REL Skeptics and Believers Religious Debate in The Western Intellectual Tradition JUDAISM - BUBER LEVINAS ROSENZWEIG BARTH COHEN (Tyler Roberts)

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Religious Debate in the
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Western Intellectual Tradition
Course Guidebook
Professor Tyler Roberts

Grinnell College
Professor Tyler Roberts, a scholar of Western religious

thought, is Professor of Religious Studies at Grinnell
College. He was educated at Brown University and the
Harvard Divinity School. Professor Roberts’s essays
have appeared in leading academic journals, including
The Journal of Religion and the Journal of the
American Academy of Religion. He is also the author
of Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion.
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Tyler Roberts, Th.D.
Professor of Religious Studies, Grinnell College
Tyler Roberts is Professor of Religious Studies at Grinnell College in

Grinnell, Iowa, where he has taught since 1998. Prior to his arrival at
Grinnell, he taught at Boston College and Harvard University, where he was
director of undergraduate studies for the Committee on the Study of
Religion. Professor Roberts received his A.B. from Brown University. He
then studied philosophy at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in
Germany and studied religion at Harvard, where he received his M.T.S. and
Th.D. degrees from the Divinity School.
At Grinnell, Professor Roberts teaches courses in religions of the Western
world, modern religious thought, theory and method in the study of religion,
and religion and politics. His research interests range from the intersection
of religious and philosophical thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, to the
history and politics of the “secular,” to the nature and purpose of the
academic study of religion.
In 1998, Professor Roberts published Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche,
Affirmation, Religion, an exploration of Friedrich Nietzsche’s criticisms of
religion and Christianity in light of previously overlooked religious themes
in his work. Since then, Professor Roberts has published a number of essays
in leading journals, including “Exposures and Explanations: On the New
Protectionism in the Study of Religion” in the Journal of the American
Academy of Religion and “Rhetorics of Ideology and Criticism in the Study
of Religion” in The Journal of Religion. He contributed “Nietzsche’s
Passion and Compassion” to Reading Nietzsche on the Margins (Purdue
University Press, 2008) and “Toward Secular Diaspora: Relocating Religion
and Politics” to Secularisms (Duke University Press, 2008). He also has
published on such philosophers as Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, and
Stanley Cavell. He is currently working on his second book, Encountering
Religion in a Post-Secular Age, which will be published by Columbia
University Press.
©2009 The Teaching Company. i

Table of Contents
Religious Debate in the Western Intellectual Tradition
Professor Biography .................................................................................... i

Course Scope ............................................................................................... 1
Lecture One Religion and Modernity ..................................... 4
Lecture Two From Suspicion to the Premodern Cosmos ........ 7
Lecture Three From Catholicism to Protestantism .................. 10
Lecture Four Scientific Revolution and Descartes ................ 14
Lecture Five Descartes and Modern Philosophy ................... 16
Lecture Six Enlightenment and Religion ............................. 18
Lecture Seven Natural Religion and Its Critics........................ 21
Lecture Eight Kant—Religion and Moral Reason .................. 24
Lecture Nine Kant, Romanticism, and Pietism ...................... 28
Lecture Ten Schleiermacher—
Religion and Experience .................................. 31
Lecture Eleven Hegel—Religion, Spirit, and History ............... 34
Lecture Twelve Theology and the Challenge of History ........... 38
Lecture Thirteen 19th-Century Christian Modernists ................... 41
Lecture Fourteen 19th-Century Christian Antimodernists ............ 45
Lecture Fifteen Judaism and Modernity .................................... 49
Lecture Sixteen Kierkegaard’s Faith .......................................... 53
Lecture Seventeen Kierkegaard’s Paradox ..................................... 56
Lecture Eighteen 19th-Century Suspicion and Feuerbach ............ 60
Lecture Nineteen Marx—Religion as False Consciousness ......... 64
Lecture Twenty Nietzsche and the Genealogy of Morals .......... 67
Lecture Twenty-One Nietzsche—
Religion and the Ascetic Ideal ......................... 70
Lecture Twenty-Two Freud—Religion as Neurosis ........................... 73
Lecture Twenty-Three Barth and the End of Liberal Theology ............ 76
Lecture Twenty-Four Theology and Suspicion ................................... 79
ii ©2009 The Teaching Company.

