thought, the requirement of which is to include all possibilities of the relating self until its last step returns it to its beginning. Scharlemann analyzes the systems of both Schleiermacher and Tillich, concluding that—despite Schleiermacher’s lack of clarity regarding a rather double function of “Feeling,” and despite Tillich’s “symbolical” approach and its inclusion of a “depth” dimension—neither Schleiermacher nor Tillich explored the possibility of a form of reason beyond the usual three of theoretical, practical, and aesthetic, which means they closed the self off from a “full range of possibilities.”145

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Any “reason of following,” in order to be “Christological,” would require some narrative or discourse that summoned an immediate or unreflected following, which can be explained in such a way that the meaning of the narrative will manifest the phenomenon in itself. This is the reason Scharlemann calls his approach an ontological phenomenology146: the language instantiates relations of the self otherwise not recognized or perhaps nonexistent. He further emphasizes that “a genuine Christological relation” is simply a relation in which those summoned “act freely” immediately in their response of following; if not, it is a mere heteronomous power, or a separating reflection, not a Christological encounter. But earlier Scharlemann had identified acting immediately as a response to a heteronomous demand. So how could one determine whether it was a Christological relation or pure heteronomy or authoritarianism? One’s identification with the narrative does not require that one actually once upon a time had literally experienced that “Jesus”; but Scharlemann insists that, if the narrative is about Jesus’s disciples long ago, then it is necessary that one have at least sometime been involved in a relation of following, or a “Christological relation oneself.”147 Here is where he attempts to build the “corroborative” element of Christology, saying that one’s present experience of such a Christological relation has to have occurred and that only that can supply meaning and certainty to that narrative about Jesus’s early disciples’ experience. Only then could one “relive” or experience an “empathetic identification with a character and the course of action of events in a narrative.”148 What this means is that one somehow can imagine oneself being that “other,” or even that one at least can see the summons to be the other, even if one rejects the summon as foolish.149 Scharlemann insists that, in this summons, whether by a narrative in the Scripture or in some play one is watching, one is not simply mirroring the action but is actually “reenacting” it personally inwardly. But that does not make the details of the play or Scripture “reality.” It simply shows that one can respond to the picture presented, but it does not even detail what kind of response that would need to be. Finally, Scharlemann opines, the systematic concepts by which one attempts to examine the phenomenon presented are not physical entities but, rather, linguistic tools that can be used to explain physical entities, just as mathematical formulae are not physical but are useful in mathematical physics.150 They ultimately must be derived independently of the Christological occurrence. So what are possible forms in which the self can relate to itself? Scharlemann delineates five possible relations of the self to itself: (1) as the unity of the singular or concrete and the universal, which, in Cartesian form, is an “insubstantial or immaterial” though ineradicable reality (that is, a thinking or pure subjectivity),151 (2) as a real existing self, because it “posits itself by asserting a unity of subject and predicate in itself” as in Fichte

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and so is a subjectivity that serves as origin for an objective grasping of the world,152 (3) as the point of “activity” or “zero point of perception,” which means that the self is an “embodied” self with a particular perspective, as in Heidegger’s Dasein, (4) as an “anonymous self” when not expressing its singular subjectivity, in the “language of everyday,” as “das Man, as being projective of itself via a sense of its universality,”153 and (5) as an “ecstatic I” or self in which one’s own egoity is experienced as introjected rather than as merely projected, in all of its “singular and absolute propriety,” uniquely its own, unlike the projected self in Heidegger.154 Scharlemann was persuaded that this “ecstatic” self was recognized as the power of love in medieval literature and also as the power of faith in Luther and so is not really a new idea. It is simply the way one comes to oneself “by being outside itself”—ec-statically. This Christological expression through language enables one to come to oneself, to be authentically itself within itself by hearing itself as an exstantial I in distinction from the experience that is moral or governed by agape in which one actually loses one’s self but finds it within an other—a distinction Scharlemann often emphasized. Forms of Reason The “reason” of “following,” which Scharlemann terms “acoluthetic” reason, attains its legitimacy not simply for one’s understanding of one’s self and one’s relation or connection to others but especially in the area of faith or in one’s response to “God” or in one’s understanding of “being” within everything. The unique character of the “reason of following” (or acoluthetic reason) is its closer involvement with language or ontological phenomena (that is, being that appears only by the spoken or written word) than other forms of reason, such as theoretical, practical, and aesthetic reason, although these other forms also depend on a correspondence between physical objects and language but are not “second level” reflections of language actually creating the object or relation. This involvement in instantiating that Scharlemann discussed in other works is now attached in the Reason of Following to a form of ecstasy. One’s “I” or egoity or most intimate inner self is actually exstantiated, or introjected from without,155 as opposed to being merely projected from within, heard as one’s own voice in the other as one’s summons to oneself. Because the summons of that other or of one’s own exstantial self empowers one’s own ability, one’s response is immediate rather than reflective, thereby removing any possibility of its being heteronomous or of one’s being separated from oneself. In its sense of reinforcing autonomy, one finds one’s mission and “authentic” self.

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Scharlemann suggests that Christological reason would require some words or a narrative that carries a Christological meaning, and he finds that this is the idea that Jesus summoned his disciples by telling them to “follow” him upon which they immediately did so. Scharlemann’s second step is to reflect on such a phenomenon, which requires that we ask whether or not it is possible for anyone to find the narrative meaningful if they have not already had a similar experience with Jesus or had some “Christological relation.”156 But Scharlemann argues that the only requirement is being able to conceive of oneself participating in such a capacity. He refers to this as one’s “participation” in the sense of one’s being capable of imagining oneself as being those very agents, or as an “empathic identification.”157 If one can either identify with it in a positive way or even in a negative way, in which case one might even judge it stupid, then the phenomenon has in both cases nevertheless “shown itself.” He insists that a Christological phenomenon evokes one’s free response, whereas if it is coercive it would not be Christological. But why is it not heteronomous, and, if heteronomous, why is it not coercive? In any case, this becomes Scharlemann’s ground for Christology by one’s ability to find one’s ecstatic I or exstantial self in the “inscribed” voice of Jesus, as overcoming the problem Scharlemann saw in Heidegger, thereby enabling the self not merely to “project” one’s death but also to identify itself with its own “I Am” in its exstantial mode, even the “I am the Resurrection,” while still being in the world and thereby being one’s authentic self while continuing to be in the world but not of the world. In the “reason of following” the significant other with which one relates—the summoning voice to motivate one to follow—is one’s own inner voice, even if heard ecstatically in an other. This raises the question of the nature of the phenomenal self, specifically whether it can be “exstantial” or whether “the other to which the self relates itself is the inwardness of the self without being a projection from that inwardness,”158 which is asking whether the power of the relating rests solely within oneself or requires some relation with a real other, and, if it does, why that is so.159 But what does it mean that one “comes to oneself” or becomes one’s own “authentic self” in this experience with one’s “exstantial I”? Is it simply the discovery of some inner identity, some heretofore unrecognized talents, interests, qualities, or character? Is it the discovery of who one “always already was,” as Scharlemann seems to say elsewhere, or rather of “see[ing] who we become in the course of reading the narrative itself”160 and so a matter of seeing one’s unrealized potential or potential that is immediately realized, such that one finds their “I am” in that other? Is the Christological experience of “following” effective primarily or only in a soteriological capacity, thereby

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assuming an estrangement, including a disease or corruption of human reason, or is it only an experience of seeing unrealized essential possibility, not implying some estrangement? Scharlemann admits that it could be both, but he is trying to draw attention to the “essential possibility of selfhood,” which implies only the “perfection of finitude” and not a deficiency.161 Christological reason thus understood is not some restoration of one’s freedom from another source, after which one no longer needs that other but can function properly without it, but, rather, it is an awakening of one’s own freedom from within by the summoning from one’s “exstantial I,” who could finally as spiritualized also be universalized such that anyone could be a person’s “Christ.”162 More importantly, Scharlemann is distinguishing Christological or acoluthetic reason from both ethical reason and aesthetic reason. Although Christological reason, ethical reason, and aesthetic reason all involve a relating of the self to others, all of whom are subjects, in ethical reason the other is a “you” or a “he,” “she,” or it,” whereas the other in acoluthetic reason is one’s own exstantial I. The relation created in ethical reason is one of respect through analogy from one’s own subjectivity to that of the other; in acoluthetic reason the relation is of identity, of one’s becoming ecstatic, an exstantial self. The other subject in ethical reason elicits respect from oneself, but in acoluthetic reason the exstantial subject’s authority “enables one to be the self that one is as one’s own.”163 Aesthetic reason is perhaps even more analogous to acoluthetic reason since it too involves a possible form of ecstasy or identification of the self with one of the subjects or with the whole of the painting or production, a form of self-forgetting and self-transporting that does not end until the end of the play when one “returns” to one’s normal self. This oblivion to one’s being “here,” which Scharlemann calls a self-forgetting and self-transporting, is not true in Christological reason; instead, the very authority of Christ “recalls the self of the disciples to its own place,” thereby enabling one’s self to come to itself in its own “here.” This is especially provided by the death of the Christ, which removed Jesus and his place, returning the disciple to his own place. Scharlemann summarizes the character of the relating in the various forms of reason by saying, “If the ethical relation to the other as ‘you’ is one of ’respect’ which is ‘elicited’ by the other person, the theoretical relation is one of ‘positing’ the other as an ‘object’; the aesthetic relation is one of ‘identification,’ made possible by the ‘appeal’ of the ‘I’ of the dramatis persona or the scene of the artwork; and the Christological relation is one of ‘following’ made possible by the ‘authority’ (exousia) of the Christ figure.”164 To say that something is possible is not to say whether or how it exists; a nonrational gap seems to exist between possibility and actuality. But Schar-

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lemann contends that Anselm’s focus on the name of God rather than on real conditions of the world does fill the gap, and he contends that Tillich’s idea of the symbol of “Jesus as the Christ” does imply the reality of the Christ. If the explanation of the systematic definition of acoluthetic reason simply shows the possibility, Scharlemann thinks, then, that the earliest disciples’ being called by Jesus to “follow me” was an old example of its having happened and that Albert Schweitzer’s response to the same call in the early twentieth century was a more modern example of it.165 Although Christological reason need not be theological, Scharlemann is convinced that it is more theological than any other form of reason and that, while there may be “secular” science, art, and ethics, there is no secular selfhood.166 This accentuates Scharlemann’s focus on combining theology and Christology, even as the “reflexivity” he used to resolve the question of reflection for theology has its parallel in the “exstantial I”—in the sense that the thinking done by the self is about the thinking itself, not of some historical persons or events or things or behaviors. But Scharlemann raises the question whether any reflection on Christology does not remove one from the immediacy of the relation, as some have contended, and as shown in the opening quotation of this chapter. His answer is that even such a question or objection is itself a product of reflection. A more important consideration is whether the Christological form of reason is absolute and therefore exclusive or is relative and therefore inclusive or universalist in nature. Scharlemann avers that both positions can be found in the Bible and that, while the universalist position based on logos is compatible with a phenomenological approach, there is a third possibility: that would be that the universal “is to be found not indeed in an abstract principle or a general truth, but in the identity between the subject who now is here under one name and now there under another name.”167 Acoluthetic Reason Explained If one asks the “who,” “what,” or “where” the self as I is when it thinks, it formally is the one speaking in the here and now. But that neither suggests what kind of being it is nor its particular material or substantial content, and neither does it suggest whether it is even lost or hidden, as Heidegger shows. Yet, after insisting that “being” is only “being” and nothing more, Scharlemann nevertheless calls it the “substance” of a thing, in contrast to its uniting an abstract (concept) with something concrete (percept). He mentioned three ideas of what this “substance” could mean: (1) the traditional idea that the spirit is a synthesis of one’s soul and body, (2) Kierkegaard’s notion that the being of a human being is not any synthesis but, rather, an active relating

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of the self to itself, and (3) a Heideggerian view that the self stands outside itself as anonymous but realizes its humanity in coming to itself. The Heideggerian view is more appropriate to Christological reason in search of the times and places that the self can be, and personal pronouns are the most useful language to express the eigentlich quality of the real, properly, and authentic rather than mere “everyday language.” The difference shown by the “everyday” and the “authentic” I in Heidegger is illustrated by comparing discussion of “people dying” or “everyone must die” as distinct from my saying “I must die.” Heidegger was convinced that the call of conscience was the way one could bring to mind one’s egoity or move beyond the anonymous “self-forgetfulness,” as one was summoned to real existence in the world, a coming to oneself in terms of pure possibility. The language “I can die”—that is, the possibility of my having no possibility of being in the world—shows the “I-ness of the self,” one’s owning of oneself vis-à-vis the self-forgetfulness of the “everyday” or anonymous self.168 A third form Scharlemann calls the “hamartetic” (missing the mark) self, which is not merely self-forgetful but also disowning of the self, described most appropriately as the “despair” explored in Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death. At this stage, the self cannot will what it is and wills only what it is not. When inserted into the Heideggerian schema of anticipating its death as something that it always can do but never does do, Scharlemann asserts that it even tries to “transform” the “I can” into an “I do.” If a call comes completely from without, then it would mean heteronomy or authoritarianism. How does the exstantic I avoid being such an other and therefore deprive me of my autonomy? Precisely because, although it comes from without, through another person, it is my own voice and because it is not merely a call of conscience that might require my reflection about others. As exstantial, it is not silent or like a “you.” It is my own summons through another for me to follow myself, which actually enables my self “to be on its own in the midst of its own impossibility of self-disowning. My response of following my exstantial I is that ‘I do do what otherwise I only can do: come to an end on my own.’”169 But what does it mean that I “come to an end”? The language of pure possibility (“I alone only can always come to an end”) and of the hamartetic self as pure impossibility (“I alone always never do come to my end”) are resolved as the voice of the other is my voice, my “coming to myself,” whereby I can say, “I have always already come to an end!”170 If the call to be what one can be comes first in the interior call to conscience, then it is only when one “appropriates itself as I” that one can recognize that the voice summoning one is the same as the I being summoned. On the other hand, the summons to “Follow” is immediately responded to, which makes it Christological. The Christological figure, even though the

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“object-term” of the relation, is the same as the “I” of my own here-and-now; it is not another person as it is in ethical reason or aesthetic reason. This is not to say, Scharlemann argues, that it is “mirror image” of my “I” and thus is narcissistic, and neither is it merely a representation of some common cause. It is a real person. He goes so far as to say that the Christological figure does not summon one to any cause at all but simply is one’s own call to activate one’s freedom.171 But to Tillich the activation of one’s freedom always brings “estrangement”; so how does Scharlemann see it? The Modification of Reason: Freedom and Truth Because the self can not only be summoned to become culpable for what it is not responsible for—even its very being-here-and-now—but also be summoned to “follow,” the self that is in fact estranged by the call of conscience, the acoluthetic reason itself, can be misshapen or distorted. While such disruptions can also occur within theoretical reason, moral reason, and aesthetic reason, the primary concern here is to note what would happen to acoluthetic reason. Scharlemann notes that it would be a relation involving no externalization, only “disablement” between the inward and outward forms of the I such that the I does not come to itself via the I-without but remains unreconciled with it and such that the external I is tied to one locality rather than being possible everywhere.172 Scharlemann suggests that in both the biblical narratives of Christological following as well as in the history of philosophy there is a definite connection made between freedom and truth. He thinks that it can be found in three forms: (1) in the relation of faith to the “I am” sayings in the Bible, (2) in the way that the two are “intertwined” within the very phenomenon of truth, and (3) in the free response the Christ figure elicited. On the biblical picture of the “I am” that was attributed to the voice of God in the book of Exodus and to Jesus in the Gospel of John, it seems especially in the latter case to be connected to Jesus’s admonition that his disciples “continue” in his “word.” Scharlemann inquires whether this means an admonition only to recall his word and try to live by it or an admonition to actually make Jesus’s word one’s home, so to speak. Jesus seemed to present the choice thus: one either dwells in Jesus’s word, or one dwells in the world. To dwell in the world means to be preoccupied with caring for it, the concerns of existence, which take us back to Heidegger’s Sorge. But to dwell in Jesus’s word means that, if we examine the “I am,” then one posits one’s meaning as a self or an I, as a “free and not derivative subject of one’s own.”173 The emphasis includes one’s autonomy: one hears oneself requiring oneself to take charge, to be an authentic self on one’s own, rather than simply act upon a command from

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Jesus. In the expression “I am the Resurrection and the life,” the answer to Heidegger’s question with which Scharlemann introduced the topic is that one sees oneself as having autonomy in owning one’s own death but also sees oneself as an autonomous I who has the gift of being beyond death, as Kierkegaard’s knight of faith. But this comes at the cost of selecting as one’s home the “word” rather than the world, which means that one chooses between Christology and ethics but cannot be at home in both? That becomes a crucial choice that Scharlemann’s schema presents, even though he never puts it quite this way. But to go on, Scharlemann says that “authentic existence” is a twofold freedom from: (1) the anonymity of the generalized self and (2) finitude. More specifically, he insists, “there is a difference between being in the world, authentically, as one who has already come to an end—that is, one who has appropriated the possibility that can never be one’s own actuality—and being in the world as one who both has already come to an end and also exists in the promise of resurrection.”174 To be in the world as one who “dwells in the word” (of the “I am” or of the “I am the Resurrection and the life”) is to be in the world authentically on one’s own but to be “also ecstatically beyond the deed most one’s own,”175 which is the deepest sense of “knowing” the truth. But being “in the word” does not mean becoming free of finitude, since one is still finite, and it does not become free by dying but only by being convinced that somehow “Resurrection” will change that. One cannot have “already come to an end” yet still only be standing in the “promise of Resurrection.” This is to confuse metaphor with reality—not just different meanings of symbols. Another connection between freedom and truth is found in Heidegger’s idea that “freedom” lies between the understanding and reality, a “freedom” in the sense of an opening of thought to reality and of reality to thought, lying with language itself, which can both “say the meaning and show the reality.”176 Truth also appears in this “opening” or freedom that is between meaning and reality, an openness “in our own being.”177 This implies that “language which is between thoughts and things, is the embodiment of freedom,” that the space or opening between the subjective and objective is continually given a shape by the configuration of language, which itself is continually creating the unity of meaning and reality or subject and object or the ideal and the real, or is itself, as language, both meaning and reality. Is language really creating reality? Scharlemann is persuaded that existing in the world is a state in which one’s subjectivity is “merged with the objectivity of the world” and its worldly concerns; the “authentic” self is one who disengages from the world and its cares, and the “open region” is “filled by linguistic configurations”

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that supersede the concerns of the world. This comprises “dwelling in the word” while existing in the world, after which any reestablishment with the world becomes an impossibility, since one has “died” to it. So linguistic configurations supersede people in one’s concern? The third way freedom and truth are connected is by acoluthetic reason. In the call to follow, the speaker is not compelling the hearer or annihilating the hearer’s autonomy. To do so would ruin the possibility that the self will actually come to itself or become free on its own. Thus the summons from the “exstantial I is a summons eliciting the inward self’s power of freedom, meaning that one is able to respond either positively or negatively, and both are authentic and “equally legitimate.” The “exstantial I can elicit either a positive of negative response. He emphasizes that the Christ figure does not say: ‘Follow me because I am your true self’ but simply: ‘Follow me.’ By giving either response, one is summoned to become “free in the wholeness of one’s own selfhood.”178 Is it thus that either response brings one’s “true self” or that it is actually appropriate or meaningful to speak of the self as “true” or “false”? Pirandello’s play by which Scharlemann ends the chapter sums up the picture of acoluthetic reason by emphasizing that the “I am” who has no “biological predicates,” like a character in the play, is there “completely open to either the yes or the no in the response to the acoluthetic summons,” even by contradictory predicates implied by the contradictory responses to the summons to “Follow me.”179 This reinforces Scharlemann’s earlier relativism and universalism that was suggested by his understanding of the equally valid yes or no to the symbol of the Cross and the way that he concludes The Reason of Following. The Inscription of the Self Scharlemann asks, since Dasein’s meaning is primarily temporality, is there a form of temporality that belongs to the exstantial self and acoluthetic reason? If “time” is not a mere “stretching” of the “soul” between past and present, as in Augustine, then neither does Heidegger’s answer, that it is the “coming to be” of the authentic self out of the anonymous self, provide us with an understanding of what kind of time it would be in which the exstantial self would appear. For a possible answer, Scharlemann turns to Heidegger’s three forms of being there, which combines the earlier with the later Heidegger, and perhaps made Heidegger more systematic than he was. In any case, Dasein carries the meaning of the self as temporality, and its focus is care; the being of a work of art carries the meaning of the world; and poetic words carry the meaning of being constituted by self and world as a “self-announcement of being.”180

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Scharlemann concludes that, since even this did not provide the answer about the mode of being that would be appropriate for the “exstantial” I, as it is not mere being of the self, being of the world, or being as being, then he had to look to language rather than to existentialism for a path. Heidegger spoke of a “being-there-with” or a “being-there-too,” which Scharlemann suggests could be a self in the “materiality” of a text or linguistic signs rather a flesh-and-blood self. Scharlemann distinguishes between “care” and any mere “common concern” that one might have with the “self” of the text. Buber suggested a relation created not by common concern but by “encounter” in which that which stands between the self and the text is manifest as a “being-there-with,” which creates a society of the I, a “we” connected by an “event” that happened to both the self and to the voice in the text. This shows the difference between a community of common concern and a community of those who have been “grasped.” But this still does not answer the question. In neither Romantic ideals nor in Husserl did the ideal of self-transparency lead to knowledge of the sensible world. Heidegger reversed Husserl’s picture, however, making the self’s “actual being in the world” primary, as opposed to Husserl’s judgment, that it was the subject’s intentionality that was primary. This means for Scharlemann that humans’ “ordinary” dealing with the world shows the connection between the thinking self and the material world and that scientific cognition of this relation is only a “modification of everyday dealing with the world.”181 Scharlemann sees Heidegger’s hermeneutical approach as superseding “noematic reflection,” since it sees interpretation as a “process in which we put into reflectively formed concepts the understanding of the world that is already contained in the everyday talk of the world.”182 Further, Heidegger distinguished between everyday language, which expresses the meaning of “being-there,” and poetic language, which expresses the meaning of being as such. Scharlemann expands the scope of this analysis by the concept of “textuality.” He defines textuality of texts as their “quality of being there in the word as intelligible entities.”183 A text has an autonomy—that is, is independent of the author’s intention as well as of the recipient’s understandings. In this sense, the “inscribed word” is a “located self-understanding” other than our own and can exist alongside the self-understanding of the Dasein, as it stands on its own. This being the case, it can exist with its own intelligibility, whether its point is either care or mortality. Here Scharlemann turns to the concept of the preaching of the Christian message or the kerygma, which itself addressed the subject of mortality by its assertion of the “Resurrection” of Jesus. Scharlemann examines how D. F. Strauss and Rudolf Bultmann dealt with that message and symbol as they both sought a resolution between the ancient mythical mentality that

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presumed Resurrection from death to be possible and the modern mentality that is positive that Resurrection from death is not possible. Scharlemann suggested that Strauss sought neither to discredit nor defend what the biblical texts says but, rather, to give the “most plausible” explanation of what the “text is about.” Scharlemann thought Strauss’s insight as what the “text is about” was that the early disciples sought the meaning within other ancient texts about the “Suffering Servant” as well as about the “Messiah” and came to the conclusion that if Jesus were the Messiah (or God) then he surely would not have succumbed to death. If this was what the disciples thought, then did this mean that Jesus did not die—or only that this conclusion of theirs was only wishful thinking? What Scharlemann fails to mention is that in the concluding chapter of Strauss’s work, regarding the “dogmatic significance of Christology,” Strauss showed the evolving answers all the way through Schleiermacher and Hegel, finding that the basic problem was in their thinking that any single person could have been that perfect unity of human and deity.184 This to Strauss contradicted science irreparably; therefore the only possible meaning of the Incarnation was in the potentiality of the whole human species. But Scharlemann skipped Strauss’s final answer, moving to Bultmann’s idea that the “Resurrection” is only a new self-understanding that one receives in responding to the kerygma, that the recitation of the kerygma with words is the only meaning of “Resurrection,” as he said, and that the “Resurrection” a “raising” of life not out of actual death but of “Christ” into the kerygma. This was typical of Bultmann’s demythologization, which decosmosized, dematerialized, or existentialized the mythological claims of the early Christians. Scharlemann modified the “middle term” of Bultmann, the kerygma, into the “presence” of the inscribed “voice” within a text in Heidegger’s notion of being “there too with us” so as to discover the linguistic materiality of the voice as the “living voice of the exstantial ‘I am.’”185 This enables the voice to become even more detached from any single author or speaker, which is crucial to Scharlemann in order that the hearer, reader, or “follower” have no concern with any particulars of such an author or speaker. Without creating this division, the words of a text do retain their specific author’s worldviews, limited understandings, intentionalities, and the like, as any speaker or writer—which would eliminate the possibility of contending that faith is guaranteed of the actuality of the speaker while any specifics about such an entity are inconsequential. When Scharlemann ends the chapter by saying that the even letters can “become” texts, can “become inscriptions of a voice, whether or not identical with the voice of the letter writer,” he insists that this is because “the words in the structure of the text give a place to a being that is there with us in the world.”186 He concludes that the exstantial I

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can therefore be encountered in any of three possibilities: (1) in another living person, (2) in the kerygma that makes present a person from the past, or (3) in the voice within a text. So what does this mean for Christology and theology? Christology and Theology If any text or any voice can be a “being there with” us,187 and if acoluthetic reason has no “closer connection with theology or ontology” than with other forms of reason,188 and if God’s “otherness” means any entity can manifest “God,” then the voice or form that can be a “symbol”— in the sense of being both a rational form but also of expressing either being as being or God as God—could serve as a “more direct” theological or ontological expression. If this expression of being as being or of God as God presents itself in a particular one we trust or understand, then it can be thought of as “Christology.” A second way of understanding Christology is when one finds that “following Jesus” is paradigmatic in the sense that it involves both Christological uniqueness and theological exclusiveness. Scharlemann used the analogy of the game of basketball to show that, although the game itself is not unique, it can happen that one witnesses a single game by which they then define basketball. This is what is meant by “basketball,” the paradigm, up beside which all other basketball games appear extremely lacking, hardly of the same genre.189 Similarly to the “paradigmatic” basketball game, “only one case” shows what true following can be—namely, following Jesus. On the other hand, “theological exclusiveness” means that “the only form of reason which is also a manifestation of trust in God as God is the following that is the following of Jesus.”190 Scharlemann’s thesis is that there is a “third possibility besides the universalism and particularism”: the traditional forms of answering the question, a way to include both the question of Christological uniqueness and theological exclusiveness. He first analyzes H. Braun’s work on Jesus that was published in 1969, which opposes the traditional presupposition that Jesus’s authority appeal was to his relation with God. For Braun, Jesus saw the meaning of the name “God” as simply the basis of being human. Nothing more is meant by the word “God” than that one is called to obedience in serving other people and that both this demand and the ability come from grace. Braun is showing “how every activity of being in relation to others in the world is at one and the same time the occurring of trust in God.”191 But Scharlemann argues that even the credibility of such a position “cannot exclude the possibility that one element in the relations involved in being in the world might not only be the element it is . . . but also serve as a stand-in for, or an instantiation of, the one in whom it all takes place . . . [and] the word God might come to be not just an

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expression of what is occurring but also the meaning that acoluthetic reason, or one of its terms [i.e., self, other, and relation], symbolizes.”192 When it comes to answering how this is possible, Scharlemann surveys briefly the history of Christology, from its early hellenistic concepts all the way to Schleiermacher’s penetrating analysis of the communicatio idiomatum (communication of attributes—or qualities within the “Christ”), revealing the inner inconsistencies in formulation and irresolvable contradiction within the very word “nature.” Since the traditional formulation of Christology is inadequate, Scharlemann suggests that there is another possibility for understanding how the “Christ figure” or “exstantial I” could also be a theological figure if one considers it to be a “symbol.” While Tillich had defined a “symbol” as distinguished from a mere “sign” by the fact that the symbol not only points to something else but also “participates” in it, Scharlemann says that the symbol not only points to something other than itself but also that “what it points to is perceptible or real only there.”193 But Scharlemann quickly changes that to read that the figure could appear in any number of different situations, even with different teachings and details.194 But it would always be completely localized or concrete as the figure appeared with totally different concrete attributes. We have already seen that in his other writings, in which he concluded that God could “appear” or manifest itself in anything or person, which suggests that anything could be a symbol of “God.” The same is true of the Christ figure. Scharlemann utilized Tillich’s reference to a nation’s flag as a symbol, going beyond Tillich by suggesting that in that capacity the flag does “not tell us what the dignity and power are but shows itself as a place where they are . . . If the exstantial I is a symbol of God, in this sense of the word symbol, then it is as the exstantial I that God (who is not I and not the world but not nothing either) exists. The exstantial I is not what God is but where God is.”195 Of course, an object may be a symbol for one person but not another. Scharlemann agrees with Tillich’s idea that people cannot make something a symbol merely of their own volition. But the symbol nevertheless retains a certain “objectivity,” though it is not like the objectivity of physical objects. A person could be only an “exstantial I” or as an “exstantial I” might also be a symbol of God if that person makes perceptible the “God” in whom any trust in any person actually resides. This difference between the symbol and the physical objects is seen even more graphically in the fact that, in a precritical stage, one can see them only in an “unrefracted” or literal way. They do not serve to point to anything else and so are not symbols but simply objects, such as merely an “exstantial I.” But symbols can also be sensed as “refracted,” in which case the material or literal element of symbols is easily distinguished from the reality that they

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are symbolizing—that is, showing both their inherent qualities as particular entities but also being “transparent” to what they symbolize. Further, Scharlemann avers that true refracted symbols “can also take into account the freedom of responses to them”196 such that, unlike physical objects, they do not need to coerce a particular or affirmative response from everyone in order to serve as objective symbols. They can be objective without being universal. Scharlemann inquires, however, about whether or not a religious symbol can be universal and whether or not religious symbols can be compared with each other. If a religious symbol does not allow the one for whom it is a religious symbol to even question its being such, then this question is only for the one for whom the symbol is not a religious symbol. Yet that person also cannot conceive of the other possibility. Nevertheless, Scharlemann asks the questions. First, he suggests two ways that a symbol could be “universal.” First, it could be universal if it were accepted by all people everywhere—which, of course, could never be determinable. But his second answer is that the symbol could be universal if it incorporated within itself any kind of response, affirmative, negative, or indifferent. In addition, it could a final symbol (or as Tillich called it, the criterion of all symbols) if it can anticipate the possibility of its own not being a symbol someday or for certain people. But how does a symbol “anticipate” such circumstances and decide to be so generous nevertheless? Or is one really talking about how a later person reflects upon the different ways a symbol (which might itself be totally unconscious of anything) might be construed by those who can think? Who actually ascribes this all-encompassing nature to any symbol, if anyone? But we must therefore ask, what actually is the causal agent of the varied possible responses to the symbol—the nature of the symbol itself or the different perspectives of those who encounter it? Scharlemann speaks of the symbol eliciting varied responses, but how so? Or does it make no difference whatever? Elsewhere, he insists that the “plurality” of possible responses does not come from the decision of the respondent but from one’s finite freedom.197 Scharlemann then analyzes Barth’s exclusively narrow treatment of the answer’s being found only in “Jesus” as the revelation of God, a position that belittles any desire to compare it with other religious symbols as proof that the one asking has not really accepted “Jesus” as a religious symbol. Yet even for Barth this symbol of the manifestation of God in Jesus needs and accepts no details, no information, nothing that could be disproven by critical history. It is at once the “concrete” revelation of God while it simultaneously has no concrete or material or historical details—only the name “Jesus.” Such removal of all details, qualities, and descriptions of the symbol is, of course, precisely the same way that Scharlemann saw the symbol.

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Not surprisingly, Scharlemann says that even Barth’s apparent exclusiveness has “an opening in it,” since what is important to Barth is not when or where or how many times or forms God has manifest itself but only whether the manifestation has happened at least once, with an identifying name, and whether the manifestation has been “as one than whom we cannot even think a greater.”198 But, if one has no details to think and if “reflection” is simply a separation or “sin,” how, then, would one make any judgment about that of which one cannot conceive a greater? Even if this estimate of something’s being the “classical” or “paradigm” of an ideal—whether Scharlemann’s earlier description of “true” or “real basketball” or his analogy here of a performance of Hamlet—is an evaluation that can be continually revised in one’s life experiences, Scharlemann alludes to Jesus as being the “eternal Logos” in the flesh, which seems to preclude its being superseded. But Scharlemann returns to accept Barth’s position that “nothing about him [Jesus] makes him the revelation of God other than the sheer, not derivable fact that he is it . . . It is the very concreteness of the person of Jesus which defines what or who the Christ, what or who God, in truth is.”199 But how is anything “concrete” or a “fact” without having any attributes? In any case, it is not a matter of comparing which religion or religious symbol has the most consistent picture of grace, for example, since Barth himself admits that Pure Land Buddhism might easily outflank even the most Lutheran of Protestant forms of Christianity on that idea.200 Scharlemann rephrases the query: It is not a question of whether religious figures or symbols are alike or different, whether they have similar or different teachings, or whether they show different character. Rather, “it is a question whether the one known to his disciples as Jesus, the self-showing of God, can also be recognized in another name with other features, other meanings, perhaps even other teachings,” which he thinks Barth’s exclusivism may not rule out.201 If so, “one can see a third possibility besides absolutism and relativism or besides a traditional exclusivism and a traditional universalism.”202 CONCLUSION: ABSOLUTE AS WORD OF UNITY OF RELATION BEYOND RELATIVE PERSPECTIVES Although ethics was not Scharlemann’s interest, and although he was critical of how Hegel construed the conception of “Absolute Spirit,” which by its absoluteness simply failed, Scharlemann sought a grounding of Christology that could provide the certainty lost with the relativism of all the critical reflection on the historical claims of Christology. He attempted this through a different kind of “reason” and by linking the “otherness” of God that he saw

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in Anselm with the “otherness” of the Christ figure with which the “follower” can be identified, hearing their own voice. In that way Scharlemann perhaps “corroborated” those Christological claims by his phenomenological ontology, but their uniqueness was universal within no single consciousness, since each person is confined within a particular time and space and sees symbols only as either yes or no. Its counterparts in other times and spaces may theoretically reveal a new sense of universality, but it is never existentially experienced by any single person. The “certainty” sought, however, remains not any certainty about any particular figure of the past but only a certainty about one’s subjective feeling of authenticity and freedom to be who one is in the world. This is certainly a redefining of Christology and a redefining of what was regarded as Absolute. The scope and thoroughness of Scharlemann’s thought as well as the tightness of his line of argument is beyond any challenge. The innovative approach that he takes to theology and Christology by examination of the power of words, especially of “instantiating” what is named, is reasonable on the surface if at times confusing. Buber saw the words “I” and “You” (or “it,” “they,” etc.) as determining relationships. But words by themselves, as “phenomena,” are quite limited in actually “creating” anything material, other than evoking empirically perceptible responses from hearers or readers, which can involve or affect empirical phenomena or account for creating relationships, and this limitation, I believe, is not entirely clear in Scharlemann. Throughout the above analysis, I have shown problems here and there that convince me that the Christ figure who has no attributes or details—so no “factuality,” as Scharlemann insists—also has no “actuality,” and I am convinced that no words that one uses to call him have any instantiating power to make such an empty figure reveal “God,” especially “God” who also has no attributes except “otherness,” since the very word “otherness” presupposes already existing things to which it is “other,” and yet those “existing” attributes do not exist. But the problem here is only that Scharlemann failed to acknowledge that each symbol does have “factuality” within a particular time and place that causes people’s responses of yes or no to be mutually exclusive in that particular situation. Any of the words—whether inscribed in a text or spoken by another person or by me—contain a specificity, even the vague “Follow me.” People do not follow nonspecific ideas, promises, or commands; without these, the command “Follow me” is just bewilderingly vacuous. The factuality and different perspectives of “Follow me” can only be minimized by a greater sense of unity that Scharlemann points to as the universal, the “depth” dimension of truth, rather than by a short-sighted or deficient perspective of the facts, a sense of a more-embracing actuality that can somehow encompasses all possible diverse facts.

