V. RELIGION AND FAITH CHAPTER 14 The Critique of Religion 1. DEMYSTIFICATION Christianity presents itself as a kerygma, that isto say a proclamation, a discourse addressed to. The Greek word “kerygma” has an ¢ .eaning: announcement, proclamation, message—demystification deals precisely with this address, with this discourse addressed to. We say that we have been victims of a nystfiction when, having received a letter, we discover that it was not sent by whom we believed The problem of demystification interests us in this very precise sense that itis not so much a critique of the content—it isnot that we have not received the letter—but of the origin: i did not come from whom Ieis just the problem of an illusion about the origin which is here posed; would enter into this critique by the analysis of the functio mn, inasmuch as itis the critical instrament of demystificx tion, and attempt to understand what it signifies a the heart of our cul I'am therefore co rained to speak of she impact, which seems to me to be irreversible, of three masters of suspicion—Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, who belong to our culture and with whom we are bound I want to make it understood that they make sense only if we take them together, of if we understand them a$ a unity, for itis atthe nt when their critiques converge that they become significant. If Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud at phenomena of culture still not been brought together in their joint impact on o Take ‘we cannot really understand them, for we are at once mess, and we miss their significance for us when fe concern ourselves only with their individual historical limitations.214 Religion ard Faith Marx appeats to us at first asa critic of the economic world to whom we could be indebted for an anatomy and physiology of capital ism in the mid-19th century. And we extricate ourselves quickly his message by proclaiming this political economics out of date, non. scientific, te ude the blow that Nietzsche struck at us when we take him by the limitation of the romanticism of the will to powe which seems in line with the philosophies of life; we say, “This is not re than Marxism is scientifie economics. In the same way, we would confine Freud in a purely psychiatric theory, in order to sn miss his imp uted a fundamental critique of modern culture If we are to succeed in understanding as a unity theory of ide ologies in Mars, the genealogies of ethics in Nietzsche, and the t of ideas and illusions in Freud, we will se the configuration of a problem—hereafter posed before the modern mind~the problem of se-consciousness. Therefore, itis to illuminate this problem of false ‘consciousness that we engage in a common rereading of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. The term “false-consciousne appears espe cially in Marx, But I think that it can be epplied usefully to Nietzsche and Freud, for itis specific problem. It is a problem which is not com cerned as such only with the individual as if he were in error in a purely epistemological sense ora falsch From here on, with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, a new type of et To be sure, Marx could not conceive of this illusion other than as a reflection of the clas struggle. Nietzsche could not grasp false- trong. And Freud could not experience this same problem apart from what I will call a semantics of desire, a history of hurnan desire entrapped by cultural prohibitions, reasons why the approach to the problem of false consciousness differs from one to the other; but each of them, die gaged from his narrowness, cooperates ina general exegesis of false interpretation, under the negative form of demy'stification. Bur w’ Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, beyond their economism, biologism, and psychiatrism respec:ively, demystifica place as the exercise of suspicion. I call suspicion the act of dispute ‘exactly proportional to the expressions of false-consciousness. The problem of false-consciousness is the object, the correlative of the ac 215 The Crit que of Religion suspicion, Out of it is born the quality of doubt, a type of doub which is totally new and different from Cartesian doubt Descartes doubts things but leans on the fortress of consciousness. Consciousness is what it is, tis what it says it stys what ie is. Con: e, equal to itself. Only things are doubtable, only things can have appearance dissoc om their reality. Iv isthe ver heart of Cartesian doubr that the more I doubt things, che more I attest to the coincidence in being itself which constitutes the very act of he problem of false-conscioumess could only appear by way o} a critique of culture whe consciousness. But—and this is a second trat—this doubt can only work consciousness appears in itself 2s a doubiful through a totally new technique which is a new method of deciphering ing will enable us to grasp what we have to appearances. This decip ‘What distinguishes false-consciousness from denunciation, is her thing than what possibility of signifying an fone believes was signified, that is, the possibility of the masked con: Marx, The metaphor of the mask is essentially Nietzschean. Conscious isat the same time what reveals and what conceals; it is this relation of conceal/reveal which calls for a specific reading, a bermeneutics. The task of hermeneutic (will come to this