Lecture Seventeen -- Kierkegaard's Paradox

Scope:

In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard challenged modern conceptions of religion by stressing God's transcendence. Focusing on the issue of revelation, Kierkegaard discusses how the eternal God breaks into human history to give us not just salvation but also the "condition" by which we receive this salvation. In other words, faith is not a human capacity but itself a gift from God. Through an examination of the idea of "paradox," Kierkegaard explains how reason tries to "grasp" God's gift, how because of sin, it cannot accept the gift of faith. Kierkegaard also gives an account of the "teacher," that is, Jesus, and the idea that it is our encounter with the teacher, not any particular teaching, that grants us the condition an the salvation. In this way, Kierkegaard rejects the religious significance of the historical study of Jesus and the gospels.

Outline

I. Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments poses the question of whether there is a historical point of departure for eternal consciousness.

A. He states the question as a hypothesis or "thought experiment" in the opening pages: What would have to be the case if truth were not Socratic, if our consciousness of salvation is made possible by a historical event, a god coming into time?
1. Kierkegaard sets up a contrast between Socratic pagan philosophy and Christian theology.
2. Socrates believed that the soul is immortal and that it was continually reincarnated. However, with each
incarnation, the truth it had held from eternity was forgotten; thus, we need a teacher who will spark our memory of the truth.
3. In contrast, for Christians, the truth comes from outside, through an encounter with God: It has to be given to us; it has to be revealed at a particular point in time.

B. But there is another way to look at this contrast: The name "Socrates" in the book stands not only for pagan philosophy but for the approach to truth and religion that one finds in the Enlightenment and in Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher.
1. In general, this approach focuses on our access to truth through reason and experience: We find, discover, and reason to the truth.
2. This approach also examines religion f'rom a human perspective: We can reason to God, or as in Kant, reason to faith in God, or as in Schleiermacher, see that God is a natural part of our experience.
3. For most of Kierkegaard's major contemporaries, even
the Christians, as for Socrates, ultimate truth, what we might call religious truth, is something that human beings basically contain in themselves and basically can realize by themselves.
4. But Kierkegaard wants to explore a different possibility — that ultimate truth is a gift and it comes to us from a transcendent source — by breaking into our lives and our history from outside.
5. Even the capacity for receiving the truth, for recognizing the truth when it is right in front of us, is a gift.

C. This is a much more traditional way of thinking about ultimate truth, about revelation and faith, than we find in the defenders of modernity.
1. Although we were created to be in communion with the truth — with God — we lost this gift through sin; as a result, we needed to be given the truth again in Jesus.
2. This salvation is not available to human beings except through Jesus.

II. For Kierkegaard, God gives us both the truth and the capacity, or the "condition," for receiving the truth: faith.

A. This is basic Protestant doctrine: That is, God not only gives us salvation as a free gift of grace, but he gives us the faith with which to believe that we are saved.
1. Luther's justification by faith does not mean that faith is a kind of achievement on the basis of which we are granted salvation.
2. Faith is a mode in which we are aware of and trust in God's saving grace.
3. As sinners, we are in a condition in which we need both the truth and the ability to accept it.
4. We are in a condition in which we do not want to see it.

B. Kierkegaard develops this idea of our refusal of the truth
through his exploration of the "paradox": that the eternal, ultimate truth has broken into the temporal to give us the truth and the condition for receiving the truth.
1. The problem is that our reason takes "offense" at the paradox, will not accept it.
2. Reason is a passion that always wants to know what is unknown and will not stop its pursuit of the unknown even in the face of paradox.
3. But God is unknown, is the "absolutely different," and in its persistent efforts to know God, reason domesticates God, makes of God something that will serve human interests.
4. Reason's passion is bound up with our sinfulness, with
our insatiable need to master or control through explanation and definition.

C. Kierkegaard argues that reason must recognize its limits and surrender to the paradox.
1. We cannot comprehend the difference of the absolutely different; it must be revealed to us.
2. T o happily accept the paradox is to have faith.

III. Faith is a kind of love

A. One reason it is so hard to believe that the god would have entered time to save us is that it contradicts human self­ understanding and orientation in the world.
1. As sinners, we do not believe we deserve God's love.
2. As sinners, we cannot imagine the kind of self-sacrificial love we see in the death of Jesus.

B. Faith is not controlled by reason or will; it is more like a gift that is given to us.

C. Faith is a kind of falling in love with Jesus Christ.
1. This encounter can happen whether we happen to be what Kierkegaard calls a follower at "first hand," someone who lived at the time of Jesus Christ and actually encountered him, or a follower at "second hand," living, perhaps, 1844 years after the crucifixion.
2. It is not, first of all, a matter of knowing Jesus Christ because a direct witness to his life may not actually "encounter Jesus," that is, believe that he is God.
3. Something in the encounter, the condition, makes it possible for the person to take a leap of love and trust and receive the paradox as paradox.

Suggested Reading:
Kierkegaard, Swenson, Thulstrup, and Hong, Philosophical Fragments.
Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century.

Questions to Consider:
1. How does Kierkegaard's view of the Socratic approach to ultimate truth apply to modern philosophical treatments of religion?
2. How, for Kierkegaard, does reason express human sinfulness?


Lecture Seventeen — Transcript
Kierkegaard's Paradox

In our first lecture on Kierkegaard, I suggested that his approach to writing and philosophy set him apart &om thinkers such as Kant and Hegel, who were devoted to aligning religion — and especially Christianity — with the modern age. Kierkegaard, by contrast, was a critic of Christian views that cohered too easily with the social, cultural, and intellectual commitments and assumptions of modernity. To make this point, the first lecture focused on the book Fear and Trembling to examine what Kierkegaard calls the "absurdity of faith." I pointed out that we should be careful to understand that Kierkegaard does not use the term "absurdity" in a pejorative sense, but it is equally important to note that Kierkegaard also does not use it to celebrate faith as irrational. Rather, this term indicates for him the limits of reason with respect to faith. It indicates that we cannot fully explain, using our reason, why and how we are committed to God.

Clearly, Kierkegaard makes great use of reason as a writer, and it is the case that he holds philosophy — at least certain kinds of philosophy — in high regard. But he uses reason and philosophy to make the point, a point that by its very nature cannot be fully defended rationally, the point that faith exceeds reason, and so escapes the judgment of reason — whether reason is imagined in Kantian fashion as the universal command to duty, or in a Hegelian sense of a more historical and social collective judgment. Kierkegaard's Abraham, as we have seen, stands alone before God in fear and trembling, unable to justify himself to his wife and his son.

In this lecture, I want to develop these claims about absurdity and faith in Kierkegaard in some more depth, and I want to do so by focusing on another of Kierkegaard's most famous texts, Philosophical Fragments, which Kierkegaard published in 1844­ the year after the appearance of Fear and Trembling. In my brief discussion of Kierkegaard's writing in the last lecture, I did not mention one of the most well-known aspects of many of Kierkegaard's most important books: He published them under pseudonyms. He published Fear and Trembling under the name of Johannes de Silentio, and Philosophical Fragments under the name of Johannes Climacus. We could devote a whole lecture to why Kierkegaard used pseudonyms and to explore the details of the particular names that he chose, but I' ll only make a couple of comments about this here. One reason Kierkegaard did this is that he wished to communicate with his readers in a manner he described as "indirect communication." That is, he was less interested in trying to persuade his readers of a single point of view, and particularly the point of view with respect to faith in each of these books. He didn't want to persuade them so that this particular view was the right one. He was more interested in provoking his readers to thinking through these issues on their own. His books, then, are provocations. They' re spurs to thought. They' re not traditional philosophical or theological statements of how they are defending a particular point of view as the right one.

So, we have to be careful in attributing the ideas we find in books such as Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragmentsdirectly to Kierkegaard. Interestingly, though, in the series of the pseudonymous works, the book Philosophical Fragments is unique, for it is the only one where in addition to the author — in this case, Johannes Climacus — the title page also identified an editor, and the editor it names is S. Kierkegaard. Apparently, the original plan was to have the book published under Kierkegaard's own name, but it was given the pseudonym at the last moment before publication. This may suggest that it is closer than all the other pseudonymous works to Kierkegaard's "real position." In the end, though, however close one wants to argue that the books I am discussing are the "real" Kierkegaard, the main point is to keep in mind that in these books we find a conception of faith that raises productive and provocative questions about how we can think about religion and modernity, faith and suspicion. With these questions, Kierkegaard is one of the first major thinkers to challenge, in a substantial way, the mainstream of philosophical and theological reflection on religion as it had been established by Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.

In what follows, I want to trace the contours of this challenge. Philosophical Fragments is, even by Kierkegaardian standards, a complex work — in large part because it is a kind of parody of Hegelian philosophizing. There are some extremely dense and convoluted passages and sections that mimic Hegel's abstruse philosophical prose. My students are always going on and on about this book and sort of banging their heads against the desk — even as they' re having fun with it. But Kierkegaard does us the favor of posing the basic problem of the book in the form of a question on the title page. It reads: "Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness?" What does this question mean?

Kierkegaard restates the issue in the opening pages of the book when he asks another question: Can the truth be learned? This may seem like a question with an obvious answer, until we see that what is at stake in the book, for Kierkegaard, is the difference between two conceptions of truth and how we come to the truth. The first position Kierkegaard identifies with the Greek philosopher Socrates, and he presents it to us as a well-established philosophical position.

Socrates, who lived from 470 to 399 B.C.E. in Athens, is considered by many to be the origin of the great tradition of Greek philosophy that included Plato and Aristotle. However, Socrates did not write his philosophy, so most of what we know about it comes from Plato, who gave Socrates the starring role in his dialogues. Plato's Socrates was one of Kierkegaard's heroes. As I mentioned in the previous lecture, Kierkegaard wrote his dissertation on the concept of irony in Socrates. One of the central ideas of the Socrates we find in Plato's writing is that truth is not learned, but rather only remembered. Socrates believed that our souls are immortal — that each soul is continually reincarnated, and that in the period between death and reincarnation, the soul must drink from a river of forgetfulness, and so loses all memory of previous lives and what it knew during that life.

For Socrates, this meant that we always have the truth in us, and we only need a teacher — like Socrates — to spark the memory of it — that is, we don't learn the truth, we remember it. For this reason, Socrates called himself a "midwife" — that is, someone who assists with a birth, with bringing something that is inside out into the light of day — in this case, the truth that we can't remember, but then we can bring out and remember. Thus, the Socratic position on Kierkegaard's question — Can the truth be learned? — is "No, it cannot be learned, only remembered." Kierkegaard presents the second position on this question as a hypothesis, what he describes in the book as a "thought-experiment," and really the book is him playing out this thought experiment — though it quickly becomes obvious and serves as a kind of running joke through the book, though a serious joke, that this position on the truth is the Christian position. The basic position is this: Truth is learned, and it is given to human beings by God. More specifically, it is revealed to human beings by a God who takes human form. So, to go back to the question Kierkegaard poses on the title page of the book — eternal consciousness (that is, salvation) does have a historical point of departure, the point at which the divine enters history.

So, on one level, Philosophical Fragments is about the contrast between Socratic and Christian conceptions of truth and how the truth comes to us. But I want to suggest that much more than this is at stake for Kierkegaard — that the name "Socrates" in the book stands for more than pagan philosophy. Rather, it stands for the general philosophical approach to truth and religion that we find in thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher. What is it that connects them to Socrates? Let's back up just a bit. In past lectures, we have seen how Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel set the framework for 19th-century religious thought. These thinkers approach questions of rationality, history, and religion in different ways, but in the end each tries to show that religiousness is an integral part of human nature. For Kant and Hegel, religion is intimately connected to human rationality and human society neither of which can be fully realized apart from religion. For Schleiermacher, religion is intimately related to our existence as feeling, experiencing beings.

So we can know what religion is, what God is, not through revelation, but by thinking carefully about what it is to be human through a careful examination of human rationality and experience. In short, if we truly understand what we are, we will grasp the truth of religion. My point is that this is quite Socratic. Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel are not saying anything about reincarnation and remembering the truth in that kind of Socratic sense, But they are saying that the key to religious truth is to be found in human nature, and in that sense — as in Socrates — the truth is already in us: We don't need it to be revealed to us. Kierkegaard, though, wants to say something different — namely, that truth is a gift that comes to us from a transcendent source — breaks into our lives and our history from outside. Even more, and I' ll explain this as we go on, he will claim that even the capacity for receiving the truth­ what he calls the "condition," the condition for recognizing the truth when it is right in front of us — even this capacity is a gift. So, Kierkegaard is presenting us with a much more traditional way of thinking about ultimate truth, about revelation and faith, than we find in the defenders of modernity. His is a view that goes back to Luther and beyond that to a view of Christianity shared by most in the tradition before the modern period — that although we were created to be in communion with the truth, with God, we lost this gift through sin — and, as a result, we need to be given the truth again, in Jesus.