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In Scharlemann’s earlier book on Tillich—in which he described the fact that both yes and no responses to the religious symbol were rooted in the “depth” of truth, that no one position contains all truth—Scharlemann edged a little further, since it sounds as if all that is being said is either (1) that all views are true, no matter how contradictory, or (2) that the only thing true about all contradictory perspectives or responses is that they all come from existing beings. But there Scharlemann was not satisfied with these, so he emphasized that he was not implying that each has half the truth and when added together amounts to the whole truth. But, rather, “in their dialectical interaction, as well as in their independent statements, they can let the depth of truth itself be known.”203 He concedes that this idea of an affirmation’s and a denial of the same content’s both being true is absurd, but it is so only if one fails to see the difference between the “I” and the “he”—that is, the difference between subjects making the response, the “difference between a subjectival subject and an objectival subject.”204 Is this implying that a difference in subjects actually makes each of the contradictory assertions or responses true, or is the only truth the fact that they are both “subjects” though with different perspectives? Related to this issue, Scharlemann was convinced that, while Tillich had a two-term ontological structure of “self” and “world,” it should have included “other-self” as a third term, as was assumed in Tillich’s view of the yes and no responses to the symbol of the Cross.205 Thereby, the ontology acknowledges room for different subjects and their different or even contradictory views and responses. But then Scharlemann created a problem about this that seemingly squelches its promise of inclusiveness when writing that “Essentially we should be able to see the depth of reality without special symbols; actually we cannot, because of our fallenness.”206 That means that the truth of existence is not available until or unless one has “faith” and that there is no drawing people to faith by assertions of truth since doing so is available only after one has faith. Other religions have also said that one must “convert” first and only then can see the truth or understand. So everything is God’s doing, even as Tillich, Schleiermacher, and Hegel thought. Scharlemann is sure that the “god of theism” is no longer credible and that this affects Christology. He has little use for seeing either Schleiermacher’s or Hegel’s “absolute” systems as the answer. The Absolute that was a divine “person”—wholly transcendent, beyond space and time but able to intervene within history, as omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and which was Incarnate in a real, single human being, miraculously, was crucified (only the human part), was buried, and then rose from death, reemphasizing its absoluteness, whether one simply hears the confessed creeds in the churches or reads Hegel, who united such God with humanity via Absolute Spirit—the Absolute that was a divine “person” is not Scharlemann’s “God” at all. Nor

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is “God” merely the “depth” of being beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing, as Tillich proposed, which, of course, was certainly not “a being” or “personal” and so not really theistic. Rather, “God” is the depth of “truth” as found in reflexive thinking—or is the depth of the Word (or words) underlying or presupposed by any religious symbol. This conclusion corresponds with Scharlemann’s focus on Anselm’s formulation of “that than which a greater cannot be thought”—not a definition or proof of God but a pointer to the otherness of God207; the “where” and “when” “God” could be revealed through any medium by one’s sensing its presence and naming it. This redirects the entire conversation from attempting to find the “what” or “being” of “God” as definable, credible, and real to the discovery only of the “being of God when [and where] God is not being God,” which means finding truth in the “depth” of truth rather than in any attributes which is thereby manifest by “naming” God as one considers any thing or person. So God is not anything per se but also is not nothing, and Christ is not a particular being but an image that, as one of the ways “God” can be known, can be experienced in any culture, in any number of possible forms. This is its own otherness. This otherness is rooted in what Scharlemann understands as the most definitive symbol of the Cross, since it can point to “God” only if it negates itself while still being; and that is precisely what occurred as Jesus sacrificed himself as Jesus to be Christ. Scharlemann is sure that one can see “God” manifest through Jesus if God’s work is in “reconciling the world to himself,” and that is what the mission of Jesus obviously was. But at that point, Scharlemann injects purported details about Jesus’s ministry, which may or may not be anything more than later imagination of the Gospel writers, details that obviously involve “factuality” rather than just “actuality.” But even more difficult to answer is how Jesus would still “be” after dying on the Cross.208 Nevertheless, Scharlemann extends this otherness to cover the possibility that the variety of human perspectives pushes even this symbol of the Cross to the point of having to anticipate its own negation as a religious symbol. He is convinced that if the symbol is viewed as “refracted” rather than a literal pointer to a single-historical person (or as a reflected evaluation that differs from the unreflected view) then the symbol must accommodate freedom of any and all responses.209 The symbol becomes universal thereby, which also means its power lies not in any historical identification or details but, rather, in the power of the symbol to reveal “God.”210 If the symbol has this power, it has; if not, then not. But Scharlemann insists that the question lies only in God’s hands and is not a human responsibility.211 Does Scharlemann mean that “God” determines the power of a religious symbol? Or does the power of humans to inscribe “‘God’ upon all names,

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‘God is’ upon all events, and ‘God is God’ upon all identities” depend also upon whether human theological language is adequate to such naming and whether it is free “to disclose or not to disclose at given times”?212 The fact that the idea that “‘God is God as the man Jesus’ divides reflection within itself is seen to be the self-relativization of the symbol. Hence, the reflexive experience of the truth of truth comprises the relative experience of the true and the relative experience of the untrue or the false.”213 What about the “embodiment” that seems so important to the Christological claim from Kant onward? A mere pronunciation of a name does not mean that there is any material thing that it creates by merely its pointing. The “embodiment,” as Scharlemann construes it, would be a medium that is completely transparent to its depth; but yet it is only the person speaking the words or identifying themselves with inscribed words through some form of ecstasy. But how could such an identity of one’s “exstantial I” with Christ be both an identity of uniqueness and yet also be universal by transcending all details? Does this mean that the “I” itself becomes universal as well as unique? While Scharlemann’s treatment of the otherness of “God” appears to make sense and put an end to literal theism, he nevertheless often continued to speak of “God” as the “One” or to speak of God’s power or communication that is very difficult to conceive, given the ontological structure he adopted from Tillich and Heidegger. For “God” is not any specific being but, rather, being within all beings, just as “God” is not any word per se but is, rather, the being and therefore also the meaning (logos) implied in all words. But to speak of everything as “God,” as Scharlemann suggests, appears to make sense only as long as one distinguishes the particular form through which “God” appears from what is meant by “God” as that which can both be God and not be God. But how can words mean such equivocal things to the person using them? Does this mean that, if we cannot say what we mean by “God,” then we can only point to where “God” might be manifest at particular times and places, by a renaming of things as we feel that the “presence” of “God” instantiated? Can this be distinguished from mere enthusiasm, wish fulfillment, or imagination? But “God” is “word.” Scharlemann insists that, although that to which the symbol points is not objective as an empirical thing, neither is it merely subjective, although he insists that symbols do not work in the abstract but rather disclose their “symbolic reality differently to different subjects” because of the different ways in which the subjects are historically and culturally conditioned.214 Is this suggesting that the “symbolic reality” to which the symbol points is only the “meaning of finitude”?215 On the other hand, Scharlemann’s view of God may not differ much from Tillich’s, as Scharlemann relates “God” to being and nonbeing; and Masao

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Abe pointed out the shortcoming with Tillich’s view—that is, Tillich’s inability to develop a symmetrical treatment of being and nothing in his assertion that “God” is the depth of being beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing. As we saw, to Abe this reveals an unjustified preference for being, an asymmetrical approach to those opposites and many other opposites, such as “good” and “evil,” from which unjustified reification usually results. This brings us to the overall theme of Scharlemann’s Christology: that it answers the problem that Heidegger could not—namely, that one can find, as Dasein, one’s wholeness in actually doing what Heidegger said that one always could do but never does do, since, in doing it, one no longer is, that is—one has died. In this dying, which Scharlemann reads from Saint Paul, Scharlemann says that one is now whole on his own in the world and is now free to be in the world but not of the world, free of worldly “care,” free by the Word. Heidegger’s problem and answer to the “being-unto-death” was more specific, however, and provided an answer that differs from Scharlemann’s representation. First, Heidegger was careful to disclaim any effect that accidental or random death would have on his analysis216 and insisted that he was neither in any way addressing whether or not there is life after death nor addressing any theological or metaphysical idea about death being connected to evil in some way. Heidegger was convinced that his “existential analysis is superordinate to the questions of a biology, psychology, theodicy, or theology of death.”217 Heidegger would view Scharlemann’s answer probably as beyond the limits that he was utilizing, but he might even see it as a “weakening” of the meaning of the possibility of death218 or even a diversion, “cover-up” or evasion of death’s seriousness, equal almost to the “everyday” approach that sees death as happening to “them.” The question about Dasein’s “wholeness” in light, of its “being-untodeath,” was raised because Heidegger had painted Dasein’s experience in life as always sustaining a “still outstanding” or “not-yet” perspective. For Heidegger, the question could not be resolved ontologically but only existentially—first, since it has to be experienced as and by the “I” rather than some “substitute” objectification of deaths of other people, no matter how graphically the deaths of others can impress us while we are living and experience their deaths. It must be “mine” instead. Heidegger was convinced that the “everyday” treatment of death produces an “inauthentic” Dasein or self because it projects death away from the self onto an impersonal “they” as something very remote from self. It happens to “people” or to “them.” This leads one to “temptation, tranquilization, and alienation” which are aspects of “falling” or evasion of the truth about death.

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On the other hand, Death is the “ownmost” and “uttermost” possibility and end of Dasein, the possibility of having no possibility of being in this world, which is “nonrelational,” “not to be outstripped,” “distinctively impending,” “certain,” and “constantly indefinite.” Dasein, by anticipation, makes possible this possibility of not being, and Dasein’s “being with” and “being of Others” show the possibilities of the “freedom” that one finds in “giving up” the possibility of existence. This “being toward death” by anticipation produces or actually is anxiety. For Heidegger, “anticipation” that “reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom toward death—a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the ‘they,’ and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.”219 Heidegger thereby reads “care” as the “basic state of Dasein,”220 or “the ontological term for the totality of Dasein’s structural whole,”221 derived from Dasein’s connection with “conscience” that depends upon Dasein’s being a “concernful Being-alongside and solicitous Being-with,”222 thereby anticipating “being-as-a-whole.” Language about “death” and the “totality” of what the “I” can expect is not the same in Plato, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Heidegger, and Scharlemann. The consciousness of “I,” as Scharlemann agrees with Buber (and Heidegger), depends upon an awareness of one’s relation with an other—as Heidegger called it, “being-with-others.” The “care” that Heidegger said came from Dasein’s “being-with-others” in the world, which created an ethical framework, provided an anticipation of one’s death and gave it meaning in such relationships, not simply in a negative guilt from one’s possibility of not-being in the world. We could say that one’s existential anticipation of one’s own death has combined with one’s objective knowledge of others’ deaths, some of whom one has a relationship with, which provided a whole picture of one’s being Dasein, in a particular time and place and with others. We now know too much about the human brain to believe in consciousness of a human after the death of the brain and its body. There is no continuous “I” in a Platonic or Pauline or Augustinian sense, no matter how they differed. My “death” becomes the conscious possession only of my survivors, because my particular “I” simply no longer is, and those survivors do not experience it in the unique way that “I” did. So no one knows what “I” experience in death until their own “I” experiences their own death. And the experiences are individually unique. No objective picture will replace the existential experience. Further, there is no residue of “being” or consciousness that continues, and, the survivors’ sense of respect for a lifeless body at a funeral notwithstanding,

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no one expects the deceased to be conscious of the funeral service or of the survivors’ behavior at such a moment or ever after. One can only anticipate one’s own ending as one’s own ending, not simply something that happens to others, but one cannot reflect on it after. Why would some speculation of the “I’s” consciousness of the totality of what occurred beyond the death of that consciousness be regarded as more than fantasy? It makes no more sense than probing Dasein from the very moment of its conception in the womb. It also ignores the consciousness of the specific “there” and “then” or the “with others” that Heidegger thinks is so vital to Dasein. The Dasein is a consciousness of relatedness and care in time and space; absence of one includes the absence of the other. Consciousness develops in the human gradually, and never to much of a degree prior to birth, since the eyes are so instrumental in its development. It is a process of input, though conditioned by Kant’s “categories” of judgment or comparable mental structures, which themselves may not be a priori after all, but the process is not only of the external other(s) but also of one’s own brain processing words and sights through the sense organs and nerves.223 When the brain goes dead, so do all of the receptive functions of the body, and so the body can no longer relate either to itself or to any other. Since there is no consciousness of “being-there-then” in the “I” past the moment of death, to try to paint that “death” as something that can be experienced fully only through some metaphor is to ignore real life and death, which are not a mere metaphor. So to construe an answer from Saint Paul that “in Christ” I have already died and been raised from death is not spiritual talk but totally unscientific metaphorical language, since one has, in factuality and actuality, not yet died, or else one would not be talking about it. Scharlemann’s answer, as noted before—that it need not be restricted to a metaphor so long as it has the same reality as a “being there with us” in the form of a human speaking to us—goes too far in both alleged power and truth of words spoken being equated with no criteria to judge any words as mere metaphor, imagination, untruth or bluster.224 But in Saint Paul’s letter to the Colossians, the expression is not a literal description, since Paul himself is still writing— something dead people simply do not do. Scharlemann’s evasion of the assertion as a metaphor simply does not deal with the search Heidegger was conducting. Anticipation of real death is the closest the “I” can come to death, and no amount of hoping for some continuation of consciousness or some “Resurrection” of the actual “I” that I now am will compensate. It remains “wish fulfillment,” an unclarified, pseudophysical expression in Saint Paul, mixing speculation of the Jewish and hellenistic cultures, that was only later intensified by Saint Augustine. But, as Wolfhart Pannenberg suggested, the idea of an “immortal soul” is no longer thought to

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be very credible. But neither is Pannenberg’s proleptic “absolute metaphor” of a “Resurrection of the body,” even when he admits it is a “metaphor.” On the other hand, if all Scharlemann is searching for is a release from the “cares” of this world, which he emphasizes so much, then many “cares” can be blunted or sublimated if they are merely egoistic or material. One need not go to such lengths phenomenologically as to construe words to update ancient meanings. But even a mere physical death is not the answer. And neither is the answer to be released from all “care” (Heidegger’s Sorge), since that is to cut oneself off from any responsibility in human relationships. The human is primarily a social creature, realizing themselves only within acting morally toward others, creating and sustaining beneficial relationships with others. Further, in order to retain “autonomy,” which is essential for one’s being an “authentic self,” Scharlemann reads the picture of “following” as being totally unreflective at its beginning, since one is hearing one’s own voice. It was absolutely immediate in response. But neither logic nor language supports that except by exaggerating it from silence of any actual historical accounts or probability. Quite the opposite is the picture of Jesus’s “followers” in the Gospels, as they continually questioned what Jesus was doing and saying and how he was relating to others—even questioning his going to Jerusalem, since they were aware he might not escape alive. They were not simply an unreflective bunch, hearing only their own voices. This even raises the more significant question of how and why those original followers to whom Scharlemann alludes ever thought Jesus was the “Messiah.” Does one determine the meaning of “Messiah” or its equivalent, “Christ,” only from much later Christian theology or from the Jewish setting in which that Jesus is alleged to have appeared? Even if Christology is focused only on its beginning, as we saw in Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Tillich, how does it escape its Judaist roots and meanings? Judaism certainly had no Trinitarian God, no “Son of God,” no “Incarnation,” no Savior via Crucifixion, that is, and certainly no Cross that carried a universalism within its symbolical power. While this method does align with Hegel, Hegel himself had no use for the religion of Israel or Judaism, just as Schleiermacher refused even to accept Judaism as the “forerunner” to Christianity. Yet Scharlemann is speaking of reflexivity and of a religious symbol that supposedly embraces any response, as he says is true of the “reason of following,” that any response is acceptable and true as long as it is authentic. When Scharlemann explains Strauss’s explanation of that original equation of Jesus with the Messiah via Jesus’s “Resurrection,” both Strauss and Scharlemann are correct in seeing a combining of “Suffering Servant” and “Messiah” symbols. But those were only much later reflections of some disciples, once they, as Jews, had decided that the symbol had to stand for God’s

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incursion into history (but still not as God Incarnate or God’s “Son”), while a more important symbol was the “Son of man,” which shaped the synoptic Gospels and Paul’s writings about the imminent parousia. Even then there was no assumption that the meaning of “Messiah” was the ultimate unity of humans with God—which is assumed by all four scholars whose work we analyzed, as well as by Strauss—much less that the Messiah was one human actually being God in a fleshly form, which Strauss saw through. That position Strauss critiqued for offending both the church and science required much time and reflection—and a non-Jewish setting as well as prescientific understandings. It appears that Scharlemann ignored Strauss’s main point about Christology—that it cannot be credible with modern science in its assertion that a single member of any species was the complete embodiment of the potential of that species while no other member of the species showed those characteristics. Of course, Scharlemann was attempting to avoid any reference to specifics, such as qualities of a single human being or the ethnicity of Jesus, since Scharlemann was convinced that the universal power of the symbol had released Christology from such details. But unscientifically ignoring historical detail was the mistake Strauss saw in both Schleiermacher and Hegel. It will not quit plaguing Christology until Christology quits conflating historical with mythological claims. The ethics in both the teachings assigned to Jesus as well as Paul’s writings were wholly oriented around this imminent end of history, not some symbol that could be tolerant enough to embrace both those who accept as well as those who reject that Jesus. Nowhere in Scharlemann’s approach is the rejection of Jesus by the majority of people in Jesus’s day taken seriously. When Scharlemann finally suggests the lack of any absolute perspective in his analysis of the symbol of the Cross—by which he concludes that those who reject Jesus as well as those who accept Jesus both stand in the truth—is he suggesting that both found their authentic and highest form of their selves, either by “following” or “not-following”?225 So it really made and makes no difference? That seems to be the implication that Taylor reached regarding any postmodern approach still attempting modernism’s desire to form a totality, so “what is, is what ought to be.”226 Scharlemann’s “Christology” is formed from this end, the latter part of the twentieth and first part of the twenty-first century—basically ignoring every historical detail in the Gospels that has any credibility among historians as having any real connection with that Jesus, and embracing those that have lost all credibility. Certainly the “I am,”227 the “Logos,” the “Follow me,” and the “I am the Resurrection and Life” are not accepted as being among the few credible historical words spoken by that Jesus.228 But it is not just

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the biblical scholars who cannot endorse such a wholesale dismissal of the facticity of any and all historical claims about Jesus; the lay Christians, even if not interested in spending their lives as historians to analyze all the historical processes of redactions of texts and the like, simply assume the historical claims about Jesus in the Gospels as being true. What has not been shown is how the antagonism between any reflection on the historical claims can be resolved with the unreflected view by simply concentrating on “reflexivity.” As Scharlemann noted, reflexivity simply identified one’s thinking and one’s being, nothing more. It is does not “corroborate” any claim made about some other figure’s thinking or being of centuries past. We saw earlier that Scharlemann suggested that in “dialectical interaction” the conflicting perspectives may disclose the “depth” of truth, but in the approach to the otherness of God many of Scharlemann’s colleagues associate any idea of difference that can be resolved by dialectic as only a form of essential identity, like Hegel’s.229 One has to wonder how much of this explanation comes from presuppositions against anything being connected with “God” that implies “accidents” or “change,” even as Nietzsche accused Christian theology.230 For Scharlemann to say that the early disciples found their true selves only in the “mission” on which Jesus sent them ignores the disciples’ lives as a whole, reducing their lives merely to the single fact that the disciples were only who they were in their announcing peace.231 But such an insight comes neither from reflexion nor from reflection of actual details. These are details, but there is nothing in the record to indicate what Scharlemann says about them, that their identities were only in their mission of “following” Jesus, in proclaiming peace. To the contrary, the association of the mission with “peace” ignores Matt. 10 and the picture of rejection that Jesus expected them to experience, which could only be answered by the imminent coming of final vindication by the “Son of man” (Matt. 10:23). While it is true that this is all much later reflection rather than the actual words of Jesus—perhaps even a retrospective allusion to the Destruction of Jerusalem in 66 to 70 CE—so was the account in Luke (which was even duplicated by “Luke”) that Scharlemann utilized. The “mission” still had a certain “content” to it that was the imminent coming of the Kingdom. By the radically different approach of somehow accepting the “actuality” of Jesus but not his “factuality,” Scharlemann certainly did not intend to “corroborate” some historical details. Like Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Tillich, all Scharlemann felt he needed in order to “corroborate” the Christological claim was for someone, somewhere, at some time, to have received the symbol of Jesus or the Cross as the final religious symbol by its inclusion of its own negation; that, Scharlemann felt, was sufficient to validate it.232 That is all.

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But even to assess such a strange, hyperbolic claim requires some facts and argument. The “Cross” per se was certainly not a religious symbol prior to much Christian reflection. Only gradually did the words about Jesus’s death become more than a method of laying off blame on a few Jewish authorities, and quite differently—and become even the very “will of God.” With Tillich’s idea that Jesus sacrificed himself as Jesus to be himself as the Christ, the picture is anachronistic, superheroic without any justifiable reason for it, ignoring that it all came from the later church as a community with its “lost cause.” Yet both Tillich’s and Scharlemann’s presupposition makes the Cross the “final” religious symbol or the criterion of all religious symbols? So the relativity of everything is embraced in the new universal symbol that anticipates its own negation and rejection. Yet it has no factuality? All that is needed is the “actuality” of a person to respond to the symbol in some way (or must one respond to it as a “religious symbol,” as Scharlemann earlier insisted?), just as all that is needed for the Cross to be inclusive of even those who reject it is for one person once in history to have opined its universality? That becomes the extent of “embodiment” needed for the Christological answer, the embodiment of the one responding to the symbol as a “religious symbol,” or at least a symbol that might be religiously true for some or quite false for others? That is a long way from the person originally being signified by the Gospels as the embodiment of an all-encompassing Word. But as Taylor noted, in much postmodern theology the referent behind the image disappears, leaving only an image of an image, a simulacrum.233 Finally, despite Scharlemann’s erudition, and despite the fact that he was attempting to lay a groundwork for a new way of seeing Christology and not a groundwork for ethics, a major weakness seems to be that the primary goal of self is to be “authentic,” to hear its own voice, to exempt itself from “care” in one’s world, such that one can live “in the world but not of the world,” or not by the world but “in the word.” Does this mean that the authentic self has no concern to be an ethical self or to be motivated by Sorge? This is disturbing. Only in a handful of places does Scharlemann connect ethics with Christology,234 but here the emphasis is always on Christology, such as showing the universalization of the Jesus figure, which universalization means not only that the “Christ figure” can appear in various forms in different cultures but also that any “follower” or “exstantial self” can itself become a Christ figure for others, enabling them, which reflects Luther’s own idea of a disciple becoming “a Christ for others.”235 This universalizing seems not to resolve the issue that if the Christology itself is too difficult to comprehend or is not convincing then it cannot be the ground for an ethic—and certainly not of a universal ethic. Is this really

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the optimum human life, or, if both those who reject Jesus as well as those who accept him stand within the truth, does it matter at all which response one makes, whether toward Christ or toward one’s fellow humans? Or does it suggest that a Christ image is only one of any number of images in which one’s authentic being or the meaning of existence could be found, that such a universal possibility or contradictory responses to a single image is recognized only in the totality of different responses so is seldom if ever embraced by a single person, and so a sense of exclusivism and therefore divisiveness still exists between religions and with the nonreligious? Or does it really not matter whether anyone ever hears about this “Christ” or any comparable potent religious symbols, since thinking and being are universals experienced by every human, and so one would not feel the need for religious symbols unless one already had been convinced that one was “fallen”? Or are all the nonreligious people simply taken for granted, to be excluded from what is supposed to be a universal possibility? Certainly Scharlemann’s approach is truly a different approach to the issues of absolutism versus relativism or of exclusivism versus universalism in a religion. But the religions themselves continue to perpetuate the conflated historical-mythical claims in an absolutistic and very exclusivistic form, which is the real problem in both theology and Christology as well as within society. So theologians feel compelled by mythology to utilize different ontologies or use logic to read meanings from words whose referents lack facticity in order to maintain contact with the ancient, exclusive mentality? If the only “Absolute” is actually a universal embracing all kinds of relative responses, then it seems no longer to be Absolute. A universal does not necessarily transform into the Absolute by accommodating different perspectives, and the idea of sustaining itself while negating itself, when utilizing a death of a person on a Cross, stimulates a picture of radical and illogical impossibility. Hegel’s idea of Aufhebung was a simultaneous negation and elevation, but that does not square with his early writings in which he rejected the idea that substitutionary death would satisfy the demand for justice. On the other hand, if that negation and the negation of negation is only the movement of thinking, then the referent of the negation is not what is taken up or still remains but, rather, is a totally different referent. How a Christology is credible by reflexivity or the symbol of double negation still says nothing about the referent that was supposed—that Jesus—but only about one’s own thinking about thinking, and implicitly then, one’s being a thinking being. Does the nature of the otherness of either God or Jesus as Christ remain too complex in its language for any lay person to understand and so remains only an insight into possible truth for those bothered by what they feel is an endless “reflection”? Scharlemann tries to clarify by saying that, if “God is

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God” says nothing more than “the absolute is the absolute,” then “God” is no different from the absolute process of reflexivity. “But if ‘God is God’ has the sense that God is God as the absolute process, then the being of thinking shows what it means for God to be God even though reflexivity is not itself the divine being. The being of thinking and the being of God are different, but the being of thinking is capable of showing what it means for God to be God.” So “God” is not some entity that is absolute, just as Jesus as Christ is not divine in himself as a human. But reflexivity can enable us to understand what it means to be God as “to be able to relate oneself to one’s other,” while “to be God is to be other than the process of relating oneself to one’s other.”236 Scharlemann’s concluding words in The Being of God point to a new direction: which people must be responsible for the truth of words they speak, but this does not mean that they have to “answer for God.” Rather, “For the sake of truth, theology has to answer for the word ‘God,’ the tale ‘God is,’ and the judgment ‘God is God.’ But it does not have to answer for God, the being of God, and the identity of God, which answer for themselves when they answer.”237 The division appears to be not between humanity and divinity but between speaking and being. Yet if one spends time analyzing “God” and its otherness or the “being of God when God is not being God,” then how is this not a human answering in place of “God,” presuming God’s role, answering for God’s be-ing and identity? How otherwise does God’s “be-ing” and “identity” “answer” if not through the otherness of God? Or was Scharlemann agreeing more with his former colleague, Richard Rorty, that “truth” is not “out there” somewhere but only within speech? If that is so, then “theology” should restrict its speech to the truth, which means theology would quit speaking of power that has no predicate or of being that is known only in its not-being what it essentially is or of “truth” whose only concern is its “depth,” which really says nothing about percepts and concepts, understandings or anticipations even based on speech, but only about speaking. Most postmodern theology makes no claims to knowing what “essence” is, yet to speak of the “truth of truth.” One could also transcend Tillich’s negative assessment of “estranged existence” as being any actualization of human freedom. The question is whether or not the “Absolute” can be left behind for something that is simply encountered as “universal.” Scharlemann himself emphasized that the “Absolute” is beyond all words, and yet he wanted to equate “God” with “word” or language. Could it be that what is truly universal, if beyond all words or description, also has no “name,” not even “God,” nor “word,” so that pronouncing the “name” “God” does nothing and means nothing, as we see from the ubiquitous “Oh, my God” expression of present culture? Further, could it not be truly universal and not merely anthropocen-

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tric, and therefore involve all forms of life as their primary concern, which means it would be the universal “will-to-live” even for living entities that have no “language” but still experience relation? If authentic being could be this universal, why would one have to posit some ambiguous experience of a human claiming to be “the Resurrection and the life” in order for one’s being to be an “authentic” self? Are those who do not hear those specific words or experience a comparable “Christological experience” or who do not have a language thereby “inauthentic”? Why would the most inclusive symbol, the most capable of embracing diverse response, not be a symbol of living rather than of dying? If the true “universal” is the “will to live” in every living creature, then one can be done with trying to explain the “answer” as one’s paradoxical “ultimate concern,” which leaves humans helpless before an inevitable “estrangement” so that they can be rescued by “God” who planned it all. One can avoid trying to figure out a way of reconciling symbols that contradict each other or that have no common methods of measurement or intelligibility. One can avoid having to feel that one is forced to choose between living ethically with a “care” for this world and its creatures and living in the Word beyond any care for this world. One could quit speaking of that which is beyond all description and even that which is beyond the polarity of being and nothing as if it were a person, an accommodation in speaking just to satisfy the presupposition that “faith,” if a crucial, otherworldly, and legitimate form of thinking, is equal to if not superior to understanding. One could be done with the “metaphysics of infinity” as if “infinity” is intelligible, perceptible, and accessible within any and every finite thing, at least within humans. And one could move beyond assuming that an Absolute yes in the form of Redemption and a Redeemer is the most obvious truth. One could also transcend Tillich’s negative assessment of “estranged existence” as being any actualization of human freedom. It might even cause those of us who have at one time considered ourselves “theologians” to realize we do not speak for “God,” to realize that to profess to speak for God is presumptuous if even credible since God is not “a being” at all. It would reinstate humanization as humanity’s actual possibility and highest goal. Here one returns to the way Scharlemann attempted to locate the various possible “appearances of the I” and especially how he thought the “reason of following” was superior to ethical concern, which he illustrated from Wilhelm Hermann. Hermann asked how one can become concerned with others, breaking free from mere self-interest. His answer was that, when we meet someone who fills us with respect and trust, a new value is created within us that is not

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derived from mere self-interest but that was stimulated by the free autonomy of the others and that enables us to stand in our own freedom. Scharlemann characterized the two concerns in terms of different kinds of freedom: the one who is so impressed with another that they “trust” and become ethically concerned is the self “come into its own freedom to be on its own,” whereas the one who “follows” immediately “heedless of social or familial ties” is one whose entire identity flows from that following, who becomes the “self free to be finitely.”238 But does not “following” degrade autonomy, and does not the state of “following” require that one be in a state of “ecstasy” and no longer have any concern or care for the “world,” even for one’s social and family ties, as Scharlemann paraphrases Jesus’s instructions to the disciples? That literal reading from the Gospel of Luke is full of hyperbole based on an extremely authoritarian Christology of that author or editor—again supported by an imminent eschatological orientation that Scharlemann overlooks. But this may all show that the very process of the critical questions we are asking vis-à-vis Scharlemann’s literal rending of such symbols and statements is confirming his point. In his beginning quotation at the start of this chapter, Scharlemann emphasized the schism between a precritical and a reflective approach to the religious symbols and said that “reflexivity” must resolve that incompatibility between the first two: “Religion views the possibility of reflection as a fall into sin and warns against it; reflection sees religion as a prereflective state that needs deliverance from its illusion. Each, in the judgment of the other, is blind to its own nature . . . A solution must appeal initially to reflexivity as a standpoint from which the conflict can be seen independently of how the two contenders see it.”239 Nearly every aspect of Scharlemann’s work that I have criticized—be they criticisms of what I considered to be Scharlemann’s lack of clarity or of positions I have felt were perhaps not well founded—fall under the “reflective” approach. Perhaps this only underscores his point. Thus it is no criticism of his answer to say that reflexivity seems to expect too much theological knowledge of lay people. That also is his point. He is telling both those of the precritical as well as those of the critical or reflective approaches that they are simply two different perspectives, both actually embraced by the self-negating symbol of the Cross of Christ and by reflexivity. This was also Hegel’s conclusion—not that the prereflective or representational approach was ignorant and untrue but that the “essence” of the Christian message was there, even as it was with speculative reason, but that this was understood only if one could see it philosophically through speculative Reason as Absolute Reason. Would it not be more logical simply to admit similarities and differences between various perspectives or approaches and then weigh the credibility of their facets by reasonable arguments of “public reason” rather

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than simply having “faith” or employing some form of reason unacceptable to many? “Reflexivity” does not decrease the distance between the thinker and the referent of the thinker’s thought but simply changes that referent to the “truth” of the thinker’s being, as Scharlemann emphasized. But most differences between people are not over questioning their actual being. Reflection seems not to have been deserted in human existence, in science, history, or other disciplines, so why should religion view it negatively, as if public reason is an enemy to religious truth? NOTES  1. Martin Buber, I and Thou, 2nd ed., postscr. Martin Buber, trans. Ronald G. Smith (New York: Scribner, 1958), 43–45.  2. Scharlemann, Being of God, 28–29.  3. See Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion? The claim made by Christology, as any religion’s claim that conflates mythology or metaphysics with history, cannot be directly answered with any concept.  4. Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, 197, italics original. Scharlemann emphasizes that faith cannot guarantee a historical person behind the biblical picture, and neither does it need to (197).  5.  Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, 197.  6. Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, 111–12.   7.  Scharlemann, “Argument from Faith,” 188–89, italics original.   8.  Scharlemann, “Argument from Faith,” 190, italics original.   9.  Parentheticals mine. Is this compatible with his statement that preceded this, that faith “guarantees one kind of historical fact but not another kind” (Scharlemann, “Argument from Faith,” 190)? Are there different “kinds” of “factuality”? 10.  Scharlemann, “Argument from Faith,” 190. 11. Scharlemann, Being of God, 138–39. 12.  Only in the conclusion of Reason of Following does Scharlemann allow the possibility that there could be other equivalent symbols (of “Christ”) even with different teachings, and so on, that are as valid in supplying the symbol in which one finds one’s authentic being and can be both in the world without being “of the world.” One must ask why it would have to be within a religion at all—why any culture might not have symbols that can be recognized as having meaning that includes a variety of relatively particular answers or content. In Reconciling Opposites we will find that this was how John Rawls saw the unity of a “democracy.” 13. Scharlemann, Being of God, 25. 14.  Robert P. Scharlemann, “Onto- and Theo-logical Thinking,” in Inscriptions and Reflections: Essays in Philosophical Theology, Studies in Religion and Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 5–8. For example, in reflexive thinking, Scharlemann insists, “thinking and being are identical in the sense that that

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of which one is thinking is nothing other than the thinking by which one thinks of it” (5). 15.  Schleiermacher equated “religion” with Gefühl (feeling) or unmittelbar Selbstbewusstsein (immediate self-consciousness) and saw it as prior to Kant’s theoretical and practical reason as well as their only connection. Scharlemann is correct, in The Reason of Following , 110, that Schleiermacher finally established his Christology not on “theoretical judgments about an entity but on theoretical reflections of religious feeling.” 16.  Aesthetic reason, having only begun to be recognized as a specific form of reason in the eighteenth century by Alexander Baumgarten, was only of marginal concern to Kant, only a part of Schleiermacher’s philosophical ethics, but occupied a prominent place in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a form of the “absolute.” In Tillich, although he distinguished especially ontological reason from technical reason, the former contains cognitive, practical, technical, and aesthetic (Tillich, Systematic Theology, I:72). But Tillich also emphasized both objective and subjective reason, as well as “ecstatic” reason, which is the position of the religious person, and “technical” reason, which is the role of the theologian. Even in On Art and Architecture, however, Tillich did not develop a consistent form of aesthetic reason distinguishable from cognitive reason. 17. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, viii. 18. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, viii. 19. See Robert P. Scharlemann, “Does Saying Make It So? The Language of Instantiation in Buber’s I and Thou,” in God in Language, God: The Contemporary Discussion Series, ed. Robert P. Scharlemann and Gilbert E. M. Ogutu (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1987), 117. 20.  Scharlemann, “Does Saying Make It So?,” 117–18. 21.  Scharlemann, “Does Saying Make It So?,” 120. 22.  Scharlemann, “Does Saying Make It So?,” 122–24. 23.  Scharlemann, “Does Saying Make It So?,” 125. 24.  Scharlemann, “Does Saying Make It So?,” 126. 25.  For example, Scharlemann ends The Being of God with the following: “Theology has the task of inscribing ‘God’ upon all names, ‘God is’ upon all events, and ‘God is God’ upon all identities. In carrying out that task it has the intention of speaking the truth so that the truth can be seen or heard. Sometimes it will, and sometimes it will not, succeed in this effort” (183). 26.  Scharlemann, “Does Saying Make It So?,” 126. 27.  Scharlemann, “Does Saying Make It So?,” 126. 28.  Scharlemann, “Does Saying Make It So?,” 127. 29.  Scharlemann, “Does Saying Make It So?,” 127. 30.  Robert P. Scharlemann, “God as Not-Other: Nicholas of Cusa’s ‘De li Non Aliud,’” in Naming God, ed. Robert P. Scharlemann (New York: Paragon House, 1985), 116–32. 31.  Scharlemann, “God as Not-Other,” 118. 32.  Scharlemann, “God as Not-Other,” 121. 33.  Scharlemann, “God as Not-Other,” 122. On the “double negation” without a bias toward being, see Abe, “Double Negation,” especially 104–11.

