Contents
Cover
Books by Gary Dorrien
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface and Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Introduction: Kantian Concepts, Liberal Theology, and Post-Kantian Idealism
Imagining Modern Theology
Kantian Liberalism and Mediating Theology
Kantian and Hegelian Ordering
Ideal and Normative, Subjective and Objective
Chapter 2: Subjectivity in Question: Immanuel Kant, Johann G. Fichte, and Critical Idealism
Refashioning Enlightenment Metaphysics: Immanuel Kant
Pure Reason and the Bounds of Sense
Moral Religion Within the Bounds of Reason
The Kantian Legacy
Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, and Post-Kantianism
Chapter 3: Making Sense of Religion: Friedrich Schleiermacher, John Locke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Liberal Theology
Sense for the Infinite: Friedrich Schleiermacher
Spiritual True Religion
Christian Theology of Religious Feeling
John Locke, British Empiricism, and the Anglican Threefold Cord
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and English Romanticism
Chapter 4: Dialectics of Spirit: F. W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, and Absolute Idealism
Imagining Hegelian Idealism: Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel
Concept and Intuition: Hegel, Schelling, Kant, and Jena
Phenomenology of Spirit: Conception, Consciousness, Self-Consciousness
Spirit, Absolute Religion, Absolute Knowing
The Struggle for Recognition
Logic, Encyclopedia, Right
Hegelian Philosophy of Religion
Hegelianism
Chapter 5: Hegelian Spirit in Question: David Friedrich Strauss, Søren Kierkegaard, and Mediating Theology
Mediating Schleiermacher's Legacy
David Friedrich Strauss and Left-Hegelianism
History, Myth, and Hermeneutics
Becoming a Self: Sren Kierkegaard
The End as the Middle: The Fragments and the Postscript
Provoking Ridicule
Training in Christianity, Attack Upon Christendom
Chapter 6: Neo-Kantian Historicism: Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, Wilhelm Herrmann, Ernst Troeltsch, and the Ritschlian School
Ritschlian Theology
Adolf von Harnack and the Spirit of Liberal Protestant Theology
Wilhelm Herrmann, Ernst Troeltsch, and the Scope of Historical Criticism
Another Kind of Ritschlianism
Revelation as Freedom from History
Ernst Troeltsch: The Relativity of Christianity and the History of Religion
Political Ethics and Social Christianity
Chapter 7: Idealistic Ordering: Lux Mundi, Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, Hastings Rashdall, Alfred E. Garvie, Alfred North Whitehead, William Temple, and British Idealism
Lux Mundi and Liberal Catholicism
Getting Hegel and Personality Right: Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison
Idealistic Elitism: Hastings Rashdall
Liberal Evangelicalism: Alfred E. Garvey
Idealistic Ordering: William Temple
Organic Realism as Theology: Temple and Alfred North Whitehead
Chapter 8: The Barthian Revolt: Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and the Legacy of Liberal Theology
Fire Alarm of a Coming New World
Dialectic in the Service of Dogmatics
Refashioning German Idealism: Paul Tillich
Interrogating German Liberal Theology and Idealism
Dialectics of the Open Word
Chapter 9: Idealistic Ironies: From Kant and Hegel to Tillich and Barth
Idealism as White Supremacist Ordering
Deflating Idealism: G. E. Moore and the Analytic Turn
Idealism Fading and Embattled
Tillich and the Future of Idealism
The Neo-Kantian/Postmodern Barth: Realism, Idealism, and Dialecticism
Index
Books by Gary Dorrien
Logic and Consciousness
The Democratic Socialist Vision,
Reconstructing the Common Good
The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology
Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity
The Word as True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theology
The Remaking of Evangelical Theology
The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology
The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900
The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism and Modernity, 1900–1950
Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana
The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony and Postmodernity, 1950–2005
Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition
Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice
Obama in Question: A Progressive Critique and Defense
Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology
This edition first published 2012
© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dorrien, Gary J. Kantian reason and Hegelian spirit : the idealistic logic of modern theology / Gary Dorrien.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-67331-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Philosophical theology. 2. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804–Influence. 3. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831–Influence. I. Title. BT40.D67 2012
230.09′034–dc23
2011045996
For Cindy, Nelleke, Mike, Xan, Kevin, and Hannah, with affection and
treasured memories.