So, to be precise, when Kierkegaard asks whether the truth can be learned, the answer he explores in the book, that he contrasts with the Socratic view of remembering, is that humanity was created with the truth, but then lost it and must learn it again — not by remembering it, but by having it revealed to us by God. Moreover, this salvation is not available to human beings, except through Jesus. So, those who either lived before Kierkegaard's historical point of departure — the life and death of Jesus — or those who came after but did not encounter Jesus in their lives, cannot receive the eternal truth.

One traditional version of this idea can be found in Dante's Inferno, in which the author, Dante, travels through the various circles of hell to observe different forms of eternal punishment. Right outside of hell proper, is a place called "limbo." And there, Dante finds the virtuous pagans, including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Those are people who were virtuous, and they' re neither damned nor saved, but who did not have a chance to receive the truth. In many respects, of course, I think this is deeply offensive to the modern mindset — and here, I would include not just thinkers like Kant and Hegel, but the many today who believe that this kind of Christian exclusivism cannot be rationally or ethically defended, or who question how a God of love could be a God that excludes from salvation the greater part of humanity.

Of course, this is not the only Christian position. We see Hegel, and Kant, and others expressing a Christian — or at least a religious­ position where this kind of exclusivism isn't quite there — although they come close in certain ways. But there are also different ways to read Christianity, in which Jesus is not divine in the most radical sense offered here, but more like a teacher in the Socratic mode — or like a teacher who represents a way of living that we can all emulate. There were many thinkers in the 19th century who wanted to see Jesus in this more human way. But Kierkegaard's point is that modern defenders of Christianity have lost sight of one of the fundamental claims of the tradition: Christ did not come just as a teacher, but was God incarnate who, in being crucified and resurrected, redeemed the world and humankind. Those events were not just accidents, but they were essential. He knows that in some way this is offensive — in fact, the category of offense is a key part of the book, Philosophical Fragments, as we' ll see in just a minute. He knew that it cannot be defended rationally or ethically. Indeed, making this point is part of what he's doing in Philosophical Fragments, and it's to this we turn next as we consider some new terms for thinking about what in Fear and Trembling he calls the "absurdity of faith."

I want to return briefly to a point I made earlier — namely, that as Kierkegaard understands it, God not only gives us the truth, but also gives us the condition for receiving the truth. This condition, as I' ll try to clarify here, is faith. From one perspective, this — and we saw this in the lecture on Luther — this is a basic Protestant doctrine — that is, God not only gives us salvation as a free gift of grace, but God also gives us the faith with which to believe that we are saved. When Luther talks about justification by faith, he's not making faith into yet another work in the sense of "if you believe, then God will justify you." That's not how it works. Faith is the awareness of — and trust in — God's saving grace, but it is not some sort of achievement on the basis of which we are granted salvation. For Kierkegaard, like Luther, we are so disabled by sin — which Kierkegaard describes as a "state of untruth" — that we need both the truth and the ability to accept it to be given to us. This is different from simply saying that we don't know the truth or that we have forgotten the truth. It' s saying that we live in such a way that even if the truth was in front of our noses we could not see it — or, even more radically, that somewhere we do not want to see it.

Thus, Kierkegaard says that we are polemical against the truth. It' s not as if we' re all hanging around waiting for the truth with open arms, but that we actively resist it in myriad ways — conscious and unconscious. Kierkegaard develops this idea of our refusal of the truth primarily through his exploration of what is at once the most important and most difficult concept in Philosophical Fragments: the paradox. In the simplest sense, the paradox is this: God has entered history, which means that the eternal, ultimate truth has broken into the temporal — that the divine and the infinite, God, has taken human form: Jesus. The teacher who gives us the truth is both divine and human. Kierkegaard puts it this way: "But in order for the teacher to be able to give the condition, he must be the god, and in order to put the learner in possession of it, he must be man. This contradiction is in turn the object of faith and is the paradox."

So the paradox — that the teacher is God and human, eternal and temporal — is itself the object of faith. Notice it's not any specific teaching of Jesus that is the object of the faith, but the teacher himself — Jesus. For us, what is most crucial about this paradox is what it says about Kierkegaard's understanding of the relationship between reason and faith. Where Kant, and Hegel, and, to some degree, Schleiermacher argue to faith — that is, can give us reasons for why we should believe in God or why our experience of God is a natural human experience, and thus argue that faith is rational or reasonable — Kierkegaard, by using the concept of paradox, is saying that reason cannot get to God. God is the paradox — and thus, he' s saying that reason is incapable of defending faith in any complete way. In some sense, then, reason and faith are at odds with one another. Interestingly, though, Kierkegaard also says that they have something in common — both reason and faith, he says, are passions. Reason, for Kierkegaard, is a passion because it wants to know, it pursues, the truth. It wants to make all that is unknown known­ thus, it constantly comes up against the unknown and tries to know it. It constantly comes up against paradoxes and tries to get beyond them, to make sense of them.

For Kierkegaard, God is the ultimate unknown because God is transcendent — that is, God is utterly different from us and from what we can think. In other writings, Kierkegaard will use the term "infinite qualitative distinction" to describe the difference between God and human — or, as he will put it in Philosophica/ Fragments, God is the "absolutely different." To make a long story short, Kierkegaard examines the ways in which passionate reason tries to grasp the unknown that is God — tries in its passion to know what is unknown, to exceed its limits. Examples for this that Kierkegaard explores are the arguments for the existence of God, which he shows to be misguided. He also argues that in our insistent efforts to know the unknown, our reason inevitably domesticates God, turns God into a human project and interest — it names as God that which is really human. In this sense, Kierkegaard is arguing that reason's passion, its need to know, is bound up with our sinfulness—with our insatiable need to master or control through knowledge, explanation, and definition.

It's as if, faced with the absolutely different, with God, reason falls into a kind of vertigo — it drives itself crazy, where it can't tolerate the fact that it has come up against its limits. So, Kierkegaard's point is that reason must recognize its limits and surrender to the paradox. It must cease its efforts to grasp God with the understanding. It must let God show God's self through revelation. We can't comprehend the difference of the absolutely different — it must be revealed to us; but, in our sinful state, reason does not do this. In the face of the failures of the arguments for the existence of God, or in the face of testimonies of the faithful who say: "Well I just believe that God has been revealed" — in the face of these, reason takes offense. It demands that God be proven — or, if that is impossible, it demands that God must be rejected. It keeps insisting that theological paradoxes become probable, or it starts to denigrate them by calling them absurd. Of course, for reason to say that something is absurd is pejorative. But Kierkegaard points out — employing his taste for humor and irony, and he has some very funny passages on this­ that's the whole point: Of course, by definition, the paradox is absurd. He writes:

The offense [and this is reason, refusing to accept the paradox] remains outside the paradox and retains probability: whereas the paradox is the most improbable.... When the understanding wants to have pity on the paradox and assist it to an explanation, the paradox does not put up with that but considers it appropriate for the understanding to do that, for is that not what philosophers are for — to make supernatural things ordinary and banal?

Kierkegaard's point is that for reason to avoid the unhappy consequences of offense, it must recognize its limits and surrender to the paradox — it must accept the paradox happily. This, for Kierkegaard, is the passion of faith. He puts it this way:

How then, does the learner come to an understanding with this paradox, for we do not say that he is supposed to understand the paradox but is only to understand that this is the paradox.... [This] occurs when the understanding and the paradox happily encounter each other in the moment, when the understanding steps aside and the paradox gives itself, and the third something, the something in which this occurs, is that happy passion to which we shall now give a
name.... We shall call it faith,

As Kierkegaard says here, we do not grasp or understand the paradox, but the paradox gives itself and, as he also says here, it gives us the condition for receiving this gift — that is, it gives us faith. Faith is the passion, then, in which we embrace the paradox, the absurd, and in which we come to understand that it is the absurd, not a puzzle to be solved, not a question to be answered or a claim to be proven, but a gift to be received. Kierkegaard, therefore, in a way that cuts against the grain of almost all the thinkers we have discussed to this point, posits a gap between reason and faith that cannot be crossed but must be accepted. This is not to say, however, that we can't make any efforts to come to a better understanding of what this passion of faith is, so what I want to do now is to make the completely unoriginal suggestion — though it is perhaps a useful reminder — that faith, as Kierkegaard describes it, is a kind of love, and we can think about this from two perspectives: God's love for us and our love for God.

One reason it's so hard to believe, for Kierkegaard, that God would have entered time to save us — would have lowered himself to take human form and undergo a painful and humiliating death — one reason he would do this, or that we find it hard to accept that he would do this, is that it contradicts human self-understanding. That is, it contradicts the experience of love as it tends to be understood and lived by sinful human beings, love as something in sin that is intimately bound up with self-interest. Part of this is the sense that as sinners we do not deserve God's love, but more important, I think, it's that we self-centered human beings can't really credit this kind of self-sacrificial love. We can't really imagine the kind of sacrifice involved in God taking human form and being crucified for our sins. In our sinful state, something like this — some sacrifice like this­ contradicts our view of love and motivation. From the other perspective, we can think of faith as a kind of falling in love. How does falling in love happen? It's very difficult to say — it's certainly not controlled by reason or will, even if they are involved to some extent. It's more like a gift that is given to us — or it's like something that happens to you over which you have little, if any, control. It is, of course, extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make yourself love someone or not love someone. So, for Kierkegaard, we fall into faith in an encounter with Jesus Christ.

This encounter can happen whether we happen to be what he calls a "follower at first hand" — that is, someone who lived at the time of Jesus Christ and actually encountered him in the flesh — or if we are a "follower at second hand," who, perhaps living 1,800 years after the crucifixion, is so taken by the testimony of this event in the Bible that he or she finds Jesus to be present in his or her life. So faith happens — though it's impossible to make it happen or to know why, in any given instance, it happens. Some sort of historical encounter with the teacher directly, or with the teacher through testimony, must take place — but Kierkegaard is also clear that such an encounter does not necessarily make for faith. In his reflections on what it means to be a follower, Kierkegaard insists that it is not a matter of knowing Jesus Christ: Someone could have known him; someone could have watched every moment of his life; or someone could know the words of the Bible back to front and still not "encounter Jesus" — that is, believe that he is God — and so someone who did all of this might still not have faith. This is why, again, Kierkegaard argues that we need to be given the condition — we must be given faith.

The basic point is that no matter how close we get to the teacher, unless we have been given the condition, we cannot see that this teacher is the God. Something in this encounter — and again, it is mysterious and does not happen to everyone who meets or hears about Jesus Christ — something in this encounter makes it possible for the person to have faith. We can compare this to love in the sense that it is always possible for one to turn away from the gift of love­ to refuse to accept the gift or refuse to trust what is happening. What makes it possible for someone to take the leap of love and trust or the leap of faith that receives the paradox as paradox — and so surrenders the passion of reason? This is one of Kierkegaard's main questions. Involved in this reception is not just the belief that God became man — not just the acceptance of the paradox as, indeed, the truth­ but also the ability to live this love.

Recall that in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard described faith as a task for a lifetime, and then goes on to show that the life of faith, for Abraham, was a life of ordeal or trial. To accept the paradox is to accept the fact that the passion of faith opens one to risk and insecurity — to the risks and contingencies of actual life. To love Christ, on Kierkegaard's terms, is to follow Christ — that is, to love one's neighbor; to live as the birds and the lilies without a care for where your next meal is coming from; to suffer ridicule and persecution; to have your sin, your deepest desires and fears, exposed. Throughout his writings, Kierkegaard identifies and analyzes many of the different ways that we avoid such love and such faith — the dependence on reason is just one of them. In this, as many have noted, Kierkegaard showed himself to be a brilliant depth psychologist. He also anticipated the topic of our next four lectures: the new form of the criticism of religion that we find developing in Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud—and I'll call this form of suspicion "the hermeneutics of suspicion."

Kierkegaard, as we have seen, is not primarily interested in rational defenses or criticisms of faith, but rather in uncovering, by peering into the human soul, the strategies by which we avoid faith — either by living a Christian life that is too easy and finds its goal in security rather than in God, or by dismissing faith through an over-reliance on reason or other kinds of avoidance strategies. Where Kierkegaard, though, employs this kind of depth psychology, this suspicion, this examination of the soul to articulate a richer and deeper form of faith — we will see in these next lectures how suspicion was employed to argue that faith, per se, involves a flight from reality.