particularly in the second part) has always been to read a text and to distinguish the true sense from the apparent sense ext under the unintelligible text. There is, then, a proper manner of uncovering what was covered, of unveiling what was veiled, of removing Tes with this relation between the concealed and the revealed, the type is buie: in this respect, the fundamensal contribution of Marx will not remain his theory of class struggle, but the discernment of the idl Jen relation which connects ideology to the phenomena of domination. ‘This reading of ideology as a sym he durable contribution of Marxism beyond its politica applications. From this point of view Marx does not belong sole! ne Communists, Marxism, let it never be forgotten, appeared in Ger many in the middle of the last century at tae heart of the departments of Protestant theology. Its, the submission, authorizes an inter216 Religion and Faith pretation of the phenomenon of religion as a sort of coded language of domination and submission. Substitute paradise for the submissive, ideological justification for the powerful, and you have a perfectly valid and legitimate reading of religion and a kind of denunciation of what religion falsely proclaims in ignorance of its economie moti [insist again on the fact that the critique of Marx is interesting only in the degree to which it is not the critique of a moralise. Very often ‘But there is a moralist peopl Marx by sayin in him, not simply a scientist.” To my mind, what is interesting in Marx is neither his science, which seems to me suspect, in any case uncertain, nor what could remain of moralism, even if itis to see an ethic rem niscent of the Prophets; but it is this art of deciphering applied to cer- tain structures, Marx i interesting, not when he accuses the capitalists as men, but capital as a structure which is ignorant of itself asa false creation of values. It is this history of the great money fetish which is fork of Marx. The denunciation of the religious reat fetish is the point of the Marxist critique of the most important implications of the religion. We can surely apply this critique to ourselves; we must appro: priate it to ourselves as a task of truth and authenticity In the same manner, the Nietzschean genealogy of morals must, I will believe, be understood as a certain hermeneutics of our wil ing will that Nietzsche tried to look for behind the “willed” will in its imied objectives. This great deciphering of the will in its signification, in its projections of value, requires of him also a very particular tech- nique; this is more evident in Nietzsche than in Marx. Nietzsche isa nad the insight that philosophy, as treat) waa be waa Fas: eure, was a hermeneutics, an analysis of significations, itself ira text consequently philosophy iexegrcal inthe dere Skis eo tes Oo peep ele ie eecd gaol the meee That surpasses considerably the apparene biologism. Aasd moder to speck Of Prot «few worde-1 wil eve che vce be mech better waderstood if we wold diaccra bus place ina tye tt the boca fi crite ofthe ideals und ofthe vilacs ofthis al er eee etipenlgyee Gece Gececct peal is always to wonder, faced with a cultural phenomenon, how this cculeural phenomenon pertains to the history of human desire, be it as substituted object for lost primitive objects, be it asa factor of pro 217. The Critique of Religion hibitio critique of religion is p of inhibition, f frustration, of fear. And in this sense, his fectly legitimate, Any dispute with this cri tique can be made only on its own terms It is nece terms as they have been designated and marked off in th by Freud on the origins of morals and relgion, namely, 7 great books fem and sion. This critique concerns religion as far as itis effectively for us a compensation stemming from fear or a substi ously this“ Taboo, Moses and Monotbeism, and The Future of an for prohibited pleasures, It is obvi 3s far as” which will be the object of our study in the second essay Beyond this suspicion, beyond this work of deciphering, we have finally come to the thied trait, to discern 1 common power of affi ‘mation: we have thus to struggle in ourselves not only with suspicion, with this deciphering, but also with the affirmation. For all three of these men, finally, ate positive thinkers in the sense that they have pressed fundamentally for the restoration of man’s positivity is at this point that it would be necessery to relate these three, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, to Feuerbach. It was Feuerbach in the first place who said, and saw, that man was emptying himself into the absolute~that the absolute isa loss of substance. The task of man is to reappropriate his own substance, o stop this bleeding of substance ‘This hermeneutics was, as Ljust described it, a movement which sets ‘out from an original negation, advances through a work of deciph and a struggle against masks, and finally is put in the quest of a new affirmation. But whar kind of affirmation’ ‘You doubtless know how the young Marx, when he was more a philosopher than an economist, had rei cerpreted the words of Feuer bach. Man, he suid, in producing riches and in reproducing his exist ence, determines man. Ultimate affirmation, according to Marx, is this engendering of man by man through a biology of reproduction and an omy of production. What is at stake, therefore, is that man posits