Table of Contents
Lecture Twenty-Five Protestant Theology after Barth ....................... 82

Lecture Twenty-Six 20th-Century Catholicism ................................. 84
Lecture Twenty-Seven Modern Jewish Philosophy .............................. 87
Lecture Twenty-Eight Post-Holocaust Theology ................................. 90
Lecture Twenty-Nine Liberation Theology ......................................... 94
Lecture Thirty Secular and Postmodern Theologies ................ 98
Lecture Thirty-One Postmodernism and Tradition ........................ 101
Lecture Thirty-Two Fundamentalism and Islamism ....................... 104
Lecture Thirty-Three New Atheisms ................................................ 107
Lecture Thirty-Four Religion and Rationality ................................ 110
Lecture Thirty-Five Pluralisms—Religious and Secular ................ 113
Lecture Thirty-Six Faith, Suspicion, and Modernity .................... 118
Timeline ................................................................................................... 122
Glossary ................................................................................................... 129
Biographical Notes .................................................................................. 137
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 143
©2009 The Teaching Company. iii

Credits
The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised
Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian
Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.,
and are used by permission. All rights reserved.
iv ©2009 The Teaching Company.

Scope:
What are we doing when we profess belief in God? When we pray? When
we join with others in rituals of worship? Western philosophers and
religious thinkers have asked and answered these questions for centuries.
But in the 17th century, with the advent of modernity, the nature of these
inquiries changed. “Modernity” names a historical period characterized by
advances in science and new models of reason and politics. It also marks a
new attitude toward the world and our place in it, where intellectual and
cultural authority is no longer located in past traditions or in divine
revelation but in our exercise of reason in the present and where our sense
of indebtedness to the past is replaced by confidence in our ability to shape
our world for the future. In this context, Western intellectuals began to ask
new questions about God, faith, and religion. How do we know that God
exists? Can reason defend any of the assertions about God and the world
claimed by our religious traditions? Is religion a force for good in human
life, or is it something that belongs to a past age, a symptom of the
childhood of humanity?
Before the modern period, few serious thinkers questioned the existence of
God or the importance of religion for human life. The truth had been
revealed, and philosophers and religious thinkers debated how, precisely, to
understand this truth. In this sense, they were engaged in the project of
“theology” as defined by Saint Anselm in the 12th century: “faith seeking
understanding.” But once the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century
split Western Christianity, and with the successes of scientific inquiry into
the workings of nature, such thinkers as René Descartes proposed to ground
knowledge in “natural reason.” Increasingly, they came to believe that they
could identify a universal human rationality that worked independently of
faith. With this development, modern philosophy separates itself from
theology and gives birth to a new way of thinking about religion. Even
though many philosophers continued to defend religion as “reasonable,”
others not only criticized it as irrational and harmful but developed methods
for explaining religion as a psychological or social, rather than a divine,
phenomenon. Atheism became a real possibility and criticism of religion
became an intellectual responsibility.
©2009 The Teaching Company. 1

The lectures in this course examine the different challenges to religion that
have emerged from the modern worldview and the ways in which Christian
and Jewish thinkers have responded to these challenges. After Lecture One
sets the agenda, Lectures Two and Three put the modern period in historical
perspective by discussing premodern views of religion in the immensely
important medieval Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas and in the Protestant
Reformer Martin Luther. Lectures Four through Nine examine the
emergence and consolidation of the modern worldview from the Scientific
Revolution through the Enlightenment. These lectures explain how the
question of knowledge comes to predominate philosophical discussion
during these periods and the impact these debates have on the question of
religion. The basic question for religious thinkers during this period is
whether religion can be rational. John Locke and Immanuel Kant answer
this question in the affirmative while the skeptic David Hume and the
atheist Denis Diderot answer in the negative. One thing we notice, however,
is that what is also being debated here, whether explicitly or not, is the
definition of religion itself.
If “reason” is the watchword of the Enlightenment, “history” is the
challenge of the 19th century. Philosophers criticized their Enlightenment
counterparts for their static, historical view of reason, and scholars began to
study religion, and particularly the Bible, as a historical phenomenon. In
Lectures Ten through Seventeen, we explore this challenge and Protestant,
Catholic, and Jewish responses to it. Liberals and modernists seek to meet
these challenges by defining religion in terms acceptable to the modern
worldview while antimodernists and conservative evangelicals attack
modernity in the name of traditional religion. Søren Kierkegaard, though,
defies these categories. A strong Christian critic of modernity, his
existentialist approach to Christianity appeals not to an inerrant Bible or
infallible pope but explores the passionate faith of the Christian in the face
of God’s revelation.
In the latter half of the 19th century, a radical challenge to religion emerges in
the work of such thinkers as Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. This is
the subject of Lectures Eighteen through Twenty-Two. Rather than focusing
on the rationality of religion or on the question of whether historical research
undermines the fundamental doctrines of religious traditions, these “masters
of suspicion” treat religion as a form of false consciousness, as a set of beliefs
and practices that are symptoms of underlying social or psychological realities
that human beings hide from themselves.
2 ©2009 The Teaching Company.