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Karl Jaspers (Philosophical Faith and Revelation, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Harper and Row, 1967], 259–61) arrived at a slightly different conclusion in his analysis of Nicholas of Cusa in which he saw Nicholas’s exposition of coincidentia oppositorum in its superiority to a mere “negative theology” that just “drops the thought” once it is seen that the attributes of finitude are negated. Cusanus saw the realization of enabling one to experience God as unthinkable. Jaspers concluded that this is not something that allows humans to identify with God, so the only possibility left is “an indirect leap: formal transcending in the pure concepts that rescind their definitions in the coincidentia oppositorum.” To this he adds, “Cusanus thinks in a direction where nothing is conceivable, definable, imaginable any more, in the direction of that which really is—and which is nothing as well.” This seems closer to Abe’s understanding of Sunyata and Mark Taylor’s understanding of “difference” than to Tillich’s “bias” toward being over nonbeing. 34.  Scharlemann, “God as Not-Other,” 125. 35.  Scharlemann, “God as Not-Other,” 126. 36.  Scharlemann, “God as Not-Other,” 126. 37.  Scharlemann, “God as Not-Other,” 129. 38.  Scharlemann, “God as Not-Other,” 131, parentheticals and emphasis original. 39.  Found in Altizer, Thomas J. J., Max A. Myers, Carl A. Raschke, Robert P. Scharlemann, Mark C. Taylor, and Charles E. Winquist, Deconstruction and Theology (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1982), 79–108. 40.  Scharlemann, “Being of God When God Is Not Being God,” 85. 41.  Scharlemann, “Being of God When God Is Not Being God,” 86, italics original. 42.  Scharlemann, “Being of God When God Is Not Being God,” 94. 43.  Scharlemann, “Being of God When God Is Not Being God,” 88. 44.  Scharlemann, “Being of God When God Is Not Being God,” 88. 45.  Scharlemann, “Being of God When God Is Not Being God,” 90. 46.  Scharlemann, “Being of God When God Is Not Being God,” 91. 47.  Scharlemann, “Being of God When God Is Not Being God,” 96. 48.  Scharlemann, “Being of God When God Is Not Being God,” 105. 49.  Scharlemann, “Being of God When God Is Not Being God,” 106. 50.  At this point, Scharlemann has moved far from Tillich, who insisted that God cannot not be God. 51.  Scharlemann, “Being of God When God Is Not Being God,” 107. 52. Scharlemann also tried to explain faith by his reference to Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith” who received back that which he gave up as impossible. The story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, distinguishes faith from reason. In faith he relinquished Isaac, was willing to sacrifice him, when reason could no longer justify his hope that he would get Isaac back from death. He had faith that he would, however. But this was not the Jewish story at all, and it was not known to Saint Paul, who, in speaking of Abraham’s faith, spoke only of his faith vis-à-vis the reasonable view of the age of his and Sarah’s bodies and yet managed to have a child, Isaac, as a product of this faith (Rom. 4). Naturally the Jews certainly did not appreciate Hegel’s reading of the Abraham story and saw it as so

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much anti-Semitism. Rather, Emil Fackenheim is more typical of modern or “postmodern” readings of the Abraham story. He simply cites a midrash relating that when all the nations of the world saw what Abraham was willing to do (but did not have to), they abandoned their idols. See Emil L. Fackenheim, What Is Judaism? An Interpretation for the Present Age (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 119–20. The biblical reference utilized by Kierkegaard is only from Heb. 11, a most antiJewish approach to Jewish traditions and faith, where the author says that Abraham, through his faith, was “ready to offer up his only son” because “he considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead—and figuratively speaking, he did receive him back” (Heb. 11:17–19). The author of Hebrews’ tendentious reading ignores the fact that the original Jewish story did not mention anything about Abraham thinking that if he killed Isaac he would get him back from the dead. This is all a later Christianizing of the story that basically ruins the Jewish story. And the final statement that the author of Hebrews makes—that, “figuratively speaking, he did receive him back”—is ridiculous, since that would have been so only had he killed him. He didn’t. He did not receive him back from anything but a near sacrifice, what turned out to be only a “test,” despite Kierkegaard’s mocking of this term. It was the author of Hebrews’ term (11:17). So this is not a story of actually giving something up and then receiving it back but only a story of anticipating that one would give something up and receive it back, which turned out to be a mistaken anticipation. The idea of receiving it back after killing it was not anticipated in the story, but only in Kierkegaard. Hegel’s interpretation of the Abraham-Isaac story is more apropos in The Spirit of Christianity, but it is also anti-Semitic. 53. Scharlemann, Being of God, 103. This meaning of Jesus’s Resurrection for a believer comes initially from Bultmann’s idea of one’s “authentic” self, as Scharlemann notes it is not “an assertion that projects, but that of the donation which presents, the referent. It presents the reality, by its actually enabling the hearer to be a self-authentically, and this reality corresponds to what is projected through an assertion about human possibility” (100). How Scharlemann distinguishes between the unverifiable word of the “herald” and the verifiable word of the kerygma is not clear, since even Saint Paul is included with the former class for whom reflection cannot ascertain the person’s connection with God (105). It seems that Scharlemann accepts Ebeling’s idea that the kerygmatic statement is of a different status than a “general statement,” but such a kerygmatic statement that focuses on Jesus’s Resurrection is certainly much more difficult to align with other assertions that are only unrealized existential possibilities, which is what Scharlemann claimed verified it (100). Scharlemann eradicates that difficulty only by adopting Bultmann’s idea of the unrealized possibility of being an “authentic self” or who one really is. If all this is saying is “Grow up” or “Think for yourself” or “Be autonomous rather than submit to heteronomy,” then this would be acceptable in its humanizing idea. But it goes far beyond that, since Scharlemann continually avers that this power comes from “outside” oneself. To alter any religion’s symbols as Bultmann did, proposing it all as a “new self-understanding,” simply made a new religion of Christianity. Of course, it was a new self-understanding, but in what specific way? It was not a mere acceptance of

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oneself as is being implied. Most people have no need to be told to “Just be yourself” unless they are posing for a portrait. 54. Scharlemann, Being of God 101, italics mine. 55. Scharlemann, Being of God, 103. 56. Scharlemann, Being of God, 100. 57. Scharlemann, Being of God, 102–103. 58. Scharlemann, Being of God, 102. 59. Scharlemann, Being of God, 103, italics original. 60. Scharlemann, Being of God, 103. 61. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 182, note 7. 62. Scharlemann, Being of God, 100. 63. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 105. 64. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 95. 65. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 84. 66. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 94. 67. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 111. 68. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 111–12. 69. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 117. 70. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 120. 71. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 118–19. 72.  Here Buber insisted that “I am who am” was more meant as Yahweh’s promise to “be there,” to show up when Moses needed assistance. Even a more questionable misuse of the wording as a claim of sheer self-existence is the “I am” put on Jesus’s lips in the “Before Abraham was, I am.” Historical research finds it very unlikely that these words came from Jesus. Likewise with the alleged sayings attributed to Jesus, “I am the Resurrection and Life” and “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” which are also most likely much later Christian creations out of whole cloth, not from Jesus at all. The intriguing element is that Scharlemann emphasizes that the whole of the message of Christianity is the overcoming of the separation between humanity and God, but one hunts in vain through the Gospels to find Jesus ever speaking in such extremely general terms, and certainly in the Gospels Jesus does not appear to embrace a view of universal estrangement from God, as does the Apostle Paul. Of course, Paul tells his readers almost nothing about Jesus’s history. 73.  Philip P. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon, and How Goodness Happened There (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). 74. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 122–23. 75. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 124. 76. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 127. 77. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 129. 78. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 129. 79. Scharlemann, Being of God, 131. “The identity and meaning sought are the ground and end of the being of God as a transcendent ‘I am’”: Scharlemann emphasizes that “Even in the case of the death of God what matters is not that there is a death but that it is God who undergoes it.” This,

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incidentally, was always the accent in Altizer’s theology. The center of attention was not the disappearance of a belief in transcendent deity but the act of God that is told in the words “God is dead.” Scharlemann says that these words do not name something befalling God but something that God does. They express the be-ing of God, of the way in which God is (Scharlemann, Being of God, 130). This may be true, but many of Altizer’s earlier works seem quite otherwise—including his references to Nietzsche’s madman proclaiming that “we have killed him,” to Altizer’s own expression of “God’s death” as the meaning of all history from which we have now escaped, or to his emphasis that saying “God is dead” was not the death of merely the idea or belief in the transcendent God but was actually the death of such a God, or his insistence that the new, apocalyptic, immanent, unnamable “Totality” that is “present” is a redemption of the “secular.” See Thomas J. J. Altizer’s following publications: Total Presence: The Language of Jesus and the Language of Today (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980); Genesis and Apocalypse: A Theological Voyage toward Authentic Christianity (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990); The Contemporary Jesus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). And see Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1966). 80. Scharlemann, Being of God, 132–33. 81. Scharlemann, Being of God, 134–35. 82.  This is an extremely vague and general statement Scharlemann makes, sliding over the variety of historical pictures of Jesus by critical historians. 83. Scharlemann, Being of God, 135–36. 84. Scharlemann, Being of God, 136–38. 85. Scharlemann, Being of God, 138. 86. Scharlemann, Being of God, 139. 87. Scharlemann, Being of God, 139. 88.  Scharlemann’s analysis even of “reflection” seemed periodically to show that the Christological claim was “corroborated,” as he spoke of the truth discovered through the kerygma, as the “living Jesus” was instantiated or presented, such that one’s experience of hearing Jesus say “I am the Resurrection and Life” finds the “correspondence” or “corroboration” not in comparing these words with the ancient reality inscribed that spoke them but in comparing one’s anticipation of hearing them to what one actually experiences—namely, that one is thereby “enabled to be the self that he actually is (Scharlemann, Being of God, 102–103). This is explained in more detail in The Reason of Following when Scharlemann suggests that the referent of the assertion is not the other but one’s own words spoken by the other. In Being of God Scharlemann is intent on showing that referent to arrive at the truth is the correspondence between expectation and reality and the reality itself is not Jesus but one’s own empowerment. At that point, one no longer needs any historical details or sense objects. See also Scharlemann, Being of God, 118, 135, 158, about disconnecting thought from sense objects, even one’s expectation being “contrary to outward ‘fact’” (138). If instantiation is actual, then no “corroboration” is really needed. 89.  If this is what “subjectivity as truth” looks like, then the human dimension of socialization becomes graphically more necessary, without which even “common sense” seems vacant.

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  90.  Even at this point Scharlemann acknowledges that the “nonseparability of thinking and being” or the structure of the thinking of being is not yet known as “God” but simply the truth that all thinking of being presupposes this structure just as all thinking presupposes being itself that thinks.  91. Scharlemann, Being of God, 150–51.  92. Scharlemann, Being of God, 96. And also see p. 151.  93. Scharlemann, Being of God, 141–42. At what point does the word “God” simply become vacuous?   94.  That is, if such opposites appear from reasonable people, then the “truth” must lie beyond mere “reflection” unless is it ascertained by reasonable criteria that only certain people have the correct standpoint or ability to reason, which is not itself reasonable. On the surface, the last sentence of the quotation from Scharlemann may sound strange, but what he is saying is that the different response each gives represents the depth of truth; it does not represent that both are asserting that “God is Jesus” is truth but the relativism of both assertions.  95. See Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion?  96. Scharlemann, Being of God, 155.  97. Scharlemann clarifies that “speculative” thinking’s focus was only upon the idea, for which words were simply tools for carrying the meaning of the ideas (Scharlemann, Being of God, 160). On the other hand, Scharlemann admits that Hegel’s notion of “concrete concern” “tends in the same direction, of course; for a concept that is concrete is in effect a concept incorporated into a word in such a way that the word is simultaneously the carrier of the abstract thought and the donation of the reality” (159).  98. Scharlemann, Being of God, 170–71.  99. Scharlemann, Being of God, 171. 100. Scharlemann, Being of God, 174. 101. Scharlemann, Being of God, 175. 102. Scharlemann, Being of God, 176. 103. Scharlemann, Being of God, 177, italics mine. 104. Scharlemann, Being of God, 177, citing Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 97. Notably Tillich articulated this view only in Dynamics of Faith but not in the comprehensive Systematic Theology. Did he think it would be offensive or just not fit the Systematics? 105. Scharlemann admits that Buddhism has such negating symbols. The most obvious is the empty circle, or Sunyata or Emptiness, or even the equation of nirvana with samsara. But Masao Abe is persuaded that Buddhism’s symmetrical nothing or emptiness does not have the problems that Christianity’s kenosis or Tillich’s priority of being over nothing have. 106. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 97–98. 107. Scharlemann, Being of God, 177–78, citing Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 98. 108. Scharlemann, Being of God, 178, italics original. 109. “Experience of the truth in the symbol of the cross is thus different from other experiences of truth in symbols by virtue of its reflexivity or self-relativization. What the symbol of the cross symbolizes is the symbolic character of all symbols”

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(Scharlemann, Being of God, 178). Does Scharlemann mean that they manifest truth or that they are all relative or both? 110. Scharlemann, Being of God, 180, italics original. 111. Scharlemann, Being of God, 181. This is strong criticism of Hegel—that it was satisfied with meaning at the expense of reality. But neither Hegel nor Scharlemann does justice to the reality of death, reducing it to mere words about an Absolute or the Depth of Truth, though it relativizes everything. 112.  Scharlemann suggests that, in Buddhism, nirvana also expresses the depth of reality by way of negativity (Scharlemann, Being of God, 182), which we see more specifically in Buddhism’s equation of samsara and nirvana, in the central Mahayana idea of Sunyata or Emptiness, and by the symbol of the empty circle. At the conclusion of Reason of Following, Scharlemann cites Barth’s statement, that Pure Land Buddhism might even more effectively serve as a symbol of “pure grace” than Protestantism does (Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 204). Interestingly, Pure Land Buddhism and True Pure Land Buddhism predate Luther by centuries, originating in India within Mahayana Buddhism, spreading to China, and eventually to Japan via Hōnen in the twelfth century and Shinran a century later, as it focused on the Amidha Buddha or Amitābha Buddha and the “Pure Land.” This form of taking human salvation completely out of the hands of humans occurs with religions the more they absolutize their theistic picture of their god vis-à-vis their awareness of human imperfection. Even the Qu’ran, which sees faith as being essential to salvation, understands that faith ultimately comes from Allah, for those of his choice. 113.  Whereas Heidegger’s Dasein includes the time and space—as “being-therethen” or “being-here-now”—“possibility” in Heidegger probably could be seen as parallel to Sartre’s “Nothingness,” for which we could use Sartre’s insistence that humans do not “have freedom” but, rather “are freedom.” Sartre, of course, also used the word “possibility” or “possibles.” See Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 114.  Of course, “I” always points to uniqueness, but two questions emerge: (1) Does this mean than no “I” could therefore be universal, since the unique is not the universal? And (2) does Scharlemann imply that the person is not unique unless they are thinking or speaking, always implying a use of “I”? 115. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 11. 116. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 17. 117. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 18–19. 118. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 21–22. 119. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 24, italics mine. 120. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 27. 121. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 24. 122. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 29. 123. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 30. 124. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 31. 125.  The mission of the seventy is simply Luke’s duplication of the mission of the twelve, in which “peace” was not the subject of the proclamation at all but, rather, the imminent coming of the “Son of man” in the Final Judgment. This eschatological framework accounted for the urgency of not wasting time on those who were unre-

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ceptive to the warning. Likewise, the “I am” in the Gospel of John is also a much later retrospective insertion of the church’s Christology but is not credible as coming from Jesus. 126.  Wach’s differentiation of the relationship between master and disciple versus teacher and student seems exaggerated, even contradictory, as, for example, when he says that the disciple may “often” develop a “hatred” for other disciples, since “it seems impossible that someone else should have a part in the relationship that ties the disciple to his master”; yet Wach also says that, once the master or teacher is gone, the disciples, unlike the students, do not break up into disputing factions but, rather, “are brought together through the image [of the master] which is sacred to each of them.” This simply exacerbates the simplistic contrast between the two pairs. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 32, and note 34 on p. 32, citing Joachim Wach, “Master and Disciple: Two Religio-sociological Studies,” The Journal of Religion 42, no. 1 (January 1962): 1–21. 127.  To the extent that the disciples of Jesus were “followers” of the “I am” of Jesus, the one they encountered in his person was not their “thou” but their “I,” and in losing themselves in him, they came to themselves on their own. In attaching themselves to him, they attached themselves to one whose death left them on their own. His exousia [“authority,” literally, “being-out,” “ex-entitas”] is not the power of a lord over a servant but the “beingoutside,” the appearance “without,” of the egoity of the I of which we are normally aware “within” ourselves. That the I can so call and be followed is its ecstatic trait.

Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 34–35. 128. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 33. 129. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 36. 130. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 76. 131. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 34. 132.  Scharlemann compares this temporal gap by which one’s “I” is never catchable by one’s thinking to the insoluble dialectic that Kant analyzed in the idea of the “beginning” of the world, which concludes only that the world must be thought of as a whole and yet cannot be (Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 47). Scharlemann also provides a further clarification between “existence” and “being” in that the former refers to “anything that is in the physical world or, more broadly, in some world,” whereas “being” refers to “anything definite at all, whether I it is in the physical world or not” (note 8 on page 44). 133. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 47–48. 134. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 49. 135. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 51. This is extremely important and I think one of the few places where Sartre’s understanding needs to be qualified, since he thinks that we want to relate to if not possess not just another in the other’s objectivity but their full subjectivity as well, which he thinks is not possible. The “possession” is possible in neither sense, but Scharlemann shows that the recognition of the other’s subjectivity is where the “unconditional” element lies, which follows Tillich;

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but I think the ethical occurs when one recognizes that one’s own existence depends upon a mutual agreement honoring the subjectivity of both self and the other. 136.  To reduplicate Scharlemann’s condensation of Fichte’s full argument is not possible, but it seems a reasonable reconstruction of Fichte’s attempt to find certain knowledge. 137. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 68. 138. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 69. 139.  If both “being” and “God” are truly ultimate and have no further definition, could it be that either or both is also the third term, the “subject” and so either one can be seen simultaneously as subject, copula, and object? That would seem to be the “panentheism” that Tillich embraced, except for Tillich’s protest that “God” cannot be an “object.” 140. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 69. 141. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 71. 142. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 76–77. 143. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 77–85. 144. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 83–85. 145. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 113. 146. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 88. 147. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 91. 148. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 92. 149. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 92–93. 150. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 94. 151. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 97–98. 152. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 98. 153. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 98–99. 154. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 99. 155. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 100. 156. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 90–91. 157. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 92. 158. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 96. 159. Scharlemann is convinced that it requires an other, and yet, in the final analysis, any characteristics of the other, any supposed factuality of the other, fades to insignificance as one is intent only to hear one’s own voice in the other or only to confront one’s own inwardness introjected now as the exstantial I, for which the other serves as only a shell, platform, or mirror. 160. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 92. 161. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 119–20. 162. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 120. In drawing this conclusion, Scharlemann is speaking of Jesus’s Ascension, depending upon how the disciple interprets his own relation with Jesus, if Jesus’s absence means to the disciples that they no longer have Jesus or anyone in the world who can be an exstantial I, but, having come to themselves through following, the disciples are able to be “on their own to be the ones they are.” Or others may see that absence in a different positive sense, that now

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“anything and anyone in the world can be for them the exstantial power that Jesus was” (119). But is Scharlemann correct in presupposing that the disciples can find that possibility only “henceforth” because they earlier experienced “following” Jesus prior to his absence? 163. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 121. 164. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 124–25, parenthetical and italics original. 165. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 125. 166. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 126. 167. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 130, 204. Scharlemann’s language is a bit imprecise here, since he really seems to be speaking of any person who could elicit from any self that self’s decision to follow itself as it heard its ecstatic I in that other person (some “Christ figure”) in the sense that within “different linguistic figures and meanings” one’s “authentic self” becomes accessible (130). 168. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 134. 169. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 138, italics original. 170. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 139. 171. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 146. 172. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 159. 173. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 161. 174. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 163. It must be pointed out here that Heidegger’s sketch of the “being-unto-death” as something people were in a state of denial over was challenged in its very formulation by Sartre, who emphasized that my death is certainly not something I always “can do” but do not do. To the contrary, many people have their lives extinguished by sheer accident, and so it is not a matter of it always being my possibility. Further, it must be said that Scharlemann’s quotation from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, just like Paul’s letter to the Romans, when speaking of their death to the world of sin, is not speaking of their physical death, as is Heidegger. See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 533–37. 175. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 163. 176. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 165. 177.  “Human existence is word bearing; it is signifying existence. Being free is being in the open, and the way of being in the open is to be as a sign, that is to say, it is to have a linguistic mode of being” (Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 166). 178. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 167. 179. Scharlemann reinforces this picture that, while one may know oneself to be of a certain character, have certain traits or status, in various relationships, “one is no more and no less than what one is taken to be” and different people can have conflicting ideas of who the person is, all of which are authentic and correct to them. He reinforces this picture by explaining Pirandello’s 1917 play It Is So! (If You Think So). But what makes sense of different views? 180. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 175. 181. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 180. 182. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 180. 183. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 183.

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184.  See David F. Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, tr. George Eliot (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), esp. the conclusion, “The Dogmatic Import of the Life of Jesus,” 757–784. 185. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 187. 186. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 188. 187. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 187. 188. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 189. 189.  Scharlemann concludes the book by suggesting the same possibility in seeing one perfectly acted production of Hamlet that is so well done that the viewer could never conceive of seeing it better done; here Scharlemann is dealing with Barth’s criticism that thinking anything can be compared with “Christ.” For Scharlemann the real question does not involve an absolutism or exclusivism, as Barth demands, but, rather, involves the open question of whether God might, in fact, show himself “in another name with other features, other meanings, perhaps even other teachings” (Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 202–205). This reinforces Scharlemann’s analysis of the objectivity as well as the finality of a religious symbol. Its universality could be seen either by everyone in the world recognizing it or by its taking into its affirmation total finite freedom of responses, even its rejection or negation. Its finality is that it anticipates even “the possibility of its not being a symbol at all” (200). But no individual seems a symbol that way, and so the problem is not resolved by pointing out even the difference in the “subjects.” 190. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 190. 191. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 194. 192. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 194. 193. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 197. 194. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 204–205. 195. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 198, italics original. 196.  This sounds like the symbols are alive and decide what to reveal. 197.  Robert P. Scharlemann, “Pluralism in Theology,” in Inscriptions and Reflections: Essays in Philosophical Theology, Studies in Religion and Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 211. Scharlemann insists on the one hand that the respondent must be free to accept or reject, and that both express the truth but that, on the other hand, it is only that freedom that “determines” one’s response, not any particular reasons the respondent might think (210). What, then, does “freedom” mean, other than a nonreflective and nonrational response, something with no “particular reasons”? We know that the temporal expressions in the Gospels—such as “and it came to pass” (or however kai egeneto and other temporal expressions were translated)—were only transition words used by the editors of the Gospels and had little if any precise temporal significance. This idea of not questioning the voice was more Kierkegaard’s castigation of reason (and Hegel’s) when one is summoned to an absolute relation by the Absolute. But how does one identify anything without reflecting? It would be interesting to attend a trial and have the defendant deny what was obvious to the victim and all the witnesses and, when asked why he is denying it, state that he is simply helping the jury realize the “depth” dimension of truth—or suggest that the jury needs to engage in “reflexive” thinking rather than in “reflection,” which makes his statements as true as the witnesses’ and victim’s statements (213).

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198. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 203. 199. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 204. 200. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 204. 201. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 204. 202. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 205. 203. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 201. 204. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 201. 205. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 201. 206. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 195. 207.  In April 1994, in honor of Scharlemann’s sixty-fifth birthday, fifteen of his international colleagues presented contributions at the International PhilosophicalTheological Conference on The Otherness of God at the University of Virginia and subsequently published the articles in his honor, in Orrin F. Summerell, ed., The Otherness of God, Studies in Religion and Culture (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1998). They offered the volume to pay “tribute to Professor Scharlemann’s persistent engagement in mediating continental and especially German philosophy and theology with Anglo-American thought—and that in terms of reflection on the being of God and the experience of truth” (vii). 208.  When Scharlemann repeats Tillich’s, saying that the man from Nazareth died as Jesus to become the Christ, it cannot be overlooked that (1) the “Christ” came from the Jewish word translated “Messiah,” which was not a title for God but for a new king who would bring in the final Kingdom to vindicate the Jews and who would have certain qualities that many claimants pretended to or perhaps tried to exhibit but were rejected, including Jesus, and that (2) after one’s death one does not “become” anything real other than a memory in those still living, perhaps even a memory of having been a hero or a martyr, but these have no affect on that actual person even if they revise their own status in history books. Or are both Tillich and Scharlemann saying that Jesus died as finite to become infinite and so has infinitely transcended contingency? But as otherworldly as that is, there still would be no connection with the Jewish title of being an “anointed” (Messiah) of God unless one wants to take Pannenberg’s position that Judaism didn’t know what it was talking about. 209. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 199. 210. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 119–20. 211.  Scharlemann concludes The Being of God with the following: “For the sake of truth, theology has to answer for the word ‘God,’ the tale ‘God is,’ and the judgment ‘God is God.’ But it does not have to answer for God, the be-ing of God, and the identity of God, which answer for themselves when they answer” (183). 212. Scharlemann, Being of God, 183. 213. Scharlemann, Being of God, 182. 214. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 199. 215. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 201. 216.  Sartre contradicted Heidegger, insisting that one is never fully in control of one’s death, even if the death is completely “mine,” as if one “always can” but never “does do” it. To the contrary, the Dasein or “being for” can always die an accidental or disrupting death rather than one’s life reaching a rational ending or finishing as a piece of music. In such cases, no “expecting” or “waiting” for it or even “anticipat-

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ing” it has any connection to it if it comes merely from chance or bad luck. In such case, the whole as one conceived it might be shredded, as Sartre is thinking; and so he writes, “Thus this perpetual appearance of chance at the heart of my projects can not be apprehended as my possibility but, only the contrary, as the nihilation of all my possibilities, a nihilation which itself is no longer a part of my possibilities Thus death is not my possibility of no longer realizing a presence in the world but rather an always possible nihilation of my possibles which is outside my possibilities.” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 537. Heidegger sees one’s conception of the whole in more general terms and thus not affected adversely by accidents or random events, as he analyzes the existential-ontological structure of death. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1962), 293. 217. “Heidegger, Being and Time,” 292. 218. “Heidegger, Being and Time,” 306. 219. “Heidegger, Being and Time,” 311, emphasis original. 220. “Heidegger, Being and Time,” 293. 221. “Heidegger, Being and Time,” 296. 222. “Heidegger, Being and Time,” 308–309. 223.  Even Nietzsche fought against Hegel’s focus on “pure spirit,” insisting that the “spirit” is merely the development of consciousness, “the symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism; it means trying groping, blundering . . . The ‘pure spirit’ is a pure stupidity: if we subtract the nervous system and the senses—the ‘mortal shroud’—then we miscalculate—that is all!” Nietzsche, Antichrist, 581. 224. See Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 182, note 7, in which he tries to defend Paul’s assertion as setting “into equipoise two different world-times, the existential world in which existence is toward death and another world in which existence is beyond death.” Paul was simply confusing in this letter as well as other places, such as his letter to the Romans, in which he told his readers that “in Christ” they had died and were raised to a new life and yet contradictorily had to shame them into “dying” to their former life and living the new “resurrected” life; so he was using “death” as a metaphor, not literally. 225. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 200. 226.  Taylor, “Postmodern Times,” 183. 227.  Why Scharlemann and Altizer utilized “I am” so much in their writings is not at all clear. Buber long ago suggested that all the Hebrew words in Exodus 3:14 indicated was that God was promising to “be there” with the people. The same is still recognized as a misreading, beginning with the Septuagint and from then on as a ground for God’s supposed omnipotence. See Alfred Jäger, “The Living God and the Endangered Reality of Life,” in The Otherness of God, Studies in Religion and Culture, ed. Orrin F. Summerell (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1998), 245, note 14. 228.  The Jesus Seminar agreed that the “teachings” or “sayings” of Jesus in the Gospels likely traceable back to Jesus comprise less than 20 percent of the whole and that most of these “high Christology” expressions come from a much later time, perhaps thirty to fifty years after Jesus’s death. See Robert Funk and the Jesus Semi-

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nar, The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 1, in which he notes that, after many years of work, the Jesus Seminar concluded that less than 18 percent of the teachings of Jesus were thought to have a high level of probability of coming from Jesus, and 16 percent of the “acts” of Jesus were thought to have the same level of probability. See also John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), in which he notes that illiteracy in Jesus’s day was between 95 and 97 percent. 229. Taylor, “Postmodern Times,” 186–89, and see several others throughout Summerell, Otherness of God. 230. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 479–80. 231. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 30–31. 232. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 200, 203. 233.  Taylor, “Postmodern Times,” 182–83. “The simulacrum is an imitation for which there is no original. Whatever appears to be original is actually a citation with erased quotation marks, whatever seems real is an artifact that represses its artificiality. In the postmodern culture of the simulacrum, there is nothing outside the image” (182, italics original). Nothing “original” except one viewing the image; but was Christology about that? 234.  For example, Scharlemann says Matt. 25:40 shows the “universalization of the man Jesus”: as Jesus informs the disciples that their caring for others in need is a ministration to Jesus himself; and when they ask when they ever would have seen Jesus in that needy condition, his answer is that the identification is anonymous, which mixes the ethical with the Christological (Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 120). 235. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 120. 236. Scharlemann, Being of God, 88, italics mine. Mark Taylor utilizes Kierkegaard and others to suggest that the otherness of God as “difference” should be informed more deconstruction rather than by the “modernist postmodernism,” which repeats difference but dissolves it into sheer identity by virtue of its conception of the totality, as in Hegel. Taylor notes that Kierkegaard’s insistence in the Philosophical Fragments on the “absolutely different in which there is no distinguishing mark,” which goes beyond his “either/or,” should suggest that Kierkegaard perhaps suspected a “third alternative that is neither both/and nor either/or.” Taylor, “Postmodern Times,” 187, italics original. This seems to have its parallel in Abe’s correction of Tillich’s system, which gave preference to being over nothing rather than to seeing “being” and “nothing” as both/and and neither/nor. Masao Abe, “Double Negation” in Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue, 101–111. 237. Scharlemann, Being of God, 183. 238. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 29. 239. Scharlemann, Being of God, 28–29.