Lecture Sixteen -- Kierkegaard's Faith

Scope:

Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel offered influential models for thinking about religion and Christianity in modern terms, especially with reference to modern conceptions of reason, experience, ethics, and history. Equally influential, though not immed'iately, was Seren Kierkegaard's Christian challenge to modernity.Kierkegaard attacked modern efforts to make Christianity "reasonable" and was particularly critical of Hegel's systematic world-historical effort to grasp Christian faith conceptually. Instead, Kierkegaard emphasized the existential nature of faith, the idea that faith is only realized in the passionate commitment of the existing, not just the thinking, person. In Fear and Trembling, he presents the figure of Abraham, with particular reference to the biblical story of Abraham's near­ sacrifice of Isaac, as a paradigm of faith grounded in a passionate relationship to God that defies clear explanation.

Outline

I. In many ways, the Danish philosopher Seren Kierkegaard challenged the mainstreams of Western religious thought of the 19th century.

A. As a writer and philosopher, he departed radically from the conventions and main ideas of the 19th century.
1. He is one of the great writers of the Western philosophical tradition.
2. But he wrote differently than most philosophers, assigning pseudonyms to many of his great works, writing with wit and irony, and rather than trying to abstract from life, he immersed himself in what would come to be called an "existential perspective."
3. He was geographically and linguistically marginal, living in Copenhagen and writing in Danish, and he was institutionally marginal, not having an academic position.

B. Of great importance for these lectures, Kierkegaard is also the first major figure we've seen who is, in many respects, a critic of modernity, modern philosophy, and modern conceptions of religion.
1. He was a critic of the comfortable bourgeois life of so many of his contemporaries, especially of the way that it domesticated their Christianity, making it a religion of comfort and social status.
2. He was critical of the way philosophers mirrored this comfort and complacency with philosophies that stressed rationality and system over the passion of life.
3. He was critical of the way Enlightenment reason had influenced conceptions of religion and Christianity,
making it "reasonable."

C. For Kierkegaard, Christianity was about passion and faith and about the passion of faith.
1. For Kant, faith is a relatively easy issue: We get to it simply by right thinking.
2. For Kierkegaard, faith is the struggle of a lifetime.
3. It is an encounter with the creative source of life­ God — but one that always involves suffering and doubt or, to cite the title of the book we will examine here, "fear and trembling."

II. At the center of Kierkegaard'sFear and Trembling is the biblical figure of Abraham and the story of Abraham's near sacrifice of his beloved son, Isaac. This story illustrates for Kierkegaard the "absurdity of faith" and the idea that faith is faith for this life, not for the afterlife.

A For Kierkegaard, Abraham is the paradigm of faith and a life of fear and trembling.
1. Abraham lives a life of obedience to God, even to the point of being willing to sacrifice his long-awaited and beloved son, Isaac, though at the last minute, God stays Abraham's hand and allows him to sacrifice a lamb
instead of Isaac.
2. Throughout the biblical account and throughout Kierkegaard's account, Abraham is silent, unable or unwilling to talk to his wife or his son about what God has commanded.
3. For Kierkegaard, this silence points to the fact that there is no "reason" for Abraham's obedience; it is, in some sense, "absurd."
4. In other words, faith involves the "teleological suspension of the ethical"; From the perspective of ethics and human reason, the sacrifice of Isaac is murder,
but from the perspective of God, it is an act of faith.

B. Kierkegaard offers two perspectives on this act of faith.
1. It is an act of "infinite resignation": The point of faith is that we must learn to view the things of this world, even the most important ones, as unimportant compared with
things eternal, that is, God.
2. This is significant for Kierkegaard, because in faith, one does hand oneself over to God, but Kierkegaard also insists that even as Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac, he has faith, "by virtue of the absurd," that he will get
Isaac back.
3. Abraham's faith, then, is not caught up in the resignation of this life for the eternal but is more complex.

C. Faith, as Kierkegaard says, is a movement of passion rather than a movement that we can calculate by weighing the pros and cons and considering consequences.

D. Unfortunately, Kierkegaard's own life seemed closer to resignation than faith.

Suggested Reading:
Kierkegaard, Evans, and Walsh, Fear and Trembling.
Welch, Pvotestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century.

Questions to Consider:
1. In what ways does Kierkegaard represent a departure from the majority of modern thinkers we have examined so far?
2. In what respects is faith a "passion" for Kierkegaard?

Lecture Sixteen — Transcript
Kierkegaard's Faith

Over the past three lectures, we've explored the different ways that Christians and Jews in the 19th century struggled with questions of faith and suspicion. We have considered how liberal Christians and Reform Jews embraced many modern ideas regarding reason, morality, and history — and in light of these ideas took Christianity and Judaism in some new directions. We have seen how other Christians and Jews tried to articulate visions of their traditions that, as they saw it, retained crucial elements of those traditions that they thought were threatened by modernity. In this lecture and in the next, I want to introduce a Christian thinker, the Danish philosopher Seren Kierkegaard, who in many interesting ways confuses and challenges the dichotomy that established itself in the 19th century between modernists and traditionalists.

He is, I think, one of the most fascinating and provocative figures we will encounter in these lectures. I want to do two things in this first lecture on Kierkegaard. First, I want to place him in the context of the ideas and movements we've been exploring, particularly in relation to the work of Kant and Hegel. I want to do this by talking about three closely interrelated aspects of Kierkegaard's significance for us: Kierkegaard as a writer, Kierkegaard as a philosopher, and Kierkegaard as a religious thinker. The second thing I want to do in this lecture is to focus on his conception of faith, which is at the heart of his thinking. This conception of faith has exerted a profound influence on 20 -century religious thought, and it is here, I think, that we see Kierkegaard the thinker at his most penetrating — a thinker who posed questions that were radical and disturbing in their time and are no less so today.

I remember encountering Kierkegaard for the first time in a college Religious Studies course that I had taken, quite by chance, as a break from a Pre-Med menu of Chemistry and Calculus. I found his writing captivating from the start — it was puzzling and frustrating, too, but it was really the first time in my life that I'd been captured by the voice and the ideas of a thinker. For me, that was the end of my Pre-Med days. I have distinct memories of walking around campus that fall, wracking my brain to figure out what Kierkegaard meant by what he described as the "absurdity of faith." I will admit I also liked the idea of looking like the tortured thinker I imagined Kierkegaard to be­ — walking around campus with my furrowed brow and making sure everyone could see that I was thinking deep thoughts and — to use a word appropriate for thinking about Kierkegaard — "existential" thoughts. I'm not sure I really understood back then what "existential" meant — it meant "deep" or something like that — but it is important for understanding Kierkegaard to get at this idea of "existential," and we' ll come back to it in just a moment.

Kierkegaard was born to a well-off family in Copenhagen in 1813. Like most Danes, his family was Lutheran, and his father was deeply pious. He received the equivalent of a Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen, where he studied philosophy and theology, and he wrote a dissertation on the concept of irony in Socrates. He spent the rest of his relatively short life as an independent writer, having inherited enough from his family to live in relative comfort and to even finance the publication of his early works. In my view, and I don't believe that I'm being particularly controversial here, Kierkegaard is one of the two or three most captivating writers in the Western philosophical tradition. Even when he is at his most dense­ and his writing can be extremely dense and abstract — his wit and his style shine through. I' ll begin with a passage from the preface to his 1843 book, Fear and Trembling, and this book will be the focus of this lecture. This is from its Preface:

The present author is by no means a philosopher. He is in a poetic and refined way a supplementary clerk who neither writes the system nor gives promises of the system, who neither exhausts himself on the system nor binds himself to the system. He writes because to him it is a luxury that is all the more pleasant and apparent the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes. He easily envisions his fate in an age that has crossed out passion in order to serve science, in an age when an author who desires readers must be careful to write in such a way that his book can be conveniently skimmed during the after-dinner nap.

So, this is vintage Kierkegaard. The writing sparkles, it's witty, and it's a bit savage — and, above all, it's ironic. Here we see Kierkegaard downplaying the significance of his own status as a philosopher while he's actually mocking the pretensions of the philosophical ethos of his age. In particular, he is mocking the system — by which he means the philosophy of Hegel, who, as I've said, was the philosopher of the first half of the 19 century. I'll address other aspects of Kierkegaard's view of Hegel in a moment, but the first thing to say, that Kierkegaard's style of writing — witty, ironic, and often radically indirect — is intimately related to his criticisms of philosophical systems and philosophy's pretensions to scientific knowledge.

Kierkegaard wrote to engage the reader existentially, to engage the reader's passions and questions — to encourage people to reflect not simply on reality and ultimate truth, but on their own lives. One of Kant's great achievements, as we have seen, was to provide philosophical grounding for scientific knowledge, answering the question: How do we know?He also gave us philosophical grounding for the question of practical knowledge, answering the question: What shall I do? In answering these questions, Kant also argued that theoretical and practical reason led us ineluctably to rational faith in God. Although Kierkegaard had no interest in directly refuting Kant, or even Hegel's more grandiose vision of rationality, he thought that such efforts missed something very important — namely, the individual human being, the human subject as existing, deciding, feeling, being. It missed, in short, what he called "inwardness" — the texture of the inner life of a human being faced with decisions and possibilities. Let me go back, then, to the Preface of Fear and Trembling and read another passage:

In our age, everyone is unwilling to stop with faith but goes further. It perhaps would be rash to ask where they are going, whereas it is a sign of urbanity and culture for me to assume that everyone has faith, since otherwise it certainly would be odd to speak of going further. It was different in those ancient days. Faith was then a task for a whole lifetime because it assumed that proficiency in believing is not acquired either in days or in weeks. When the tried and tested oldster approached his end, had fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten the anxiety and trembling that disciplined the youth that the adult learned to control, but that no man outgrows — except to the extent that he succeeds in going further as early as possible.

So, "Everyone is unwilling to stop with faith" — as Kierkegaard puts it. As we will see in a moment when we begin to look more carefully at Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, in contrast to the "everyone" in this passage, he believed that it was crucial to stop and think very carefully about faith and — as he also says in this passage — that one must not only think carefully about faith, but, more important, live one's life in a way that one is always struggling with faith. It is, as he says here, the task of a lifetime. From this perspective, then, he is mocking what he calls in this passage "our age."

To this point in these lectures, with the exception of a few religious traditionalists, all the thinkers we've been examining have been champions of "our age" — that is, of modernity. Kierkegaard is the first thinker we' ve looked at, with the possible exception here of Hirsch, who is directly engaged with the pressing philosophical and religious questions of the day and critical of the promises made on behalf of rationality, universalism, progress — and especially critical of the way these modern ideals obscure the real difficulties and challenges of life. Kierkegaard's criticism here takes two forms in his writing. It takes philosophical form in his criticisms, particularly of Hegel. For Kierkegaard, Kant is wrong for thinking that we can get to faith through right thinking, and he thought that Hegel's claim to have comprehended the whole of reality and history misses the important thing — the individual. But Kierkegaard was not just a philosophical critic, but also a cultural critic. He was a harsh critic of bourgeoisie Christianity that was more a norm and expectation, a marker of respectability, than a challenge — or, to use the word that Kierkegaard emphasizes in his discussion of faith, a "passion." So he' ll say that: "What our generation lacks is not reflection but passion."

We can think about it this way. Where so many religious thinkers of his time were confidently proclaiming that Christianity was being fully realized in modern Western civilization, Kierkegaard was convinced that modernity had produced a new Christendom — not the Catholic Christendom of the Middle Ages, but a bourgeoisie modern Christendom that paradoxically, in its very pervasiveness, actually made it more difficult to be a genuine Christian — that is, to live faith as a passion. So, Kierkegaard is a very interesting marginal figure in 19 -century Europe. In his philosophical sophistication and in his existentialist passion, he's not a defender of traditional religion, of Church authority or biblicism, but he's also not a modernist in certain crucial respects. We can think about his marginal status from a number of angles and see that there is some truth to what he writes in the passage above about himself not as a philosopher but as a "supplementary clerk." He was geographically and linguistically marginal, spending almost all his life in Copenhagen and writing in Danish, rather than in those venerable philosophical languages of, English, French — and, especially, German. He was institutionally marginal because he was an independent writer and not a university professor in an age where philosophy had become more and more professionalized. He was marginal given the central role that his fine literary sensibility played in his philosophical writing. At a time when systematic argument and above all "seriousness" was paramount for philosophers, Kierkegaard communicated as much through his humor, and his style, through metaphor and literary strategy, as through his arguments. What he tried to communicate above all, as I've said, was the passion of faith.