man. Its in this sense that man isa god for man, to take a phrase f Spinoza. I think that one would understand this discourse of the foung Marx if one could align with it the themes of the old Marx, speaking of the leap from necessity to freedom. This leap from neces sity to freedom by the knowledge of necessity, and by the mastery exercised on all the alienated forces, is finally the arrival of the king parency. This isthe end of false-consciousness—to know the moment when what man say’ is equal when his work is truly equal to his being. And in this kind of equation between being human, doing, praxis, and speak ing, there is no longer ideology ; such isthe eschatology of Marxism, his218 Religion and Faith Let us return to thisidea of the “understood necessity”; we would do well to reappropriate this positive thrust of Marxism within the same positive thrusts in Nietasche and Freud T think that one would understand the affirmations of Marxism if ‘one also understood the affirmation which inhabits the great enter prise of Nietrschean destruction. Because the great problem of Nietz Sche, and in this sense he was ess naive than Marx, if I can say 80, is that God is dead, and since He is dead, culturally, man cannot survive This is why the problem of Nietzsche concerns itself with the after man, the superman. And Nietzsche saw very well that the great affir ‘mation, which Marx believed attainable by revolution through a poli jcal-social process, demands in truth a veritable new birth of man. One can only attain and anticipate this rebirth through three broken myths: the Superman, the Eten future and To te al Return, and Dionysus—triple mychs of the f the will to power. he truth, and Nietzsche knew it well, we do not have, we no longer have, we do not yet have the key to decipher this new myth. But this isthe myti of modernity par excellence. Modernity is be: its own myth, What Marx called “understood necessity” moving to the transparency of consciousness to itself, becomes with Nietzsche the innocence of becoming—Unschuld des Werdens; this innocence of becoming would ulti freedom ly be the kingdom of necessity having his the key also to the work of Freud. You know how at the end his life Freud had remythologized, remythized all of his work; the irreat problem of man, in effec, is to pass from the pleasure principle {nto the reality principle, thereby making the sacrifice and bereavement of infantile desire. But this kingdom of necessity, this ananké as itis called in his last works, can be understo Eros and d stand the one work by the other if one could understand that this re 4 only in the struggle between th, between the life and death instincts. One would unde lation, this wager for Eros against Thanatos, has with Freud the same meaning as the myth of Dionysus for the late Nietzsche. Itis difficult to understand fully these three myths of the classless society or the understood necessity, of the eternal return, and of the reality principle What they have in common, pethaps, isa certain way of blessing reality for what itis a sort of celebration of the liberating power of necesst It isnecessary to go this far in order to understand fundamental acquisitions that I have just placed under the theme of demystificatio It isat this point that we can appropriate what Jaspers called a combat of lovers. It isa battle of lovers that we must mediate, not simply with the brute negations of one or the other, but rather with their enterprise of deciphering, and finally with their fundamental affirmation. If we can follow them this far, we will underscand the positive function of 219 The Critique of Religio: the dispute with religion by all three. Because what they have in com: against idols, that is, against the gods of the God of men let symbols speak. But today I do not wish to assure a good outcome in the face of so great and respectable a eriicue. 1 think with Bonhoeffer, and others, that hereafter a critique of religion, nourished by Feuerbach nd these masters of suspicion pertains to she mature faith of modern rman. In this sense, one can say that this atxeism concerning the gods of men, pertains hereafter to any possible faith. What we have therefore appropriated to ourselves is first, the critique of religion as a mask, a ask of fear, a mask of domination, « mask of hate. A Marxist critique # ideology, a Nietzse an critique of resentment and a Freudian cr Ligue of infantile distress, ae hereafter the views through which any kind of mediation of faith must pass, In this second part, I want to show how we can extend this external critique of religion into an internal critique; in the same way that I have tried to locate the place of demystificat tics, I want to situate demythologization, Whatever we may think of Bultmann’s s proble a modern hermene on to the hermeneutical his question is in any ease unavoidable and urgent. The question which Bultmann has posed from the interior is for me only completely understood when it is placed in relation with the ques tion posed from the exterior by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, ete.: that strangement, of the culeuni distance betwe one hand, our world and our discourse of modern man and, on the her, the cultural expressions and the cultural world of the Gospel. cel understand the paradoxical relationship, fiom the b ing, between the kernel of the preachi in order to understand