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Conclusion: A Redefining of the Absolute as a Universal Embracing Differences

The long-range concern underlying this study was to find a possible ground for a future ethic that could unite humans rather than divide them. If the very principles that we all would expect to provide this unity also could provide a certain freedom for all, then the principles could be generally acceptable to all people. This could enable humanity to address its great problems with at least a barebones sense of moral unity. Most religions offer fairly detailed or comprehensive ethical systems, and so they seem to be natural candidates. But they are exclusive, divisive, and driven by an Absolute as opposed to participating in “public reason” and being able to be modified or upgraded. Religions probably do much of this alienating of others without realizing it, since each of their identities is often so intricately joined to the very particular, historically ancient, and specific mythology at its center. The ethic of any single religion, thereby, usually becomes very divisive in a religiously pluralistic culture because of the religion’s insistent link to the myth or metaphysics as well as to the religion’s heteronomous approach. I elsewhere examined Christianity to see if it had the potential to unite people rather than divide them, to see if it could move beyond its divisive absolutism. I singled out various metaphysical “burdens” that Christianity posed—“burdens” that might be experienced also within most other religions as well.1 Many of these burdens created possible cognitive dissonance for the believer, and others generate obvious social problems. Probably Christianity’s most crucial burden was also its most central and unique claim—its conflated historical-mythological claim about Jesus being Christ and thereby a resurrected “Son of God,” which seems progressively less credible in our scientific world as time passes.2 Because these claims do make strong historical assertions that one person is an Incarnation of God, in that earlier study I 377

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analyzed two quite different historical methods to examine that central claim by two of the most recent, sophisticatedly critical approaches to that alleged history of Jesus. These were by historian John Dominic Crossan and by theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg.3 Crossan redefined the “Incarnation” to mean anyone who takes a stand against systemic injustice, but he left the claim’s traditional theological validity up to theologians and the hierarchy of the church. But his proposed ethic within the Christian faith lacked any real connection with the church’s traditional idea of the Incarnation. Pannenberg insisted on a “proleptic” verification of the claim while putting off the ultimate validation of the claim to the eschaton or end of history, which would then be useless. He, too, proposed a basic ethic of “exocentricity” but was unable to ground it on his allegation of Jesus’s “Resurrection” being a verifiable historical event. Therefore, neither theologian offered a presently credible Christological answer, either placing the decision merely within the heteronomy of the rulers of the church or ignoring current scientific limitations on historiography and then placing any credible certainty into the indefinite or imaginative future, the end of history. My conclusion therefore was that Lessing’s famous “ugly ditch” between the contingencies of history and eternal principles was not bridged either by a tracing of historical data or by some future historical verification of an alleged event of the past that is presupposed to have inherent universal meaning even though it defies present scientific understandings. While these two interpretations were improvements on the old, uncritical presuppositions about “revelation” and “inspiration” of the Scriptures, they fell short of being convincing. Some outstanding Christian theologians since the end of the eighteenth century, however, have tried a different approach to restore the certainty about the Christological claim that had dissolved because of the historical method’s inability to work with conflated mythical-historical or metaphysical-historical claims. We examined four of these most innovative and famous systems of Christian thought to see where Christology stands, whether it can itself be credible, under the insights of these great thinkers, and thereby supply a credible basis for ethics that would even be acceptable to non-Christian people today. In the present study, of asking whether a universal ethic could be grounded on the central claim of the Christian religion, we began by setting up the argument with Kant, who answered yes and Nietzsche, whose answer was no. We then examined briefly the Christologies of Schleiermacher, Hegel, Tillich, and Scharlemann, which took us from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, to see whether any of them proposed a credible Christology that could be accepted by even nonreligious people as grounds for ethi-

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cal principles for the general structures of civilization or that would enable nonbelievers to accept its ethical standards as “freestanding.” We saw that each of these thinkers attempted in their own particular way to “corroborate” the Christological claims in general through analyzing the present believer’s state of mind, form of consciousness, type of reason, or faith. The irony is, of course, that if there were not already some historical evidence accepted for the claim, then there could be no “corroboration.” It would be starting from scratch to provide the basic “evidence.” All of the four professed to be interested in ethics, but only one attempted to analyze an ethic outside the sphere of the Christian religion (Schleiermacher); but his attempt to present a single, coherent ethic that all could embrace was defeated by his understanding that human “redemption” occurred only in Jesus of Nazareth, and the ethics of sanctification through Jesus’s “absolutely potent God-consciousness” is all strictly God’s doing, not to be thought of as an imperative for humans. Schleiermacher otherwise articulated significant ideas that might have had ethical import, such as the consciousness of the Totality, but his Pietism confined him to a theological ethic as the ultimate answer, a status in which God does everything. Hegel put forth many ideas that could have been seen as “freestanding” ethical principles—such as his definition of “love” as “what is” rather than a mere command, and with his focus on relationships that could become disturbed or estranged but that needed to be “reconciled.” Yet none of Hegel’s ideas stood apart from the Lutheran tradition and even its sacramental approaches to them. The Christian “God” as “Spirit” was behind all life, and it was absolutized, proving God’s unity with humans. It needed that Christian connection so could not be turned into a “freestanding” ethical principle. Tillich wrote of Morality and Beyond, with the emphasis on the “beyond”; his entire theological approach, in fact, emphasized the beyond—in his definitions of “God” as the “Depth” “beyond” the polarity of being and nonbeing, the Christological dogma as “paradox” that is not nonsense but is “beyond” our common experience, the encounter of “Final Revelation” requiring that one be in a state of “ecstasy” that is “beyond” one’s usual subject-object mental framework, and so forth. He equated the beyond with “theonomy,” but it was beyond all human relations and empiricities and concerned only conquering “estrangement,” which was one’s separation from God. But it all came completely from beyond humans, only from God. To think in moral terms, Tillich feared, led only to futile forms of self-salvation. On the other hand, there is hardly any question that many of Tillich’s ideas—such as “acceptance”—could have had a freestanding status as an ethical principle, but he limited it to one’s acceptance of oneself, understood in Christian terms.

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Finally, Scharlemann wrote much about identifying with the other, of trust, or of Buber’s words of “relation”; but Scharlemann seemed too intent on establishing a ground for Christology even if it meant finding fault with Heidegger’s ethical understanding of being human. While there can be a strong ethical element in feeling oneself freed from the world given all of its problems and materialism, feeling free of the world can also be quite socially isolating if not amoral, which traces back to Scharlemann’s agreement with the others that “God” can be manifest in virtually anything but is no thing and yet the positive benefit the believer receives comes only from God, who alone can defend himself. The Cross as the criterion for all religious symbols— because it can take into itself its own negation as well as affirmation—and “reflexivity,” which Scharlemann develops—tend to redefine the Absolute as that which includes all relativity but therein leave ethical guidance hanging. These four great thinkers all presumed that there was a historical beginning, which supplied some shred of important evidence, and that the historical beginning was probably found in one man, even if the man’s name was something other than “Jesus.” So “corroboration” was a proper term for what they were attempting. In fact, Scharlemann claimed there was real probability that such as person as “Jesus” had actually lived. But we pointed out that the actual existence of a man named Jesus was not the issue; the question was not whether a person existed but why the church makes the claims it does about Jesus—about Jesus being the “Christ” or the “Son of God.” The issue is about whether or not Jesus was God Incarnate, not just about whether or not believers today have similar subjective experiences to those claimed by the original Christians, or even about whether or not we understand the Christ image’s real meaning, as important as that is. How that escaped being informed by Judaism in the work of these four Christian theologians is a huge question. So we must briefly summarize the degree to which each of the four was successful in meeting what they implicitly established as the criteria for a corroborative answer, and then we must deal with the more basic element of the relationship of the finite to the Infinite, first in its mystical aspect and finally in its universalistic implications. For any religion whose basic claims involve some intervention of the Divine in actual history, this examination is necessary to any desire or reasonable hope that one could establish a viable ethic upon that particular religion, not to mention the more problematic idea of thinking such a particularized ethic could serve in a very pluralistic world as a universal ethic with such a specific metaphysical ground. We found that these four systems did not show how their ethical principles could be detached or “freestanding” but, rather, insisted on their validity only because they were grounded on their particular understanding of Christology.

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THE FOUR CRITERIA FOR A CORROBORATION When we began this analysis, we suggested the specific “corroboration” and sketched some of what it needed to involve. We suggested that “corroboration” was not only dependent upon a source different from the primary evidence of the claim but also that the corroboration needed to present a trustworthy chain of custody—to put it in legal terms. Schleiermacher was the only one of the four who explicitly emphasized the connection that had to exist between what the original disciples experienced and what a presentday believer experiences, but even this experience changed from a personal encounter with Jesus that the original disciples had lived to a preached report about Jesus that was heard hundreds of years later. The real “chain of custody” was certainly not merely the chain within the doctrine of “apostolic succession,” since even apostolic succession could not guarantee the identical continuity of a single message or image. But none of the four systems showed any details of any such actual connection between the past and the present. Instead all four read into the original setting their own present understandings of what religion is and from that defined the meaning of the “Christ” (which meant “Messiah”), ignoring its own originating ground in ancient Judaism. Thus there was no real attempt among the four to understand the Christological claims of the church in its earliest times but only an effort to establish criteria from some present perspective, totally independent of any Jewish understandings. That alone showed their lack of inclusiveness in their approaches and results. This marked especially their radical difference from any “historical” approaches to Christology, the most advanced being by Crossan and Pannenberg, who both were quite dependent upon Judaism, even if still too negative toward that religion. In any case, the four Christian theologian-philosophers we covered seem also to have searched their own ideas for some “corroboration” that needed to meet at least four demands: certainty, autonomy, embodiment, and inclusiveness. Perhaps it was due to a sense of religion’s insecurity, or maybe merely the influence of Descartes, but first on the list was a search for certainty for the Christological claim or symbol, not simply some high degree of probability. In addition to certainty, they all sought a claim or symbol that would embrace autonomy rather than a symbol that would simply be forced on a person by some authoritarian tradition or heteronomy. Whether their orientation was basically idealism, existentialism/ontology, or phenomenology, they also all felt that, whatever the answer was, there had to be some embodiment of that answer so that it was not a superfluous idea, an extravagant aspiration, or a sheer fantasy. Finally, there was also a strong consensus that the answer

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needed in some way to avoid exclusivity, that it needed to be inclusive or universally accessible in the world, not just tied to a single culture or epoch, even if the answer were absolutely unique. Otherwise the answer would justifiably remain limited in scope. That even these four requirements are in tension with each other is fairly obvious even from the outset. Regarding certainty: if Rousseau thought religion was discovered by “reason” rather than by some professed “revelation,” Kant limited true religion more specifically to stemming from within “practical reason” or morality; but Schleiermacher opposed both, insisting that religion is only “Feeling” that precedes both theoretical and practical reason, which itself, though contentless, involves an awareness of “absolute dependence” that can become revelatory. It was alleged to be immediate, and therefore certain, since one experiences it only within one’s passive state, not creating it, invoking it, or enabling it. Hegel feared Schleiermacher was making Christianity unreasonable, so he combined reason and revelation; but he saw Reason or Mind or Absolute Spirit itself as both the revealing power as well as what it is that is revealed. This means that Reason or Spirit (Geist) is the unity of Divinity and humanity, of idea and reality, which equals absolute certainty but also is the reconciling power that conquers all difference by taking the extreme opposites up into itself. We saw that Tillich defended revelation but insisted that it was not mere information but, rather, “paradox” of grace to be revelatory; he further insisted that paradox does not mean unreasonable and that paradox marks both Christology as well as the human situation—that is, that humans are always “saint and sinner.” Any certainty required paradox but lay beyond paradox in the “depth” of being, beyond any polarity of being and nonbeing, or in the symbol of the Cross, which points to reality that anticipates even contradictory responses, since either a yes or no only confirms that “depth” which is not “a” being but the power of being-itself, for which “God” is the symbol. Finally, we traced Scharlemann’s development not only (1) in his application of “reflexivity,” which was alleged to resolve the “schism” of reflection by a deeper certainty about the truth of truth itself, but also (2) in a new form of “reason”—acoluthetic or “following” reason. This enabled the identity of the ecstatic self and the other through “instantiation” and either an actual voice or an “inscribed” voice in a text. This self finds itself in its own voice (thus certainty) through the other that summons oneself. Thereby one finds more than the Cartesian certainty that “I am,” even life that includes the certainty of being my authentic self and free; that is, by the words “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” I transcend the problem of a “being-unto-death” by experiencing a freedom by which I pass beyond death to be “in the world but not of the world.”

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As I mentioned, in general the quest for certainty led to an absolutizing of some element in the system of each of these four great thinkers—an element placed beyond challenge or dislodging doubt. Sometimes more than a single symbol, idea, or entity became absolute. Hegel nearly wore out the term “Absolute,” as he also did continually redefining “Spirit.” But within the systems of these four thinkers, even where the word “absolute” or its equivalent was not used explicitly, other terms pointed in the same direction by their definitions and use—words such as “immediate,” “depth,” “ultimate,” “infinite,” “Totality,” and so forth, even the specific religious symbols “God,” “Christ,” and “Spirit.” Each of these words or symbols was in one way or another described as all-encompassing, undefinable, or beyond any challenge or any literal description. For Schleiermacher, it was at first “Feeling” of the Infinite in the finite or of the Totality, and then it was the feeling of not being self-caused; then still later it was the Feeling of Absolute Dependence that he equated with one “God-consciousness.” For Hegel, it was basically “Spirit,” which he redefined over and over, as it infused, empowered, related, and reconciled many finite forms of life and the various aspects of culture, finally transforming culture so much that Hegel could equate the Germany of his day with a manifestation of that Absolute Spirit, as the true theodicy, the real working of God, and immediately known via the universal Spirit. Tillich called it the “ultimate concern” or the “depth” of “being-itself” that is beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing; it was “God” beyond any form of being but within which all beings stand. And Scharlemann saw it as the Word, which is beyond all material forms but empowers, instantiates, relates, and provides meaning and identity to humans. This was the “certainty” as “Word” identified itself (as “God”) within one’s very being. Inasmuch as the “certainty” pointed to something, even if it was claimed to not be any specific entity or thing, it was Absolute but finally devoid of any qualities or attributes. This evolution of thought proceeded with a theism that focused on the meaning of the divine or Infinite rather than on any proof of its being within history in a particular form, shifting the Absolute to a “God” alleged to be the God even somehow “beyond the god of theism” yet, ironically, while refusing to accept any words as literal predicates for this in its absoluteness or ultimacy; even Tillich referred to “God” continually in the singular and personally and with many of the old theistic anthropological attributes. Scharlemann, however, actually moved the needle beyond the old theistic picture in his Christology but found certainty in any word that is able to disclose “God,” especially in “God’s” otherness or “not being God.” This extended Tillich’s certainty that the criteria for all religious symbols must both include the religion’s negation of a physical body, such as Jesus’s (not

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simply the negation of the person represented by the symbol), and also see the entity’s ability to be used by God to manifest “God,” though the entity itself would not thereby be deity, and this meant that the “truth of truth” as reflexivity and this double symbol embrace diverse perspectives. In this sense, the certainty was found only in one’s subjective experience, somehow seeing beyond any particular physical entity or historical event to find the overpowering Presence of “God” manifest therein in that where and when. So the “certainty” was not really anything objective or objectifiable, since it was not even the specificity of any word but, rather, only of “Word” as a function or predicate; and so there is no certainty of a noun that actually is the equivalent of the predicate, not even the certainty of “being,” as in Tillich, but only the vacuous otherness of God within any thing but identifiable with nothing. This not only exempted Christology from any historical data about Jesus but also exempted “God” from any attributes at all in emphasizing the “being of God when God is not being God.” This “certainty” appears more vacuous than anything preceding it—although it professed to universalize and relativize the experience of truth, a real “redefinition.” But how is a predicate or action or speech attributed to a nonentity? Regarding the quest for autonomy within the answer, Schleiermacher found autonomy in his strong sense of the uniqueness, individualism, and personal imagination, due to his Romanticist leanings. Romanticism also accounts for his first publication or speeches on religion and remained in his insistence that religion is “feeling” rather than either reflection or ethics. As I criticized this earlier, there is no reason “feeling” had to be so separated, no reason it could not simply be part of either or both theoretical and practical reason, except Schleiermacher’s attempt to isolate feeling from any relativity of human initiative, since human input was involved in both theoretical and practical reason, as defined by Kant. But the mere elimination of human initiative does not thereby establish an Absolute as the Totality or Whole or “God,” and appears to work against autonomy. In his dogmatic system, Schleiermacher also capitulated to a degree when he embraced ideas and even judgments about other religions of which he had originally disapproved, but these seem to be elicited more from the tradition of the church. He did espouse a certain autonomy if it were based upon one’s feeling of absolute dependence and so on that basis one could reject the “two natures” Christology, the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity, ideas about Satan, eschatological imagery, and many other doctrines. But on the other hand, in his dogmatic system Schleiermacher said that ethics could best be articulated simply from the Christological doctrine of “sanctification,” not as an “imperative” to be obeyed by humans but as mere “description” of the work of God. His defense, as we saw, is that it is a state in which the believer

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says that God does everything to the extent that the believer cannot even be said to be cooperating with God. By that blanket emphasis, autonomy was thereby eclipsed by Schleiermacher’s Christology. Autonomy in Hegel was attached both to his conviction that Reason had to be central— disagreements or antitheses were natural but had to be resolved—and to his opposition to an old “slave mentality” or sense of subservience to the heteronomy of others. On the other hand, since Reason or Spirit (Geist) in humans is actually the self-reflection of “God” as Absolute Spirit, the identity between humans and God is so fixed that the whole question of heteronomy or autonomy is a moot question. Any relationship between the two is simply Spirit-driven. Does this mean that one should therefore think that their autonomous decisions are simply God’s own thinking? That heteronomy would transform human autonomy into a sham, or else it would completely equate humans with the Divine, a hubris that would divide humanity immediately instead of serving as a base for a global or universal ethic. Tillich suggested “theonomy” as the resolution of heteronomy and autonomy, but it unfortunately still had humans doing God’s will, even if with a different spirit than mere obedience of a law. But if it were possible only through grace, then, as Tillich said, as had Schleiermacher, everything is done by God. Further, if the person of faith were actually autonomous, then this would have been considered by Tillich to be a futile intellectual if not a moral attempt at self-salvation: one reflects and decides what to do on one’s own. So Tillich had to remove all fragments of real autonomy, deciding that faith is neither reason nor a person’s choice but, rather, is a being grasped by the Spirit, whose conceptual formulations are based on paradox. So reflection is a dead end; there is no real self-governance or human autonomy. Yet in light of forensic justification, it hardly matters if God has really pronounced one just, no matter what. Autonomy was strongest in Scharlemann, and the obvious reason for this is because his system, unlike the other three, actually led away from any form of “theism”—whereas even Tillich’s system was more what he described as “pan-en-theism,” so still a “theism” rather than a God beyond the god of theism, as he proposed in The Courage to Be. Autonomy, for Scharlemann, also existed within all forms of reason, including within acoluthetic reason, in the sense that reflection and even reflexivity utilize reason or thinking. He also spoke of autonomy being involved by the very unreflective or immediate response one makes when hearing one’s own voice in the other, inscribed voice of Jesus saying, “Follow me.” So it is not a command from another—whose name is Jesus—to follow him but, rather, one’s own encouragement to be one’s authentic self, to follow oneself.

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There was no need, however, for Scharlemann to paint this picture as an unreflective response, since he had already included autonomy implicitly within the various forms of reason; so probably his major point was only that one was hearing one’s own command in one’s exstantial I and so it obviously was autonomy rather than heteronomy. But one must recall that such exstantial occasions require that one be in a state of ecstasy, and even then the disclosure or manifestation of God in such encounter is not controlled by oneself, and the Kierkegaardian “silence” of Abraham is the result and posture of this mystical unity. The question remains as to why one could not discover one’s own voice without being in a state of ecstasy—why one could not discover it by using one’s own reason, trying to be honest with oneself, not simply be blindly opening oneself up to strange claims attributed to another, as if they were reasonable when spoken by oneself. And if the commands to follow includes unreasonable ideas about one’s identity, then why would even those original disciples have immediately left everything to follow Jesus? Or is that whole scene of spontaneity in the Gospel assuming that they already knew who Jesus was—that is, colored by a very post-Crucifixion church’s input? Thus autonomy was eclipsed in the systems of Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Tillich, as they made it plain that anything pertaining to human redemption was done completely by God and that humans not only could not save themselves but also could do absolutely nothing but “assent” to God’s working in them and that even their “assent” was God’s “preparatory grace.” Hegel’s system perhaps seemed a little less direct, speaking of “love,” “mutual recognition,” “reconciliation,” and so on, but it wasn’t really, since, as Farneth showed, they were connected with the central symbols and rituals of Lutheran Protestantism. The symbols and rituals were received through the authority of the Spirit in the church, which grounded the ethics on the same Absolute Spirit. Even more so, Hegel was sure that the human Spirit or consciousness was God’s self-consciousness or Divinity, and so the actual role of humans initiating their own thinking was negated. Likewise with Tillich’s idea of “theonomy,” a simple overpowering, transforming of the human spirit by God’s Spiritual Presence, despite his saying that humans now will the same as God’s will but not as a command or law. If they do, it was nothing they themselves had done to change themselves. Even their mere acceptance of themselves depends upon their being willing to accept God’s acceptance of them, according to Tillich, which willingness itself is God’s grace, and so Tillich ironically injected theism and heteronomy back into the picture. Unfortunately Scharlemann also speaks of the “assent” and the “disclosure” as if another-than-self must initiate it, and yet he does suggest that “we” (is it only theologians?) need to speak of the various entities, events, and relationships as “God’s” manifestation of himself. Yet Scharlemann said that God

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alone would have to defend himself; so why are we still using terms such as “God,” “himself,” and so on, as we are describing or even pointing to anything at all? It is difficult to critique theism without using theistic terms, as he faulted Altizer. The third criterion—of embodiment—was a problem with Kant, because it meant moral perfection would have had to be manifested in the actual embodiment of a person in ancient history, in Jesus of Nazareth. But any problem with the idea of an ancient embodiment of moral perfection was completely avoided by the four scholars we have analyzed. It was largely reduced to an embodiment within a mere idea, word, or ambiguous symbol to escape being subjected to an examination of possible contradictory historical facts and mere “probability.”4 So it is not an embodiment in the usual sense of being actually within a living body, which is empirically verifiable. While they intentionally did not focus on the question of whether or not a specific historical event had happened, assessing the evidence, but, rather, placed their entire inquiry into only the “meaning” of such a claim or such an event, if it did happen, even then 1.  they were inconsistent in still utilizing alleged historical sayings or other historical fragments as a basis for the meaning 2.  they proposed in place of a real person a symbol or Christ image based on dubious biblical ideas (“New Being” or the idea of one uniform image of Christ in the Bible), in some cases far removed from either the person behind the original image or from the responses of those people to that person (which, of course, nullified the requirement Schleiermacher himself laid down in the very first quotation to begin the chapter on his thought) or only remotely connected with Christology (e.g., “Follow me”), and 3.  the final meaning was focused on the inquirer, hearer, or reader or word itself rather than on the subject of the inquiry; that is, the meaning is derived from whether or not one felt the relief of redemption, understood the pure notion, felt transformed in some sense, or discovered one’s “authentic” self. The embodiment conceived by Judaism’s hope for a “Messiah” was not some Incarnation, some absolute moral perfection, or someone with an “absolutely potent God-consciousness.” But Christianity turned a hope for an “anointed” and effective leader into a mythical character, an embodiment of God, even of “same substance” or essence as God. It was no wonder that Kant had insisted that an embodiment even of the moral ideal is impossible because it would be unintelligible. And, as one might have feared, the insistence on the embodiment, as Incarnation, resulted in an obvious Docetic

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Christology, which we saw in Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Tillich. It was the ideal of one’s consciousness of God (Schleiermacher) or the ideal of God’s own consciousness within humans (Hegel) or the ideal of the “New Being” (Tillich), an image of only one man who experienced it in an absolute capacity, which all three managed only by altering their ontology for just that one image. Tillich only presumed that it was an “analogy of image” connecting the picture with any real person. This revealed the virtual disappearance of the intended subject reality (Jesus) as the “embodiment,” which Kant seemed to have known. But, after all, what could be reasonably expected as the embodiment if the religion itself was no longer theistic, not taking its anthropomorphic language about God literally? If “God” no longer had any real attributes, how, then, could Jesus have any real attributes without subjecting himself to historical scrutiny, since there were no other data to examine? So it was the “ideal” released from the universal impotent God-consciousness of all humans—or from the universal fallen or estranged existence in the “world.” Tillich’s “embodiment” was within a picture of New Being fashioned after either a different ontology than that universal ontology or at least by virtue of a single “paradox” or an unjustified exceptional embodiment reminiscent of Schleiermacher’s exemption of Jesus’s Spirit or God-consciousness at the moment of his birth.5 If one is allowed to build an entire system but make one exception, one great miracle, for only one person, called “Christ,” then cannot anything be proven? That one exception amounts to much more than the small and rather insignificant individual claims of Jesus’s separate miraculous feats, which none of these four accept as authentic. This culminated in Scharlemann, where one’s “exstantial I” could be identified with the inscribed Christ image, resulting in one’s becoming one’s authentic self through death or becoming free to die with the promise (or having already died symbolically?) of thereby being free to be in the world but not of the world, which means overcoming the incomplete Dasein of Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tode (being-toward death). Perhaps this “reason of following” is only a subcategory of Hegel’s all-embracing Reason of Spirit that implants itself in every being in the world, creating one’s mystical identity or being embodied by God or Absolute Spirit, which, though working itself out in material history, is beyond the material, totally mental, transcending all bodily and material connections. But it mixed metaphor with reality, not addressing Heidegger’s problem or showing how it moved beyond “anticipation” to reality. Regarding the issue of inclusivity, the early Schleiermacher had a very inclusive view of religion and of different religions, challenged only slightly by his short treatise on the necessity of a “mediator” in the Speeches. But his

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later, definitive, dogmatic system deserted inclusivism, painting Christianity as the highest form of religion while trying to avoid excluding people despite the system’s analysis of different types and stages of religion as well as its enumeration of “heresies.” But the exclusive claims overpowered the whole structure. Hegel placed religions on an historical-evolutionary plane from which he easily judged Christianity as the highest form and determined that Absolute Spirit promoted by Christianity’s cultures produced the actual working of God, bringing in the Kingdom of God even on a “secular” level in freedom. No other religion need be considered if Absolute truth has been attained via Absolute Spirit in the Germany of Hegel’s day. Tillich remained as Protestant as both Schleiermacher and Hegel, with his key being simul justus et peccator, which should have been all-inclusive, since it depended on nothing like one’s “character,” which Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), Tillich’s contemporary, thought so central to religion. Yet Tillich’s systematic thought was a Christian apologetic, and so for him Christianity was the only “final” revelation. Although that symbol of the Cross as well as his Protestant principle suggested that the ultimate symbol would need to negate itself in order to be ultimate—which would mean that it took into itself its own negation, as Hegel had allegedly articulated, as Scharlemann pointed out—it is not clear whether or not Tillich included within this negation the possibility of the Cross itself losing its symbolic power. He did become more open to non-Christian religions only in the closing years of his life, but his “system” stood as only Christian. This symbol of the Cross in Scharlemann’s treatment helped provide a redefinition or deabsolutizing of the Absolute, as one that was totally inclusive of any responses and all possible perspectives. Although Scharlemann felt that it was best experienced in the definition of the Cross, he mentioned that even Barth, in his exclusivism, had suggested that Pure Land Buddhism might provide as much grace or more than Protestantism. In this sense, what was seen was a Protestantism of Protestantism. Scharlemann also saw this Christological answer as accommodating the split between unreflective faith and reflective faith by virtue of reflexive reason. He saw the variety of different perspectives allowable within a symbol that can stand in the “depth” of “truth about truth” and there tolerate all kinds of responses—positive, negative, and indifferent. Inclusion in Scharlemann is attached to the very idea of difference, and he believed “God” could manifest itself in anything or everything, no matter how different things are, just as the Christ image might be found in different times or places within quite different specific teachings and content. If each self is unique by its own particular time and place of being, then such different perspectives cannot be nullified by a symbol capable of instantiating the self’s freedom to be itself. The symbol must be able to

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accommodate all different perspectives—so inclusive, thus, that there could be different symbols that can perform the same universal effect of enabling one to be one’s authentic and free self on one’s own in the world while not being “of the world” but of one’s own autonomous being. This is inclusiveness and a redefinition of the Absolute; but, in any case, by what all four theologians meant by “God” and “Christ,” Scharlemann’s insights moved beyond any need for or possibility of “corroboration.” The whole focus was thereby changed, moving beyond theism and the traditional Christological approach. THE MYSTICAL INFLUENCE AND ITS ISOLATION In our earlier discussion of the problem of the conflation of historical and mythical claims—that is, especially as Lessing defined the “ugly ditch” between accidents of history and eternal principles—we suggested that the only one of three options that seemed open was to find some way that one could be reasonably convinced that the eternal is actually within the historical—that the Infinite is already within the finite. That relation is, in fact, assumed by all four of these thinkers, though with different meanings. I suggested that “mysticism” itself, such as found even in the writings of the Apostle Paul, follows such a persuasion, claiming that somehow one has immediate access to God—that is, that God or Christ is already within oneself (via Spirit) and usually in some form of ecstasy, and that mysticism has taken many forms over the centuries, some of which were never even referred to as mystical. Nevertheless, certain claims are common to mysticism historically, such as the immediacy, certainty, and ecstasy of a supersensible experience that is neither visible nor capable of being put into words—an experience that takes priority over every other aspect of one’s life. Schleiermacher spoke of “Feeling” or the “Feeling of Absolute Dependence” as the “Immediate Self-Consciousness.” Its immediacy precedes all thinking, and doing so it has priority over all reflection, beyond all words or language, and over all theoretical and practical reason. Though he does not call it a state of “ecstasy,” and he does not speak of an attraction he has for mysticism, Schleiermacher does speak of this consciousness, as we saw, as not really a moment in time, an experience that has no equivalent in thought or action. Perhaps his experience within his Pietistic church in which as a youth he was always hoping for some divine encounter served a similar purpose of mystical orientation. Nevertheless, he insisted that such a consciousness of the Totality or even Absolute Dependence is immediate only to an individual and so is not something that can be taught; and he insisted that any necessary verbalization of it or any behavior resulting from it was never equal

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to the passive moment of the consciousness that was somehow not within time. But Schleiermacher nevertheless attempted to explore it in words or ideas and cautioned in his dogmatic system that he was actually limited to describing one’s “state of mind,” not actual things in themselves—which, of course, was very Kantian. If this consciousness cannot be taught but is experienced only in one’s passive state, then even Christology, which can be conceptualized and taught or passed down in history by the preaching (via Spirit) of the church, is subordinate to this more primal consciousness. In fact, it is difficult to see Schleiermacher moving beyond his Romanticist emphasis of the uniqueness of each individual, which seems to say that the Totality, made up of all the unique people within it, is more significant that even any teaching, dogma, or ethical instruction. Here “religion” is a consciousness of Totality. But why must the Totality be “Infinite” or outside time? Why could it not simply be an experience so exceptional that one feels one’s connection to a universal, to a commonness that we recognize with all other people, which might even be something as basic as the common “will to live”? Does the sense of the “Whole” have to include every named thing or thought in the world to be valid as a “whole” or “totality,” or can wholes and totals be experienced and imagined in a variety of sizes and constituencies and thus not necessarily be taken in an absolute sense as the “ultimate” or “absolute” whole or totality not necessarily actually be an experience “outside time” since it is not clear how human beings would either enter or return from such a state? Might the sense of the whole not be an experience that only exceeded in one’s subjective estimate the significant typical temporal events we are used to experiencing? Would that not be sufficient, especially since Tillich said “infinite” is only a limiting concept, not any being, and since Schleiermacher insisted he was only speaking in The Christian Faith of “states of mind”? Hegel’s form of describing God’s immediacy within a person—that is, the Infinite within the finite, or the eternal within time—was also through Spirit. Early on he insisted that the nature of the universal is to actualize itself through becoming particular, but this does not make it “positive” in the negative sense unless it annuls freedom. This movement of the Spirit is in fact the actualization of freedom that accompanies continuing private and public experience, as Spirit motivates people in their thinking to work through things dialectically, as the Spirit takes up from within each antithesis the best elements, as elements or ideas discredit or negate themselves in the process of being thought, and Spirit moves to greater heights or less dependent upon any representation. That progression in thinking, to move past the sensible objects or their representations to pure concepts, to move beyond testing sense objects by ideas to actually testing ideas only by other ideas—that is,

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the process of reflecting on the process of reflection—might be the equivalent of what mysticism was trying to do, moving one to transcend normal reflective thought to find the Absolute behind it. We know some of the historical Christian mystics from whom Hegel learned. In fact, as we saw, Hegel goes so far in describing the Spiritual unity between humans and God that not only does it seem as panentheism but in its mystical frame it also seems more like a monism, as Scharlemann noted, in pushing past unity based on considerable correspondence to a complete correspondence that is identity or sameness.6 In that capacity, however, Hegel “oscillates,” emphasizing that this Incarnation was in one special person— Jesus—while also insisting that it is the state of all thinking humans. Even though Hegel elaborated various stages of the development of Spirit in human history and culture, the certainty it finally brings is only in the experience of the “I” who thinks the Spirit and realizes one’s identity with it, that one’s own reflection is “God’s” self-reflection itself, which confirms one’s reality with the Idea. This is very mystical. But when “Spirit” is separated, as Hegel separates it, from any biological organ or function, then it is no longer credible in today’s scientific understanding. Could it be that the feeling of unity with that which is so much “greater” is simply the feeling that describes nearly all religious experiences and that, whatever is the greater power, as William James said, that enables us to find a fuller life need not be any “God” or suprahuman being but, rather, may be any person or group who might enable one to “take the next step”? Tillich’s mystical element appeared in several forms in addition to “ecstasy,” which is the only state in which he felt one could experience God’s “revelation,” a state he carefully defined as being beyond or out of one’s normal subject-object frame of mind. In his early writings, Tillich considered it and religious symbols as the way the sinner experienced justification by God. That “appearance” of God came through the symbol’s pointing beyond itself, in Tillich’s terms, as a “breakthrough” or “breach” (Durchbruch) or, later, a “depth dimension”—that is, that which breaks through the dimension of the senses to something deeper. In mystical experience the “appearance” of God was the “transcending” of the subject to reality that is beyond language. So Tillich called concepts and symbols “correlates” of each other—that is, pointing to each other—though he often spoke of this self-transcending nature as belonging only to symbols rather than to concepts. In his later Systematic Theology Tillich developed the mystical certainty first through his method of correlation between question and answer or between an ontological question and theological answer. Scharlemann reasoned that the copula “is” in Tillich’s expression “God is being-itself” is the presupposed mystical connection between the question and answer. Thus neither the symbol nor the concept by

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itself points beyond itself, but they do so only by virtue of the copula. Scharlemann says that if one asks what the copula means, then the answer is “the presence of the ‘mystical’—the presence of the unsayable unseeable, so that, in understanding the word ‘is,’ we transcend both the symbol and the concept and reach the mystical.”7 This corresponds to Tillich’s clarification of what he means when referring to the “God beyond the God of theism.” Tillich addressed a variety of negative responses to that term he had used in The Courage to Be, insisting that he had not been suggesting that people desert traditional religious symbols but only that they learn that the symbols are not meant to be taken literally. In the context of this 1961 corrective, Scharlemann spoke again in mystical terms, saying that “God” is not a person but both more than and less than a “person,” since “God” is not any thing or object, belonging to some species; rather, he says, the word “God” indicates one “who is nearer to each of us than we are to ourselves.”8 This combines with Tillich’s important idea of “paradox” in the sense of something being different from what we would usually expect to appear, see, or understand. So both the knowing subject (through ecstasy) and the entity (through paradox) are defined as vehicles by which one allegedly comes to know that which is beyond normal human thinking. This is not mediated through any human agencies or means. To Tillich that would only be futile attempts at self-salvation. Rather, it is experienced immediately as the “depth” of a religious symbol, far beyond words or language or analogies that contain any significant specifics. It is supposed to be only received by an individual as the grace of “New Being,” a transforming power, but ultimately one is never really actually transformed so it remains only one’s mere acceptance of being counted as righteous even though one always remains sinner.9 This acceptance by one’s “personal center” is the only way a revelation can be final, never as a group, Tillich insists, and that effortless acceptance of oneself is allegedly just assent to God’s acceptance of one, a Spiritual Presence that allegedly transcends the ambiguity of the religious group and even its doctrines and ethics. The Spiritual Presence itself is self-directed, not something that one can access by one’s will or initiative so faith is always created in the individual only by God within. But when “God” is not a person—a being of any kind, an entity that can be distinguished in any way, is even beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing—how would one ever know that “God” was within, that one had an immediate relation with “God”? Surely just using the word does not create the inner experience unless it is strictly subjective. But is “Spiritual Presence” any clearer when Tillich insists it has no biological connection with the brain?