We ordinarily think about passion as an intense desire for, or commitment to, something. But with Kierkegaard, and in the Christian context more generally, we always have to keep in mind that passion also means suffering or ordeal. So, we call Christ's trial and crucifixion the "passion of Christ." Faith, for Kierkegaard, is a passion in this sense, an encounter with the creative source of life­ God — that certainly involves desire and commitment, but also demands the trial of suffering and doubt. Or, to point to the title of the book we are focusing on in this lecture, faith is always a matter of "fear and trembling." Kierkegaard borrows this phrase from the Bible, specifically from Paul's Letter to the Philippians, which reads at Philippians 2:12: "Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." We see here that faith, for Kierkegaard, is not a matter of easy "spirituality" — not a matter of comfort or consolation, not simply a starting point that settles and secures one's life.

Rather, the life of faith is a life of spiritual discipline — it is a life of what Kierkegaard calls the "single individual," who, standing alone before God, must face the uncertainty and openness to life that comes with surrender to God. From his perspective, wanting always to go further than faith is first and foremost a strategy of avoidance and refusal — refusal to confront the reality of God and the reality of one's own heart. So, what is it to face God and one's own heart? We can begin to get a sense of this by introducing Kierkegaard 's model of faith, the main figure of Fear and Trembling: Abraham. Those of you familiar with the Bible will know that Abraham is one of the major characters in the book of Genesis — along with Adam and Eve and venerable patriarchs, such as Noah. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard tells the story of Abraham from different perspectives­ meditates and reflects on this story in an effort to think through what he calls the "absurdity of faith."

Here's my summary of the story. As a young man, Abram, not yet Abraham, is called by God to leave his home in Mesopotamia to travel to a new, unknown land — where, God tells Abraham, "I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you." Without fuss or question, Abram goes, with his wife Sarah, to this new land — which later will be called Canaan, and then Israel. But although Abram does everything God asks of him — including submitting to the rite of circumcision, at which point Abram becomes Abraham — he and Sarah are still not blessed with the child and, thus, the nation that God had promised. But then, after much trial and adventure­ miracle of miracles — Sarah, at age 90, gives birth to Isaac, and it appears that Abraham, who had continued to trust in God, has had his faith rewarded. But, when Isaac is still a child, God one day speaks to Abraham and says to him: "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you."

Abraham obeys God, travels dutifully and without protest — in fact, with barely a word — to Mount Moriah with Isaac, ascends the mountain, prepares the sacrificial altar, binds Isaac to it, and raises the knife, and it is only then that God intervenes — staying Abraham's hand and offering him a ram to substitute for Isaac. This is Abraham's ordeal or trial. For Kierkegaard, this is a story that raises a host of difficult questions. He puts it this way:
So everything was lost, even more appallingly than if it had never happened! So the Lord was only mocking Abraham! He had wondrously made the preposterous come true; [that is Isaac was born when Sarah was 90 and Abraham was even older] now he wanted to see it annihilated.... All was lost! Seventy years of trusting expectancy, the brief joy over the fulfillment of faith. Who is this who seizes the staff from an old man, who is this who demands that he himself shall break it! Who is this who makes a man's grey hairs disconsolate, who is this who demands that he himself shall do it? Is there no sympathy for this venerable old man, none for the innocent child? And yet Abraham was God's chosen one, and it was the Lord who imposed the ordeal.

What I want to do in the time remaining in this lecture is to consider a line of thinking that emerges from these questions and that I think will illuminate a central aspect of Kierkegaard's vision of faith: Faith, for Kierkegaard, is faith for this life — not for the life hereafter.

I' ll begin by noting a crucial aspect of Abraham's trial: It wraps Abraham in silence. Throughout the biblical account, throughout Kierkegaard's account of the story, Abraham is silent — unable or unwilling to talk to his wife or his son about what God has commanded him to do. But, of course, what's he going to say? It would make no sense. Why would God command this? Perhaps even more troubling, how could Abraham assent to God's command? As Kierkegaard discusses in probably the most famous section of the book — such a conception of faith requires what Kierkegaard calls "the teleological suspension of the ethical." Basically, this means that from the perspective of ethics and human reason, killing Isaac is murder, but from the perspective of God, it is a sacrifice — an act of faith.

Here we see Kierkegaard opposed to the close link that Kant forges between ethics and religion, where the ethical and the religious are perfectly integrated. For Kierkegaard, by contrast, the religious perspective suspends the ethical perspective, can require us to transgress it. This is one way to think about Kierkegaard's conception of faith and the way it's also opposed to Hegel's emphasis on the social nature of ethics and religion, because Kierkegaard places the believer in direct relation to God as a single individual, and in that sense can be opposed to the social. Abraham here is commanded by God to do something that not only would not be allowed under Kant's categorical imperative, but also cannot be explained even to those closest to him — Sarah and Isaac. It isolates Abraham.

We can contrast here perhaps with, as Kierkegaard does, with stories from Greek mythology and tragedy. We can compare, that is, Abraham's situation with that of Agamemnon — who must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, before the gods will allow his fleet to sail to Troy. Agamemnon is put in a tragic situation. He must make a terrible sacrifice, sacrifice his daughter for the good of the fleet, and so the good of his people, but in his mind — and, just as important, in the mind of his people — he is doing it for the greater good. It makes sense to them, and so even as it wounds Agamemnon deeply — and, of course, it wounds his daughter even more — Agamemnon knows, in an ethical sense, that he did the right thing. But Abraham remains silent. We do not even know what he is saying to himself — only that when God calls, he answers: "Here I am." To us, to Sarah and Isaac, and we must presume, possibly even to Abraham himself, it seems absurd. But perhaps there's a way to make more sense of all of this, to explain Abraham's actions in a relatively familiar way. Perhaps we should look at things from the perspective of what Kierkegaard calls "infinite resignation." Perhaps the point of faith is that we must learn to view the things of this world, even the most important ones, as unimportant as compared with things eternal — that is, with God. So, we must learn to release, to give up, the things of this world for the sake of God — symbolized here by the sacrifice of one's son and one's future hopes.

One of the most affecting sequences in Fear and Trembling is Kierkegaard's portrait of what he calls the "Knight of Infinite Resignation," a portrait of a certain kind of faith, a certain commitment to God, that gives up this world for another. But it' s clear that Kierkegaard introduces the Knight of Infinite Resignation in Fear and Trembling not to explain Abraham, but as a way of contrasting this familiar view of faith with Kierkegaard's insistence that faith — genuine faith — holds on to the things of this world. There is, he says, something important about infinite resignation. In faith, one does hand oneself over to God: Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac if God commands it. But the key to faith, for Kierkegaard, is that even as one is fully willing to do God's bidding, one also­ simultaneously — keeps the faith that God will grant you your life here and now. For Abraham, this is the faith that he will get Isaac back:

Yet Abraham had faith, had faith for this life. In fact, if his faith had been only for a life to come, he certainly would have more readily discarded everything in order to rush out of a world to which he did not belong.... But Abraham had faith specifically for this life — faith that he would grow old in this country, be honored among the people, blessed by posterity, and unforgettable in Isaac, the most precious thing in his life.

There are two points to emphasize here. First, Kierkegaard stresses Abraham's youthfulness throughout: Even though Abraham is 100 years old, he lives as if he were a young man, with hope for the future. Second, Isaac, as Kierkegaard says, is the most precious thing in Abraham's life. So, later, Kierkegaard will say that Abraham "had faith that God would not demand Isaac of him, and yet he was willing to sacrifice him if it was demanded. He had faith by virtue of the absurd, for human calculation was out of the question." So, even as he is willing to sacrifice his most precious Isaac to God, Abraham has faith that God would not demand Isaac of him, and he holds to this faith by what Kierkegaard calls "by virtue of the absurd." What does that mean? This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of Kierkegaard's thought — in part because we must resist the temptation to try to make sense of this movement that, after all, for Kierkegaard is on some crucial level inexplicable; this is, after all, what it means to say that something is "absurd."

But let me try to say just a little more about this absurdity in this lecture, and I' ll come back to it from a different angle in the next lecture. We should start by going back to passion. Faith, as Kierkegaard says, is a movement of passion rather than a movement that we can calculate by weighing the pros and cons and considering the consequences. It is, as Kierkegaard puts it in one of the most well-known images from his writing, "a leap of faith." It involves taking a risk, of acting without certainty, of trusting that one can hold on to both the eternal — God — and the temporal — Isaac. But to call it a leap of faith is not to call it blind faith, but rather to talk about it in terms of the kind of risk one takes any time one trusts — or, more specifically, loves — someone else.

By contrast, consider the calculation of infinite resignation, of giving up the temporal for the eternal. This isn't to say that it is easy, or that it does not involve a certain passion, but it does, if accomplished, says Kierkegaard, bring one "peace and rest." You give up everything for the sake of the future, and then that gives you a certain kind of security. One can stop yearning for the things of this life, or at least be finished with the hopes that one's yearning will be realized. Faith, for Kierkegaard though, is not a resting point, but a constant, difficult examination of the relation of one's loves and one's passions. Another way to put this is that what is being tested here in the trial of Abraham is not just his love for God, but also his love for Isaac. Abraham does not resign himself to a life without Isaac—the most precious thing in his life. He does not say to himself: "Gee, God asks me to sacrifice Isaac, so I must learn to be happy with that." Yes, he's willing to perform the act — and even once Isaac is gone, to live in continuing faith in God, but, still, his passionate faith holds tightly to his love for Isaac.

Is this absurd? How can he do both? It is this "how" that we need to avoid trying to explain too much — for again, Kierkegaard says explicitly, Abraham does this "by virtue of the absurd." Yes, this is not much of an answer — other than to say that the point for Kierkegaard is not to explain Abraham's love and passion, but to show us a human heart risking all in standing before God as a single individual. It's crucial that Abraham does not try to justify his actions to Sarah or Isaac. The point of the ordeal is not to rationalize his behavior to others, but to open his heart to God — trusting that God's love will always bring us back into this life.

To sum up then, we have seen how Kierkegaard stands apart from both the philosophical and the religious mainstreams of his day­ both in the way he writes and in the way he refuses to subsume the life of the individual under that rationality of Kant — or under the social and historical, like Hegel. We see this most clearly in Kierkegaard's treatment of Abraham and faith, where he tries to capture the workings of passion and love by which Abraham relates to God and to his life here on earth. In the next lecture, then, I want to elaborate on what we have discussed here by brining to bear Kierkegaard's conceptions of sin and salvation. At this point, I want to end with an illustration that helps to bridge these two lectures. It' s a rather sad one that came out of Kierkegaard's own life. As most readers of Kierkegaard know, his life and writing were deeply marked by his love for a woman named Regine Olsen. After a year­ long engagement, Kierkegaard broke it off and apparently broke his own heart in doing so. At one point, he wrote the following:

If I had not been a penitent [that is, one who is conscious of one's own sin], if I had not had my [melancholy] — marriage to her would have made me happier than I had ever dreamed of becoming. But being the person I unfortunately am, I must say that I could become happier in my unhappiness without her than with her.

So, on the one hand, this is a testimony to self-doubt and broken dreams, and in this sense is very wrenching and sad. But, from another perspective, it seems to me to fly in the face of everything Kierkegaard wrote about faith as hope and affirmation of this life: One doubts one's self — one is a penitent, a sinner — but one nonetheless trusts in the chance for the loves of this life, believes that in spite of penitence and unhappiness, that God loves you and is concerned for your worldly happiness. What makes this doubly sad — and one reason why Kierkegaard is often referred to as "the melancholy Dane" — is that he knew this. So, elsewhere, he wrote: "If I had had faith, I would have stayed with Regine."

Lecture Fifteen -- Judaism and Modernity

Scope:

Modern ideas challenged Jewish thinkers in many of the same ways as their Christian contemporaries. But the distinctiveness of Jewish history and the marginalization and persecution of Jews by Christians over the centuries also meant that Jewish thinkers came to these challenges occupied by questions about the place of Judaism in relation to Christianity and the rights of Jews in the modern European nation-state. In the 18th century, Moses Mendelssohn linked Judaism with natural religion to show that it was eminently rational and modern and that its particularity resided not in its ideas and beliefs but in its laws. The 19th and early 20th century thinker Hermann Cohen was a distinguished Kant scholar who originally saw Judaism as a vehicle for an emerging universalist ethical humanism. Later, however, he came to stress Jewish particularity with respect to existential religious questions of sin and salvation that, he argued, universalistic ethics cannot address.