As Nietzsche saw most clearly, however, these radical methods of suspicion
not only threatened religion but also brought into question the optimistic,
human-centered visions of reason and progress at the foundation of the
modern project. In the 20th century, particularly after the devastation of
World War I, religious thinkers became much more critical of the modern
project and of 19th-century religious accommodations to this project.
Lectures Twenty-Three through Twenty-Seven examine how Protestant and
Jewish thinkers in particular, influenced by the existentialist views of
Kierkegaard, came to stress the importance of divine revelation and to chart
a course between the secularism of modern culture and the antimodernism
of the fundamentalists.
In the second half of the 20th century, two new challenges to religious
thinking assert themselves. Lectures Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine
discuss the Holocaust and the growing awareness of global economic
inequity and other forms of unjust domination, such as racism and sexism.
Critics pointed to the complicity of religious traditions in these evils, and
others called for a religious faith forged in the practical resistance to
violence and oppression. Lectures Thirty and Thirty-One discuss
postmodernism, which for some leads to the “death of God” but for others
opens new possibilities for religious thinking.
The final lectures of the course explore the “new atheism” as a response to
the reemergence, in the last decades of the 20th century and especially after
the events of September 11, 2001, of conservative and fundamentalist
religion around the globe. The new atheists criticize the violence,
irrationality, and intolerance of religion; their view thus provides an
opportunity to look back over the lectures and consider these criticisms in
light of the different religious responses to modernity we have discussed.

Lecture One
Religion and Modernity
Scope: What are we saying—and what are we doing—when we profess

belief in God? When we pray? When we join with others in rituals
of worship? These questions have been asked and answered for
centuries, almost exclusively by thinkers who themselves believed
in one god or another and practiced one religion or another.
However, with the advent of modernity—roughly since the
Scientific Revolution of the 17th century—new views of
knowledge and reality and new methods of inquiry allowed
Western thinkers to question the existence of God and criticize
religion to a degree unheard of in the premodern West. As a result,
one of the major dynamics of modern religious thought in the West
is the tension and conflict between faith and suspicion.
Outline
I. What are people doing when they profess belief in God? Is religious
faith a response to life that flees from reality or courageously embraces
it? In these lectures, we will examine how leading Western
philosophers, theologians, and cultural critics, over the past 400 years,
have debated these questions, particularly in light of the criticisms of
religion that emerged during this period.
A. This period is generally referred to by historians as “modernity.”
The question of religion and the question of what constitutes the
modern are closely bound together.
B. With the advent of modernity, new views of knowledge and reality
and new methods of inquiry allowed Western thinkers to question
the existence of God and to criticize religion to a degree unheard of
in the premodern West.
C. Since the 19th century, religious practice has declined markedly in
many parts of the developed world, with the United States being a
notable exception.
D. Most leading intellectuals in the mid-20th century thought that
modernity meant the gradual decline and, perhaps, even the death
of religion.

