Table Of Content(cid:2)
DIALOGUES BETWEEN
FAITH AND REASON
DIALOGUES
n
BETWEEN FAITH
AND REASON
The Death and
Return of God in
Modern German Thought
John H. Smith
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review,
this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in
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First published 2011 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, John H., 1954–
Dialogues between faith and reason : the death
and return of God in modern German thought /
John H. Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-4927-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8014-7762-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Death of God theology. 2. God (Christianity)—
History of doctrines. 3. Theology, Doctrinal—
Germany—History. 4. Philosophical theology—
Germany—History. 5. Atheism—Germany—History.
I. Title.
BT83.5.S65 2011
231.0943'0904—dc22 2011000861
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(cid:2)
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: L ogos , Religion,
and Rationality 1
1. Erasmus vs. Luther: Philo- logos
vs. Faith 23
2. God and the Logos of Scientific
Calculation (Descartes, Spinoza,
Leibniz, Pascal) 45
3. Kant: The Turn to Ethics as Logos 68
4. Hegel: Logos as Spirit ( Geist ) 95
5. Logos and Its Others: Feeling, the
Abyss, Willing, and Kritik
(Schleiermacher, Schelling,
Schopenhauer, Feuerbach) 120
6. Nietzsche: Logos against Itself
and the Death of God 152
7. Being after the Death of God:
Heidegger from Theo- to
Onto- logos 175
8. Dialectical Theology (Gogarten,
Barth, Bultmann) 205
9. “ Atheistic” and Dialogical Jewish
Theologies of the Other
(Rosenzweig and Buber) 236
vi CONTENTS
10. Fides et Ratio: “Right Reason” and
Europe in Contemporary Catholic
Thought (Benedict XVI) 258
Bibliography 275
Index 293
(cid:2)
Preface
In 1966, the death of God made the front cover
of Time magazine—on Good Friday, no less. We have here not so much a case
that confirms Nietzsche’s madman’s point that it will take a while for the
news of God’s death to reach the masses. Rather, what sparked the cover story
was in fact the return of theology in the form of a North American move-
ment called “death-of-God theology.” In a more academic forum—namely,
his extensive study of atheistic philosophies and Christian apologetics in the
seventeenth century—Hans-Martin Barth begins with a reference to the
disappearance and return of discussions about God’s existence:
In the Preface to the first edition of his complete works in 1846 Lud-
wig Feuerbach wrote: “The question of whether God exists or not,
the opposition of theism and atheism, belongs to the eighteenth and
seventeenth centuries, not to the nineteenth.” Not to mention the
twentieth—, one could logically conclude. Amazingly, however, the
question of God has been the focal point of an intense theological
discussion for nearly a decade. What a philosopher of the last century
could consider over and done with for at least a century, appears to
have found its way, with considerable delay, back into the field of vision
of contemporary theology. (13)
What Barth has in mind with this “return” of the question of God’s exis-
tence in “contemporary” discourse is, in fact, the same “death-of-God the-
ology” that made the cover of Time, for he encountered it during his studies
in the United States (at Harvard Divinity School) in the late 1960s. And so
this professor of systematic theology at the famed University of Marburg,
which had been part of a new movement to “save” Protestant theology and
rethink philosophy after the demise of Judeo-Christian values in the wake
of Nietzsche and World War I, himself must engage with a new movement
that takes as its explicit starting point the death of God. The goal of this book
is to provide a broad historical and intellectual context for these amazing
phenomena—the death(s) of God and his return(s).
vii
viii PREFACE
The divide between believers and nonbelievers, theists and atheists, has
been, and continues to be, perhaps the deepest one separating individuals
and groups. As we learned from the 2004 U.S. presidential election, in the
United States today the main predictor of voting patterns turns out to be
regular church attendance. “Red” and “blue” depict not just party affili-
ation by state but, more fundamentally, the divide between those who see
faith as central to all aspects of their lives and those who consider it a private,
if not irrelevant, matter. Certainly the opposition, both real and politically
hyped, between religious believers—such as “Christian” versus “Muslim” or
“Fundamentalists/Orthodox” versus “modernists/liberals”—can be deadly
serious. But the conflict within the realm of faith is different from that
between the secular and the devout. After all, for nonbelievers, there is always
a “pox-on-both-your-houses” sentiment lurking in the background, a sense
that the real problem lies with religion, or at least monotheisms, per se. And,
of course, for the religious nothing could be worse than those who profess
to challenge the foundation of religion as such.