Outline

I. The parameters for doing philosophical and theological work on religion in the modern period were set by Christian thinkers or by thinkers who came out of a Christian background, but we need to consider important Jewish contributions to this tradition, as well as the distinctiveness of the Jewish perspective on central issues.

II. Some historical background on the Jewish tradition is helpful for understanding the context in which Mendelssohn and Cohen wrote.

A. Following Wellhausen, historians generally agree that the Hebrew Bible has its source in post-exile Jerusalem, that is, some time after 538 B.C.E.
1. The Babylonians conquered Jerusalem in 597, destroyed the Temple, and exiled many Jews to Babylonia.
2. Upon their to return to Jerusalem in about 538, Jews inaugmated what is known as Second Temple Judaism.
3. In 66 C.E., the Jews rebelled against Rome, and in 70, the rebellion was crushed and the Second Temple destroyed.

B. From this emerged a new form of Judaism, led no longer by Temple priests but by interpreters of the law, rabbis.

C. With the emergence of the nation-state in Europe and, with it, the citizen as a political actor and the ideals of human rights, the question of Jewish citizenship emerged in such countries as France and Germany.
1. This became known as the "Jewish question": Should citizenship be granted to Jews as Jews or only on condition that they renounce Judaism?
2. In the 17'" century, a Jewish form of Pietism, Hasidism, took shape.
3. In the 19'" century, Judaism split into three distinct branches: Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative.
4. In the late 19'" century, the Zionist movement emerged, devoted to the establishment of a Jewish homeland and largely secular at first.

III. Moses Mendelssohn was associated with and admired by a broad range of leading Enlightenment intellectuals. As a Jew, however, it was impossible for him to get an
academic appointment.

A. His early work reflected the dominant trends in pre-Kantian Enlightenment thought.
1. He argued that Judaism was, at its core, an expression of natural religion, and because Judaism cohered well with Enlightenment ideals, he thought Jews should assimilate into German culture.
2. The laws in the Torah applied only to Jews and did not conflict with the ethical perspective of natural religion.
3. Religious freedom meant that Christians must cease their persecution of the Jews and that Jews were required to renounce any ideas from the Jewish tradition that involved the coercion of religion.

B. The problem of coercion immersed Mendelssohn in controversy because some argued that the Jewish tradition did allow religious coercion in the form of excommunication.
1. Mendelssohn wrote Jerusalem in 1783, a book that many since have lauded as the inaugural work of modern Jewish philosophy.
2. He distinguished between the role of the state and the role of religion in arguing that there should be no coercion when it comes to religion.
3. The punishmentof excommunication had been appropriate when Israel had existed as a religious state during the First and Second Temple periods but was no
longer appropriate.

IV. Reform and Orthodox Judaism took shape primarily in the 19 century.

A. Reform Judaism began in efforts to modify worship services and other traditional practices.
1. A leading Reform intellectual was Abraham Geiger, who argued that the halakhic framework of the rabbis had been superseded.
2. He was influenced by Kant's view of a pure rational faith and by the higher biblical criticism.

B. Orthodox Judaism argued that Jewish law was not a human response to particular historical conditions but had been revealed by God and was not subject to change.
1. Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808—88), a leading Orthodox thinker, was influenced by Kant and argued that Enlightenment ideals and Jewish ideals were largely the same.
2. Unlike Kant, Hirsch did not share the idea of a pure universal moral religion but thought that it was God' s will for many distinct moral communities to exist, each with a different set of duties toward God.

V. A prominent Jewish philosopher of the 19th and early 20th centuries was Hermann Cohen (1842 —1918), who became, in 1876, the first Jewish full professor in Germany.

A. Cohen was one of the most renowned and influential Kantian philosophers in Germany.

B. He wrote very little "Jewish philosophy," did not lead a particularly observant religious life, and in his early work, took the Kantian position that religion is basically a stage on the way to the universal ethical kingdom.

C. But in his later work, Cohen argued that religion can address individual issues, such as guilt and sin, that Kantian rationalistic ethics cannot. This led to an increased focus on Judaism.

D. He argued that the Jews had been chosen by God to be a beacon to all humanity. Through their suffering, they could help illuminate for all humanity the significance of a universal ethic.

Suggested Reading:
Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism.
Mendelssohn and Samuel, Mendelssohn's Jerusalem.
Morgan and Gordon, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy.

Questions to Consider:
1. What is Mendelssohn's view of the role of Jewish law?
2. In what way might we say that Orthodox Judaism is both traditional and modern?

Lecture Fifteen — Transcript
Judaism and Modernity

To this point in our lectures I've said very little about Judaism, but it's time now to address some important Jewish contributions to our discussion of religion and modernity, faith and suspicion. I've said that the parameters for doing philosophical and theological work on religion in the modern period were set, for the most part, by Christian thinkers or by thinkers who came out of a Christian background. These figures tended to see Christianity as the model for all religion or as the model against which a critical view of religion needed to be articulated.

But we should keep in mind the following. There were some key modern thinkers who were Jewish. Though I won't discuss his work here, Baruch Spinoza was, with Descartes, one of the founding figures of the modern philosophical tradition. In addition, two of the figures I will discuss in this lecture, Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen, were respected mainstream philosophers and made important contributions to philosophy and the philosophy of religion. Second, though many Jewish thinkers shared much with their Christian and post-Christian contemporaries with respect to issues of Enlightenment, reason, and ethics, their sense of Jewish history and their experience of the realities of Jewish life in modern Europe, and their views on Judaism as religion, allowed them to explore questions that their non-Jewish contemporaries were not asking. So, studying their work does give us a broader and fuller sense of modern Western religious thought — and, in particular, it allows us to explore crucial questions regarding religious difference from the perspective of thinkers who challenged the explicit and implicit universalism of Enlightenment thought, as well as the belief in Christian superiority that was shared by so many of the thinkers we have discussed to this point. We see in the work of Mendelssohn and Cohen, but also in debates between what came to be called Reform and Orthodox Judaism in the first half of the 19'" centuries, where thinkers such as Abraham Geiger and Samson Raphael Hirsch battled over to the extent to which the Rabbinic tradition of Halakhah — Jewish law — should or should not define modern Judaism.

Before we turn to these figures and issues, I want to sketch rather quickly some of the key elements of the Jewish tradition. Recall our discussion, a few lectures back, of the Documentary Hypothesis­ the idea that the first five books of the Bible were not written by Moses, but at some later point in Jewish history, long after the events that they portray, that these stories were woven together from a group of distinct narratives and other sources at this late period. Modern biblical scholars, by the end of the 19th century, had basically constructed a history of the Bible that placed this editorial process­ and thus the origin of the Hebrew Bible — some time after 538 B.C.E. This was the point at which some Jews return from the Babylonian exile and rebuilt the Temple of Jerusalem. From the point of view of historical scholarship, then, this is the point where Judaism begins­ not with Abraham's covenant or with Moses receiving the Commandments on Sinai, but with the post-exilic construction of the narrative of those early events, along with the ideas, laws, and rituals at the heart of Judaism.

This period of Judaism, known as Second Temple Judaism, lasted until 70 C.E. During this period, the rest of the Hebrew Bible took shape, as did a religion centered on the Temple in Jerusalem and the animal sacrifices there performed by priests. During this time, Israel is almost constantly occupied by foreign powers — first the Persians, then Alexander the Great, and finally, starting in 63 B.C.E., the Romans. About 100 years later, in 66 C.E., the Jews rebelled against Rome. In 70, four years later, the rebellion was crushed, Jerusalem was sacked, and the Second Temple was destroyed. As a result, Judaism loses its center, and the Jews are scattered throughout the Mediterranean world in what is known as the "Diaspora." This leads to the emergence of a new form of Judaism — led no longer by Temple priests, but by interpreters of the law, the rabbis, who over the next 400 years — at the same time that Christianity is being formed — consolidated a new kind of Judaism, the Rabbinic Judaism that is still with us today.

This consolidation was based in large part on a new vision of Jewish law. The rabbis claimed that in addition to Torah, the written law found in the Bible, God had revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai an oral law that had been passed down through the centuries and generations to the rabbis. This oral law, the rabbis claimed, allowed the proper interpretation of the Bible, and, indeed, the rabbis claimed that Torah should now be understood as the Hebrew Bible and the Rabbinic tradition of interpretation. This Rabbinic vision produced its own literature in the first five centuries of the Common Era with the writing, first, of the Mishnah in the 3rd century, and then, in the 6th century, the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds. The Talmuds consist of immense compilations of Rabbinic commentary on the Jewish law and come to have a religious status for the rabbis that equals, if not in certain ways supersedes, the status of the Bible. Rabbinic Judaism thus develops as a religion of Halakhah, of law, and is based in synagogue worship and the study of Torah. It also develops as a religion of Diaspora, for the most part in the context of Christian and Islamic empires in which the Jews were marginalized, rarely given any political rights, and not infrequently subject to various forms of persecution — especially in Christian lands.

For our purposes, we need to think about what all this means for the Jews of early modern Europe. With the emergence of the nation-state in Europe came a new category of political actor, the citizen. Eventually, the question presented itself as to whether Jews should be granted citizenship in these nation-states. If so, under what conditions should it be granted to them: as Jews or only on condition that they renounce their Judaism? This came to be known as the "Jewish Question," and it was an issue of much debate in the late 18th and through the 19th centuries. It's in the context of this question that we can understand many of the major developments in Judaism in the modern period. These developments in some respects parallel developments in Christianity, but in other respects diverge significantly.

One significant development that actually has little to do with the Jewish Question, but does represent an interesting parallel with Christian Pietism, was the emergence in the 17th century of Hasidic Judaism in eastern Europe. Like Christian Pietism, Hasidism emerged as a challenge to what it perceived as an over­ intellectualized religion centered on the study of Torah and stressed instead personal devotion, religious experience, and the idea that God could be encountered not just in Torah, but in nature. By and large, though, Hasidism remained marginal to mainstream Judaism, which started to undergo significant changes, especially in Germany, in the course of the18'" and then in the first half of the 19'" century­ as Jews grappled with modern philosophical developments and with the question of assimilation into European civic and political society.

In the course of the 19th century, Rabbinic Judaism split into the three branches that continue to represent the mainstream of Judaism today. First, there was Reform Judaism, a liberal Judaism that embraces many modern ideals and downplays traditional Jewish law in favor of a universalistic ethical perspective. Second, there is Orthodox Judaism, which insists on maintaining the traditional Rabbinic perspectives on the law in all aspects of life. Third, there is Conservative Judaism, which holds to Halakhah norms more closely than Reformed Judaism, but does allow careful changes to the tradition to make possible greater Jewish participation in modern life. A further development, later in the 19th century, was the emergence of Zionism — a movement, largely secular at first, devoted to the establishment of a Jewish homeland.

With this as background, let's turn to the work of Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn was born in 1729 in Dessau, Germany. He received a broad, humanistic education and as a young man became associated with leading intellectuals, such as Kant and Lessing, who admired him for his philosophical acumen and for his liberal, modern humanism. As a Jew, however, it was at that time impossible for him to get an academic appointment. For the most part, Mendelssohn's early work reflected the dominant trends in pre­ Kantian Enlightenment thought and his ideas about religion borrowed heavily from Enlightenment ideas about natural religion. Thus, he believed that human beings were possessors of innate knowledge of eternal truths self-evident to reason — such as a wise and beneficent God and the immortality of the soul. He argued that Judaism was at its core an expression of this natural religion.

Since he thought that Judaism cohered quite well with Enlightenment ideals, he believed that the answer to the Jewish Question was that Jews could and should, to a great degree, assimilate into German culture. But at the same time that he thought more assimilation was necessary, he also believed that Jews should follow Jewish law. Although Judaism was a form of natural religion, he thought that the laws in the Torah, which applied only to Jews, continued to be valid for Jews — and so would limit their assimilation into European culture. Not surprisingly, then, Mendelssohn also stressed religious freedom and argued that Christians must cease their persecution of the Jews, and that Jews were required to renounce any ideas from the Jewish tradition that involved the coercion of religion. This later claim drew criticism from those who charged that the Jewish tradition did allow religious coercion in the form of excommunication.

Critics also attacked Mendelssohn's work on Jewish emancipation. These criticisms drew him into controversies that led, eventually, to the publication of the book Jerusalem in 1783 — a book that many have since lauded as the inaugural work of the Haskalah or "Jewish, Enlightenment." The main argument of Jerusalem rests on a distinction between the role of the state and the role of religion. The state, Mendelssohn claimed, deals with action, with our deeds, while religion deals with our beliefs and our relationship to God. The state, therefore, is permitted to use coercion in order to regulate action, but it cannot use it when it comes to belief since that is the concern of religion.