E. Today, the picture looks very different, and many secular
intellectuals are worried more about the danger of militant religion
in the world than they are confident about religion’s decline.
II. What do we mean by “debating religion from the Enlightenment to the
postmodern era”?
A. These lectures focus on religious thought in Western culture.
B. “Modern” does not mean contemporary but refers to a cultural
epoch that, for our purposes, can be defined as beginning in the
17th century with the Scientific Revolution and the emergence of
explicitly non-theological conceptions of religion.
C. Also for our purposes, the term “religious thought” encompasses
both thought from within religious traditions, which we will refer
to as “theology,” and thought about religion, which we will refer to
as “philosophy,” “cultural criticism,” or “religious studies,”
depending on the context.
III. What do we mean by “faith and suspicion”?
A. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has called Marx, Nietzsche, and
Freud the “masters of suspicion.”
B. One of the crucial elements of this response is that some major
20th-century theologians begin to incorporate this suspicion into
their own religious visions.
C. But after such events as the Holocaust and with the recent rise of
militant religions and the escalation of religious violence around
the world, religious thinkers are increasingly confronted with
questions not only of religion and reason but also of the possibility
of religious pluralism and the relation of religion and politics.
Suggested Reading:
Harris, The End of Faith.
Lilla, The Stillborn God.
Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem.
Ricoeur, “The Critique of Religion.”

Questions to Consider:
1. What are the most important characteristics of modernity as a cultural
and intellectual epoch?
2. What is the difference between philosophical and theological
perspectives on religion?

Lecture Two
From Suspicion to the Premodern Cosmos
Scope: The modern conflict between faith and suspicion reached its
culmination when, in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced the death of God. Nietzsche’s
picture of a meaningless, nihilistic cosmos offers a stark contrast to
the conception of the Christian cosmos that dominated premodern
religious and philosophical thought. This medieval picture is
particularly clear in the work of the major Christian thinker of the
period, Thomas Aquinas. This is a picture framed by the concepts
of creation, sin, and salvation, a picture in which the natural and
the divine are intimately interwoven such that all of nature reflects
the will and purpose of God.
Outline
I. Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous pronouncement of the death of God in his
1882 book, The Gay Science, provides a stark picture of a universe
without God and meaning that helps illuminate, by contrast, the cosmos
of premodern Christianity.
A. For Nietzsche, with God’s death comes a loss of orientation—the
“horizon” has been “wiped away” and the earth “unchained” from
the Sun: We are “straying as though through an infinite nothing.”
B. If we consider the term cosmos to mean “the universe considered
as a harmonious and orderly system,” then we can say that for
Nietzsche, the death of God means the end of a sense of cosmos.
C. We are left with a sense of “chaos,” in a state of “nihilism,” a
condition in which we realize that there is no ultimate order or
meaning and, thus, no way to determine what is right or wrong,
valuable or worthless.
II. This vision of a universe without God and without meaning contrasts
starkly with the way Christian theologians of the Middle Ages viewed
the cosmos.
A. We will examine this medieval worldview as it is expressed in the
work of the 13th-century thinker Thomas Aquinas.

B. Aquinas was a scholastic theologian.
1. Scholasticism arose because of the growing recognition
among Christian thinkers that well-established authorities
in the tradition often appeared not to agree among themselves
on important matters and often appeared not to agree with
the Bible.
2. Scholastics tried to show through theological examination of
these authorities and the Bible that despite appearances, they
substantially cohered with each other.
3. Aquinas was writing at a time when Christian thinkers were
first being exposed to the pagan philosophy of the great
philosopher of ancient Greece, Aristotle.
4. Aristotle’s view of the rational, fulfilled human life challenged
Christian thought with a coherent and attractive vision of
human life and ethics articulated without any reference to God
or Christ.
5. This left Aquinas to think carefully about the distinction
between the natural and the supernatural, nature and grace.
III. Aquinas’s view of the relation of nature and grace is closely related to
another distinction that was important for Aquinas and that many of us
are familiar with: that between the natural and the supernatural.
A. But Aquinas means something by this distinction that is quite
different from the way that most of us use it today.
1. It is less absolute: For Aquinas, God, through his creative
power or creative grace, always already infuses human nature
and the natural world.
2. This difference can be elucidated by considering some basic
Christian categories: creation, sin, and salvation.
B. With respect to creation, the basic Christian claim is that God
created everything that is and pronounced it good.
1. Human beings were created in the image of God.
2. Aquinas argued that the proper end, or telos, of human beings
was to be united with and seek completion in God.
3. Aristotle, by contrast, argued that our telos was simply a
virtuous life, and Nietzsche claimed that after the death of
God, we had no telos.
4. Creation for Aquinas was not a one-time act but is ongoing, as
God sustains the world at each moment.