The goal of this book, however, is not to take sides in this debate, as there
are enough polemics promoting proofs for the existence or nonexistence of
God. 1 It is not my interest either to support radical skepticism or to “dis-
place the secular economy” with a new theology.2 Rather, I will be arguing
that the two positions have in fact been historically interconnected for at
least four centuries. Specifically, I will be retracing the course of a “slip-
pery slope” that has led from belief to unbelief, from God to the death of
God, resulting not so much from attacks from the “outside” of religion as
from intellectual and philosophical developments w ithin modern Christian
theology. Many thinkers along this path who intended to support or at least
grasp the essence of Christian faith with reason ended up undermining it.
Paul Ramsey wrote in the preface to Gabriel Vahanian’s The Death of God in
1961 that “every revival of Christianity in the past three hundred years has
revived less of it” (xxiv), a claim I will be applying to mostly well-intended
theological and philosophical “revivals.” We know where the best intentions
are said to lead. The goal is to show how a certain logic in modern thought
about Christianity brought about both its own undoing and the seeds for
1. Hence, I will not take up Bertrand Russell’s call to atheism, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” as
does William Connolly in his Why I Am Not a Secularist. Nor will I address the strident new athe-
ists Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens (or even less strident
earlier ones such as Michael Martin).
2. See Phillip Blond’s introduction to P ost-Secular Philosophy (5).
PREFACE ix
a revival of faith from a new perspective. Stated in political terms, I’d like
to show people in the “red” state of mind how those in the “blue” came
to think as they do; and those in the “blue” how their position grew out of
“red” soil.
The notion of an ongoing “dialogue” over the past five hundred or so
years of Western (esp. German) thought between reason and faith presumes
two things about the very nature of dialogue. First, despite the contentious-
ness of the exchanges and despite the call from both sides to break off all
communication with the other, the past existence of a dialogue between
the two means that some form of common language must be possible.
Within the tradition of Christian theology and philosophy that is the focus
of this book that common basis resides in the very notion of l ogos, a rich
term variously translated as word, discourse, speech, reason, or calculation. It
forms the precondition of dialogue, a term derived from the Greek d ia-logos,
from dia-legein, meaning to speak through or across, to speak alternately.
After all, as we will see, logos is both the very foundation of Western con-
ceptions of rationality and, thanks to the early melding of Jewish and Greek
thought, the very beginning of Christian conceptions of God. Hence, in
these times of conflict between secularism and religiosity, Enlightenment
and piety, we can, I hope, benefit from the exploration of historical sites of
interaction, the attempts to “think through faith” (an intentionally ambigu-
ous formulation).
Second, it is valuable to recall an essential feature of all genuine conversa-
tion or dialogue that the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer highlighted in
his major study on hermeneutics as the art/science of achieving understand-
ing. He argued, namely, that partners in a dialogue who are interested in
generating new knowledge, as opposed to merely repeating what is already
known or to speaking past each other, do not so much lead the conversation
as they are led by it.3 If in a dialogue we are mutually open to what the other
is trying to say, we end up—hopefully—at a new place because we allow the
matter under discussion (l ogos ) to set the direction. In this case, the dynamic
of the “slippery slope” guides attempts within modern (German) Christian
thought to use reason to justify faith. I hope to encourage readers, even or
3. Gadamer writes on conversation: “To conduct a conversation means to allow oneself to
be conducted by the subject matter to which the partners in the dialogue are oriented. . . . What
emerges in its truth is the logos, which is neither mine nor yours and hence so far transcends the
interlocutors’ subjective opinions that even the person leading the conversation knows that he does
not know. The art of conducting a conversation, dialectic, is also the art of seeing things in the aspect
of unity” ( Wahrheit und Methode, 367–68).