this problem adequately, it is necessary to inning of preach- igo! the Gospel and the culture This relationship, it seems to me, is a double one. On the one side, it vain that the kerygma, the primitive proclamation, performs a sort of rupture in the discourse of ancient man The preaching of the Cross, as St. Paul said, isa folly for the world (we who have read Marx and Nietzsche understand better now the noticn of folly), Its a folly in this sense—and here I feel myself 1 Barth that ntally reoted in our experience, has horoughly faithful to K: this preaching is not fundan rrespondence in our experience it cannot justify itself, prove it self by something about which we could sxy we truthfully await; it is the eruption of something from the other side, from the totally othe:220 Religion and Faith But itis necessary at once to add that this kerygma has only become visible by becoming ite a fact of culture. Not only has it ruptured into our culture, but it has appeared as a fact of culture, It has created new words, new affirmations, including an art, a philosophy, which legel may have been the first to think through systematically as Chris tology. Consequently, a double relationship is instituted with culture, 4 relationship of discontinuity and a relationship of continuity Relationship of discontinuity: This means that the Gospel will a ways be carried by an extraordinarily fragile testimony, that of the preacher, that of personal life, that of community. There is no proof which can support either the experience or the rationale. In this sense the Cross remains a folly for the intelligent, a scandal for the wise. But ar the same time a new structure of communication, a new dis ourse appears which is of cultural importance, and which happens through what one could call an “available believable” (croyabl ponible). That is what we learned fist from the school of form crit ‘ism, then from Bulemann. I must say that we are today in theology doubly debtors: to Barth and to Bultmann. Each epoch permits a believable and an unbelievable. So it is certain 1 the language in which “those things" have been spoken, in order o return to the expression of the beginning, is folly but, at the same time, itis folly which speaks into a certain available believable at a given time, In the preceding century, one was particularly concerned with the he Gospel by Orientalism, Hellenism, etc. Think of the work of Harnack, trying to rediscover an “essence,” as he sad, the essence of Christianity, uncontaminated by Hellenism’ Our generation has discovere hing more important than these additions of Hellenism and Orientalism—something which pertains even to the composition of the text we now read: to know that the cultural vehicle has imposed its own law, that it is present in the expressions of the text. This presence first manifests itself under the form of a conception of the world which one could call mythological in the sense that i represents the world a8 a system of regions and of localities whe wclog he cultural vehicle first the destiny of beings is deployed it is, therefore, by a sort of esch cal cosmology, with is hell and heaven, tha becomes evident. This mythological view in itself did not consticat or ancient man. It has become a scandal for modern man that of the Cross; itis the false scandal of a cul a scandal tural vehicle which isn longer ours. But itis not only this mythological framework which falsely pro: vokes the scandal, There is also the framework which I would call natural believable, to know that che folly of the Cross will be said within the available eredible of a given culture: the signs will become 221 The Critique of Religion miracles, the divine origin of Christ is going to be expressed by way of the virgin birth; victory over death, the Resurrection, is going to be told in statements on the empty tomb, the miraculous apparitions. But now that long and durable coalescence between the folly of the message and what has been the belicvable of an epoch kas been broken before our eyes, and it is this dissociation between the culeural believable on the ne hand, and the folly and the scandal of the Cross and the Resurrec ion on the other which to me constitutes the problem of demythologi- zation. This problem is not only legitimace, but urgent and unavoidable > such an extent that it has become the central event in our culture If we are always equally far from the folly of the Cross, if tis no more believable today than it was for ancient man, what has become irreversible is our cultural estrangement from a cultural vehicle which i, for ws, to a great extent mythological. In this regard the work of Bulk mann is perfectly legitimate, to dissociate the true scandal from the false scandal. To demythologize is to disselve the false scandal in order .0 have the true scandal, the original scandal, revealed to all Thus, we are now in 4 hermens cipherin tical age: on the one hand, the de usions of religious consciousness belongs hereafter to the of the faith of modern man, ard yet, we know now that in deciphering the cultural vehicle of the ext, We have to discover what is ‘more than text, what is the preaching of the Person and of the event of Christ. To put it another way, itis a prochmation purified of its myth ological vestments with which Christian preaching is confronted tod Ieis true that there has alway’ been a hermeneutics, in