It's always a good experience for a grad student when you read something that makes you sit bolt upright. I'm the TA in Theology I this fall, and this week's assigned reading from Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith had me ramrod straight in my chair Monday.
After situating Christianity within the spectrum of world religions, Schleiermacher notes that Christianity naturally shares a historical connection with Judaism. The Redeemer couldn't appear anywhere else but among a monotheistic people, Schleiermacher maintains.
However...
First century Judaism wasn't some pure, undiluted Mosaic religion. It had imbibed from the Persians the idea of resurrection and final judgment. Moreover, within paganism there had developed a tendency toward monotheism among the Greek philosophers. And there's the strange circumstance that Gentiles found the Jewish Messiah more compelling than the Jews did. All these facts lead Schleiermacher to conclude
that the relations of Christianity to Judaism and Heathenism are the same, inasmuch as the transition from either of these to Christianity is a transition to another religion...
And
We shall certainly find quite as near and accordant echoes in the utterances of the nobler and purer Heathenism (as we find in the Jewish prophets); as indeed the older Apologists were no less glad to appeal to what they held to be Heathen Messianic prophecies, and thus recognized that there is a striving of human nature toward Christianity. (emphases mine)
I recall from Schleiermacher's biographer that one of his "ordination exams" was on Justin Martyr. Justin, you may recall, was bold enough to call Socrates a gentile Moses, and asserted that the philosopher must have encountered Judaism at some point; otherwise, where would he have got all that wisdom? Schleiermacher seems to have jettisoned Justin's dubious history but embraced his esteem for Greek philosophy with a vengeance.
I can't recall a religious endorsement of secular wisdom framed in quite these terms, and if I were Jack Aubrey, I might ask if he weren't "coming it a trifle high."
Both Origen and Augustine justified using the tools of pagan philosophy to construct Christian theology by likening it to the Israelites plundering the Egyptians. But Schleiermacher seems to regard pagan treasures as not needing any polishing, much less melting down and recasting.
These days, every Christian intellectual fancies him or herself as a cultural critic. So do I, I suppose, even though my lifestyle testifies that I'm as captive to the culture as anyone. Perhaps for that reason alone I should welcome Schleiermacher's positioning of Christianity as equidistant from Athens and Jerusalem. Here's a world-affirming theology that lets me of the hook! But the utter failure of the German Church to distinguish between the kingdom of God and the Kaiser's kingdom, which was the catalyst for Karl Barth's No to all general revelation, looms like a dark shadow over Schleiermacher's sunny and urbane appreciation for the secular. No one wants to be on the wrong side of that fight, should it ever be fought again.
Which brings us to the whiff of anti-Semitism I detect here. Not that you can lay the Holocaust at Schleiermacher's feet, any more than you can lay the excesses of capitalism at the Puritans' feet. But I had it pounded in me in my first go-round of theological education that, in this post-Final Solution world, the solution to Christian anti-Semitism is to rediscover the Jewishness of Jesus and repudiate supercessionism. Gentile Christians are the wild olive branch that God has grafted onto the domesticated Jewish branch, says Paul. We're muscadines; they're Chateau Lafitte. Through faith in Jesus we are Abraham's children, say Paul. But the Jews are Abraham's children by birth. They're the biological children. We're the foster kids that the parents have graciously let into the house. All this led Krister Stendall (a Lutheran, no less!) to famously say that the meaning of the doctrine of justification is that we gentile Christians are but honorary Jews.
Schleiermacher has raised Mars Hill to the level of Mount Zion. Or has he brought Mount Zion to the level of a molehill? My fear is that, in amending John 4:22 to read, "Salvation is from the Jews (and the gentiles too!)," Schleiermacher gives warrant to the same hard-heartedness that results from our perpetual failure to quote Mark 14:7 in full. American Christians aren't anti-Semitic by any means. But a soft anti-Jewishness pervades Christian preaching and lay people's understanding of what we call the Old Testament. This leads me to question whether or not today we can profitably think about the relationship between faith and reason, the sacred and the secular, Jew and Gentile, Jew and Christian, Old and New Testament, in Schleiermacher's terms.
All that said, there's something tantalizing about Schleiermacher's words. I take it that there's more than an antiquarian interest Schleiermacher's blessing of the "nobler Heathens." I take it that this is a statement about the relationship of the religious to the secular, which may offer a corrective to what I see as some wrongheaded thinking in the Church about the World.
The current spirit of cultural criticism leads Christians of all stripes to redefine the secular as the profane. Conservative evangelicals demonize modern science, while post-liberals demonize liberal democracy, all the while sucking at their teats. But what if Christ, who doesn't abolish but fulfills the prophets, also doesn't abolish but fulfills evolutionary theory? Or social contract theory? Is there room in our stained glass windows for Charles Darwin and John Rawls? It's an interesting idea--one that committed secularists would find as repugnant as sectarian Christians.
Naw. Put that way, such a move would be an over-correction. Redefining the secular as the sacred, as Barth warns us, may be even worse than redefining the secular as profane.
Robert Markus maintains that Augustine saw the need for a genuinely secular sphere acting as a buffer between the sacred and the profane, but partly by choice and partly by necessity the secular withered in the hands of his early medieval successors. So, are there any Augustines among us who neither love nor hate secularism?
And with that question (if you're still reading this post), I turn it over to you: Are Mars Hill and Mount Zion like the Middle and Grand Teton, two excellent peaks in the same range? Or not? What say you?
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