Preface and Acknowledgments
Until now, I lacked an answer for one of the nicest questions: “Which book of yours means the most to you?” Usually I stammered the truth – “I have no idea.” Otherwise I settled for an evasion – “The next one.” At last I have a real answer, because this book makes an argument about the thinkers and ideas that underlie modern religious thought as a whole.
My work ranges across social ethics and politics, on the one hand, and modern religious philosophy and theology, on the other. I am equally committed to these subject areas, having never tried to settle on one of them or even ranked one higher than the other. There is a disciplinary link between the fields of ethics and theology – theological ethics – but that is not where most of my work takes place. On the ethical side, I work mostly at the intersections of social ethics, social theory, and politics, and on the theological side, I work mostly in the branch of historical theology that deals with modern religious and philosophical thought.
I started this book with the idea of something analogous to my three volumes on The Making of American Liberal Theology, but soon I realized that I had too much at stake in this project to give it the encyclopedic treatment. Instead of tracking, in a multi-volume format, the history and variations of modern German and British theology, I went straight for an argument about the importance of Kantian and post-Kantian idealism in the founding of modern theology.
This decision reflects something about how I learned modern religious and philosophical thought, something about how I teach it, and something about my constructive perspective. In college, I cut my teeth intellectually on G. W. F. Hegel and Paul Tillich. Long before I had an inkling of a future in the academy or anything pertaining to religion, I was drawn to Hegel's theory of self-knowing Spirit arising through the realization of consciousness, an idea that, importantly to me, held a similar lure for Martin Luther King, Jr. But one day I realized that it was pointless to grapple any further with modern philosophers and theologians until I took on Immanuel Kant's critiques of reason. Kant is the single unavoidable thinker in modern philosophy, and one of the founders of modern religious thought along with Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Today, in the classroom, I find it impossible to teach almost any subject in religious thought or social ethics without spending at least two weeks on what the subject in question owes to Kant and Hegel. This interpretive and pedagogical standpoint underlies the normative argument that I make in this book – that progressive theology at its best is always buoyed with idealistic conviction and armed with a realistic brake on it.
Karl Barth enjoyed regaling his students with the story of how Hegel and Schleiermacher came up at the same time, Hegel eclipsed Schleiermacher when they lived, and Schleiermacher overtook Hegel, at least in theology, after they were gone. Usually Barth cautioned his students about their acquired liberalism, telling them that they lived in Schleiermacher's age and under his influence, whether or not they realized it. Sometimes he urged them to imagine what theology might have been like had Schleiermacher never existed. But I will argue that even Barthian theology is unimaginable without Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher.
This book is like my previous one for Wiley-Blackwell, Social Ethics in the Making, in that I held my students at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University chiefly in mind as I wrote it, especially my doctoral students. For me, it is always a high priority to help students grasp the story of the field they are entering. My understanding of it has been greatly enriched by working with three recently graduated doctoral students (Ian Doescher, Eboni Marshall Turman, and Christine Pae), and a special group of graduate students with whom I have worked closely (Nixon Cleophat, Preston Davis, Peter Herman, Dwayne Meadows, and Elijah Prewitt-Davis), and my current group of doctoral students: Lisa Anderson, Nkosi Anderson, Malinda Berry, Chloe Breyer, Babydoll Kennedy, Jeremy Kirk, David Orr, Tracy Riggle, Dan Rohrer, Gabriel Salguero, Charlene Sinclair, Joe Strife, Rima Vesely-Flad, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, Demian Wheeler, and Todd Willison. Blessings and thanks to all.
All my colleagues at Union and Columbia are superb colleagues and some are special friends; in the latter category I am especially grateful to James Cone, Roger Haight, Esther Hamori, Kelby Harrison, Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Brigitte Kahl, Paul Knitter, Serene Jones, Barbara Lundblad, Daisy Machado, John McGuckin, Christopher Morse, Aliou Niang, Su Yon Pak, Jan Rehmann, Mark C. Taylor, John Thatamanil, and Janet Walton. Many thanks to my editors at Blackwell for their skillful work, especially project manager and copy-editor Graeme Leonard and publisher Rebecca Harkin. And thanks to Diana Witt for another superb index.