the sense that the Fathers of the Church posed the problem in the manner of St Paul,! how can one interpret the Old Testament in terms of the New? In another sense, there has always been a hermeneutical problem. Ni only was it necessary to decipher the images of the Old Testament into he New, bur it was also always necessary to decipher the New Testa into life. St. Paul is the founder of this second signification of (Christian hermeneutics when he showed that the rela Gross to the Re ationship man and the birth of the new. Therefore, this analogical relationship, this analogy of faith between Christ and our- selves, duplicates the ty'pol ical relationship between the figures o! he Old Testament and the New Testament, Such was the kernel of what one could cal the ancient hermeneutics. But we modern m jonted with a totally new necessity: to know, to decipher scripture itself asa text which at the same time reveals and conceals. For the There was only one text, the Old Testament, and what they preached ‘was Christ asa living Word in relationship to & text that had become,222 Religion and Faith accordingly, an obsolete letter, an old letter, the Old Testament. But caught in its own cultural trap, the New Testament became, it also, 1 testament—it became a letter. And our hermeneutical problem is then ne following: what to do so that the New Testament will not be a second Old Testament? What to do so that it will not be a leter? We ave thus entered into en when itis in interpreting, consequently ing to discern what is announced through what has been said in a certain cultural langusge, chat the faith of modern man is possible We ate, therefore, today in a situation where it is in reinterpreting that we can believe, And Iam not afraid to say that we are in a “circle” in the sense that Bultmann, taking an expression of Heidegger, speaks of the “hermeneutical circle.” I can only, in effect, approach a text if T hear it as it speaks to me, if Iam seized by what is said through the text. Ie isin this sense that itis necessary to believe in order to under stand, but I cannot grasp what it has told me unless I first decipher the text Bultmann has fo ally und the true nature of this circle, which is not only a psychological le (to know that it is necessary to have within oneself the emotion or the experience of faith in onder 1), but also a methodological one, to know that itis h rules the comprehension, the comprehension itself being ruled in the Worauf bin, that is, in the “toward which of the looking and the heating. TThe exegete is not his own master; to understand is to place himself the object of faith that rules the reading, but that it is also the cipherment wh under the object which is at stake in the text; thus, the Christian her meneuties must be placed in motion by the Announcement which is at stake. There is a circle bectuse in order to understand the text, it isn jeve what the text announces. But what the text announces is i kind given nowhere else than in the deciphering of the text and in of struggle between the false and the true sea Twill say, then, that this circle can only be broken by the believer in the hermeneutics when he is faithful to the community, and by the thermeneut” in 1 believer when he does his scientific work of exe esis, This is today the dual condition of modern man in whom st gles both a believer and an atheist; in the believer himself there con front one another an adult critic and a naive child who listen to the Word. Thave by desi justaposed the external critique and the internal tique, demystification and demytholog ation, We learn their organic connection when in the following essay, we incorporate them tog: in the struggle for the language of faith CHAPTER 15 The Language of Faith As my title, “The Language of Faith” suggests, the subject of this essay involves an ¢ pliciclimit—the problem of communication, How can one communicate to another and neself the meaning z of the kerygma in such a way as to develo something approaching a mmprehensible discourse? Why approach things this way? Because we are in a cultural epoc when we meet pe who do not reject the faith by an explicit deci- sion, but who do not encounter the subject matter at all; who ask, instead, “What does it mean to me when ene speaks of being lost or peing saved! In order to discuss this question, 1 will depar Rae eeniee: the previous essay had assumed: the distance between our culture and mation, the kerygma, was written, We un: Jerstand more about this cultural distance because we understand petter today that itis not only a distance in relation to some very elab- orated theold jel theories, but that itis in the Gospel itself that we now find a cultural framework of categories, of notions, to which ou! culture renders us strangers. How can we make ours something to which we have become In this sense, we said I distance. Its this problem which, in one way, Kierkegaard posed when he asked, “How does one become contempo: raneous with Christ?” But this problem of contemporaneity which Kierkegaard posed on the level of individual affirmation, at the root of aith, isa problem which I am not going to treat at present—we are going to attack it at the center of tieulation of Christian discourse ‘What we understood in the first essay asa fact, we will now treat as a question. In effect, this culeural distance can be surmounted in two