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Finally, Scharlemann’s Christology describes a mystical unity via the immediate articulated Word that itself creates a relationship between oneself and Christ—or that unites subject and object or unites the historically temporal with the eternal, the finite with the Infinite, the relative with the Absolute. But it is not mystical in the sense of one’s having immediate union with some definite power or being called “God.” That would still be theistic. The mystical element can be found only in the self’s ecstasy, the “exstantial I,” which can be heard as one’s own words even though they are Jesus’s words inscribed as the Word, since Jesus is the place in which one finds the fullest manifestation of God being God and since God is Word just as Word is God but not a specific being or even being-itself. That is, the Word itself instantiates the relation of which it speaks so that anything might exude a “presence” sufficient to be taken as a symbol or word of the “otherness of God” and be instantiated by my naming it “God,” for the very naming is its presence to me as such as it is named. But why does something have to be named to be “present” to me? Tillich proposed that the “depth” of the symbol of the Cross expresses Hegel’s negation of negation, which means that in negating itself it nevertheless still remains, and Scharlemann interprets this to mean that it affirms any response from different perspectives whether they be yes or no. It is this view of “faith” or “reflexivity” or a “religious symbol” that brings the certainty or absoluteness of the other to me, even if it is from my “exstantial I,” which is parallel in Scharlemann’s explanation of Kierkegaard’s knight of faith who “actually” ate calf’s head even though he was “factually” eating only hash. This illustrates the “uncommon singularity of the I.” The knight of faith had gone through Kierkegaard’s “double movement,” from the aesthetic mentality to the ethical or universal perspective and finally to the “religious.” Kierkegaard described the aesthetic as the “first immediacy” and the religious as the “second immediacy.” But although “faith” is conceived therein as “immediate,” that does not then mean it is reasonable either to the one being summoned by God or to anyone for whom one would care to justify their actions or ideas. Kierkegaard’s whole point is that it is neither reasonable nor communicable. So even though it may appear to the person involved to be immediate and certain, it is incapable of being shared and so is also very isolating. All one has to do is task, “But what if this knight of faith thanked his wife for the ‘calf’s head’ when she knew she prepared only hash for him? What would be her response? Might she ask him what he’d had to drink?” But, on the more serious side, in truth, all mysticism leads to the same individual preoccupation and isolation unless it becomes only a group method of self-improvement or traditional ritual of veneration of Deity. But then it is

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not truly mysticism. Scharlemann, qualifying Kierkegaard, says that Kierkegaard’s contrast between individual and universal was incorrect; the focus should have been on the “I.” After taking Isaac to Mount Moriah, Abraham “cannot answer for what he does by appealing to general principles or by referencing a reason or cause that makes his deed intelligible to anyone else or even to himself as a thinking being. He can answer for it only in the form of himself as a self alone. If any reason can be given for the deed, it can be given only in a language of silence.”10 That is the isolated “I”—the mysticism of Saint Paul, who tried desperately to communicate his visionary experience to others but whose theology was finally accepted only by excising or ignoring that mystical element so that the religion could be taught and become a uniform standard for believers. But from Saint Paul to Scharlemann, the real paradox of the isolating and individualistic mystical aspect11 of the Christology is that the position ends up being put in such general terms that it turns into a universalism—at least in its hope or hyperbolic or unrealistic promise—and this is true in various forms of all four of the theologians we analyzed besides Saint Paul. “God” ends up overpowering everything finite, even the most radical doubt and rejection, even the most pious and most demonic, whether one belongs to any religion or is a radical “atheist,” so long as one is conscious of the “Totality” (Schleiermacher) or so long as one thinks (Hegel) or so long as one has concern about meaning, no matter how much doubt about religion (Tillich), or so long as one accepts anything in the world as an appearance of an answer transcending the contingent “world” or showing the meaning of existence (Scharlemann). Thus “God” points only to what Scharlemann called the “unsayable” and “unseeable,” the unknowable, the inexplicable, unless all it means is one has felt better about one’s predicament, whether the predicament is a particular nagging question or a seemingly insoluble problem. That is, there is no content, nothing specific, not even enough to think “lamb’s head”—but one simply feels better about eating “hash.” That is the only way it would be meaningful for a person to tell someone else who is seriously concerned about finding meaning for their life that they are already within the best answer that religion can provide. “Redemption” and “salvation” are therefore “lost” or superfluous symbols, largely replaced by feeling, thinking, accepting oneself and being authentic—as the innovative theological alternative to continuing to espouse the ancient literal “metaphysics of infinity” with all its unscientific and rational straining to find a meaning that has any relevance. If a sense of inclusiveness and unity is where the most innovative Christian theology takes us, then the real question remains as to what those terms mean and who creates such inclusiveness and unity. If it is all done by “God,” then humanity is helpless, if not worthless, and it

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is a waste of time to speak of ethics. In such a scenario nothing remains for humans to do; religion and theology have not provided any guidance for human living. Yet in our present world cognitive dissonance reigns and religions are nearly all split into warring or at least divisive sects, while their formerly most central symbols are not only desacralized but also prostituted for political power by their leaders, whether in India, the United States, Iran, Turkey, or elsewhere. In an earlier study I examined the various divisive religious absolutes and the burdens they create for both the religious and nonreligious. But I also defined “religion” as being any absolutizing, so not limited merely to the traditional, formal ancient rituals, symbols, icons, or dogma of worshipping communities. The Absolute can take many forms—from the religious mysticism of secluded monks to an economic ideology to a single national dictator. Often in history the emergence of such a dictator as the Absolute (whether Die Führer or other) necessitated that the dictator consolidate power by an attempt to absorb any formal, traditional religion and its claims to transcendent authority into the dictator’s administration, even utilizing the religion’s clergy and symbols in a partisan way to oppress if not annihilate all opposition, real or potential. If the religion so used is the majority religion of a state, even if it is not a “state religion,” then nostalgic claims of antiquity, of permanent values, and of former generations of the religious are provided as a backdrop of extreme potency. The state can call itself “conservative” and can appeal imaginatively to the “restoration” of a previous golden era. Tillich called this kind of political manipulation of the religion “demonic,” and he barely escaped Germany alive. Dietrich Bonhoeffer labeled the political manipulation of religion the “antichrist” and worked with some military to try to stop Hitler before he destroyed Germany—and possibly the entire world. It cost Bonhoeffer his life. In a way, this is a form of repristinating that is similarly trying to “corroborate” basic claims by alleging to have the same values as that great Archetype of some distant former culture. But any absolutizing of anything in the present makes an idea of “corroboration” of that element in the past completely superfluous, whether that present Absolute is a present political leader or is called “God” or “Jesus” or “Buddha” or “Dharma” or Capitalism or Marxism or Freedom. Remember that by “Absolute” I mean something that is considered beyond all question, all challenge, that is itself all-powerful, indivisible, and incommensurable. But anything that fits this description of “Absolute” certainly is beyond ever needing any “corroboration.” And it can end up being even an Absolute Annihilation. “Corroboration” is required only when there is a certain amount of evidence that suggests something but not quite enough evidence to be wholly convincing; the new evidence of a different

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nature helps “corroborate” the earlier evidence. In any case, the problem of something’s being absolutized is also never simply an intellectual problem. We need to embrace relative universals, not an Absolute, not even by suggesting mystical union with it. THE CHRISTOLOGICAL “ATTRIBUTES” OR “SIGNS” AND THE PROTESTANT PRINCIPLE Another aspect of this difficulty of “corroborating” the Christian claim that Jesus was the “Christ” or the “Son of God” was precisely this latter equation that said Jesus was not only relative as a human but also was Absolute as the Son of God. As just suggested, the latter claims that Jesus was “Absolute as the Son of God” could never be corroborated and would not need to be corroborated if it were true. That Christological claim that Jesus of Nazareth was in some way “God” (whether the Incarnation, the Son of God, the Absolute Spirit, the New Being, or other) seemingly requires some aspect or qualities or predicates of God to be revealed or disclosed in that Jesus. This was made explicit in the “two natures” doctrine or the communicatio idiomatum, which formulated that Jesus as the Christ had a fully human nature but also a fully divine nature. This Chalcedonian formulation of the fifth century is assumed in the theology of most Christian churches, and many worshippers confess this very thing in the form of one of the ancient creeds quite regularly as they worship with their group today. One must understand that this idea of the divine attributes being a part of Jesus’s existence is not simply some analogy or metaphor implying that Jesus appeared “similar” to God but, rather, is the assertion that Jesus and God were of “same substance” (homoousia), which implies that there must be a traceable causality, that God essentially manifested “himself” in or revealed himself in fullness through that Jesus, as is evidenced by the presence of those qualities or attributes of God’s that Jesus also had. This would seem to require that “God” have some qualities, attributes, or predicates; that is, it still is a “theistic” understanding of Christianity. In traditional Christian theistic theology, “God” did have such qualities or attributes, as he was spoken of as “omnipotent,” “omniscient,” “omnipresent,” “all-loving,” and so on. Even if Saint Augustine realized early on that one could not speak of God’s “knowing” something if saying so implied learning something new or having at some time not known something, the main assumption was that these attributes were still certainly justified and that they were often taken literally. So if one found a human being with these qualities, one might claim that the person is a revelation of “God” or a disclosure of God or an Incarnation. But no Christology really seemed to be

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suggesting these precise qualities, even if in ancient times they spoke of this person’s performing great miracles or surprising people with his insights and authority. Although the creeds confessed a whole human nature and whole divine nature for Jesus as the Christ, there was a natural reluctance to take the quite static attributes that the theologians were assigning to God and assign them to a human—although certainly some lay people may have felt no discomfort in thinking that Jesus knew everything, was all-powerful, showed infinite love, or even was everywhere simultaneously. On the other hand, the real questions are how one determines the omni of each of the presupposed divine attributes and how that is distinguished from a person who knows a tremendous amount or has fantastic power. Moreover, where would one ever derive or verify such hyperbolic if not meaningless terms as these? In fact, in Tillich’s Christology, he carefully admitted that “omniscient” certainly does not apply to the image of New Being in the biblical picture of Christ, since there were many ways in which Jesus revealed very important things that he did not know. On the other hand, Tillich does speak of “omniactivity” as a way of retaining “omnipotence” as justification for God’s creativity in every place at every moment.12 But, again, Tillich does not assign this quality to Jesus of Nazareth. Is that a point at which the Infinite is incompatible with the finite? Or is this a “God with attributes” (the Father) and a “God with no attributes” (Jesus the Christ), a reverse parallel of the Saguna Brahman and Nirguna Brahman in the Upanishads of Hinduism? Scharlemann, on the other hand, opposed any idea that Christology implies some divine attributes or qualities in a particular person such as Jesus. As we saw, Scharlemann agreed with Schleiermacher that the “two natures” Christology is not credible. Instead Scharlemann took his cue from Eberhard Jüngel (b. 1934) on the question not of “what” God is but rather “where” one can best find the manifestation or appearance of “God.” Scharlemann combined this with Wilhelm Hermann’s idea of “God” as an appearance of the other that elicits my trust, along with what “appears” in Descartes’ cogito and Heidegger’s analysis of conscience. So Scharlemann insisted that “God” is not a being and does not become a being. Further, as we saw, Scharlemann insisted that Jesus had no divine nature at all but that there are signs or indicators in Jesus’s life that could become disclosures of the Divine. For example, “God” can “appear” in some other that elicits my trust as a response to the “good will” radiating from the other. Scharlemann presses this further as the “where” one can best find “God being God” in “not being God” if one hears Jesus’s inscribed voice saying that God loves him, or he hears Jesus’s voice say “I Am.” These, of course, by one’s state of ecstasy, create one’s “exstantial I” as one recognizes one’s own voice in the voice of the other in the text, manifesting authenticity and providing autonomy simultaneously. Also, since

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Scharlemann was convinced that Paul was correct in speaking of God through Christ “reconciling the world” to God, if one sees that reconciliation within Jesus’s ministry and message, then there are grounds for Christology.13 This does not mean that there is historical proof but only means, as Tillich made clear, that the mystical presence is the proof found behind the symbol, even though in an inarticulable form. But how would one ascertain that Jesus’s understanding of his mission in life was to reconcile the world to God without the aid of many indisputable historical details, and how would one distinguish that from some psychotic problem? How would one experience “God’s” love in someone simply saying that “God loves you”? Scharlemann asserted that, if it is given only as a general statement vis-à-vis reality, then it only projects or signifies a referent, whereas a “kerygmatic” use of the assertion that “God is love” supplies, “donates,” or gives the referent to the hearer. But how could such different effects be determined? For Scharlemann, “The kerygmatic assertion ‘God is love’ is true if, in a person who is announcing ‘God is love’ to us, the love of God is really presented.”14 But how would one have any idea what is meant by “the love of God” and whether it was “really presented”? How would the announcement be verified as the “love of God” other than by sheer subjectivity or opinion? How would that differ from the love of the other person who is speaking? Or is that person’s “love” being attributed for some reason to “God”? Or is that person’s love what the real meaning of “God’s love” is? Christology is tending to manifest itself here as anthropology and social ethics. When one pushes further, it is obvious, since Scharlemann was convinced one cannot even speak of God’s “existence”—because “no one, not even the one taken to be God in the flesh, is God”15—that even the idea of a “Resurrection” back to life, which Pannenberg saw as the primary feature disclosing “God” in Jesus, is not valid, which is certainly Scharlemann’s position. “God” simply does not “exist” and cannot exist but may be disclosed by existing things. Then why was Pannenberg incorrect? Scharlemann simply insists that any assertion from reflection claiming that “God exists” in the sense of someone or something possessing divine attributes is simply false.16 His fuller Christological explanation follows: The Christological statement that God is Jesus of Nazareth (illustrated, for example, by the Pauline words that God was “in Christ reconciling” the world) does not imply that Jesus of Nazareth has divine properties or deity as a predicate. It asserts, rather, that it is the man Jesus who shows what it means for God to be God; and even if this demonstration of God is final and full—so that to see God there is to see in an unsurpassable way how the deity is the deity it is—still the man Jesus is the place at which the deity appears in its deity, but deity is not necessarily a predicate applicable to him. The deity is the deity it is as this

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man. Whether “God is Jesus” is true is determined not by whether Jesus had divine properties but by whether Jesus the man is the essence of God, that is to say, by whether in view of the man Jesus we can understand what it means for God to be God. For Jesus to be the symbol for the essence of God means for his career to signify and make manifest what it means for God to be God. One can understand why Jesus career ran the course it did if the essence of God, what it means for God to be God, is to be other than God.17

What is not clear is what it means for “God to be God,” whether it means that truth is found only in the “negation” of everything or in the meaning of existence or in openness to the new or other or simply “to be other than God.” The problem reduces to the question of how God’s being can lack predicates or definition and at the same time be perceptible to someone reading about Jesus’s life, and thereby be an “unsurpassable” disclosure that establishes Christology. Is any predication of God sufficient to disclose “God,” or is it sufficient only if it is “reconciling the world to God”? In Tillich and finally Scharlemann, as we have already noted, the predicates for God are reduced to nothing but the “depth” of being beyond the polarity of being and nonbeing and to the otherness of God or of the “not-being-God of God.” Does this not mean that anything or nothing will suffice to manifest “God”? The old theism lingers, needing to make a connection by predicates in order to ground a Christology; but the theism has lost credibility in its anthropomorphic and unscientific mythology. Scharlemann noted that Tillich’s “predicating ontological terms of God” was his technique for enabling the concepts to express the “divine depth”18; so “otherness” or “depth” ends up being the only way to bridge from God to humanity. But would not otherness require something for which it would be other— some definite contrast—just as “depth” would presuppose other dimensional levels for contrast and clarification? In a court of law neither of these appeals by themselves would serve as evidence of any assertion. They neither corroborate existing evidence nor stand as original, credible evidence. Yet all four scholars did end up reverting to historical details taken from the Gospels or Paul’s letters, such as “love” or “reconciling the world”; or they ended up taking from the Fourth Gospel the “I am” or “Logos”—all of them nevertheless insisting that the Christology was certainly not dependent upon historical data, although Scharlemann was the only one who went so far to distinguish “actuality” from “factuality,” insisting that Christology needed only the former, as we saw. So historical facts remained irrelevant to Christology. But if so, why did all four of our great thinkers refer to specific things that the Gospels claim that Jesus said or did? This is what Scharlemann meant when he said that reflexivity turns reflection’s judgments of the “true” and the “false” into “signs of something else.”19

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Scharlemann, however, was not contending that the “truth” of something is unavailable to one who is unreflective. He was simply attempting to resolve the apparent conflict set up between the unreflective approach and the reflective. If the unreflective stage presumes the correspondence between the percept and concept or what we empirically sense and the mental concepts of all “things” in our minds, then the reflective stage does not take that correspondence for granted. Scharlemann inserted the reflexive stage at this point to try to resolve the difference between the prereflective and reflective stages—or what he called the “schism of reflection.” We saw that, while Taylor thought such probing got the inquirer even closer to the original referent in question, Scharlemann speaks only of the “depth” that one discovers in seeing the difference between the subjectival subject and the objectival subject. But as Scharlemann embraces Hegel, the reflexive thinking is not concerned with the empirical details of the original referent but only with the identity of one’s own thinking and one’s own being, as we showed.20 One probes different perspectives of the elements not of the referent but of one’s thinking and being—what Heidegger and Scharlemann called the “unthought,” to see what they disclose that one’s usual perspective did not.21 Taylor suggested that “Difference” or “otherness” may, in fact, extend itself so much within reflexivity that all representations are self-annihilating or “withdrawing,” with the result that Heidegger’s es gibt (literally, “there is” or “there are,” but also carrying the meaning of “gift” and “play,” among other translations) “simultaneously bestows the gift of being and leaves everyone and everything wanting.”22 Thus, “es gibt is the presencing of the present that is never itself present.”23 In any case, Taylor suggested that this difference must be not merely dialectical or oppositional but also a difference beyond such, since these approaches reduce it to a totality of sameness or identity. It must even be described in contradictory terms as neither Hegel’s “both/and” nor Kierkegaard’s “either/or.”24 When Scharlemann discussed symbols, the equivalent was what he called a “refracted” rather than literal symbol.25 True refracted symbols “can also take into account the freedom of responses to them”26 such that, unlike physical objects, they do not need to coerce a uniform, particular, or affirmative response from everyone in order to serve as objective symbols. They can be objective without being universal. That is to say, “truth appears here by virtue of a third language in which can be said both what thinking is and what being thinks.”27 So “the reflexive experience of the truth of truth comprises the relative experience of the true and the relative experience of the untrue or the false.”28 Reflexivity synthesizes the true and the untrue in the depth of truth as reflection synthesizes meaning and reality in the phenomenon of truth. Reflection sees

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that in the experience of mundane objects being is split between meaning and reality—the “is” of the proposition and the “is” of the object. The wholeness of being is recovered in the experience of truth as a synthesis of meaning and reality. Reflexivity sees that, in the experience of the phenomenon of truth, being is divided between the true and the untrue, and it synthesizes the two in the experience of the depth of truth. In the presence of the depth of truth, the experience of truth is also relativized . . . The real depth of truth is the sameness in the difference between the true and the untrue, which is copresented with the reflective reality of truth in the same way that reflective realities are copresented with mundane objects.29

Scharlemann’s use of “synthesizes” reveals his use of the Hegelian dialectic; but the synthesis is not a combining of content of the original referent in question, a unity of experiencing the uniting of any possible relativity. Scharlemann’s statement that “there is no ‘the truth’” was somewhat reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “‘This is my way, where is yours?’—thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way—that does not exist,”30 in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There are only different perspectives, as different as each individual. This neither means nor produces chaos of extreme relativism and dissension. Nor is there a realistic quest for some absolute perspective from outside or beyond history’s process or the material world’s relations,31 either from absolutized religions or other ideologies from which one can decide on absolute values or absolute truth, and neither is it to exercise coercion on those who have different perspectives. It is also not a sense of unity based merely on the common element of our existence or being such that anything we say is materially true. But there the agreement between Nietzsche and Scharlemann ends, since Nietzsche is unwilling to posit some “depth of truth” that embraces all different perspectives. That to him remains an obfuscation of an ancient metaphysics, whereas the only way the different perspectives can attain a sense of unity is through using reason to analyze that which is basically instinctual and so not some chimerical answer. When Nietzsche says there is nothing but the Whole, he was not pointing to some “depth of truth” but to the actual connections of everything in the cosmos. The common element’s content derives from a voluntary but necessary acceptance of the points of correspondence between the manifold different perspectives, arrived at by the contracted or agreed-upon meanings of our languages that are publicly based and modified by public reason, as Richard Rorty emphasized—languages that are quite contingent. This reinforces Nietzsche idea that “being” must not be preferred to “becoming” as so much religion and philosophy has done. Life is contingent—period. Any “agreement” on meanings of language points to the social dimension of language, that hu-

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manity is in continual engagement of redescribing in order to find some common temporary agreement on meanings of words as new tools upon which to hang our expectations of each other. The inclusive “consensus” which a social contract must arrive at requires a base of “freestanding” principles to which all the people would agree, which Rawls called a “political” rather than “metaphysical” conception of justice, but it still is part of the contingent culture so must be continually re-evaluated and updated using Kant for his primary springboard. But we must not get ahead of ourselves at this point. This brings us to what could be even a more basic principle that the question of attributes of Christ—the larger problem of the “Protestant principle,” as Scharlemann elaborated it. In Luther the Protestant principle meant that absolutely nothing could be equated with God or identified with God. This logically would mean that no historical person could be God and so would negate the possibility of an Incarnation. This would also seem to eliminate the possibility even of the mystical identity with God from Saint Paul through all of the subsequent Christian mystics. That Luther and Christianity did not push the difference between God and humans that far does not mean that the problem was resolved. Even when the “modern” spirit took the alternative— saying that, because of the incompatibility of the two, reality must be seen only in the finite—Scharlemann thought there was still a Protestant longing for the infinite and that the answer was not even found by conceiving of the reconciliation as simply between opposite finite entities. The options remaining would be, as Scharlemann articulated them, (1) either to desert the idea of there being “God” if one has to choose between obvious finite reality in front of one’s face and the infinite but invisible being that cannot be identified with anything finite, (2) or to in some way take the most extreme symbol of finitude, which would be death, and have that included as a part of the infinity of God. The first option Scharlemann calls “nihilism,” since he reads the problem set up by dismissing “God” as the lack of being able to satisfy the “infinite subjectivity of the human I.” The alternative—elevating the “modern feeling that God is dead” into a truth inherent in “God”—is what Hegel attempted to do, as we saw in his explanation of the Crucifixion, in which case one is no longer talking about the Crucifixion being only the death of a man but now the “death of God.” With Hegel, it is still talking only about an Idea, an Idea that each day dies and is raised again in the mind or through the Aufhebung. On the other hand, where does one find evidence of an “infinite subjectivity of the human I”? Does that really require “infinite” rather than simply undetermined or indefinite? In the 1980s Scharlemann thought that Eberhard Jüngel and Thomas J. J. Altizer offered a possible resolution. Jüngel, as we saw earlier, suggested that

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the answer would be “where” God is or can be experienced, and he suggested that “place” is the Crucifixion of Jesus. This might help resolve the issue of the “two natures” Christology, and depended only upon a theological understanding rather than on a difficult or impossible anthropology or ontology for Christology. This, of course, Scharlemann later extended, as we have seen in his analysis of the otherness of God—that God can both be God and not be God that “God” can be disclosed in anything finite but that no finite thing or person has any divine qualities. But why is this not an unjustified ontology? Finally, Thomas J. J. Altizer’s work, especially Total Presence, depicted the modern consciousness as so thoroughly conditioned by the idea of the incompatibility of the finite and infinite that it does not even miss the absence of the infinite at all. If the modern spirit does not even feel any tension between the two, since it has opted for the finite as real, then even Hegel’s idea of humans grieving after the infinite has disappeared. Scharlemann thought Altizer’s position was “perhaps the most daring of the Hegelian readings of the present” but later criticized Altizer for virtually turning all of history into meaninglessness, since Altizer had minimized its sequential and causal relations by reading it all as the “dying” or “death of God.”32 Altizer’s works have, as Hegel’s did, oscillated between speaking of God only as an idea and speaking of God as reality, from the very beginning when Altizer and William Hamilton in their Radical Theology and the Death of God emphasized that they did not mean by “death of God” only the death of the idea of such but, rather, the reality that once was but is no longer. That certainly seemed to be the disappearance of any consciousness of any infinite. Scharlemann thought Altizer’s program nullified an old theistic metaphysics but from within the same assumed theistic metaphysics, because he perceived a problem in Altizer’s and other scholars’ failure to distinguish being from beings. Even if one is attempting to eliminate the particular being as transcendent or infinite, it remains only a being, not being or the source of being. Altizer may or may not have meant that the “Total Presence” is the new “God,” or he may have been, as he originally suggested, satisfied to somehow “redeem” the sphere of the secular; but the absence of even a sense of absence of the infinite does bring into question the accuracy or justification of Scharlemann’s idea of the “infinite subjectivity of the human I.” If Altizer’s reading is truly that there is no sense of even the absence of a sense of absence—which Scharlemann equated with “even the loss of a feeling that God is dead”—then there would hardly be a sense of an unsatisfied “infinite subjectivity” with the finite. This returns us to the obvious reality of the finite and its relation to the “truth.” That would imply what Richard Rorty’s simple statement meant— that “truth” is not “out there” and that the “out there” logically includes any

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thing to which the word “infinite” is attached. Rather, it depends upon human language, the degree of its appropriateness to the usage or object, the amount of common understanding of the meaning of words, which includes the many different ways in which a single word can be used, and, we already noted, the correspondence between what meaning is given and derived between speaker and hearer as one measures what was expected or understood with the actual result. Scharlemann, too, is clear about not talking literally of some truth’s being fastened to some “God” “out there,” transcendent to the physical world, certainly not even of some object with which it can be identified. To assume that there can be any agreement about such a word as “God” that can denote to some a transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal being yet only an expression of surprise or consternation to others is to overvalue language’s flexibility if not its apparent referents. The Hegelian notion of “absolute truth” or a need for such is as far from reality as is the “infinite subjectivity of the I” that Scharlemann mentioned—or, in Karl Barth’s old terms, humans’ “secret desire to be God.” Even Sartre saw the latter as turning humans into a “wasted passion.” Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus concluded by telling us that a historical person cannot be transplanted willy-nilly centuries away without being an “enigma,” as Jesus would be—if we see him in his “thorough-going eschatological” presumptions. Schweitzer said that, when we hear Jesus, he must come to us “as one unknown” as he did to those by that ancient lakeside; and only as we undertake to do what Jesus asks of us spiritually will we actually find out who he really is. This means that we encounter the story or image of Jesus without any assumption that he is the Messiah, the Christ, or the Son of God or has been “glorified,” as Kierkegaard warned. But as even Scharlemann’s use of the story of the call of these fishermen, the story is a hyperbolic, mythical trope from the later church; the story’s reliability in the search for truth is on the same level approximately as the tradition that had Jesus as a child kicking a playmate off the roof so that he could go down and raise him from the dead. Finally, these are not more credible that Kierkegaard’s self-contradiction, both insisting that one has to experience being “contemporaneous” with Jesus, which means not presuming his divinity before we confront him, and also, ironically, arguing against starting with the conviction that Jesus was a man and then thinking that one would discover something in history that proved Jesus was actually God. Kierkegaard insisted that one has to begin with the faith that Jesus is God. Is being Jesus’s “contemporary” satisfied only by hearing his “Come unto me, all you weak and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” and by realizing the incredibly otherworldliness of such generosity as Kierkegaard’s seeing this such that I immediately know Jesus is God? The Gospels are not presenting

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some objective or neutral history but a radically mythologized Christology. The Protestant principle was only a meaningful principle to observe for Christians who in precritical days were unaware of the gap between the referent (Jesus) of those stories and the fantastic descriptions of him. FOLLOWING SELF OR OTHER OR A MUTUAL AUTONOMOUS RELATION? The striking problem with “following Jesus” is how one ever can get back to figure out what it was to “follow” Jesus if Jesus was ever a total stranger or just a person whom one accidentally met. The biblical narratives will not be helpful in presenting Jesus as a totally unknown stranger. That connection of the present believer’s experience or redemption being similar and causally connected to the experiences that the original disciples had with Jesus was quite important for Schleiermacher, as we saw, though Schleiermacher does not suggest that we need to be called from the lakeside. He, in fact, thought that he could know Jesus’s “inner person” and therefore the “maxim” of Jesus’s life. Does this mean that Schleiermacher knew this when he first heard about Jesus or first heard Jesus call him to “Follow me”? Or did that conviction and those deep insights develop only after many years of study and deep commitment to Christianity? Historical research since Schleiermacher’s day has devastated this overconfident psychological analysis, and so Hegel put it out of mind. It still beckons for attention from those who read the Gospels, but the connection between that figure in the Gospels and theology is balanced on a high wire over a bottomless pit with a very small audience still watching. How much deconstructing has to occur before one sees what that alleged original “following” really entailed and how much it requires or even suggests as important for centuries later? How much shedding of the thick overlay of the church’s later opinions? On the one hand, we could have a picture that would require us to ask why anyone would “follow” some man—and even why any person would want to summon people to follow them. The “inscribed” words attributed to Jesus—“Follow me!”—were not the event in which Jesus sent out the twelve but when he happened by the lake and spotted men in their fishing boats, allegedly men who had no idea who he was. Scharlemann speaks of such an authoritative one who successfully summons people by only two words— “Follow me!” They immediately leave everything behind, without any hesitation or reflection, which would imply without any consideration for friends, family, or future income or any other worldly ties. Amazing indeed! There is

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no valid historical or psychological explanation that would make the picture credible. Does Scharlemann ultimately tell us that the disciples were immediate in their decision simply because of Jesus’s divine authority? No—no, he does not. Scharlemann says their immediate and unreflective response was because they heard their own voice in Jesus words. But if Jesus was a stranger to them, and if that was all he said them, having promised them nothing, how is it, then, that those two words would have motivated the twelve to give up everything, including responsibilities to family, to follow him? They simply heard the command, “Follow me!” and left their boats, families, and everything behind. Were they just waiting for a good excuse to leave behind their stinking fishing business and income and families? Or were they always hearing their voice in the voice of other people speaking to them from the shore? Or did they hear their own voice in Jesus’s words because fishing had been poor that day and two of them had resorted to sitting in their boat, mending their nets with their father, Zebedee? Yes, the writer wanted it to be real history, with credible authentic beings. So the disciples are even mending their fishing nets. But that is no help. Is it not more likely that the author was sure that he knew who Jesus was, the Christ who had been crucified and raised from death, and so it was only natural that the history he would write decades later would have fishermen leaving everything upon hearing a simple two-word summons from that Jesus?33 By the time the Gospel writer and his successors wrote, the Jewish idea was prominent that the Kingdom of God was imminent, as we see in the willingness of the disciples for Jesus to return from what they understood to be his journey back to heaven. The apocalyptic figure of the “Son of man” was attached to this imminent expectation, and the Gospel writers utilized it by identifying it with Jesus. It intensified and validated the church’s expectation of the parousia soon. Letters from the Apostle Paul had already spoken of the imminent end, encouraging people to remain in the state they were in when they were “called” because of the “shortness of time.” He had even written letters to early disciples who had experienced deaths in their group, and he had to tell them that the end was not far away, and that even the dead would not be left out when Christ returned. By this time, some decades after Jesus was gone, the disciples had been successful enough to decide that Jesus was “Lord” and “Christ” (or “Messiah”) even if the new Gentile converts knew nothing about Jewish expectations of a “Messiah.” But this “Christ” was exalted so much in Paul’s writings as the Divine Reconciler of the world for God, the one whose name would soon be confessed by every human tongue, that it would have been quite reasonable for the Gospel writers to have sketched the pictures in which Jesus called people with a simple command to “Follow me!” They did also write of