With this argument, Mendelssohn defended the emancipation of the Jews as Jews: They should not have to leave their religion behind to become full citizens because they can, as citizens, obey the laws of the state while still believing as Jews. In making this argument, he was at least implicitly appealing to the slowly emerging modern idea that religious life and civil life, political life, could be separated­ that religion could be part of one's private life, and one's function as a citizen could be part of one's public life. This still, however, left Mendelssohn with the problem that traditional Judaism does allow ecclesiastical authorities the power of excommunication for wrong beliefs. Mendelssohn's answer to this was that the punishment of excommunication had been appropriate when Israel had existed as a religious state during the First and Second Temple periods. Since religious and political power had been one during that time, questioning God or worshipping false gods could not be viewed simply as a matter of religious freedom, but as a crime against the state. Since the state, on Mendelssohn's view, could coerce, in this context excommunication was an appropriate punishment.

However, in the context of the modern nation-state, this law no longer applied. Many, Jews and non-Jews alike, did not find this answer persuasive. Jews questioned the ease with which Mendelssohn disposed of elements of traditional Jewish law. Non­ Jews, and Kant is one example, thought Mendelssohn's defense of the revealed character of Jewish law only confirmed for them the idea that Judaism, in many ways like Catholicism, was a religion of the past that focused on mere ritual and traditional forms of authority. We see, then, that the question of the status of Jewish law remained a problem for Mendelssohn as he tried to balance a significant degree of assimilation with the affirmation of particularity and freedom of religion. On the one hand, he continued to argue that the basic beliefs of Judaism — monotheism and God's providential rule over history — are disclosed by reason, and that in this sense Judaism is a natural religion. On the other hand, he also continued to insist that Judaism's particularity lies in the fact that at Sinai God revealed laws that are unique to Judaism.

Following these laws are the way Jews come to fulfillment — though this is not to say that this is the way that all human beings come to fulfillment. Since they are revealed by the same God that natural religion leads us to believe in, when Jews follow the law, it helps to put them in the position, Mendelssohn thought, to see the truths of reason. This dilemma, for Mendelssohn, this balancing act he' s trying to achieve, reflects the broader issues facing Judaism in modernity as it faced, in different ways, Christians in modernity as well — how to negotiate the balance between commitment to revelation and tradition on the one hand, and reason on the other. We can explore this dilemma in more detail by considering the emergence of two distinct forms of Judaism: Reform and Orthodox.

Late in the 18th century, certain groups of Jews in Germany started making minor modifications to traditional worship services and other traditional obligations. In Hamburg, around 1817, these kinds of reforms took a more substantial turn and then started to spread out to other synagogues in Germany and elsewhere — eliciting strong condemnations from more Orthodox Jewish leaders. These reforms included worship services conducted in the vernacular, the introduction of musical instruments into the services — and, in some cases, the abandonment of the rite of circumcision. These changes helped propel self-conscious efforts on the part of rabbis and other Jewish thinkers to articulate the principles behind a modern vision of Judaism — with this the Reform Movement was born. For Reformers such as Abraham Geiger, a rabbi in Wiesbaden, the basic claim of Reform Judaism was that the halakhic framework of the rabbis had been superseded, and that for the spirit of Judaism to continue to develop, for genuine Judaism to be possible, a new framework must be articulated.

It's worth remarking on two crucial elements of Geiger's thinking on these matters. First, Enlightenment thought — and in particular, Kant's view of a pure, rational faith — was a major influence on Geiger and other Jewish Reformers. They agreed with Kant that genuine religion is essentially moral. Second, historical thought and the higher biblical criticism were also crucial for Geiger, who believed that Jewish laws had been established under particular historical circumstances and though at the time were integral parts of a living Judaism since different circumstances prevail now — in the 19th century, it demanded that these old laws be examined and, if necessary, changed. Essentially, then, and to the dismay of more Orthodox Jews, Geiger and others treated Jewish laws as — in at least crucial respects — human, historically conditioned constructions and not divine revelations. Geiger writes:

Judaism has preserved its eternal divine content in forms, most of which were the outcome of temporal conditions; they have therefore lived their day. This exterior must be refashioned, this form must be changed if Judaism is to continue to influence the lives of its followers with its purpose and its power.

In short, the halakhic framework of traditional Rabbinic Judaism was, for Geiger, an external form that must be refashioned so that what he called Judaism's "eternal divine content" could continue to be meaningful. Those Jews who in response to these developments were defining themselves as Orthodox could not have disagreed more with this kind of claim. For them, Jewish law was not a human response to particular historical conditions, but had been revealed by God and was not subject to change or to human ideas about changing historical conditions. For them, Jewish law was divine and eternal. So, where the Reformers saw the rabbis of the Talmudic period as basically having created the halakhic framework of Judaism, the Orthodox insisted that the rabbis inherited the oral law and made it central to their vision of Judaism — and in doing so were following the will of God.

It would be a mistake, though, to view the Orthodox as simply rejecting the Enlightenment and modernity. As we see in one of the leading Orthodox thinkers of the 19th century, Samson Raphael Hirsch, a rabbi in Oldenburg, Germany, the Enlightenment — and, again, Kant — exercised an influence even for these defenders of tradition, and even to the point where Hirsch could claim that Enlightenment ideals and Jewish ideals were largely the same. For Hirsch, like Kant and Geiger, religion was basically about morality, and for this reason, like Mendelssohn, Hirsch could say that Judaism, as a religion of law and thus of action, was more of a religion of morality than Christianity — which he saw as a religion of belief. Unlike Kant, however, Hirsch did not share the idea of a pure, universal, moral religion that erased all distinctions between particular religious and moral communities. More specifically, he thought that a humanity realizing God's will for moral progress would be made up of many distinct moral communities — each with a different set of duties toward God. Jews, for Hirsch, are one such community, defined by their adherence to God's revelation to them — that is, by the law. Thus, and here is the big difference from the Reformers, for genuine Judaism to survive, Hirsch thought, Jews must follow all God's laws in all their details. This, for Hirsch, would be the way that Jews would continue to advance towards moral and spiritual perfection.

To a great extent, then, the vision of Reform Judaism is closer to the modern universalism we find in Kant and Hegel — where the ideal is humanity united in a single moral and social community — while the Orthodox vision puts more stress on the particularity of different human communities. At the same time, both Hirsch and Geiger embraced the modern idea of the moral progress of humanity as a whole. Another important Jewish thinker struggling with these ideas later in the 19th century and early in the 20th century was the Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. Born in 1842 near Dresden, in Germany, Cohen studied at a Jewish theological seminary and had thoughts of becoming a rabbi, but soon turned to philosophy and became one of the most renowned and influential Kantian philosophers in Germany. In 1873, he was appointed to a position at the University of Marburg and three years later became the first Jewish full professor in Germany. This, of course, indicates that since the time of Mendelssohn, 100 years earlier, Jews in Germany had made significant strides in their assimilation into German society — though, as we will see in a moment, the Jewish Question had not been answered to everyone's satisfaction. For most of his career, Cohen was a mainstream philosopher who happened to be Jewish and wrote very little Jewish philosophy.

By most accounts, he did not lead a particularly observant religious life. But in 1879, he, like Mendelssohn before him, was faced with the Jewish Question when a famous historian wrote an anti-Jewish essay that described Judaism as "the national religion of an alien race." Cohen felt compelled to respond with an essay of his own that began with the words "We are again obliged to bear witness." In his response, Cohen argued that because the Jews were chosen by a God who protected the alien, who commanded love of the stranger, they were chosen to work towards establishing the Kingdom of God on earth.

So, like Mendelssohn, Geiger, and Hirsch, Cohen was concerned to relate the specificity of Judaism to a universalist ethical humanism embracing all peoples — though, as we have seen, each of these major Jewish thinkers understands this specificity somewhat differently. Cohen, like Geiger and also like liberal Christians, believed that modern European — and particularly German — culture, despite the continuing debates over the Jewish Question, offered real signposts on the way to this Kingdom of God. Even as he was defending Judaism, Cohen believed that religion is basically a stage on the way to the universal ethical kingdom — and thus, that separate religions will, in the end, be absorbed by ethics, and that God is basically a concept that helps us get to that point.

There's some evidence, though, and this is a contested matter among Cohen interpreters today — there is some evidence that in his last writings, Cohen became more concerned than in his earlier writings to stress the particularity of Judaism. When he retired from his academic post at Marburg, he moved to Berlin to teach at a Jewish institution. In his last book, The Religion of ReasonPom the Sources of Judaism, which was published in 1919, the year after his death, in this book, Cohen does seem to focus to a significant degree on the limits of the ethical approach to Judaism he had articulated earlier. In his last book, he argues that while ethics treats human beings generically, in their capacity as rational agents, it cannot deal fully with human beings as individuals. Religion does address those issues that concern the individual's relation to him or herself — sin and guilt, hope and salvation — and those issues that concern the Jews as a unique people. Here, then, Cohen stresses not just the conceptual God of Kantian ethics, but the God who is experienced personally and communally.

For Jews, the relationship to God should be understood primarily in terms of the Jewish law and the Jewish Messianic ideal. By embracing the law, Cohen thought, Jews commit themselves to working for the Kingdom of God — essentially, in Cohen's view, a socialist kingdom concerned above all with justice and the rights for the poor. On the one hand, then, Cohen retains his and Kant's universalism: Jews are working for a universal ethical community of humankind. It's for this reason that Cohen rejects Zionism. He wrote the following: "The Unique God has deprived us of our homeland to return it to us in humanity." Further: "The reality of Zionism contradicts the conceptual world of the prophets as well as the entirety of our philosophical rationalism."

In other words, for Jews to work for the universal ethical community of humankind, they must not separate themselves politically and socially by having their own homeland. However, Cohen also said that it is precisely through their difference, their distinct identity, their chosenness, that Jews, for Cohen, can accomplish their work. He understands Jews as a beacon to all humanity that becomes evident in their historical suffering. He argued that suffering allows the individual to reflect on, and come to greater self-consciousness with, regard to his or her life — and that Jewish suffering can play a similar role for humankind as a whole, by coming to greater self­ consciousness of themselves and their role in history in illuminating for all humanity a universal ethic.

This is summed up in the following claim about the Jewish community as what Cohen describes as "the sacrificial victim who exposes himself to suffering because of his knowledge of the irreplaceable value of this suffering for the historical welfare of mankind." All of this is captured for Cohen in the importance of the Jewish Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur — a time of reflection on one's sins, and through this reflection coming to reconciliation with God. This is not to say that one should look at the suffering of others as the result of their sin, and in that sense see that suffering as justified. Cohen's is not an attempt to give a theoretical explanation of all suffering as punishment for sin. Indeed, he believed that as individuals, we must attend to others in the particularity and concreteness of their suffering, must attend to each one of them as "neighbor" — not out of a theory of sin and punishment, but in sympathetic care for the other.

So, we see that while Cohen's universalistic views remain central to his thinking, he sees the Jews as having a specific task in the ethical project of humankind. So, we've seen, then, that from the period of the Enlightenment and the Jewish Haskalah up into the 20th century, Jewish reflection on religion was inevitably bound up with questions about Jewish assimilation and particularity vis-a-vis European culture, and a European culture that was clearly becoming secularized — even as it remained very deeply Christian in many respects. Indeed, into the 20th century a significant number of Jews converted to Christianity, some for genuinely religious reasons­ others as a way of assimilating. But what we also see is that even as Judaism was splitting into a number of branches over the question of adherence to the law, all the major thinkers we have considered here were strongly influenced by modern — and especially Kantian­ views on ethics and religion, Yet, we also see that the question of Jewish law divides them. These thinkers help us raise a question about faith that is at the heart of the developments we have been considering throughout our consideration of modernity: To what extent is religious faith a matter of the way our reason and feeling connect us to God in the present, and to what extent must our reason and feeling be shaped in conversation and commitment with a tradition of understanding and connecting with God's revelation?

Lecture Fourteen -- 19th Century Christian Antimodernists

Scope:

In contrast to the Protestant thinkers viewed modern philosophy and historical studies with suspicion. Catholic antimodernists were particularly successful in their push for greater authority for the pope, realized in the 1870 declaration of the doctrine of papal infallibility, and in their effort to establish the premodern thought of Thomas Aquinas as the "foundation upon which the whole science of natural and divine things is based." Protestant resistance to modernism took shape in evangelical and especially fundamentalist ideas. Prominent among these were, first, the doctrine of "dispensational premillennialism," a view of the end times as revealed in the Book of Revelation that implied a condemnation of modern culture. Protestant antimodernism was also seen in the doctrines of biblical inspiration and inerrancy, which put evangelicals at odds with developments in historical biblical criticism and with the emerging theory of evolution.