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the “mission of the twelve,” which, in its Matthew redaction (Matt. 10) carried reflections on the Destruction of Jerusalem in 66 to 70 AD. By this time, any number of different motivations for approaching the details of Jesus life had arisen, and so it was not unsurprising that for some it was necessary that Jesus be viewed as one who had “fulfilled” the “Scripture” or the promises made by the religion of Ancient Israel or Judaism. For others it was important that Jesus be confessed as the Messiah, the Son of God, or that he speak of himself as the “Son of man” or even use the terms “I am” or “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” These are convictions of disciples at a remove of forty to seventy years from Jesus’s Crucifixion, reading back into “Jesus’s” history their Christological ideas, most of which are not thought by many historians of the Gospels to actually reflect the facts and speaking of the historical Jesus. But Scharlemann is not saying that one hears Jesus’s command to “Follow me!” but rather one’s own self-command. Did the original disciples know that all they were hearing was their own voice? While it might be comforting for one who is religious to know that the object of their faith has their same ideas, does this not pose the danger of merely subconsciously transferring from one side to the other? It is a mirror image that can even be reversed. So Tillich posits that, by God’s grace, God’s ethics become what a believer’s ethics are by virtue of the Spirit, and so it is not purely either autonomy or heteronomy but what he called “theonomy.” Is Scharlemann saying the same thing in reverse—that we discover that Jesus was thinking and speaking the same thing we are and that this is also by grace or a gift from God? In any case, if what I hear in the inscribed words of Jesus are only or already my own words, then certainly I would not need any historical details about that Jesus. I already have the ideas and words and so recognize them instantly and need not examine anything further, for this Jesus is not really needed except to convey to me my true self through my own words that I already know. But nagging questions remain: Are these specific words that I have actually used on my own (“I am” or “I am the Resurrection and the Life”)? Or if I ever use them is it perhaps only because they were important within the religious fellowship that has been part of my identity for a long time? While a phenomenological ontology may provide us with realistic pictures of how words can actually instantiate that of which they speak, particularly creating relationships, the meaning of words from past history were established in their own time and place, which is not discovered or reconstructed primarily by ontology but by historical data and psychological data assuming the particular ontology. The ontology only lays the groundwork for the history and psychology that then help provide the meaning. From that standpoint, Scharlemann’s Reason of Following stands on its own as a phenomenological

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ontology—that is, on its own only if it does not make historical references to what he sees as the “meaning” that he simply recites at face value without any critical framework. For those used to the critical framework that all historiography entails, Scharlemann’s use of such alleged history without any critical appraisal or use simply detracts from the phenomenological-ontological argument of what a “reason” of any “following” might entail. But then on the other hand he does not consider it as simply a following of just any person but specifically only of Jesus—but yet not really of Jesus but of Jesus only as the “Christ,” and not Jesus as the “Christ” in the sense of the fulfillment of the Jewish Messianic hope but only as the “Christ” of Protestantism or the “Christ” of the double negation of the symbol of the Cross. In any case, this is Scharlemann’s answer to avoid heteronomy or merely the voice of the “other.” Whether the net result of hearing one’s voice in the “inscribed” words of Jesus (even if they did not come from him but from a later author) is more important than hearing other people’s present actual voices in dialogue with one’s own, I cannot say for sure; but somehow it seems that “being-therewith” and its implied dialogue that is undetermined is much more important than simply “being-there,” confronted by a fixed text that cannot reply to one’s questions. While autonomy is necessary for a human being, mutual autonomy between equals (not a relation between a master and a disciple) seems more necessary. If the most significant speech is relational speech, then this points to the priority of relationships for any real meaning in life. Since Scharlemann emphasized that acoluthetic reason accommodates both yes and no responses as valid—illustrating this by his reference to Luigi Pirandello’s play It Is So! (If You Think So) (1917), as well as to Kierkegaard’s knight of faith who “actually” ate lamb even though he “factually” was eating only hash—the difference in subjective assessments or perspectives is accepted. If universalism accepts these differences, then that is a good starting point from which religions can begin to learn to tolerate on another. But ethics and political justice, after accepting different perspectives, require a prioritizing by mutual agreement of elements considered “universal” so that death is not preferred to life, discrimination is not preferred to equality, and pain is not seen as more valuable than happiness. We can accept the fact of diverse perspectives, but to coexist we have to engage in a reasonable dialogue of equals to decide on which values or principles we actually agree on that might be sufficiently powerful and beneficial to all concerned that their observance would provide that desired constructive coexistence. So social life, ethical life, and political life have to move beyond the mere chaos of subjectivity and different perspectives. Just because I think so does not make it so, except perhaps in my own mind, but not necessarily in actual life with

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other people. Society or life with others must be able to accept the fact that, as John Rawls insisted, diverse conflicting but reasonable perspectives or comprehensive doctrines will be common, not a mere aberration. But they will be tolerated only by a more immediate and prior social contract to which all concerned have agreed. Reasonable coexistence of different people with conflicting ideas can exist, not by arbitrary preferences or by unjust discrimination or by giving them equal weight and producing only chaos but by public reason, by discussion and public voluntary agreement, or by what Rawls called an “overlapping consensus.” This is an element that is always nearly if not entirely missing from most religions. These religions are not driven by public reason or freestanding principles or toward some negotiating that leads to a consensus. It seems, therefore, that what is involved in “following” does not require a special type of “reason” but, rather, that it, even like Schleiermacher’s “feeling,” actually participates in both the theoretical and practical reason that Kant elaborated. Both forms of reason, as well as “feeling,” were based on relational words and an ontology corresponding to them. They too were learned, not a priori, and the only universal really evident is existence or definite beings, not any being-itself, and they all depended on mutual trust in all their designated modification, classification, relations, and forms. People “follow” when they think following will benefit them. William James’s explanation of the variety of religious experiences as being driven by people’s quest for “more life”—a “following” that is more important than any “what” or “agency” they might try to use to attain that life—is not remarkably different from the variety of nonreligious experiences of people’s quest simply for “more life.” A more satisfying, flourishing life is what they all want, and otherwise, James recites, they are not that concerned about the details of the being, the means or the nature of the power by which it is attained, although they might well want it to be a moral means. As James said, the people feel that something is deficient or wrong in their lives and can be remedied if they could just make proper connection with some higher or greater power that could help them. This higher or greater power need not be some deity but could even be anyone who could assist them or supplement their effort to “take the next step.”34 But, I must add, this all requires trust on their part. If a person has a religious upbringing and is taught that “God” or “Christ” or “Buddha” or some other religious person or power can make the person’s life much better, then the person may trust that, as long as there is evidence that it really works, it is therefore true. However, if many things go wrong in the religious person’s life to which they are committed as a believer that their trust will pay off, then the person’s trust may eventually be threatened or even become impossible. The same is true of people whom we are told we

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should trust, assuming that our relations with them will be to our benefit. If the opposite occurs, and we suffer at their hands, or if life gets more unbearable because of our relationship with them, then we lose trust in them. This is especially true if we have been taught that these people’s very profession means that they are there to help or protect us—such as law-enforcement officers, doctors, or priests. Then, when trust dissolves, so does the relationship, and it is often hard to re-create once trust is lost. A constructive relationship exists only by mutual trust and mutual autonomy, not by coercion, force, abuse, dissembling, or feigning. The irony in any kind of “following” is that the following often has a tendency to be built on and/or operate from one’s desire to not be autonomous or self-directing. This means that one places oneself as a dependent in the hands of others and that trust is unusually vital and precarious. In most traditional religions, the very age of these religious traditions has placed most members into a position only of “following,” and they are not encouraged to explore how to challenge the traditions, to individually evaluate the dogma or rituals or norms. As Ivan Karamazov had the “Grand Inquisitor” describing it, most people are incapable of handling freedom. They would gladly trade their freedom to the religious institution, especially if they can be convinced by “miracles, mystery, and authority,” plus perhaps a bit of “bread” and a sense of self-confidence from belonging to a large group of people who also similarly “bend the knee.”35 In that sense, the desire to be rid of freedom may surface from a feeling of powerlessness that borders on what Kierkegaard called “despair,” or at least on self-disparagement, at not being what one wants to be or being capable of only what one does not want to be. The longshoreman Eric Hoffer (1902–1983), in describing “mass movements” and the “true believer,” described the latter as one who does not want freedom but wants not to be free precisely because they have not been capable of dealing with freedom beneficially or constructively. One wants to pass the burden of decision-making off to someone else, to simply “follow” the leader, to avoid personal blame or responsibility. In such allegiance, however, it is easy to become blinded to the real issues once one quits thinking for oneself or once one simply trusts those in positions of authority to always know and do what is best. Hoffer said this could lead to a complete loss of freedom and self and that people would be willing to die for the “cause” because they have found meaning in the “following” or “belonging” in not having to be responsible for the decisions. We witness this over and over in the history of leaders who build their “following” on the promise that their people will find their real freedom (from freedom or autonomy): consider such episodes as David Koresh and the Branch Davidians at Waco or the history of Jonestown in its utter self-

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contradictions and self-disintegration. Jim Jones, who had built his huge, multiracial, integrated Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, had warned his followers of a capitalistic and corporate takeover, of dictators soon arising in the United States. Jones said if that happened, he would take his followers away. In the late 1970s many of the group’s adherents left under the leadership of their own dictator, Jones, to go to Guyana, and not long after, on November 18, 1978, more than nine hundred of them committed mass suicide at his command. It was a “following” that was socially advanced, even seemingly ethically sensitive to the marginalized of society in the belief system’s racial integration and care for the elderly. But due to other powerful elements, the church developed into a sinister cult built around one man’s ego and the absolute control he desired over others. If one seeking “more life” elects to “follow” someone promising that very thing—“more life”—then one needs to learn from history and past experiences that it does not always work out. It may sound “too good to be true” and actually turn out that way. In fact, then, any “following” requires reflection, not just peer pressure, happy talk, extravagant promises, great personalities, temporary relief, or feelings of being privileged. In fact, I have never met a person in my life who was more “reflective” than Professor Scharlemann. He was super-analytical about everything. So why was the emphasis placed upon the “follower” also placed upon the follower’s immediate and unquestioned response—that it could not involve any reflection? Immediately, it was to preserve a picture of autonomy, as I have said, But here we have to revert to a possible answer for Scharlemann’s citation of many other biblical terms and stories as well as consider whether or not he took them literally. Despite all of my criticism of his usage of these citations, terms, and stories, he did not take them literally but, rather, explained them as someone else who would have taken them literally—someone who was precritical in their religious understanding. But it has occurred to me over the years, after reflecting on this, that Professor Scharlemann was attempting in the very process of his writing to not simply explain the power of “reflexivity” to resolve the antithesis between the “precritical” and the “reflective” approaches to religion but to utilize the antithesis in that very process of his explanations. He thereby sketched a picture that did more than speak of inclusivity; it actuated inclusivity. It was not simply a description of “reflexivity” from a reflective standpoint but an exercise for the reader in reflexivity. I am convinced that the one thing that he did not want to do was make a precritical reader feel that they believed something that was not true or in some way give the impression that only reflection or the typical critical approach of scholarship held the truth. If the latter were the criterion for membership, then the majority of humanity would simply not really belong to

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any religion; churches would consist primarily only of religious professionals or professors. Professor Scharlemann was far too smart, compassionate, and modest to have ever tolerated that kind of exclusive thought and discrimination. So he was assisting his readers to actually experience what reflexivity can enable us to do, to see the relative nature of our perspectives; he pointed to the necessity of finding a deeper sense of unity. He did this both for those who are reflective as well as for the prereflective. The “reflexivity” and whatever that deeper sense of unity is, however, does not decide between conflicting perspectives, but it does dislodge any illusions one might have about attaining a purely “neutral” standpoint.36 In real life, in order to peacefully coexist, we have to be willing to discuss such ideas and issues reasonably and must evaluate them as deeply as possible so that we can reach some mutual agreement that will serve as our social contract. This is true of any kind of relationship—even just between husbands and wives or between siblings or friends—not to mention for a community to exist as a unit in any sense, for a state or a nation. Reflexivity reminds us of a unity of being that we all experience, our existence; but we can alleviate the conflict between our different perspectives only by discussing reasonably what we understand things to be. And that may require considerable critical reflection of our presuppositions and other elements of language that we use. If the unity we have with each other that can accommodate our diverse perspectives is our very existence, our common value of the “will to live,” as Schweitzer put it, then that should be sufficient to open the door to discussing possible principles based on that priority of life itself, with the hope of reaching not simply a social stability but some cognitive consensus as well. This will mean that we find our unity in the common will to live; and this means that people are even more important than ideas, actual relationships more significant than even ethical principles. But in order to live by such priorities, we must be willing to discuss, negotiate, and reason together—to share life. Could it not be that even people who become “followers” or thereby join a religious group are not seeking anything that is so difficult to attain that it requires them to embrace either the position of a sophisticated reflection of religious matters or of moving to a state of understanding and utilizing reflexivity? Rather than one’s having to wrestle with even the pros and cons of theism, polytheism, Trinitarianism, monism, panentheism, and other religious approaches, might the “more life” people seek be found with a little encouragement or positive reinforcement from friends? Or might they merely need some financial assistance and find others to help? Or might they have certain habits of action or thinking that have a detrimental effect on themselves or on their relationships and so secure the assistance of other people, friends, doctors, professionals, counselors, or medications? Do most people really

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desire to become “God” or “gods” or “superheroes” or “miracle workers,” or do they have to be reassured that they have a “divine destiny,” which Tillich mentioned over and over? I suspect that most people, on the other hand, would like to live flourishing, fulfilling lives while they have the physical and mental abilities to function reasonably independently and that they would like to have friends and family or other relationships that are meaningful and that have reciprocal benefits. Most of us want neither to be a burden on others nor to be unable to make reasonable decisions about our lives and needs. I do not see how these generalities differ from person to person significantly. These are reasonable desires for one’s “living.” We would hope to live in a secure and reciprocal society in which all live responsibly and respectfully. We would want our lives not to be plagued with terrible inequities of assets, income, status, or opportunity but, rather, to cultivate mutual autonomy, honesty, trust, and equality. We would desire a government of the people and constitutions and structures of justice that cover all people equally, in which all are dedicated to the common will to live. This is not simply a “following” or a leading but a “walking together,” a unity in diversity in supporting life. Some of our currency calls it e pluribus unum. In that sense, I believe that Scharlemann’s shifting of the focus of the thing people really want—to be their authentic selves in the fullest possible sense—may be profound in an analysis of Christology, especially when combined with his understanding of the diverse perspectives that are simply a part of human consciousness and social life. This is the reason he suggested that what he describes may likely be the very way people already live. The Christological creeds that continue to speak confusingly of the two natures of Christ were never, and still are not, the believer’s primary concern. The Christological creeds were only fairly natural attempts to try to explain what Christians thought were the “means” of getting what they wanted, which was “more life.” Scharlemann, however, saw the desired result as not simply a freedom to be “authentic” but as a freedom in one’s finitude and, as authentic, as a freedom to live and die, even to “die to the world” while still being within the world.37 However one sees a life beyond death, the real danger in it is that religions may diminish the zest for this life by unrealistic and extravagant promises of that postmortem existence through unrestrained imagination and enthusiasm. But of the four theologians we have covered here, only Scharlemann spoke of a “Resurrection”; but there is no indication that he saw it as some utopian existence or even postmortem. Eschatology had been reduced to a mere symbol from any possible literal understanding in all of these four. It is this life with which they were concerned.

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Does this not raise the possibility that most of the earlier generations’ attempts to align the historical and mythical elements of Christology were an impossible task, a distraction from people’s real goal? People did not realize that the help they needed, the empowerment that they sought to attain the better life they desired, does not require some supernatural God or even some disclosure of “God” who is not any specific being at all or some Resurrection to a utopian endless bliss in which one cannot even recognize one’s former self. Rather, what they needed was an improvement of life that can be supplied by help from their fellow humans. An improvement in one’s relations with others is always paramount and possible within our existence. The meaning found in our relationships with each other tends to dwarf all other concerns, and this is confirmed even by people’s concern when they are in the very process of dying, as they often speak only of the people or relationships that they are leaving behind, the relationships with others that have provided meaning. Does it not suggest that the real problem in Christianity has not been in the possible Christological or theological solutions that the religious have proposed but in the perpetuation of the ancient formulation of the ancient claims from which later people have asked questions structured by those claims that conflated what we now view as these two contradictory categories of history and myth, or the human and divine, or the finite and infinite? People had been taught to believe that humans were incapable of meeting their own most basic needs, that the intervention of a god or gods was required to provide and guide them and protect them and deliver them from all evil. Many had grown up in a culture that provided stories of different gods intervening in their histories or that spoke of military heroes as half-human and half-deity. But that metaphysics of infinity has lost its credibility. We now can see that their cultural eyes were perhaps turned in the wrong direction, underestimating humanity and their own friends’ and families’ power and goodness, while overestimating or exaggerating their own needs to the point of being unrealistic. Does this not become apparent when, after Schleiermacher made so much of the “antithesis” between the God-consciousness and one’s immediate selfconsciousness—a state he called “God-forgetfulness,” in which all humans experience only a dreadfully impotent God-consciousness—describing the answer of “Christ” he changed his tune and spoke of that “God-forgetfulness” as only a slight “disturbance of nature”? The same was true in Tillich’s portrayal of universal estrangement but ended up not being universal enough for Jesus even to have ever been genuinely “tempted,” and certainly never guilty or causing estrangement. Could it be that what people were wanting was accessible through help from other people and did not require some divine intervention or some supernatural Incarnation or some unreal state or some magic incantation, ritual, or human or animal sacrifice?

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Many of us have taken that very long journey to try to find the answer because we learned from somebody to believe that there was something very wrong about our lives, something quite lacking, and that it was our fault. Is it not possible that the various religions over generations have posited an unrealistic answer so Absolute that it would be only an impossible solution? Could it be that we, like Gilgamesh, went on that long journey to try to fix the problem, and yet, after getting the word from an ancient hero alleged to have been bestowed with immortality, we both captured the answer but ironically lost it again in the same place in which we found it? Gilgamesh returned home, finally, resolute with a more realistic answer—to accept who he was, even the half of him that was human and therefore mortal, and to improve his relations with other people, despite the fact that his quixotic quest had failed. And this was actually the answer all the time—that he must accept his humanity and mortality and be a better person to others. Or as the Dalai Lama admitted, he no longer thinks it matters much whether people are religious or not; what matters is whether they are good people.38 These questions I ask actually correspond to a degree with Scharlemann’s insightful glimpse of the possibility that is “God” manifest in any entity or any person. So the “empowerment” is allegedly universally accessible. If it is universally accessible, then it is not confined to any place or any time or age; one does not have to find the Divine in past history. If it is life that one seeks, rather than some imagined Absolute being, is not that life always in front of one within all the surrounding living beings? Why is it necessary to call any of those entities or beings “God” when Scharlemann explicitly denies that they are God? They only “manifest” or “disclose” “God”—but that is not a manifestation of any being at all or any theistic certainty. Even then, all they disclose is “God” in its otherness—its elusive and undefinable otherness beyond all specific beings and language, even the depth of language itself. This otherness as even the double negative of the Christ symbol opens up an inclusiveness that suggests a new way of seeing what are otherwise conflicting assertions of exclusive perspectives, a new view of an open-ended and relativized Absolute containing an inclusiveness of a pluralism that not only includes all religions but all nonreligious perspectives as well. But since this otherness embraces even opposite relatives, it is only a universal, not an Absolute, in its ability to be manifest in comparable capacities in different times and places. It is not a definite entity or the same essence that is the same in particulars in different places. It is not Absolute, not Everything, but only the universal of “living.” Scharlemann showed how reflexivity and the self-negating religious symbol embraced both the precritical or prereflective understanding of religion and the critical or reflective, even if they seem to be separated and contradictory. But they embrace both only in

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Conclusion: A Redefining of the Absolute as a Universal Embracing Differences 417

that both are expressed in living beings but not simultaneously in any single being. So the common thing is not the different perspectives but the living beings themselves—that alone. It still remains the task of those beings to figure out the details of how to live with each other. This is indeed a radical redefining of the Absolute, in relativizing all positions and words, although one can still speak in terms of particulars and universals. We know that most words are flexible, open to considerable variation in meaning. So it is with human perspectives that are contingent, limited, and frail frames of reference—gradually, constantly, but inevitably changing within space and time and often radically altered without any plan or intention by the viewer. The limitations of the appropriateness of a word are confronted with the constant temporal and spatial differences between the various consciousnesses of those arriving at their particular viewpoints. But somehow we manage to reach enough agreement to be able to exist together in most cases, despite the apparent differences and flux. But the “consensus” of the meaning or connection between words and what they signify is itself always involved in negotiation, compromise, accidental discoveries, and revision, and yet the whole of humanity is seldom involved in even significant redescriptions or reformulations; so it is a piecemeal process. If one cannot consciously create religious symbols, as Tillich insisted, but can only await their intrusion into one’s subconscious with some empowering or insight, and if those symbols are alleged to carry all the necessary power of transforming one’s life, then humanity is to be pitied. And where is there room in such a scenario for the nonreligious person to find the better life? Why is “God” or the meaning of one’s existence or one’s authentic self so inaccessible as in Tillich, who, when asked where or how one could get that Spirit that was the “answer,” replied that he could not say because that would be a futile attempt at self-salvation? Scharlemann’s interpretation has made “God” seemingly accessible in anything and everything but dependent upon our “naming” it; yet, unlike the word “cat,” the referent of the naming is nothing definite other than some power of being that can be manifest by any and all beings.39 But how is that manifest—through one’s naming it or through its unique “presence” or “donation”? Can one “name” it without experiencing its exclusive presence and its “donation”? If not, is it not also as inaccessible as was Tillich’s, a sort of “waiting for Godot”? If one cannot create religious symbols but they are given birth and experience their deaths only in the communal unconsciousness, as Tillich said, then what purpose is accomplished in one’s own naming or “inscribing ‘God’ upon all names, ‘God is’ upon all events, and ‘God is God’ upon all identities,” which was Scharlemann’s hope?40 Without lengthy and difficult explanation of what one means, it will mean nothing to someone who hears it; in case they are religious, they might think it one’s subjective idiosyncrasy—or worse, blasphemy.

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So within the social world in which we live, with people’s many, varied perspectives, would it not be better to use language that people understand? Inasmuch as the most obvious and efficacious empowering entities we know are human, why does a person feel forced to say that their compassion, empathy, encouragement, or love was all God’s love, compassion, and so forth? We need to return to hear Feuerbach in his scholarly proof that all the qualities assigned to “God” are perhaps in fact only a subconscious projection of the qualities or attributes of our human species. It is not idolatry to see humans as having love and compassion or as having the power to encourage one to see things differently or to help the powerless one to “take the next step.” That is where “faith” must drop its otherworldliness—or at least supplement it with intelligent mutual trust and trustworthiness. No matter how fantastic one’s dreams or even one’s ecstatic experiences, including the assurance mystics have, humanity can survive only when we are willing to express ourselves intelligibly mutually to each other in the spirit of mutual autonomy and mutual respect as equals. KANT VERSUS NIETZSCHE REVISITED: EXCLUSIVE VERSUS INCLUSIVE ETHIC With regard to the issue as we raised it in the beginning by contrasting Kant and Nietzsche, what can we conclude? If no “corroboration” occurred, since the Christology moved beyond theism, who was correct—Kant or Nietzsche? If historical details about “Jesus” are superfluous for arriving at an image of “Christ,” then “both” Jesus and historical details are superfluous for any “Christology”; and if “Christology” has no historical aspects, then it is superfluous to claim that “Christ” is “God’s” “final revelation” to humanity, which would make Christianity only a human construct, extravagantly supported by artificial struts; and if Christianity is only a human construct, then there would be nothing in its proposed ethics that makes it inherently superior to other human ethical systems. They would all have to be judged by common human reason—nothing more. But common or public reason is how we would judge all the “if” sentences I have given above, and they might be judged differently in time than the way public reason presently judges them through these theologians we have analyzed. We are not stopping time or thinking. Kant thought a universal ethic was necessary for civilization to exist, which can hardly be gainsaid. Nietzsche, however, insisted that the ethic could not be important, universal, or uniting if it were grounded on a specific religion or the religion’s metaphysics, or on some view of the Totality of history and humanity that lost credibility. This also seems logical.

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Conclusion: A Redefining of the Absolute as a Universal Embracing Differences 419

We see how this manifests itself in actual history, especially if we compare a monistic with a pluralistic culture: A monistic culture might be determined by a single ruler or by a small, authoritarian group of ideologically identical people or by a single philosophy or worldview or by a religion or belief about supranatural beings. In such situations, uniformity is assumed. If the possibility of dissent or difference is recognized, then often the very mention of the single name serves as a sort of shibboleth to determine the loyal from the disloyal, those who can be trusted from those who cannot, even though many people learn how to dissemble, pretending to be what they are not just to preserve their lives. But cultural priorities change over time which is also true of cultural views of the importance or irrelevance of religion, which also involves a renaming, redefining, or even radically new vocabulary. Where a single view can be assumed by all citizens, the safety and welfare that people seek can be felt; but when significant differences or pluralism becomes evident, even strident, then a society has to resolve it in some way. This, again, poses the choice between continual conflict and reasonable agreement for peaceful coexistence. This is true regardless of the specific moral content that any religion carries and is true despite the fact that the diversity of views of any single religion’s moral content has enabled anything one wanted to call a religion’s ethics its actual ethics. A geographical uniformity and absolute temporal or chronological stability of content is actually lacking in most if not all religions. They continually develop and reinterpret their traditions, question the relevance of their interpretation of life and of their commitments and expectations, and repeat the process over and over, sometimes consciously and in other cases subconsciously. There is also nearly always a tremendous gap between a religion’s moral ideal and its actuality in real life so the name of the religion finds itself being used to justify even all kinds of contradictory policies, institutions, and actions. People can attach the name onto whatever economic, social, military, medical, or other issue about which they feel strongly. Witness the Christians, on both sides of the Protestant Reformation, on both sides of the US Civil War, or, today on both sides of the debates surrounding gay marriage, abortion, capital punishment, interest rates for loans, immigration, global warming, and many other issues. While the name can be used in designating very emotional issues, Kierkegaard also showed how trite a name can become, to the point of meaning virtually nothing.41 The changes within cultures over generations, the advances in sciences, the confrontation of the very different cultures, and many other factors all prevent any formulation of a certain ethic that will always be readily obvious and accessible. The theocratic and heteronomous focus of the ethic of Ancient Israel, which found its way into both later Judaisms as well as into Christianity,

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made it quite the opposite of any later ethic that might be democratic and autonomous. Ancient ethics presuming superiority for a single ethnic group or gender tend to be a misfit in days when human cultures tend to see an equality between all humans. So, if neither the metaphysics of infinity is permanent or eternal nor is any ethic grounded upon it, then this suggests that even to name a religion or its ethic is a relative exercise, bound to change as it already has many times. Often people of one religion are completely exclusive, intolerant of any other named religion, wanting to supply the ethical principles or system for their culture, and this objection may be based on only a name, or on a caricature of the other, or simply on a contentiousness based on one’s need to be superior to the other. Yet probably many if not most people feel that if a religion does not provide moral or ethical guidance then it is of no real value. And people of most religions today are usually persuaded that their ethics is certainly superior to the ethics of any other religion and to the ethics of anyone who is nonreligious, while the nonreligious often judge the ethics of the religious as being built on sheer superstition or wish fulfillment.42 But this is a fairly modern clash between authoritarian, creedal, and salvational religions, far removed from the classical development of moral philosophy in Ancient Greece. Greek moral philosophy did not spring from any religion or “revelation” but from the “exercise of free, disciplined reason alone.”43 People were expected to live in harmony with others, and any belief in any gods was fairly optional, if full of irrational and often immoral stories of the gods, but a civic order existed that provided people many choices if they lived trustworthy lives. Plato rejected the Greek pantheon not because he was a monotheist or objected to myth but because the stories depicted gods who were supposed to be models of the “good” but were patently fickle and often immoral. A somewhat similar “civic” view of religion simultaneously followed in China with Confucianism, which was concerned with orderly citizens and institutions that worked for the good. Once authoritarian, salvational, and expansional religions—for example, in the West, Christianity and Islam—began to compete within a given culture, how could religious and nonreligious people coexist peacefully, all expecting what they judged as their superior ethic and exclusive religion to dominate? This situation comes to awareness only when religious pluralism becomes a proximate reality, where the presence of the different other poses perhaps a threat to one’s being or livelihood, identity, or family. On the other hand, where religious people are separated from other religions by long distances, different cultures, and significant time, or where they are totally enveloped within a community of a single religion, the threat is not felt. So spatial proximity of permanent residents and not merely enemy invaders within various

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Conclusion: A Redefining of the Absolute as a Universal Embracing Differences 421

European nations created the awareness once the Reformation had emphasized individualism; Protestant Christian leaders such as Luther and Calvin were as religiously and ethically intolerant as the Catholic Church against which they rebelled. Yet the Reformation itself, by its emphasis on individualism, did unwittingly lead to religious pluralism, though not tolerance. A second historical development, which Rawls mentions in explaining the “dualism of political liberalism,” was the development of the modern state with its central administration. The third was the development of modern science in the seventeenth century. Rawls noted the contrast between the status of religion as a purely civic function in the classical world vis-à-vis religion in Medieval Christianity—the latter with its authoritarianism, idea of eternal salvation, doctrinal and creedal uniformity, priestly authority as dispensers of grace, and focus on conversion or expansion. “What the ancient world did not know was the clash between Salvationist, creedal, and expansionist religions.”44 This clash was discovered in the Reformation. As Rawls says, the “good” sought after in the classical world now experienced the addition to it of the transcendent element, “not admitting of compromise.” This is the Absolute that we have been analyzing: “This element forces either mortal conflict moderated only by circumstance and exhaustion,” writes Rawls, “or equal liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. Except on the basis of these last, firmly founded and publicly recognized, no reasonable political conception of justice is possible. Political liberalism starts by taking to heart the absolute depth of that irreconcilable latent conflict.”45 Of course, for centuries religious wars in Europe had been fought even prior to the Reformation—that is, any time in which two or more religions encountered each other—but they were often invasions or battles fought over a middle ground, as their tendencies were already expansionist and exclusive so they perhaps vied for the same territory. The option was often the same as the result of any actual conflict and victory by one side: a complete domination by a single religious group, an oppressive or coercive regime. When the confrontation is not of one invading the other but of people of different religious beliefs becoming legitimate citizens of a country, then it is a religious pluralism, especially if no civil authority attempts to eliminate all but one. Neither Kant nor Nietzsche really opted for a single religion but only for ethical standards that promoted and benefited autonomy and real life without squelching people’s questioning of every value. Both agreed that the issue between the “I must” and the “I will” of an ethic must transcend heteronomy and sustain autonomy since morality requires one’s actual freedom to choose between alternatives. Humanity’s ideals must neither be unrealistic nor so commonly embodied that they blather in triteness.

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While “I must” might be conceived in an autonomous way, unfortunately it is still usually seen as something that one is obligated to or has a duty to do, a duty arising from the “unconditional” nature of the “other.” But why would the other be more unconditional than oneself? Or why would one be expected to sacrifice oneself for the other or relinquish one’s own inclinations in order to satisfy others’ inclinations or desires? Kant thought that one must, and Nietzsche thought that one must not! But what justifies viewing any position or entity as unconditional? Does this not become the equivalent of the Absolute, and real life is full of millions of Absolutes or the “unconditionals” laying their claims on the others? For this reason, autonomy is more adequately preserved by the “I will,” which, in any real living situation with others, can never mean mere individual arbitrariness but must be a decision based on mutual coexistence and genuine dialogue, real or imagined, over what the different people “will” or desire. Neither Kant nor Nietzsche was clear enough on the necessity of a social contract—although Kant came closer, as he insisted that each person must regard themselves a part of lawmaking body or part of the ethically defining body upon which all depend. Yet “duty” is not perceived in isolation but only within a social structure, whether real or imagined. Here, however, each must have equal expression, or else it negates someone’s autonomy. So each owns their own will, but each agrees to live in a trusting unity, not in an “unconditional” agreement but one conditioned on the mutual autonomy of equals, of “I-You.” This sounds contrary to Nietzsche’s bluster against equality and his hyperbolic appreciation of genius, but he was also realistic in all his actual relations, realizing that life is realized only in mutual trust. If any human presence can impose a unique living presence on the other, then all can. It is a mutual confrontation of the unique living presence of the other in the very meeting and within the mutual relational words that we heard in Buber. This makes it seem as if the ethical concern is instinctual, natural, immediate, and spontaneous, flowing out of living beings whose subjectival rights, basic desires, and needs are quickly realized as mutual. In fact, it is not even simply a matter of relating beneficially to the other self but also to one’s own self. One can hardly love or help others if one does not love or help oneself. Therefore, the ethic is a symbiotic relationship, an equilibrium, in which each person balances the interests and compassion they have for others with the interests and compassion they have for themselves within a symmetrical relationship in which the others do the same. It is not utilitarian or just a mathematical exercise to calculate pain and pleasure; it is an agreement that is mutual between equals. But a relationship can actually become so uniting that a person often hears their own autonomous voice coming from the other, which Scharlemann discovered, a relation, however, that needs no

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suprahuman help nor exaggerated authority, and certainly no imperative or idea of duty—just a mutual agreement. Because living relations allow uniqueness, relations cannot be based on some imperative that comes from outside oneself. Each much engage in a revaluation of values; each person must assert themselves, which is what Nietzsche meant by the instinctual “will to power,” the discharging of one’s strength. He was convinced that Kant was the “most deformed concept-cripple of all time,”46 one who engaged in “backdoor philosophy”47 because of his retention of a quasidivine imperative. Nietzsche was adamant that, “when one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.”48 “Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him or what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth—it stands and falls with faith in God.”49 And since Nietzsche announced the “death of God,” Christian morality could have no ground. What he failed to acknowledge, of course, was that Kant was basically trying to release science and even philosophy and ethics from the traditional religious conceptual restraints. That society had to postulate freedom to promote responsibility was obvious, and whether “freedom” so postulated was called “God”—or the summum bonum or nothing at all—really made no difference to Kant; he was trying to help people realize their basic ethical unity with each other and to see it as valid if it was universally applicable. But that it had no role in predetermining science. Both Kant and Nietzsche insisted on human autonomy, on leaving behind any “self-incurred tutelage.” In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche described the “three metamorphoses of the Spirit,” or maturity toward human autonomy, as the stages of “camel,” “lion,” and “child.”50 The camel bears its maximum “burdens” (of heteronomy and absolutes) to the loneliest desert to dump them and is transformed into a lion. The lion is necessary to fight the last enemy, the great dragon, morality, whose body is clad with scales of its very name, “Thou shalt!” This is not simply a battle against religious ethics but against any ethics that comes from outside oneself. One is moral only if one makes one’s own decision. The lion cannot, however, create new values but can create freedom for itself for new creation. It can say “a sacred ‘No’ even to duty.” “To assume the right to new values—that is the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear much. Verily, to him it is preying, and a matter for a beast of prey. He once loved ‘thou shalt’ as most sacred: now he must find illusion and caprice even in the most sacred, that freedom from his love may become his prey: the lion is needed for such prey.”51

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Only when the dragon has been conquered by the lion is the lion then transformed into a child. The lion can make room for new values or new ethics, but only the child can “create” them, for the child is “innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’ For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.”52 Later Nietzsche has Zarathustra say, Verily, men gave themselves all their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it; they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed values in things to preserve himself—he alone created a meaning for things, a human meaning. Therefore he calls himself “man,” which means the esteemer. To esteem is to create, hear this, you creators! Esteeming itself is of all esteemed things the most estimable treasure. Through esteeming alone is there value: and without esteeming, the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear this, you creators! Change of value—that is a change of creators. Whoever must be a creator always annihilates.53

Nietzsche did not oppose Kant for trying to create but for substituting his own ethics “as if a command of God,” for the absolute motivation of his “categorical imperative.” That, for Nietzsche, was a “false causality” and artificial sense of “duty,” a redefined but unjustified Absolute. Values and duty come from one’s own instinct, which later combines with reason. For Nietzsche the “I will” pointed to his willingness to own all history as is rather than try to will backward.54 It was not only an insight that the present would not be but also an insight for that past that can neither be changed without a total unpredictable reshaping of the present. More to the point, Nietzsche was saying that, since there was no single perspective outside history from which one can judge everything both objectively and subjectively that had occurred, then one must accept it all, or, more appropriately, one will will it all.55 What one will not will is the eradication of some event by nullifying or preventing the person’s autonomy that caused it, for that very autonomy is a part of one’s instinctual “will to live” or “will to power.” To nullify or squelch any autonomy would be the great contradiction of human life. If the result of that will in a particular instance was negative, destructive, or unethical, then it can be avoided in the future by honest, realistic discussion rather than by wishing or trying to eliminate autonomy in some remote past, attempting to unwind past history or disown it. What one wills is the human will; otherwise one wills not to be human. This means specifically the “will to power” or the natural will for the “dispersal of one’s strength” or the “will to self-assertion” that is autonomy, self-responsibility, the most humanizing of what one can will, a will that he thought has been neglected if not castrated by religion and its form of an exclusive Absolute and “thou shalts.”

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This is a redefining of the Absolute; but to dispose entirely of the word “absolute,” as did Nietzsche, would be more consistent. He knew the universal “will to power” built of life affirmation, the great new “Yes” to life. This present study has shown how fragile are the most central claims of Christianity—neither anything likely solid enough, intelligible enough, or life-affirming enough nor an inclusive-enough form of equality to provide a basis for morality or an ethic even for the nonreligious. To feel the “Totality” (Schleiermacher) or to think only about pure notions or thinking (Hegel) or to accept oneself as is (Tillich) or to attain one’s “authentic self” (Scharlemann) does not supply much specific content or sense of direction about how to live with others. To Nietzsche, one must choose the whole package; if one wants one’s religious ethics, then one must accept that they are connected with the ancient mythology and supranatural or metaphysical foundations. If they are unproven, insubstantial, outgrown, ignored, or drained of content, then Christianity has nothing to offer by its connected ethics.56 The four innovative Christian theologians we have examined have also shown no inclination to suggest that any ethic could equal what they saw as the Christian ethic, which was, in one way or another, all “done by God,” which means that it gave humans no ethical responsibility whatever. That being the case, humans probably need to realize that they are the source of the valuing, which may all have begun very instinctually for selfpreservation but now by some antilife or self-negating religious ethics has been eclipsed under the false judgment of “improving mankind” by an ethics of castratism and “Naysaying,” as Nietzsche says. That many Christians have not admitted the latter to themselves, have ignored the limitations of any religious ethic, does not nullify Nietzsche’s judgment—a judgment shared by many others who seek a religionless global ethic. But religions could focus on their unique ethics that are compatible with though not part of a “freestanding” ethic underlying the social contract embraced by all, if both groups could only see it as possible. EMBRACING DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES: MOVING FROM AUTHORITY TO AGREEMENT For significant reasonable difference that naturally exists to be viewed not as a threat but as an asset, a social structure must be established that provides mutual autonomy for all. Any ethical principles that are bidding to be the ground forming a universal ethic must be “freestanding” or released from any of their exclusive religious or even exclusive cultural grounds. Their original grounds do not guarantee their present relevance of inclusive functionality no matter their ancient credentials. Only a mutual agreement between the

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presently concerned parties can determine the principles’ appropriateness and efficacy in the present. Only detachment from exclusive, divisive, absolutized elements or foundations will suffice to enable all people to accept the ethical principles. For people to insist that something is moral primarily or only because Buddha or Jesus or Muḥammad or Moses or Guru Nanak or another religious founder said it was moral is to continue to particularize the principle that prevents its acceptability by people outside that specific group. Nietzsche’s and Scharlemann’s major contribution seems to have been providing an understanding that humanity will always experience almost indefinitely multiple perspectives. Nietzsche’s approach enabled him to see the shortcoming of any ethic that was not life-affirming. Scharlemann’s contribution enabled him to see that there is a “depth” of being and truth that can be unifying that lies beyond any specific or individual being or assertion and that therefore real “truth” is found only in that universal experience. He made sure to insist that, although universal, it was not unconditional. Everything we experience is related, conditional, in the process of life and death, or entropy. With Scharlemann, the possibility is opened up to view Christology no longer as assertions about some specific divine/human being of the past but rather as one’s encounter with any symbol, with any content, that can provide one with one’s “authentic” being, in which one is free both to live and die. In pointing to the process of life itself as the primary value, or even instinctual, as Nietzsche saw it, Nietzsche and Scharlemann show that “freestanding” principles could be derived by detaching them from any earlier source, leaving behind that earlier alleged authority that is for many people now too narrow, too ancient, too metaphysical or mythical, too exclusive—and in its place establishing present universal agreement as the authority for a group’s ethics. Is such a thing possible? If it were possible, would differences be recognized so that people could be united under freestanding principles in their social contract or structures of ethics and justice but still be free to choose whether or not to be religious? John Rawls has insisted that there would be. This would reassure us that all citizens could respond with either a yes or a no to any religious symbols, as seems to have been implied by Scharlemann. That means that society as a whole must be willing to accept different reasonable perspectives, that the government must allow these varying perspectives so long as the citizens do not thereby undermine the validity of the social contract to which all have agreed. That is remarkably what James Madison and Thomas Jefferson saw as the “separation” of religion and state—that state has “no cognizance of religion” and would be justified in interfering in religion only if religious adherents broke the generally applicable laws.57 This would move the focus from a “redefinition” of the Absolute away from all metaphysics to the basic agreement at which humans can arrive in order

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to experience life together. This would refocus things from a metaphysical concern as Christology used to be to an ethical discovery based on the basic instinctual “will to live” and the necessity of social agreement of a few basic principles. Yet those who still wanted a Christology would be free to pursue it, and Scharlemann’s direction is a remarkably inclusive view of the issue for those who can agree to a nonliteral interpretation and are interested in religions showing more respect for each other. We exist in an exponentially expanding universe and have not yet discovered any other presently living beings in our universe’s millions of miles and billions of years of existence. The consciousness of our uniqueness is shared only by reflective beings, but that makes our “will to live” and to preserve life in the future a priority. Our ethical concern cannot be limited to an anthropocentric care only for humans but for all the life forms that have the same will to live but no apparent reflective nor communicative ability that we can access. The vastness of space and time combines with this, making us realize our fragility, how dependent we are on each other, no matter how different our many values and interests. Could insights of great thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Schweitzer, and John Rawls assist us in a more constructive direction, helping us realize what our real priorities must be as we view the future? I have shown elsewhere how they can give us more hope and determination to share our lives and meaning together.58 NOTES 1.  See Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion? 2.  Christians for whom this statement sounds strange should consider the parallels to the Christian claim, such as in Islam, which claims that Muḥammad was God’s final prophet, or in Buddhism, which claims that the Buddha was incarnate myriads of times prior to Gautama. 3.  See Clark, Will Humanity Survive Religion?, especially chapters 8 and 9. 4.  Scharlemann’s admission of the “probability” that Jesus had actually existed was only a red herring, since Scharlemann and all the other four sought a certainty rather than a probability, and the certainty they sought was not of a person’s existence but of the validity of the claim about who or what that person was and did. 5.  In the Buddhist tradition, at birth Gautama declared that he was putting an end to rebirth, and Islam says that at birth Muhammed was born already circumcised. Are these more irrational beliefs than Christianity’s descriptions of Jesus at his birth? 6. Scharlemann, Being of God, 16. Scharlemann says that the problem is not resolved by simply saying that “God is not being” but by thinking only the “not” or by saying only “God is not” (15). 7.  Robert P. Scharlemann, “The Mystical Correlate of Symbolic Appearance in Tillich’s Systematic Theology,” in Religion and Reflection: Essays on Paul Tillich’s

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Theology, Tillich-Studien, vol. 16, ed. Erdmann Sturm (Münster, Ger.: Lit Verlag, 2004), 222.   8.  Paul Tillich, “22. The God Above God (1961),” in Theological Writings, Main Works: Paul Tillich, vol. 6, ed. Gert Hummel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992), 417–21.   9.  It obviously stands at the heart of the experience of “acceptance” of “justification” for Tillich. See Tillich, “Rechfertigung und Zweifel (1924)” 83–97, especially 88 and 90. 10. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 11. 11.  The monism of mysticism is seen not only in Sufi practices of Islam but also in the Upanishads of pre-Hinduism, and the negations of self into nothing are reminiscent of Jakob Böhme’s Christian mystical view that “I am nothing . . . I can do nothing . . . and will nothing of myself that so God may will all in me, being unto me my God and all things.” 12. Robert P. Scharlemann, “Tillich’s Method of Correlation: Two Proposed Revisions,” in Religion and Reflection: Essays on Paul Tillich’s Theology, TillichStudien, vol. 16, ed. Erdmann Sturm (Münster, Ger.: Lit Verlag, 2004), 41. 13.  Interestingly, “reconciliation” was not only an important ethical key to Hegel; H. Richard Niebuhr suggested that, for a Christian to see what ethics require of a person, one should look in the world to see where God’s “reconciling” activity seems most obvious. See Niebuhr, Responsible Self. 14. Scharlemann, Being of God, 100, italics original. 15. Scharlemann, Being of God, 105. Of course, here he is discussing the “schism of reflection,” but ultimately the disparate perspectives of the real world are not reduced by reflexion. 16. Scharlemann, Being of God, 95. 17. Scharlemann, Being of God, 84, emphasis added, parenthetical original. What does it mean “for God to be God is to be other than God”? That the negation is the same as the positive, a logical contradiction, that “To be x is to be other than x” or even “non-x”? Scharlemann attempts to make it reasonable by distinguishing between faith and understanding: Understanding being is open to believing God because of the fact that we cannot understand being as being; and believing God is open to understanding being because we cannot trust God as God. We can only understand things in their being (or the being in things) and we can only trust things in God (or God in things). To understand things is to be related to them in such a way that we can think of them in the unity of the particularity and generality. In faith, there is an analogous structure: a unity of singular and universal. The unity in this case, however, is not the unity of being but the oneness of God. The singular, moreover, is not a perceived thing but a noticed self (a noticed I) and the universal is not an abstract thought of a genus but an assent, or consent, to selfhood as such. To acknowledge the I as there in a person or thing (to “notice” a particular self) is not the same as perceiving the particularity of the sense appearance; it is rather to be related to a particular in the mode of trust rather than of understanding . . . What we notice, or acknowledge, is always an ego there now; what we assent to is a form of community of selfhood, and the unity of the two in trust is the trust of a self in God.

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Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 84–85, emphasis and parentheticals original. Scharlemann clarified how, in Tillich’s system of “correlation” when one reaches the dead end of either understanding or faith, one is supposedly pushed over to the other. But no clarification ensues, since “God” has not been defined by some analogia entis. 18. Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, 198. 19. Scharlemann, Being of God, 172. 20.  Scharlemann, “Onto- and Theo-logical Thinking,” 5–8. 21. In Buddhism, one sees the “whole” more easily than fragmented parts, the “original codependence” or the “no-soul” or the “emptiness” of concepts and the mistakes of reification that often results if one is unaware of the unity. As it is often put, a mountain is not a mountain without the valleys that surround it. 22.  Taylor, “Postmodern Times,” 186. 23.  Taylor, “Postmodern Times,” 186. So Taylor sees Heidegger’s es gibt as parallel to Kierkegaard’s noncommunicableness of the Absolute. But Taylor notes that Kierkegaard unfortunately thought that the only choice was between “both/and” or “either/or” rather than exploring a third alternative that is “neither both/and nor either/or.” This returns us to Abe’s “symmetrical” approach to being and nothingness, in which the answer is both “neither” nor “both” of the “both/and” and “neither/nor,” which we noted earlier, when dealing with Tillich. 24.  Taylor, “Postmodern Times,” 187. 25.  “Quiddity has to do with what something is; essence has to do with how or as what, something is what it is. A symbol does not exemplify a quiddity; it makes an essence perceptible” (Scharlemann, Being of God, 79, italics original). So Jesus is not God, but Jesus is “how” or “where” God (or “as what” God) is manifest. 26. Scharlemann, Reason of Following, 199. This is a strange way of putting it, as if the symbols were alive and decided what to reveal. 27. Scharlemann, Being of God, 176. 28. Scharlemann, Being of God, 182. 29. Scharlemann, Being of God, 156. 30. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 307, italics original. 31. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 474, 490. 32.  Robert P. Scharlemann, “A Response,” in Theology at the End of the Century: A Dialogue on the Postmodern; With Thomas J. J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, Charles E. Winquist, and Robert P. Scharlemann, ed. Robert P. Scharlemann, Studies in Religion and Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 110–129. 33.  The story appears in all four canonical Gospels, beginning in Mark 1:16–20, then almost verbatim in Matt. 4:18–22, then with all kinds of new details added in Luke 5:1–11, and finally in a very, very different kind of story in John 1:35–42. 34. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature; Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902, enlarged ed., apps. and intro. Joseph Ratner (New York: University Books, 1963), 525. 35.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David McDuff. (New York: Penguin Books, 1991).

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36.  See note 39 below. See his humorous but cutting logic in Søren Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom,” 1854–1855, new ed., trans. and intro. Walter Lowrie, with supplementary intro. Howard A. Johnson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). 37.  The metaphorical rather than literal term attributed to Saint Paul is obvious. 38.  Dalai Lama [Tenzin Gyasto], Ethics for the New Millennium (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 19. 39.  Scharlemann mentioned the theory of quantum physics in science, which can show effects on a distant object without any visible connector to the cause, to illustrate how the truth of different standpoints can illustrate the validity of the reason he calls “reflexion” (Scharlemann, Being of God, 38–46). This shows that the “hidden truth” can be obtained not by eliminating all standpoints under the idea of attaining neutrality but by including and utilizing all standpoints (also see pp. 186–87, note 9). 40. Scharlemann, Being of God, 183. 41.  See his humorous but cutting logic in Kierkegaard, Attack upon Christendom. 42.  This divisiveness over which religion or ideology would be the base of a nation’s ethics, an endless debate among the contenders, is the reason the Dalai Lama said the new millennium needed a nonreligious ethic. See Dalai Lama, Ethics, 26. 43. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxii. 44. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxv. 45. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxvi. 46.  Discussion of Nietzsche as found in Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 512. 47.  Discussion of Nietzsche as found in Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 524. This is kicking “God” out the front door and bringing God’s ethics in the back door. 48.  Discussion of Nietzsche as found in Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 515. 49.  Discussion of Nietzsche as found in Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 516. 50. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 138–39. 51. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 138. 52. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 139. 53. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 171. 54. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 250–53. 55. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 490, 500. 56.  Of course, this does not mean that some principle such as the famous Golden Rule attributed to Jesus—to “do to others what you would want them to do to you”— could not be treated as a “freestanding” principle. But its positive form by a rabbi was even more powerful. But “freestanding” means the principle has its own authority and is not derived from any single source. 57.  I have analyzed these views of religion, ethics, and government in detail in Reconciling Opposites: Religious Freedom and the Contractual Ethics of a Democratic Society, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press-Fortress Academic), 2022. See also any version of Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” (ca. June 20, 1785; for example, at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/ Madison/01-08-02-0163 ) or of Jefferson’s “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” (June 18, 1779; for example, at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-02-02-0132-0004-0082). 58.  See note 57 above.

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Index

Abe, Masao: symmetrical approach to being and nonbeing, 206–207, 250, 261–62, 281n201, 349–50, 375n236, 429n23 abiding-in-self, 69, 72, 73 Abraham, 166; conscience of, 324–25; obedience of, 145; sacrifice of Isaac, 290, 314, 363n52; silence of, 386; Spirit of Judaism in, 138 Absolute, 4, 189–90, 274n66; analogy for, 215; as being’s depth, 262–68, 350; in Buddhism, 9; in Christianity, 9–11; forms of, 396; in Hegel, 147–49, 172, 383; Nietzsche’s redefinition of, 424–25; notion of, 396; in Rawls, 421; redefinition of, 10–12; in Scharlemann, 280n186; Scharlemann’s redefinition of, 380, 389, 416–17; Schleiermacher’s use of, 63; as word of unity, 345–61 absolute idealism, 72–73, 100, 114n35, 158, 321 absolute opposites, 144, 171, 172, 242 absolute religion, 163–64 Absolute Spirit, 128, 153–56, 158–61, 167–71, 175, 176, 191, 256, 257, 316, 382, 389

absolutely potent God-consciousness, 83–89, 99–100, 106–107, 119n111, 120n123, 191, 379; origins of, 89–97 abstract expressionism, 226–27, 271n36, 275n87, 281n193 abyss, 80, 196, 201, 202, 204, 211, 216– 17, 232, 260, 265, 267, 271nn39, 41, 317 acoluthetic reason, 12, 294, 296, 330– 32, 353–56, 382, 406–18; appearance of I in, 326–27, 385; distinction between ethical and aesthetic reason and, 334–35; notion of, 335–37; as Reason of Spirit, 388; relationship of freedom and truth vis-à-vis, 339, 359–60; and temporality, 339 Acts of the Apostles, 109n5 aesthetic reason, 296, 362n16; distinction between acoluthetic reason, 334 aesthetic religion, 75 Altizer, Thomas, 188n119, 192, 387; “God’s death” in, 196, 262, 365n79, 403, 404; “I am” in, 307, 374n227; self-embodiment of God in, 310–11 analogy of being, 204–206, 213–22, 243, 274n75, 303; notion of, 213;

439

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440

Index

and transformation of New Being, 244–46 analogy of image, 195, 204, 205, 213–15, 222–32, 263, 275n87, 388; notion of, 213; and transformation of New Being, 241–47, 254 animal consciousness, 74, 77 Anselm of Canterbury, 297, 301, 304, 314, 317, 335, 346, 348 antilife morality, 25 anti-Semitism: in Hegel’s writings, 177, 363n52 antithesis: ambivalence towards, 89–98; between feeling and knowing and/or doing, 73–74, 80, 117n77; of human nature, 83–89; between two levels of consciousness, 77–78, 90, 415 apologetic theology, 197–98 apostolic succession, 36, 37, 55–56, 381 a priori categories, 22–23, 26, 79, 81, 182n58, 352 art: in Tillich, 204, 226–27, 275n87 Ascension, 370n162 Augustine, Saint, 43n15, 78, 109n6, 117n68, 173, 202, 216, 235 authentic existence, 338 authoritarianism: of the church, 136–37; of Jesus, 145–46, 180n29; Jesus’s opposition to, 136, 139; in Judaism, 131, 145 autonomy, 17, 112n24, 327; and authentic self, 353, 359, 417; conflict between heteronomy and, 257, 283n210; of convert, 96–97; in Hegel, 385, 386; “I will”, 29, 30, 421–22, 424; in Kant, 29, 423; lack of, 411; and morality, 5, 30; mutual, 28, 267, 409, 422; in Nietzsche, 27–28, 31, 423–24; quest for, 381, 384–87; in Scharlemann, 385–87; in Schleiermacher, 62, 384–86; in Tillich, 385, 386; true autonomy, 26; in US, 15–16 awakening, 113n27; of Buddha, 48–49; of God-consciousness, 67, 69–70, 72–73, 96–100, 106–107

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Backus, Isaac, 16 Barth, Karl, 193; on Buddhism, 368n112, 389; critique of Schleiermacher, 100, 115n54, 268n6; God in, 301, 305; on God’s otherness, 151; Scharlemann’s critique of, 344–45 being: “the being of God when God is not being a God”, 303, 304–305, 358, 384, 400; depth of, 80, 196, 197, 201, 204, 211, 216–17, 220, 257, 259–60, 262–68, 271n41, 317, 350, 400, 426; distinguished from beings, 404; and existence, 327–28, 369n132; Heidegger’s forms of, 339; as phenomenological data, 329; subjectivity of, 325–27, 370n139; as substance of a thing, 335–36; symmetrical approach to, 206–207, 250, 261–62, 281n201, 349–50, 375n236, 429n23; temporality of, 303; and thinking, 161, 168, 367n90, 401 being for itself, 117n70, 147, 182n56, 192 being in itself, 117n70, 147, 182n56 being-itself, 80, 161, 196–97, 200–202, 204–207, 217, 237, 241, 264, 267, 270n31, 273n54, 383 biography, 84–85 Bloom, Harold, 10 body: absolute opposites of, 171–72; division of mind from, 181n52; separation between spirit and, 143–45 Böhme, Jakob, 260, 281n201, 428n11 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 396 Brahman, 163 Brahmanism, 233 Braun, H.: God in, 342–43 Buber, Martin: on I Am, 307, 365n72, 374n227; I-thou relationship in, 285, 294, 295, 297–300, 324, 346, 351 Buddha: significance of, 33 Buddhism, 233; nirvana in, 368n112; sunyata in, 62, 261–62, 281n201,

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Index 441

282n202, 367n105, 368n112; uniqueness of, 48–49; “whole” in, 429n21 Buddhist ethics, 1, 2 Bultmann, Rudolf: existential interpretation of, 37, 52, 306; on Resurrection, 340–41, 364n53 categorical imperative, 22–25, 29, 424 Catholicism, 17; apostolic succession, 36, 37, 55–56, 381 certainty: Hegel’s quest for, 128, 135, 146–47, 149, 158, 160, 164, 167–69, 190, 205, 304, 382, 383; historical, 9–11, 70, 157, 167–68, 198, 285–86, 293; Paul’s quest for, 130; quest for, 14, 15, 38, 52, 125, 127–28, 175, 190–91, 286, 378, 381, 427n4; Scharlemann’s quest for, 290–92, 316, 345–46, 382–84, 394; Schleiermacher’s quest for, 58, 98–99, 382, 383; in sciences, 148; self-certainty, 324–25; supernaturalists’s quest for, 109n7; Tillich’s quest for, 198, 204, 206, 207–209, 223–24, 231–32, 245, 251, 257–58, 382, 383 Chang, Garma C. C., 282n202 Christ of faith, 6, 10, 35, 48–52, 191, 193, 293 Christian ethics, 1–2, 13; Schleiermacher on, 58–59, 107, 108 Christianity, 377–78; absolutism in, 9–11; European forms of, 16–17; evolution of, 170; metaphysics of, 24–25; minimization of traditional doctrines of, 59, 77; post-World War II, 177–78; and reason, 13–14; superiority of, 163–64, 186n107, 389; true monotheism in, 75; uniqueness of, 48–56, 65–67, 70–71, 81–83, 85–86, 97, 106 Christology, 378–79, 418; from above/ from below, 6; based on analogy of image, 205; Hegel’s, 126–27,

21_0142_Clark.indb 441

141–43, 151, 158, 164; Paul’s, 129–30, 132–34; post-World War I, 192–93; post-World War II, 177–78, 193; proleptic verification of, 378; Scharlemann’s, 342–45, 350, 355–57, 375n234; Schleiermacher’s, 55–67, 70, 83–89, 104, 107, 118n91, 158; Strauss on, 354; “two-natures”, 86–88, 91–97, 119n99, 120n121, 121n131, 141–43, 173, 205, 384, 397–99, 403–404, 414 the church: positivity of, 136–37, 145– 46; rituals of, 188n118 Clarke, Samuel, 13 coercion, 5 cognition, 152 Collingwood, Robin George, 52 concupiscence, 220, 239, 241, 242, 247, 252 conscience: of Abraham, 324–25; Heidegger’s call of conscience, 325 consciousness, 42n13, 324, 388; in Altizer, 404; in Hegel, 148; primary functions of, 55, 71–74, 107, 116n62; in Sartre, 182n56; Schleiermacher on, 390; Schleiermacher’s forms of, 67, 77–81; spirit as development of, 374n223 consubstantiation, 179n16, 188n118 conversion: and autonomy, 96–97 correlation, 195, 271n34; of God as being-itself, 196–97, 200–202, 205, 217, 241, 264, 267, 270n31; of symbols with concepts, 197, 198, 200–202, 392–93 corroboration, 10, 12, 14, 18–19, 126, 157, 164, 167–69, 178, 190–91, 198, 253, 285–86, 396–97; by analogy of being, 213–14; by analogy of image, 214, 227–30, 236; by believer’s common experience of faith, 55–57; criteria for, 381–90; Hegel’s approach, 379; religious attempts to, 32–41; Scharlemann on Tillich’s approach, 288–92; Scharlemann’s

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442

Index

approach, 331, 345–46, 354–55, 366n88, 380; Schleiermacher’s approach, 57–67, 70, 107, 379; Tillich’s approach, 198, 262–63, 267, 293, 321–22, 379 creation, 234, 303 critical history, 165 Cross of Christ, 367n109; Scharlemann on Tillich’s idea of, 280n186, 288– 92, 335; as second-level symbol, 288–92, 318–21; as ultimate symbol/ criterion of religious truth, 195, 198, 199, 207, 256–62, 270n30, 280n188, 317, 355–56, 380, 389 Crossan, John Dominic, 6, 184n84, 315–16, 381; redefinition of Incarnation, 51, 378 Crucifixion, 71, 95, 130, 248; in Hegel, 158, 403; in Jüngel, 403–404; in Paul, 283n213; in Scharlemann, 291, 318–19 Cullman, Oscar, 269n17 Dasein, 332, 339–40, 350–52, 368n113, 373n216, 388 Daub, Karl, 317 death, 185n87, 368n111, 373n216; anxiety about, 202–203, 212, 245, 273n61, 351; being-unto-death, 325, 350–52, 371n174, 382, 388; as metaphor, 374n224 death of God, 192, 308, 423; in Hegel, 159–60, 172, 403; Scharlemann on, 365n79 democracy, 157 depth of being, 257, 259–60, 262–68, 379, 382, 383, 393, 394, 400 depth of truth, 315–23, 346–48, 358, 367n94, 389, 402, 426 Descartes, Rene, 99, 104, 125, 223–25, 272n52, 275n89, 323, 381; on “I”/ self, 301, 302, 324, 331, 382 destiny, 242–43, 260 dialectic, 149, 155, 166, 170, 171, 176; critique on, 183n63, 185n98, 186n108, 195

21_0142_Clark.indb 442

Dilthey, Wilhelm: forms of reason of, 328; “reflexive awareness” of, 114n38 divinity, 10–12, 18, 40–41, 48–51, 66, 71, 86–88, 91–98, 119n99, 121n131, 141–43, 173, 179n13, 384, 397–400, 405; divinity recognizes divinity, 140–41, 174 Docetism, 90, 91, 93, 97–98, 100, 119n99, 120n123, 218, 388–89 dogmatic theology, 15, 43n16, 68, 112n20, 272n44, 384–85 doing, 55, 68–69, 80, 117n77; as primary function of human mind, 71–74 double negation: in Hegel, 155, 159–60, 256–57, 321, 394; in Nicholas of Cusa, 301–302; Scharlemann on, 300, 394, 416; in Tillich, 195, 256–62 doubt, 324 duty, 29–30, 277n125, 422, 424 Dworkin, Ronald, 21, 42n8 dynamics/form, 242, 243 Ebeling, Gerhard, 309, 310, 364n53 Ebionitism, 97–98, 119n99 ecstasy, 12, 281n193, 287, 323, 327, 329, 332–34, 379, 382, 393 Eliade, Mircea, 274n63 embodied self, 332, 349 embodiment, 12, 32, 167–68, 177–78, 277n119, 291, 327, 387–88; in Hegel, 169; in Kant, 126; in Scharlemann, 289, 349, 354, 356, 381; in Schleiermacher, 388; in Tillich, 255, 321–22, 388 emptiness (sunyata), 62, 261–62, 281n201, 282n202, 367n105, 368n112 Enlightenment, 13–14, 16, 17, 22, 112n24, 124, 190 equal liberty, 20 essence, 161, 195–96, 202–203, 223, 244, 245, 249–50, 254–55, 273n59, 387, 429n25; and paradox, 246

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Index 443

estrangement: definition of, 278n138, 328; of existence, 194–96, 200–203, 219, 233–37, 263, 271n39, 359, 415; forms of, 239–42, 252–53; with God, 238–39, 267; of human from God, 206; between humans, 243; of Jesus, 222, 247–48; of Jesus from God, 220–21, 247 eternal/eternity: within historical, 124– 25, 127, 135, 155, 157–58, 171, 175, 378, 390; in Tillich, 273n59 ethical reason: distinction between acoluthetic reason, 334 ethics, 7–8; notion of, 8–9; and political justice, 409–10; Schleiermacher’s notion of, 68; universal role of, 4 exclusivity: vs. inclusivity, 418–25 existence, 37, 161–62, 194–95, 202– 203, 233–34, 371n177; authentic existence, 338; and being, 327–28, 369n132; estranged, 194–96, 200– 203, 219, 233–37, 263, 271n39, 359, 415; of God, 18, 399–400; personal and nonpersonal existence, 327. See also Dasein expressionism, 224–27, 271n36, 281n193 exstantial self, 294, 308, 325, 330–34, 336, 343–44, 349, 356, 370n159, 386, 388, 394, 398; and temporality, 339 Fackenheim, Emil, 364n52 faith: and analogy of image, 230–32, 245, 251–52, 288–92; believer’s common experience of, 55–57; content of, 265; correlation between understanding and, 264; and estrangement, 234–35; knight of faith of, 290, 312–14, 338, 363n52, 394–95, 409; as a mode of thinking, 328–30; relation to “I Am”, 337–39; and understanding distinguished, 428n17 Farneth, Molly; critique of Hegel, 160, 386; on Hegel’s social ethics, 157

21_0142_Clark.indb 443

feeling: in Hegel, 126; as highest consciousness, 80–81; notion of, 107, 113n27, 114n38; as primary function of human mind, 71–74; in Schleiermacher, 59–64, 68–69, 71, 73, 76, 96, 97, 103–105, 107–108, 265, 382–84, 410 feeling of absolute dependence, 11–12, 59, 68–70, 73, 75–81, 106–107, 117n70, 382–84 fetishism, 74 Feuerbach, Ludwig: idea of projection, 211, 227, 273n60, 418 Fichte, Johan Gottlieb, 14, 43n14; Absolute I of, 152; consciousness in, 42n13; five types of worldviews of, 151–52; influences on Hegel, 146; on self, 156, 331–32; on speculative reason, 136 finite/finitude: Scharlemann on, 159, 403; Tillich on, 202–203, 218–19, 232, 242, 270n31; and truth relationship, 404–405. See also infinite fishers of men story, 405, 406–407 Flay, Joseph C.: critique of Hegel, 164, 168–69, 175, 183n63 following. See acoluthetic reason forensic justification, 175, 195, 227, 236, 246, 253–54, 267 Foucault, Michel, 63, 178n2 free concrete mind, 148 freedom, 179n12, 423; in Hegel, 128, 137, 156–57, 161, 163; and I, 325–27; Jesus’s emphasis on, 136, 139; Jesus’s exercise of, 219–20, 235–36; loss of, 411; in Paul, 131– 32; reciprocity between dependence and, 68–69; in Sartre, 368n113; and Spirit, 391, 392; in Tillich, 196; and truth, 337–39, 359–60, 372n197 freedom/destiny, 242–43, 260 freestanding principles, 3, 4, 56, 158, 177, 268, 378–79, 403, 425–26, 430n56; notion of, 19–21 Freud, Sigmund: notion of religion, 7 Friedrich, Carl, 23

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444

Index

Gadamer, Hans-Georg: critique of Schleiermacher, 119n110 Gentiles, 132, 178n1, 220, 247 Germany, 383; Third Reich, 175–77 God: attributes of, 397–401, 418; in Augustine, 216; Christ, Spirit, and, 179n24; as correlate of being-itself, 196–97, 200–202, 204, 205, 217, 241, 264, 267, 270n31; death of, 159–60, 172, 192, 308, 365n79, 403; existence of, 18, 399–400; Gautama Buddha on, 49; in Hegel, 143, 147, 170–71, 183n64, 293; “history of God”, 162–63; instantiation by naming, 297–305; in Kant, 182n58; in Luther, 147; naming, 417; as “not-I”, 302, 317–18; as “not-other”, 301–302; as “not-this”, 302, 318; otherness of, 150–51, 287, 303, 304, 317, 327, 342, 345–50, 357–58, 375n236, 383, 384, 394, 404, 416; reunion with, 256–62, 282n206; in Scharlemann, 200, 342–43, 347–50, 357–59, 380, 383–84, 389, 398, 400, 416; slave mentality towards, 131, 138–39, 141, 145, 385; as Spirit, 128, 379; in Tillich, 196, 215–16, 200, 220, 223–24, 269n10, 271nn33, 41, 349–50, 379, 383, 400; and word, 358–59, 383, 394 God-consciousness, 67, 68–70, 72–73, 78, 99, 191, 383, 388, 415; absolutely potent God-consciousness, 81, 83–89, 99–100, 106–107, 119n111, 120n123, 191, 379; origins of absolutely potent Godconsciousness, 89–97, 118n91; and “whence” of one’s being, 76 “God is”, 294, 301, 302, 305–15 “God is Jesus”, 308–309, 312, 314, 315, 367n94, 399–400 Godlessness/God-forgetfulness, 78, 94, 95, 98, 99, 235, 415 Gospel(s), 37, 50, 70–71, 85, 88, 109n5, 116n57, 187n118, 365n72, 374n228,