Outline

I. The liberal theologies examined in the previous lecture have two main points in common.

A. All of them, in one way or another, veered away from a strict Enlightenment rationalism that would treat biblical literature and theological doctrine primarily in terms of propositional
claims about the nature of the world and cosmos.

B. They also tried to address questions about the Bible and the Christian tradition that were emerging at the time by affirming historical study.
1. In doing so, we find that each of them continued to explain changes in history and the direction of history from a perspective in which Christianity is at the heart of the development of Western civilization and culture toward a consummation.
2. This optimism, perhaps more than anything, is the hallmark of Christian liberalism, particularly the Protestant variety.

C. But many Christians in the 19th century were suspicious of the liberalizing and secularizing trends of modern culture and society.
1. Thinkers who fall into this category by and large reject efforts to adapt Christianity to modernity and see their task as one of defending traditional Christianity and criticizing the human-centered pretensions of modern thought.
2. They saw biblical criticism as a threat and were outraged when Darwin's Origin of the Specieswas published in the second half of the 19th century. Particularly offensive were Darwin's astonishing claims that the world is far older than the Bible allows and that human beings are descended from other species rather than created as a unique species in the image of God. Further, Darwin's theory of natural selection seemed to necessitate, for many, the rejection of a history guided by God.

II. For Catholics, antimodernist thought was embodied chiefly in Ultramontanism, a movement for the absolute authority of the pope that reached its acme in 1870 when papal infallibility became official church doctrine.
A. In the centuries leading up to the modern period, the authority of the Catholic Church lay firmly in the grasp of the pope, even though during much of the Middle Ages, the pope had to fight on at least two fronts to establish and protect his authority.
1. On one front, the pope faced the concilarists, those who thought the bishops should have more power.
2. Popes also vied for temporal power against the various kingdoms of Europe.

B. In the modern period, the threats to the power of the church and the papacy came mostly from secularizing trends in nation-states.

C. It was in this context that the movement of Ultramontanism arose to defend the authority of pope and assert the doctrine
of papal infallibility.
1. This doctrine had been around for centuries but had never been formally asserted by the church.
2. It became popular in the 19th century in the face of growing secularization.

D. A series of events led up to the approval of the doctrine.
1. In 1854,Pope Pius declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary without consulting the bishops. 2. In 1864, he published a "Syllabus of Errors," which condemned secularism and political liberalism in stunning detail.

E. In 1869, the pope called to order the First Vatican Council where, despite some serious opposition, the bishops overwhelmingly supported the dogma of the primacy and infallibility of the pope.
1. The basic theological claim behind the doctrine of infallibility was based on Matthew 16:18.
2. Catholic critics of the idea appealed to the history of the church, arguing that in the early church, major councils, such as Nicea, were called not by the pope but by emperors; that there were no claims to papal infallibility for the first 13 centuries of the tradition; and that many of the claims of the early popes had since been
overturned by the church.

III. On the Protestant side, the most important antimodernist movement was American fundamentalism.

A. Although fundamentalism proper did not emerge until the beginning of the 20 century, its roots go back to
developments in 19th-century evangelicalism.
1. Through much of the 19th century, many evangelicals
had a fairly progressive sense of the moral regeneration that comes with the rebirth in Christ and were at the forefront of the abolition movement and the women's suffrage movement.
2. Some evangelicals, however, found themselves alienated from certain aspects of American culture by a number of factors: internal conflicts within the movement; perceived threats posed by liberal theology, biblical criticism, and Darwinism; and perceptions that immigration and urbanization were threatening traditional values.

B. A crucial factor in the emergence of fundamentalism was the development of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy in the course of the 19'" century.
1. Inerrancy, rather than a traditional Christian doctrine, stemmed from the effort to make biblical theology a
science grounded in an empiricist philosophy.
2. These facts were to be found in the Bible and were to be believed because they come from God.
3. The writers of the Bible were guided by God in what they wrote, even to some extent in the words they used, such that their writings would be free from any error.

C. A second factor was Darwin's theory of evolution.
1. The main problem with Darwinism, for many Christians, was not the idea of evolution itself but Darwin's claim that the mechanism for evolution was natural selection.
2. For such thinkers as Hodge, natural selection contradicted the biblical claim that God created each species and had a design for creation as a whole.

D. A third factor was the emergence of dispensational premillennialism, the idea that Christ would come only after the anti-Christ had conquered the world, would do battle with the anti-Christ, and would then reign for 1,000 years.

E. The term "fundamentalism" is derived from a declaration that came out of the Presbyterian assembly in which five doctrines were approved against the threat of liberal theology.

Suggested Reading:
Livingston, Modern Christian Thought Volume 1.
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture.

Questions to Consider:
1. What was the basic issue in the debate between the concilarists and the Ultramontanists of the Catholic Church in the second
half of the 19th century?
2. What were some of the social and theological factors that led to the emergence of Christian fundamentalism?


Lecture Fourteen — Transcript
19th-Century Christian Antimodernists

In our last lecture, we explored a range of Protestant and Catholic thinkers to show how they attempted to show modern reason and historical consciousness as integral to Christian faith — and not tools of anti-religious suspicion. But what about those Christians who were suspicious of the liberalizing and secularizing trends of modern culture and society? What about those Catholics who, even more so than the members of the Oxford Group, were convinced that these trends were destroying the power of the Church, and thus the keys to human salvation? What about those Protestants who feared that modern biblical criticism and modern science more generally were undermining the authority of the Bible, and for whom modern society was degenerating into immorality and relativism? Where liberal Christians affirmed and even deified the direction of history, it seemed to these critics of modern religion and modern society that history was headed in the wrong direction and that history, as understood by the modernists, undermined Christian faith.

These religious critics of modernity will be the subject of this lecture. In particular, I will discuss Catholic Ultramontanism — a movement dedicated to establishing the absolute authority of the pope and that was instrumental in empowering Pope Pious IX to declare most aspects of modernity as anathema to Catholic doctrine. I will discuss the development of conservative Protestant Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, movements characterized by increasing alienation from modern society and culture. At the start, however, I do want to stress that although it is tempting to call all of the figures and movements I discuss in this lecture simply anti-modern or traditionalist, things are not so simple. What we will see, especially in the case of the Protestants, is that even as they portray themselves as defenders of the tradition against the corrosive acids of modernity, their own versions of Christianity were shaped in significant ways by modern ideas and ideologies.

I'll begin with the Roman Catholics. As we have seen, the story of modernity is, in significant part, the story of the rejection of Church authority. In places such as England and France, in particular, this meant that the rejection of the authority of the Catholic Church, for the centuries leading up to the modern period, the authority of the Catholic Church lay firmly in the grasp of the pope — even though during much of the Middle Ages the pope had to fight on at least two fronts in establishing and protecting his authority. On the one hand, there were many in the Church that claimed that Church authority rightly rested not with the pope alone, but also with the bishops. This position was referred to as Conciliarism in reference to the kinds of Church councils that had produced the great creeds of the Church in the early centuries of Christendom, such as the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon. Although the Conciliarists were often a force for reform in the Middle Ages, they were never really able to significantly reduce the power of the pope.

On the other hand, there was the question of the tension between spiritual and temporal authority, between the power of the pope and the power of European monarchs and other political leaders. In the modern period, though, as we saw with the Oxford Group, it was the nation state that was perceived by the Church to be the main threat to its power and doctrine. In this context,the movement of Ultramontanism arose to defend the authority of the pope and assert the doctrine of papal infallibility. This doctrine, as we've seen, had been around for centuries, but had never been formally asserted by the Church. But in the 19th century, largely in response to the growing secularism of European society, infallibility became an increasingly popular idea among Catholics — and by the middle of the 19th century, the pope, Pius IX, used this popularity to consolidate his power. In 1854, the pope declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is the doctrine that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was conceived without original sin — which meant, of course, that not only the Father, God, but also the Mother of Jesus were without sin. More crucial in this context, though, was the fact that Pious declared this dogma without consulting the bishops, and thus asserted his power to act independently of such traditional consultation.

In 1864, Pious published an Encyclical, a letter sent out to the bishops signaling an issue of high priority — though not the most authoritative form of papal pronouncement. In this Encyclical, he appended the infamous Syllabus of Errors, which condemned secularism and political liberalism in stunning detail. Contained in the syllabus were condemnations of — among other things — freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the sovereignty of the people. It also rejected the idea that, to quote "the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism and civilization as lately introduced." So not only is the Pope asserting his power, and so the power of the Church, but is doing so against what he perceived to be the pernicious effects of modern Western culture.

Finally, in 1869, the pope called to order the First Vatican Council, where — despite some serious opposition — the bishops overwhelmingly supported the dogma of the primacy and infallibility of the pope. This was articulated in a document called "Pastor Aeternus," which read, in part:

We teach and define that it is a dogma divinely revealed: that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the office of Pastor and Doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the Universal church, by the divine assistance promised him in Blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer willed that his church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith or morals.

This doctrine of infallibility was based, first of all, in the biblical texts in which Jesus seemed to appoint the Apostle Peter as the head of his Church — as in Matthew 16:18, where Jesus says to Peter: "That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." For the defenders of papal infallibility, these kinds of passages supported at least three ideas — first, that Jesus gave Peter the gift of divine sovereignty, which implies infallibility; second, that the Church is both a temporal and spiritual monarchy, with the Pope as king; third, that Jesus gave this gift not just to Peter, but also to his successors.

It is important to note that the document specifies that papal infallibility is in force only when the pope speaks "ex cathedra"­ that is, as it says in the passage I just read, when the pope "defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the Universal church." Thus, it's only a narrowly prescribed set of pronouncements, not all papal communications, and certainly not the personal opinions of the pope. These are not to be considered infallible — it's only when the pope speaks ex cathedra. Still, there was significant opposition to the doctrine — primarily from critics who appealed more and more to the history of the Church and argued that the early Church councils, such as Nicea, were not called by the pope, but by emperors, that there were no claims to papal infallibility for the first 13 centuries of the tradition, and that many of the claims of the early popes have since been overturned by the Church. But despite these objections, the Ultramontanists carried the day — and with this victory and with the pope's radical stand against the modern world, it would be almost another century, until the next Vatican Council in the 1960s, before the Catholic hierarchy would seek to reconcile the Church with modernity.

Let me now turn, for the rest of this lecture, to Protestant criticisms of modernity. In my discussion of Horace Bushnell, I talked about the development of Evangelical theology in the United States in the 19'" century and made the point that starting in the 1820s this form of Christianity became more and more dominant in the United States. However, especially in our contemporary context, where the Evangelical revival of the last decades of the 20'" century is so often identified with right-wing politics, it is important to note that through much of the 19th century, Evangelical Christianity in the United States included a broad, multifaceted range of ideas and movements — some of which were rather theologically and socially progressive. For much of the 19th century, evangelicals, based on their sense of the moral regeneration that comes with rebirth in Christ, tended — like most liberal Christians — to be optimistic about the power of humans to do good and to change society for the better. They tended to affirm ideas about modern progress, and some Evangelicals were at the forefront of the Abolition Movement and the Women's Suffrage Movement.

However, by the end of the century, Evangelical Christianity had also spawned the movement called "Fundamentalism," which had a very different take on society and the modern world. So, how did this happen? We can point to a number of factors. First, we must note that even as this optimistic Evangelicalism was playing a major role in the life of Protestant Christians during the 19th century, old-time Protestants were still influential — particularly in academic circles.

These theologians were particularly important in articulating Evangelical responses to biblical criticism and later to Darwinism, both of which were interpreted as threats to genuine Christianity and symptoms of a dangerous secularization of the intellectual and cultural elites in the United States. As we will see in a moment, these dangers had a role in turning many Evangelicals away from optimistic social engagement, Social factors also played a role here. There was concern about the growing religious pluralism in the United States that was largely a product of immigration­ particularly, at first, of Catholics from Ireland. With increasing urbanization and industrialization, there was a sense that traditional forms of life were being undermined. First, the Civil War, and then a bit later World War I, destroyed for many — Christian or not—easy faith in the ethical and social progress of modern Western civilization.

In sum, by 1920, many Protestants found themselves alienated from dominant trends and ideals of American culture and came to stress more and more a soul-saving, culture-denying Christianity. To see how this played out, let me focus on two religious developments that were central to the emergence of a conservative Evangelicalism and, in the early 20th century, Fundamentalism. First, in the course of the 19th century, traditional Calvinist thinkers, particularly a group of Presbyterian theologians at Princeton Seminary, developed an approach to the Bible that — against the trends of higher biblical criticism—claimed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. Second, a Christian version of history called "Dispensational Premillennialism" grabbed the imagination of many socially alienated Evangelicals. Before I look at these issues in some detail, however, I want to note that these developments did not necessarily go hand in hand — that, more generally, conservative and Evangelical Protestantism in the 19th century was quite varied, with lots of ideas and movements vying with one another in trying to articulate a genuine Christian vision. As we will see, however, some convergence did take place in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, as a number of Protestant groups came together in
rejection of liberal theology and secularism.

I turn now to the question of biblical inerrancy. As the Second Great Awakening spread through the United States in the 1820s, more traditional Calvinists in the U.S. expressed criticisms of the Evangelical focus on religious experience. They were concerned about what they called the "subjectivism of Evangelical Christianity," the fact that religious truth was viewed as an interior matter of individual experience. They were also concerned that an overemphasis on pietistic experience led to an erratic enthusiasm and to false teachings. At Princeton, Charles Hodge, whose writings spanned the middle of the 19th century, and his successor, Benjamin Warfield, devoted themselves to battling liberalism, biblical criticism, and religious enthusiasm by constructing a more objective form of theology based on the authority of the Bible.

The first point to make about this approach to the Bible is that it was based upon a rigorously intellectual rejection of biblical criticism. In fact, it was directed against both aspects of higher criticism and also against what it perceived as the anti-intellectual nature of Evangelical experientialism. Its intellectual basis was a form of empiricism articulated by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid. Reid had argued, against other forms of empiricism, that we do, in fact, perceive objects and not just discrete sense impressions that we somehow construct as objects. He says that we know this because we have, by our very nature, an "irresistible conviction" that this is the case.

The importance of this epistemology for Hodge and the Fundamentalists is that it grounded an understanding of science as the accumulation of facts — attested to by what Reid called "ordinary common sense" — so his was a philosophical defense of ordinary common sense. As Hodge and later Fundamentalists saw — and, indeed, as even many contemporary defenders of conservative Christianity see it today — science was given definitive shape by the thinkers of the scientific revolution, such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. This is science understood as the accumulation and demonstration of facts. But through the epistemological work of Kant, and then increasingly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the view of science was changing as more and more scientists and philosophers came to emphasize the absolutely central role in the scientific method of hypothesis, and theory, and interpretation. On this view, facts and interpretation are much more closely connected than in the more traditional, fact-based view of early modernity. Theories for the thinkers of the 19th and 20th century guide research and are judged not so much by being proven true and turned into fact — but on the basis of whether they make possible productive thinking and questioning, new research.

Hodge, however, wanted to construct theology as a modern science based in Reid's empiricism and in the older model of science, where theology would only differ from natural science in that its facts would be derived from the Bible — not from the observation of nature. The theologian must articulate the truths of Christianity for Hodge, its claims about sin and salvation and about the nature of Jesus by beginning with these facts in the Bible and reasoning inductively from those facts to the Christian doctrines. Here's the most crucial point in all of this: For Hodge, to realize this vision of theology as science, he had to understand the Bible as consisting of propositions of facts. We can thus contrast this view of the Bible with Bushnell's claim that the Bible should be read primarily as a kind of poetry and in Bushnell's explicit rejection of the idea that the Bible is a "magazine of propositions." Further, for Hodge's idea of theology as science to work, he had to show that the facts attested to in the Bible were true — that the Bible was inerrant because it had its source in God. More specifically, he argued, the writers of the Bible — through human beings — were inspired by God.

This idea of inspiration must be taken in Hodge's technical theological sense to mean that the writers of the Bible were guided by God in what they wrote, even to some extent in the words they used — and if this was the case, than the idea was that their writings would be free from any error. Hodge's younger colleague at Princeton, Benjamin Warfield, would later refine this idea by arguing for what he called "plenary verbal inspiration" — which means, first, that all of the Bible, not just certain books or verses, all of the Bible is inspired, and that both the words and the thoughts of the biblical writers, when it comes to the teachings of the Bible, are guaranteed by God to be without error. Even as other scholars pointed out seemingly contradictory claims made in the Bible about various matters, Hodge and Warfield continued to argue that even if there are some discrepancies in the Bible, they did not amount to much and did not affect issues of major importance. Even as the discoveries of scientists, including Darwin, became available, Hodge and Warfield argued that nothing that the Bible claimed about nature went against the findings of the sciences, and that those findings that did seem to contradict claims in the Bible were simply "theories" or "hypotheses" that eventually would be shown to be mistaken. They did argue, though, in order to help combat these claims, that what is inerrant is only the original biblical texts — that is, those copies actually written by the writers themselves, not the copies that were the result of a long chain of transcription that had resulted in errors creeping into the texts we now possess. It's in the context of thinking about biblical inerrancy that I want to talk briefly about the challenge presented to religious thinkers of the 19th century by Darwin's theory of evolution.

As I've said, defenders of biblical inerrancy were not against science per se — and even to some extent could accept some findings from higher biblical criticism or even — as I'll explain — the idea of evolution, but rather they rejected certain directions that scientific thought of the 19th century was taking. As the historian Claude Welch has pointed out with admirable clarity, the problem with Darwin, for defenders of biblical inerrancy such as Hodge, was not the idea of evolution per se, but rather the idea of natural selection­ which Hodge and others took to involve a rejection of the idea that the world was guided by God's providence or design. Welch puts it like this:

What was decisive in Darwin's contribution ... was the way in which the principle of natural selection, in conformity with the "law of common descent" was developed into a powerful, coherent, and inclusive model to account for the origin of the species.... [This model held] that new species come into being from preexisting varieties by an irregularly adaptive divergence, in which the main agent in the conversion of varieties into species is natural selection.... Darwin's scheme needed no god or principle of teleology or design.

For Hodge, the idea that natural selection and the related idea that new species developed from older species directly contradicted the book of Genesis — where God, as they read it, intentionally and directly created each kind of animal and plant. Darwin was not, of course, the first to come up with the idea of evolution or the idea that species develop over time. It had been around for decades before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Many Christians, even conservative Christians, could accept the idea that God achieved his purposes over a long period of time, for this did not contradict the idea that each species was intended and designed by God — even if they were not all created at once "in the beginning." I should remark here that claiming that the Bible is inerrant is not necessarily to claim that it should be read in its most literal sense. Thus, it was not unusual in the 19th century for Christians to claim that the six days of the biblical creation story did not mean six 24-hour periods — but, in fact, meant six much-longer spans of time. Hodge himself, even as he rejected the idea that species evolved from other species, could accept the idea that not all species necessarily appeared at the beginning, or that they appeared on earth as if magically from nowhere. He wrote:

each species was specially created, not ex nihilo, [from nothing] nor without the intervention of secondary causes, but nevertheless originally, or not derived evolved, or developed from preexisting species. These distinct species ... separately originated, are permanent. They never pass from one into the other ... if at any time since the original creation new species have appeared on the earth, they owe their existence to the immediate intervention of God.

The response to Darwin among Christians was varied, in part because many could accept the idea of evolution and did not understand the deep naturalism implied by the theory — but Hodge did understand this, and for him and others, Darwin threatened to remove God and God's plan from our understanding of the world. I'll return to this and the conflict between religion and science from the point of view of the Fundamentalists in a few moments.

In addition to claims about the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, Fundamentalist theology was also shaped by a doctrine of history called "Premillennialism." Millennialism is a version of the biblical vision of history—particularly as it is inflected by the New Testament book, Revelations, which tells of the battle of the forces of the Christ and the Antichrist at Armageddon and the coming Kingdom of God. Behind this is a view of history as a battle between God and Satan. The millennium refers to the 1,000 years mentioned in Revelation 20, when Satan would be cast into a pit and would, as the Bible says, "deceive the nations no more." Two forms of Millennialism emerged in the course of the Christian tradition: Post and Premillennialism. For Postmillennialists, this 1,000 years would be the last epoch of history, during which the Holy Spirit would be poured out around the world as all the nations accepted the Gospel. Then, Christ would return to bring history to an end, and God would create, as it says in the book of Revelation, "a new heaven and a new earth." Premillennialists, by contrast, tended to read the Bible more literally and believed that Christ would come only after the Antichrist had conquered the world — would do battle with the Antichrist and then reign for 1,000 years. So, the basic difference is that Post-millennialism means that Christ comes after the millennium, and Premillennialism means that Christ comes before the millennium.

Why is this difference important? Postmillennialism is in significant respects more optimistic about human history and thought, for it sees the millennium as made possible by human action in history. Postmillennialists thought that we were nearing the end of the reign of the Antichrist, represented by the power of the Catholic Church and Islam. They believed that with the success of Protestant missions around the world and with the kind of faith in ethical progress we saw in someone like Ritschl, that we were nearing the time of the millennium — which would be largely a human achievement — so there was reason for human beings to work to improve the world. By contrast, Premillennialists, believing that the 1,000 years would come only after the Apocalypse and the return of Christ, did not think that human historical activity could bring us any closer to the millennium. Thus, for them, our task was not to make the world better — it was not to improve life on earth — it was, rather, to save souls in preparation for Christ's return.

After the Civil War — when, as I've said, many Evangelicals started to feel more alienated from American culture and when the threats of both biblicial criticism and Darwinism were seen to be challenging Christianity — this Premillennialist view became more and more attractive. Both biblical inerrancy and Premillennial Dispensationalism were crucial elements of the Fundamentalism that took self-conscious form during the first two decades of the 20th century. In 1903, conservative Presbyterians, led by the scholars from Princeton and other biblical teachers who supported biblical inerrancy, formed the Bible League of North America — dedicated to a defense of the faith. Soon many Dispensationalists joined the group. This alliance reflected the fact that although there were significant theological differences between them, conservative Presbyterians and Premillennialist Evangelicals understood the importance of uniting in opposition to what they perceived as the growing power of a liberal theology that had succumbed to modernist trends and were threatening Christianity and the Bible.

Then, in 1910, the Presbyterian Assembly brought up on formal charges of heresy some prominent Presbyterian scholars who disagreed with the claims of the Princeton school on the issue of inerrancy. The Assembly produced a declaration that laid out five points of doctrine: one, the inerrancy of scripture; two, the Virgin Birth of Christ; three, Christ's substitutionary atonement — that is, that Christ was sacrificed to pay for our sins; fourth, his bodily resurrection; and fifth, the historical authenticity of biblical miracles. Nineteen-ten also saw the publication of the first in a series of 12 pamphlets called "The Fundamentals." These were financed by an oil tycoon named Lyman Stewart, and they were dedicated to defending the truth of Christianity. These became the rallying point for the emerging coalition of critics of theological liberalism and the source of the name "Fundamentalism." By 1920, the five doctrines that had been declared by the Presbyterian Assembly in 1910 had been renamed "The Fundamentals" — and, reflecting the general cultural pessimism that followed World War I, they were revised so that the doctrine of Premillennialism was substituted for the affirmation of miracles.

Returning for a moment to "The Fundamentals" pamphlets, one of their main targets was the higher criticism, which they castigated as closed-minded speculation. They saw that it resulted only in tenuous hypotheses, rather than facts, and that it excluded as a matter of principle — not out of any proof — the possibility of miracle and God's supernatural intervention. The pamphlets defended what they saw as real science, but, again, we see that the two visions of what counts as science were being pitted against one another — one that stressed facts and the possibility of divine intervention, and one that was rigorously naturalistic and saw science progressing through hypothesis and theory, rather than simply fact and induction. By way of concluding and, very briefly, summarizing, it is worth pointing out that unlike Catholic Ultramontanism, which in most respects was decidedly anti-modern, Protestant Fundamentalism — though claiming to defend traditional Christianity — was distinctly modern in crucial respects. The Fundamentalists were not rejecting modernity wholesale, but were rejecting certain directions modernity had taken in the 19th century and were dependent on early modern theological and scientific ideas.

Although Christians had for millennia viewed the Bible as the revealed Word of God and so as absolute truth, Christian theologians from the very earliest centuries of the tradition had developed complex methods of interpreting the Bible and had identified many layers of meaning — from the literal, to the metaphorical, to the mystical. From this perspective, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, as formulated by the Princeton theologians and adopted by the Fundamentalists that focused on the plain propositional sense of the text — this is a modern doctrine, and it was strongly shaped by early modern conceptions of science.