21_0142_Clark.indb 444

406–408; expressionist style of, 225; “I am” in, 369n125; images of Jesus in, 226, 227, 279n158; of John, 83, 86, 99, 106, 110n10, 116n57, 119n97, 219, 221, 227, 326, 400; of Luke, 326, 355, 360, 368n125; Luther’s approach to, 291; of Matthew, 70, 408 government/state: separation of religion and, 15–16, 127, 426 Greek moral philosophy, 420 Greek religion, 233; and freedom, 137, 163 Hallie, Philip: Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, 310 hamartetic self, 336 Hamilton, William, 404 Harnack, Adolf von, 193 heart, 40 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 11, 39; absolute speculative idealism of, 14, 50, 126, 128; autonomy in, 385, 386; concept of concrete concern, 367n97; critique of, 149–50, 154, 159–62, 164, 168–69, 172–73, 175, 183n63, 185n95, 186n108, 194–95, 236, 277n119, 304, 341, 354, 368n111; ecstasy in, 323; faith in, 141, 181n39; feeling in, 126; forms of history of, 165–66, 187n117; on Germany, 175–76; God in, 143, 147, 170–71, 183n64, 293; God’s otherness in, 150–51; historical perspectivism of, 184n78; “history of God”, 162–63; influences of, 53, 161, 401; influences on, 127, 129, 135–36, 145, 151–52; as “ironist theorist”, 166–67, 182n55, 186nn108–109; on Judaism, 137–39, 141, 144, 145, 177, 180n37, 363n52; love/“what is” of, 29–30, 139–40, 379, 386; mysticism in, 126–28, 135–36, 167, 174–75, 183n65, 186n107, 190, 391–92; nonbeing in,

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Index 445

161, 269n8; notion of Spirit, 137–46, 149, 162, 168–71; oscillation of, 149–51, 169, 175, 392; philosophy of religion of, 162–64; on positivity of Jesus and the church, 136–37, 145– 46, 180n29; reason and revelation in, 12, 382; religion in, 126–28, 163–64, 183n64; representations (Vorstellungen) in, 115n43, 127–28, 149–51, 275n92; thinking in, 153– 54, 173–74, 304 Heidegger, Martin: “being-unto-death” in, 325, 350–52, 371n174, 388; “being-with-others” in, 351; on call of conscience, 325; death in, 374n216; “forgetfulness of being” in, 301, 303; forms of being of, 339; freedom in, 338; self in, 323, 332, 336; thinking in, 329; unthought of, 302–303, 304, 401 henotheism, 117n68 heresies, 97–100, 119n99 Hermann, Wilhelm, 325, 359–60, 398 heteronomy, 5, 7, 27–28, 101, 228–29, 336, 378; conflict between autonomy and, 257, 283n210 Hinduism, 291; Hegel’s views on, 163, 185n102 historical criticism, 15, 52, 119n97, 124–25, 165, 166, 168, 190, 197, 274n77, 378 historical Jesus, 48–52, 70, 180n37, 190–91, 193; actuality and factuality of, 278n147, 288–91, 313, 346, 380, 400, 427n4; “Christ of faith”, 6, 10, 15, 35, 48–52, 88, 96, 191, 193, 252, 293; connection between God and, 124; historical evidence of, 6, 10, 50–52, 106; reconstruction of, 83–91, 106, 169–70, 174; Tillich on, 229–30 historical method, 406; Scharlemann on, 288, 291–92; Semler’s, 109n6; verification of Christology, 9–11, 18, 184n84, 286, 291–92, 377–78, 381;

21_0142_Clark.indb 445

verification of life of Gautama, 50; verification of life of Jesus, 6, 50–52, 106 historical theology, 14, 15, 68, 112n20 historical uniqueness, 47–48, 84; of Buddhism, 48–49; of Christianity, 48–56, 65–67, 70–71, 81–83, 85–86, 97, 106 history: end of, 160, 167; and eternal, 124–25, 127, 135, 155, 157–58, 171, 175, 378, 390; forms of, 165–66, 187n117; philosophy of, 164–67 Hoffer, Eric: concept of true believer, 411 hubris, 239–42, 252, 385 human brain, 79–81, 135, 171, 201; after death, 351–52; interchangeability of mind and, 181n52; size of, 180n26. See also mind human evolution, 192, 201 human nature, 89–97; antithesis of, 83–89; Tillich’s idea of, 221, 223 human sciences, 17, 178n2, 268n3 humanity: “better life”/“more life”, 91–92, 215, 410, 412–16; in Judaism, 139; unity between God and, 141–42, 163–64, 171, 262, 382, 392 Husserl, Edmund, 340; forms of reason of, 328–29 “I Am”, 307, 325–27, 333, 354–55, 365n72, 79, 369n125, 374n227, 382, 408; and faith, 337–39 “I ought”: vs. “I will”, 28–31 idealism, 40–41, 52; absolute, 72–73, 158; critical, 14, 15, 72; speculative, 14, 50, 126, 128, 317; theological, 53 identity: question of, 282n206, 310 idolatry, 258, 418 imitation of Christ, 131, 134 immediate self-consciousness, 68–69, 73, 75–81, 99, 106, 158–59, 194, 415; and science, 100–102

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446

Index

impressionism, 224–26 Incarnation, 125; Crossan’s redefinition of, 51, 378; embodiment as, 387–88; Hegel on, 127, 143, 169, 174–75 inclusivity, 40–41, 381–82, 388–90; in Hegel, 143, 145–46, 150, 389; in Rorty, 31; in Scharlemann, 285–87, 347, 389–90, 412, 416; in Schleiermacher, 57–61, 64, 81; in Tillich, 267, 280n186, 389; vs. exclusivity, 418–25 individualization/participation, 242, 243 infinite, 184n79; distinction between finite and, 143–45, 150, 166, 217–18; double negation of, 256–57, 304; within the finite, 63–64, 66, 69, 71, 81, 100–102, 106, 116n56, 120n121, 155, 190, 257, 316, 383, 390; and finite relationship, 380; incompatibility of finite with, 404; in Schleiermacher, 63, 65; in Tillich, 172, 209–10, 273n54; unity of finite and, 141, 142, 157–58, 163–64, 171, 174, 262 infinite self-transcendence, 203, 206–13, 237, 260 inscribed words, 183n68, 286–87, 294– 95, 316, 318, 340–41, 346, 349, 382 instantiation, 287, 302, 305, 314, 317– 18, 324, 331, 332, 382, 394; I-thou/ you, 297–300, 346; by naming, 297–305 intelligibility: single referent for, 168–69 invisible, 39 Islam, 75 I-thou/you relationship, 266, 272n53, 294, 297–300, 346, 351 James, William, 92; on religious experiences, 410 Jaspers, Karl, 363n33 Jataka, 109n5 Jefferson, Thomas, 16, 426 Jesus: as archetype/exemplary of humanity, 83, 95, 97, 120n123, 130,

21_0142_Clark.indb 446

235–36, 252; divinity and humanity of, 10–12, 18, 40–41, 48–51, 55, 71, 86–88, 91–98, 119n99, 121n131, 141–43, 173, 179n13, 219–24, 274n77, 384, 397–400, 405; estrangement of, 220–22; finitude of, 92, 218–19, 242; guilt of, 222, 248; maxim of, 82–84, 86–87, 89, 119n111, 221, 406; Messianic identification of, 48, 49, 53, 54, 132–33, 173, 194, 353–54, 381, 407–408; Paul’s knowledge of, 132–34; positivity of, 136–37, 145–46; sacrifice of, 204, 221, 238, 239, 256–62, 270n30, 318–19, 348, 356, 373n208; self-consciousness of, 65, 66; sinlessness of, 94, 222, 235, 246–47, 279n155; Spirit of, 36–37; temptation of, 88, 219–20, 223, 239, 242. See also historical Jesus Jesus the Christ, 32, 207, 218–19, 275n94, 316, 373n208, 397; as “center of history”, 195, 197, 255, 269n17, 280n179; equivalent symbols of, 361n12; estranged being in, 238–41; God, Spirit and, 179n24; historical-mythological/ historical-metaphysical claims about, 6, 14, 51–52, 55–56, 157, 315, 357, 377–78, 390, 415, 425; image of, 195, 222–27, 229–32, 261, 262, 307, 356–57, 380, 387, 389; in Paul, 129–35, 179n13, 245 John, Saint, the Apostle, 86 Jones, Jim, 412 Judaism, 233, 373n208; authoritarianism in, 131; hope for Messiah, 35, 48, 54–55, 90, 132–34, 319, 373n208, 381, 387; and Jesus, 70–71; loss of credibility, 175; not a forerunner to Christianity, 54, 63, 353; rejection of Jesus, 90, 96; Schleiermacher’s critique of, 65, 75; Spirit of Judaism, 137–39, 141, 144, 145; subjectivity of, 163

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Index 447

Jüngel, Eberhard, 398, 403–404 justice, 279n166; political conception of, 403 Kähler, Martin, 6 Kant, Immanuel, 79; autonomy in, 29; categorical imperative of, 22–25, 29, 182n58, 352, 424; critical idealism of, 14, 15, 72; critique of, 268n3; embodiment in, 387, 388; on evil, 45n34; on existence of God, 18; forms of reason of, 328; Hegel’s critique of, 137, 139; ideal in, 237; influence on Hegel, 135–36; on moral duty, 277n125; vs. of Nietzsche, 418–25; Nietzsche’s critique of, 25, 26, 423, 424; “radical evil” of, 44n32; religion in, 382; on symbol of Jesus’s Crucifixion, 44n33; on thinking, 125–26 Karamazov, Ivan, 411 kenotic Christology, 242 kerygma, 37–38, 213; Scharlemann on, 305–308, 340–42, 364n53, 366n88 Kierkegaard, Søren, 77, 168; on being, 335–36; critique of, 429n23; depiction of Abraham’s consciousness, 324–25; on divinity and humanity of Jesus, 405; idea of contemporaneousness with Christ, 258; on “Jesus was God”, 10, 50–51; knight of faith of, 290, 312–14, 338, 363n52, 394–95, 409; knight of infinite resignation of, 313 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 41n2 Klemm, David, 114n34 knowing, 55, 62, 68–69, 80, 117n77; as primary function of human mind, 71–74 Küng, Hans, 121n145, 188n118 labor, 329–30 language: Altizer on, 310; relativity of, 160, 167, 185n95; religious language, 52–53; Rorty on, 270n26,

21_0142_Clark.indb 447

402–405; Scharlemann on, 298–99, 309–10; Scharlemann’s third language, 318 Last Supper: Paul on, 134; symbolism, 140, 188n118 law: corroborating evidence in, 33–35, 82, 230; and ethics, 8; hearsay rules, 213–14; and morality, 42n8; “suspect” categories, 19 leadership: and following, 411–12 legal ethics, 7 Leibniz, Gottfried, 13 Lessing, Gotthold E., 124, 158, 175, 378, 390 Levitin, Daniel, 79–80 liberty: Rawl’s principle of, 20 literalism, 52, 203, 263 Locke, John, 2, 13–14, 35 love: and God, 308, 399; in Hegel, 139–40, 379, 386; in Paul, 131; selflove, 422 Luther, Martin, 110n10, 121n143, 227, 236; God in, 147, 267; on Gospels, 291; power of faith in, 332; Protestant Principle of, 159, 403; on subjectivity of the self, 324 Madison, James, 16, 426 Manichaeanism, 97–98 Marx, Karl, 269n8 Mary, Blessed Virgin, 188n118 master-disciple relationship, 326, 327, 369n126 medical ethics, 7 Messiah, 48, 49, 53, 54, 132–33, 173, 194, 353–54, 373n208, 381, 387, 407–408 metaphysics: of Christianity, 24–25; Kant’s views on, 23 metaphysics of infinity, 63, 124, 172– 73, 178n2, 190, 359, 395, 415, 420 mind, 40, 134–35; division from body/ spirit, 181n52; Hegel on, 148, 171; opposition of body and, 143–45; Tillich on, 201

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448

Index

miracle(s), 35, 99; Hegel on, 142–43; Schleiermacher on, 88, 90, 95, 118n91 monism, 150, 156, 173, 183n65, 419, 428n11 monotheism, 74, 75 monotonotheism, 216 moral faith, 210–11 moral guilt, 222, 248 morality: antilife, 25; “deontological”/ principle-grounded, 23; feeling visà-vis knowledge and, 71; and law, 42n8; in Nietzsche, 30 Moses, 138–39, 327; and burning bush, 304, 309–10; meeting with God before the Exodus, 307 mysticism, 12, 60, 125–26, 428n11; in Buber, 299; in Hegel, 126–28, 135– 36, 167, 174–75, 183n65, 186n107, 190, 391–92; in Paul, 129–35, 390, 395; in Scharlemann, 393–95; in Schleiermacher, 190, 390–91; in Tillich, 196–97, 250, 260, 263, 265, 267, 271n41, 281n193, 392–94 mythology, 115n45, 188n118, 357 natural religion, 17, 60, 109n6, 113n28, 136, 163, 268n2 New Being, 194, 197, 283n213, 388, 393, 398; correlate of, 201; definition of, 278n138; distinction between presence and expressions of, 243–44; finitude of, 218–23, 259–60; fragmentary transformation by, 195–96, 249–52; historical and nonhistorical views of, 233, 251; participation in, 252–53; as single image, 238, 247–48, 387; transformation of, based on analogy of image, 206, 224–31, 241–47 Nicholas of Cusa, 125, 297, 363n33; double negation in, 301–302 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 428n13 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 378; being in, 402; “death of God” in, 192; depth of

21_0142_Clark.indb 448

truth in, 402; freestanding principles in, 426; as “ironist theorist”, 186n108; morality in, 30; revaluation of values, 25–28; spirit in, 374n223; Tillich’s critique of, 278n137; understanding of spirit, 181n46; vs. Kant, 415–25 nihilism, 159, 175, 403 noematic reflection, 340 nonbeing: in Hegel, 161, 269n8; symmetrical approach to being and, 206–207, 250, 261–62, 281n201, 349–50, 375n236, 429n23; in Tillich, 201, 206–207, 211, 216–17, 282n201, 349–50, 379, 383 nonpersonal experience, 327 nonreligious ethics, 2, 18 Nörenberg, Klaus-Dieter, 275n87 not-being-self-caused, 68–69, 73, 75, 383 obedience, 283n210 object, 292, 293, 295–96; difference between symbol and physical object, 343–44; God not an, 293, 370n139, 380 objective self-consciousness. See sensible self-consciousness observation, 148, 182nn59, 61 ontological faith, 210 ontological phenomenology: of Scharlemann, 331 ontological polarities/polar opposites, 171–72, 242–43, 328 ontology: Scharlemann’s phenomenological approach to, 317, 322; of Tillich, 197, 204, 206, 208–10, 215–16, 218, 232–37, 239, 277n128, 316, 347 ontomythology, 123 ontotheology, 196–98 O’Regan, Cyril, 127 original history, 165, 187n117 original position. See veil of ignorance

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Index 449

panentheism/pan-en-theism, 64, 161, 185n98, 216, 258, 266, 322, 370n139, 385, 392 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 6, 315–16; “faith in faith” of, 11, 52, 232; historical approach of, 51–52, 184n84, 378, 381; on Resurrection, 51, 53, 286, 308, 352–53, 378, 399 paradox, 198, 205–206, 208, 215, 244– 46, 249, 257, 263, 267, 278n150, 379, 382, 388, 393 passing-beyond-self, 68–69, 72 Paul, Saint, the Apostle, 119n99, 179nn10–11, 14, 242, 364n53; “apostle to the Gentiles”, 178n1; on Christ, 179n13; Crucifixion in, 71; on death, 371n174, 374n224, 407; distortion of Psalms, 117n79, 278n129; divine plan in, 247; God in, 235; influences of, 94, 227; on Jesus the Christ, 245, 271n35, 283n213, 308; mysticism in, 128–35, 390, 395; Resurrection in, 87, 352 Pelagianism, 97–98 Pelagius, 109n6 personal existence, 327 Peter, Saint, the Apostle, 143, 241 phenomena: words as, 294 phenomenological data, 329 phenomenological ontology, 345–46, 408–409 philosophical history, 165–66, 169–70, 187n117 philosophical theology, 14, 15, 68 philosophy of history: Hegel’s, 164–67 philosophy of religion: Hegel’s, 162–64 Picht, George, 310; on thinking, 329–30 Pietism, 57–58, 70, 106, 109n7, 173, 379 piety, 61, 64–65, 71 Pinker, Steven, 79, 80 Plato: on soul, 39 pluralism, 419–21 polytheism, 74–75

21_0142_Clark.indb 449

practical reason, 22, 23, 74, 81, 103, 106, 107, 182n58, 296, 382, 384, 410 pragmatic history, 165 principle of difference, 20 Protestant principle, 159, 197, 204, 253– 54, 258, 276n115, 305, 403–406 Protestantism, 17, 389 Psalms, 94, 117n79, 278n129 psychological hermeneutics: Schleiermacher’s, 56–57, 69–74, 83, 106, 221 Pure Land Buddhism, 368n112, 389 pure reason, 22–23, 74, 79, 81, 103, 106, 107, 128, 296, 300, 382, 384, 410; Hegel on, 136, 147, 176 quantum physics, 430n39 Qu’ran, 368n112 Ramsey, Ian, 52–53 rationalism, 15, 50, 109n7; Hegel on, 162; Schleiermacher on, 57–59 Rawls, John, 426; hypothetical original position of, 19–21, 30; on justice, 403; on law and morality, 42n8; overlapping consensus of, 410; on political liberalism, 421 reason, 12, 385; and Enlightenment, 13–14, 17, 22; forms of, 330, 332– 35, 362n16, 385; modification of, 337–39; and religion, 62, 81, 382; and revelation relationship, 10, 136; thinking and forms of, 328–30 reason of following. See acoluthetic reason reconciliation, 130, 131, 133, 428n13; between God and humans, 163–64; in Hegel, 156, 158–59, 161, 386; and Judaism, 138; via love, 139–40 redemption, 395; necessity of, 94, 98; Schleiermacher on, 47, 54, 56–57, 59, 69–70, 81–83, 90–92, 96, 98–100, 173, 379 reflection: and acoluthetic reason, 412; corroboration by, 366n88; distinction

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450

Index

between reflexivity and, 295–96, 317, 335; in Hegel, 140–41, 150, 157–58, 174, 316; notion of, 152; schism of, 305–15, 360, 382, 400– 402; as sin, 118n80, 285, 345 reflective history, 164, 187n117 reflexive subjectivity, 152–55, 174 reflexivity, 155, 173–74; in Hegel, 316; notion of, 152–53; in Scharlemann, 154, 291, 295–96, 313, 315–22, 335, 360–61, 372n197, 380, 382, 385, 389, 400–402, 412–14, 416–17, 430n39 Reformation, 421 Reimarus, Herman Samuel, 17, 50, 124–25, 268n2 relational words, 285, 294–95, 297–98, 322, 410 relativism, 2, 18, 28, 295 religion: ambiguity of, 170; “civic” view of, 420; in classical times and medieval Christianity, 421; and ethics, 17–19, 25, 108, 127–28, 158, 177; as feeling, 11–12, 55, 58–65, 68–69, 71, 106, 126, 382; as form of culture, 270n17; Freud’s definition of, 7; in Hegel, 126–28, 136, 139, 162–63, 183n64; Hegel’s stages of, 163–64; historical uniqueness of, 47–50; notion of, 9; political manipulation of, 396; psychological hermeneutic approach to, 69–74, 106, 221; revealed, 152, 153; Schleiermacher’s kinds of, 74, 75; Schleiermacher’s stages of development of, 74–75; and science, 100–106; separation of state and, 15–16, 127, 426; as ultimate concern, 194, 197, 204, 206–13, 318, 319 religious ethics, 425; divisiveness between, 1–2, 6, 41n1, 377, 395, 420 Resurrection, 37, 133, 374n224; in Pannenberg, 51, 53, 286, 308, 352–53, 378, 399; in Scharlemann, 364n53; in Schleiermacher, 87–89,

21_0142_Clark.indb 450

95, 340–41, 353–54, 414; as symbol, 195, 223; in Tillich, 245, 258, 275n94 revaluation of values, 25–28 revelation, 12, 382; in Barth, 344–45; “final revelation”, 196, 204, 243–44, 254–55, 257–60, 379, 382, 393; and reason, 10, 136, 382 Romanticism, 57–58, 105, 112nn23–24, 116n56, 384; understanding of self, 150–51 Rorty, Richard: critique of Hegel, 166–68, 182n55, 184n78, 186nn108– 109; “final word” of, 160, 185n95; inclusivity in, 31; language in, 199, 270n26, 402–405; truth in, 358 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 50; on revelation vs. reason, 10, 382 Rubenstein, Richard, 175, 193, 310; critique of Hegel, 161, 185n98; freedom in, 196; on Tillich’s legacy, 270n27 sacrifice: of Isaac, 290, 314, 324–25, 363n52; of Jesus, 238, 239, 256–57, 259–60, 270n30, 319, 348, 356, 373n208; of one’s bodily existence, 280n185, 318–19 salvation, 253, 255, 260, 368n112, 395; self-salvation, 195, 246, 249, 251, 379, 417 sanctification, 58–59, 68, 73, 81–83, 107, 112n19, 115n42, 121n134, 379, 384 Sartre, Jean-Paul: on being in itself and being for itself, 117n70, 182n56, 218; on death, 371n174, 373n216; on freedom, 272n53, 368n113; on understanding, 369n135 Scharlemann, Robert P., 11, 39, 178, 268, 287–88, 379, 426; on absolute thinking, 154; acoluthetic reason of, 12, 294, 296, 330–32, 334–37, 382, 385; autonomy in, 385–87; on being, 369n132; on being and thinking, 161,

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Index 451

168, 367n90, 401; concept of identity of analogy of, 328; critique of Altizer, 404; critique of Kierkegaard, 395, 405; critique of Tillich, 238, 277n128; distinguishment between faith and understanding, 428n17; on existence, 369n132; on exstantial self, 331–34, 336, 343–44, 349, 356, 370n159, 386, 388, 394, 398; on faith, 289–91, 363n52; on freedom, 326, 337–39, 359–60, 372n197, 389, 414; on God, 200, 342–43, 347–50, 357–59, 380, 383–84, 398, 400, 416; on God as “not-other”, 301–302; on Hegel’s system as monism, 173, 183n65; on historical actuality and factuality, 278n147, 288–92, 313, 346, 380, 400, 427n4; on infinite subjectivity of human I, 403–405; on I-thou/you relationship, 298–300, 351; on kerygma, 305–308, 340–42, 364n53, 366n88; mysticism in, 393–95; Protestant Principle in, 159, 403–405; on reflection, 118n80, 285, 366n88, 400–401; on reflexive subjectivity, 154–55; on reflexivity, 152, 154, 291, 295–96, 313, 315–22, 360–61, 372n197, 380, 382, 385, 389, 400–402, 412–13, 416–17, 430n39; on refracted symbols, 343– 44, 348, 401; on silence, 311; on Tillich’s idea of the symbol of Cross, 280n186; on Tillich’s use of paradox and correlation, 198; on Trinity, 150–51; on uncommon singularity of the I, 324–25, 394; on word event, 293–94; on yes-or-no [yes-and-no] judgement, 281n196, 319, 346–47 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 35, 39, 57; autonomy in, 62, 384–86; conception of religion, 11–12, 55, 58–65, 68–69, 71, 106, 126, 382, 383; on connection between believers past and present, 47, 54, 56–57, 59, 67–68, 129, 381, 406; critique of, 93, 104,

21_0142_Clark.indb 451

107, 120nn121, 125, 194, 235, 236, 265, 268n6, 277n119, 341, 354; distinction between “faith in Christ” and “faith in Scripture”, 15; forms of reason of, 330; Hegel’s critique of, 126; inclusivity in, 388–89; on kinds of religion, 74, 75; life and work of, 110n18, 112n23; mysticism in, 190, 390–91; on positivity, 180n29; psychological hermeneutic conception of religion, 69–74, 106, 221; on redemption, 47, 54, 56–57, 59, 69–70, 91, 94, 96, 98–100, 173; on reflection, 140; soubriquet, 110n17; on stages of development of religion, 74–75; theological divisions of, 14–15, 43n16, 68–69; on uniqueness of Jesus, 54–56, 65–67, 70–71, 82–83, 106; on word, 286–87, 394 Schweitzer, Albert, 335; on Jesus as an enigma, 405; on Jesus as “Spirit”, 193; on Paul’s Christology, 129–30; on “will to live”, 30–31, 413; work on historical Jesus, 51 science(s): development of, 192, 421; of the Enlightenment, 124; and idea of certainty, 148; and literalism, 263–64; medical science, 274n75; and religions, 100–106 Scriptures: approaches to Scripture studies, 14, 50; and Christendom, 17; “faith in Scripture”, 15, 95 self, 150–51, 156; appearance of, 325–27; authentic self, 306, 332–34, 336–39, 353, 356, 359, 364n53, 387, 388, 414, 417; centered self, 238, 260, 266; Descartes on, 301, 302, 323–26; ecstatic, 287, 323, 327, 329, 332–34, 379, 382, 393; inscription of, 339–42; I-thou/you relationship, 266, 272n53, 294, 297–300, 346, 351; otherness of, 287; and reason, 328–30; Scharlemann on, 277n128, 323, 335–36; subjectivity of, 324–25, 369n135; Tillich on, 208–209

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452

Index

self-acceptance, 212–14, 237, 250, 253, 267–68, 379 self-caused, 73, 75–76 self-certainty, 324–25 self-consciousness, 148; God’s, 153–54, 158, 386 Semler, Johann, 14, 50, 109n6, 110n18 sensible self-consciousness, 68–69, 77–79, 99, 106; and science, 101, 102, 105 Sermon on the Mount, 139 Siddhārtha Gautama, 9; as Buddha, 48–49; historical evidence for, 50 silence, 310–11, 386, 395 Silk, Leonard, 42n6 sins, 90–92, 94, 118n80, 120n125, 131, 132, 233–34, 238, 246; saint and sinner/simul Justus et peccator, 185n99, 195, 237, 250, 252, 255, 267, 306, 382, 389; the Sin, 195, 221 social contract, 19–21, 30; necessity of, 422 Son of God, 18, 40–41, 48–51, 66, 71, 119n99, 173, 179n11, 248, 353, 377, 397 Son of man, 57, 70, 86–87, 119n99, 193, 354, 355, 368n125, 407, 408 soul, 39–40, 134–35 speculative idealism, 317; of Hegel, 14, 50, 126, 128 speculative philosophy, 156, 164, 168, 316 speculative reason. See pure reason Spinoza, Baruch, 60, 64, 115n45 spirit, 181n46; Tillich on, 201 Spirit, 98–100, 126, 271n41; God, Christ and, 179n24; in Hegel, 128, 137, 139–46, 149, 162, 168–71, 181n39, 379, 386, 391, 392; mystical union with Christ through, 129–30, 134; in Paul, 130–31, 134–35 Spiritual Presence, 195–96, 201, 214, 234–35, 237, 249, 253–55, 279n166, 282n206, 322, 386, 393

21_0142_Clark.indb 452

spiritual religion, 163 Strauss, David Friedrich, 17; critique of Hegel, 169, 236, 277n119, 341, 354; critique of Schleiermacher, 93, 104, 107, 120nn121, 125, 236, 277n119, 341, 354; on Resurrection, 340–41, 353–54 subjectivity, 267, 272n53, 369n135; of being, 325–27, 370n139; reflexive subjectivity, 152–55, 174; of self, 324–25 substance, 335–36 suffering, 185n98, 193, 194 supernaturalists/supranaturalists, 14, 50, 109n7, 162 symbol(s): correlation of concepts and, 197, 198, 200–202, 215, 392–93; criterion of, 199, 248, 256–62, 383–84; equivalent symbols of Christ, 361n12; of “Father”, 202, 206; reappropriation by political leaders, 177; and reflexivity, 416–17; refracted symbols, 343–44, 348, 401; relativity of, 315–22; Scharlemann on, 288–92, 318–21, 343–46, 354, 401; universality of, 344, 372n189. See also Cross of Christ symbolism, 140, 155, 156 Synoptics, 87, 88, 227, 291, 354. See also Gospel(s) systematic theology, 194–206, 267, 286, 331, 389; background of, 191–94 Taylor, Mark: critique on Kierkegaard, 429n23; on God, 283n212; on postmodernism, 188n121, 267, 375n236; reflexive subjectivity of, 152–53 teleological religion, 75 temporality: self as, 339–40 temptation: of Jesus, 88, 219–20, 223, 239, 242; of sex, 235 textuality, 340–42 thanking, 329–30

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Index 453

theism, 269n10; Scharlemann’s break with, 302–305, 321–22, 347–48, 383–85 theological idealism, 53 theology: and Christology, 342–45; rationalists and supernaturalists, 14, 50, 109n7; of Schleiermacher, 112n19; Schleiermacher’s divisions of, 14–15, 43n16, 68–69, 112n20; and science, 104 theonomy, 267, 280n183, 283n210, 379 theoretical reason. See pure reason thinking, 125–26; Hegel on, 153–54, 173–74, 304; Scharlemann on, 161, 168, 295, 367n90, 401; Scharlemann’s modes of, 328–30; subjectival and objectival categories of, 272n53; Tillich on, 271n32, 280n183 Tillich, Paul, 11, 39, 178; on artistic style, 204, 275n87; autonomy in, 385, 386; belief in, 207; “belief-ful realism” of, 195; concept of analogy of being and image, 213–32, 254, 263, 274n75, 275n87, 303, 388; critique of, 232, 238, 341; critique of Hegel, 161–62, 194–95, 269n8; critique of Schleiermacher, 194, 265; on culture and religion, 270n17; death in, 202–203, 212, 245, 273n61; dialectic in, 195; faith in, 206–13, 231–32, 234–35, 245, 251–52, 264, 283n213, 288, 318, 319, 329; forms of reason of, 330, 362n16; freedom in, 196; God in, 196, 215–16, 200, 220, 223–24, 269n10, 271nn33, 41, 349–50, 379, 383, 400; on human evolution, 201; idea of paradox of, 198, 205–206, 208, 215, 244–46, 249, 257, 263, 267, 278n150, 379, 382, 388, 393; on infinitude of Jesus, 218–19; influences on, 197, 258, 281n193; on justice, 279n166; knowledge and interests of, 269n19;

21_0142_Clark.indb 453

legacy of, 270n27; mysticism in, 196–97, 250, 260, 263, 265, 267, 271n41, 281n193, 392–94; on nonChristian religions, 204; on old being, 238–41; on omniactivity, 398; on polar and absolute opposites, 171–72, 242–43; on projection, 273n60; Resurrection in, 195, 245, 258, 275n94; revelation in, 196, 204, 243–44, 254–55, 382, 392; salvation in, 255, 260, 379; Scharlemann’s work on, 287; on symbol of Cross, 195, 198, 199, 256–62, 270n30, 280n185, 188, 317, 335, 356; on symbols, 197–202, 204, 206, 215, 248, 288–92, 343, 383–84; views against literalism, 52, 203, 263 Toland, John, 13 tolerance, 13–14 totality/whole, 60–69, 71, 73, 76, 96, 97, 103–105, 107–108, 120n123, 382–84, 391, 425 tragic guilt, 222, 248 transformation, 229–30, 232, 233, 236, 252–54, 321–22; based on analogy of image, 241–47; fragmentary, 249– 52; through words, 293–94 transubstantiation, 179n16, 188n118 Trinity, 77, 155, 184n78; in Hegel, 163– 64; in Paul, 133; validity of, 150–51 Tritheism, 133 trust: and acoluthetic reason, 410–11; and appearance of I, 325–27 truth, 281n196; depth of, 315–23, 346– 48, 358, 367n94, 389, 402, 426; and finite relationship, 404–405; freedom and, 337–39, 359–60, 372n197; and reflection, 305–16, 400–402; and symbols, 256–62, 367n109 ultimate concern, 194, 197, 204, 251, 267, 359, 383; faith as, 206–13, 264, 329 unbelief, 239–41, 249, 252

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454

Index

uncritical thinking, 295 understanding, 328–30, 369n135; and faith distinguished, 428n17; and freedom, 338 United States: Bill of Rights, 15–18; growth of conservative Christian groups, 194; stop-and-frisk law, 41n2; Supreme Court, 8 unity, 29–31, 60–61, 76–77; of divine and human, 141–42, 163–64, 171, 262, 382, 392; of finite and infinite, 63–64, 101–102, 155, 157–58, 174, 262; of Jesus with God, 206, 219–23, 238–39, 242, 256–57, 275n94; and reflexivity, 413; of subject and object, 318 universal ethic: need for, 1–3, 13; problem of, 3–6; religion as a ground for, 58, 123, 158, 356–57, 377–79 universality, 309–11

21_0142_Clark.indb 454

unthought: as form of deconstructing, 302–305, 401 Upanishads, 163, 398, 428n11 veil of ignorance, 19, 30 Vogel, David, 42n6 Wach, Joachim, 326, 369n126 Whitehead, Alfred North, 170, 389 will to live, 30–31, 413 word event, 293–94 word(s), 285–87, 292–95, 305, 346, 383; God and, 358–59, 383, 394; instantiation of, 317–18 World War I, 192–93 World War II, 177–78, 193 Yerkes, James: critique of Hegel, 149–51

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About the Author

W. Royce Clark, PhD, JD, is professor emeritus of Pepperdine University. He began teaching religion in college in 1961 in Portland, Oregon. He received his PhD from the School of Religion of the University of Iowa in 1973, with his dissertation being directed by the late Robert P. Scharlemann. During his thirty-one years with Pepperdine (1970–2001), Professor Clark taught undergraduate and graduate classes in History of Religions, Modern and Contemporary Christian Thought, and many courses in ethics as well as biblical studies courses and organized team-taught courses in Human Values and Introduction to Religion. After receiving his JD from Pepperdine School of Law in 1985, he taught courses in The Law of Religion and State. Beginning in 1986 he and two colleagues organized and taught a five-semester course of study in the “Great Books.” He has published in the areas of euthanasia, the legal status of religious studies in higher education, and postHolocaust theology and on particular religious thinkers, including Wolfhart Pannenberg, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Richard Rubenstein. Professor Clark participated in many professional societies and seminar groups, presenting papers on various topics such as the alteration of the ethics behind the criminal law “exclusionary rule,” the idea of reconciliation in Dostoyevsky, ultimate concern and Susan Sontag, and religious hermeneutics and constitutional interpretation, among other topics.

455

21_0142_Clark.indb 455

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