C. We are, however, sinful, fallen creatures.
1. Despite God’s creative grace, we have separated ourselves
from and continue to resist God.
2. With Paul and Augustine, Aquinas sees this sin as affecting
the will such that even if we know, to some degree, what our
proper end is, we cannot, on our own, achieve it.
D. Through the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ and Christ’s death
and Resurrection, we are saved and are able to move toward our
union with God.
1. With the Reformation, a debate will arise surrounding the
question of whether sin so corrupts us that, without faith in
Christ, we have any sense of God at all.
2. For Aquinas, though, the fact of sin did not totally extinguish
the presence of grace in our lives.
3. Even as sinners, we have a natural desire for God, a sense for our
proper telos, an openness to God made possible by God’s grace.
4. For Aquinas, then, the distinction between the natural
and the supernatural is not nearly as strong as it is for most of
us moderns.
E. The Christian cosmos of Aquinas is one in which nature cannot be
understood in its full reality, in its full purpose, apart from God and
God’s grace.
1. Nature is not complete without grace, and all of nature reflects
the grace and will of God.
2. In the periods between the 13th and 17th centuries—the centuries
of the Renaissance, Reformation, and religious wars—a new
cosmos emerges to dominate Western thought, one in which
God becomes much more radically separated from nature.
Suggested Reading:
Aquinas, St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica.
Dupré, Passage to Modernity.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science.
1. What are the primary characteristics of scholastic theology?
2. What is the role of the concept of grace in relation to the basic
Christian categories of creation, sin, and salvation?

Lecture Three
From Catholicism to Protestantism
Scope: During the 14th and 15th centuries, Aquinas’s theological vision
was challenged, and the hold of Catholicism on European society
was loosened. The factors responsible for these shifts included the
philosophical conflict between nominalist and realist conceptions
of reality, struggles between bishops and popes over ecclesiastical
authority, calls for reform from inside and outside the Catholic
Church, and major changes in European society and culture, such
as increased urbanization, an emerging middle class, and the
cultural flowering of the Renaissance. These changes helped make
possible the Protestant Reformation, at the center of which is
Martin Luther’s challenge to the Catholic system of penance and
salvation. Emphasizing faith over works, the Bible over tradition,
and the individual’s relation to God over the mediation of church
and priest, Luther offered a radically new Christian vision.
Outline
I. During the late medieval period, Catholic thinkers and church
officials debated a number of issues that exposed fault lines in the
Catholic view of humanity, the church, and the world. Understanding
these is crucial for understanding the religious and cultural revolution
of the Protestant Reformation.
A. The philosophical and theological debate between realists and
nominalists exposed significant differences regarding the ultimate
nature of reality and God’s power.
1. Realists, including Aquinas, understand ultimate reality to lie
in universal ideas, such as “human being” or “horse.”
2. For them, we participate, through our knowledge of
universals, in the mind of God and, thus, have some real
knowledge of God’s workings in the world.
3. Nominalists view universal ideas as just names, ideas in the
human mind but not reflective of ultimate reality, which exists
in concrete things, such as particular human beings or horses.

4. Thus, nominalists see more of a gap between our knowledge
of reality and God’s will. In their view, God’s power is
unrestricted, not limited by the laws of nature or our power to
understand ourselves and the world.
5. For nominalists, then, God’s will is inscrutable.
B. The High Middle Ages was a period in which the popes
consolidated power over the church and viewed themselves as the
ultimate authority in all matters spiritual and temporal.
C. Much of the power of the church during the medieval period
resided in the penitential system of absolution.
1. Penance is one of the major sacraments of the Catholic
Church, the means by which God’s grace is mediated
to people.
2. It is accomplished through confession to a priest, who then
imposes works of penance to complete the absolution of sins.
3. Thus, good works are tied to absolution, and the church
controls a very important commodity, God’s grace.
4. The system of penance was the root of the controversial sale
of indulgences, in which one could pay to have sins absolved.
II. We also must note some of the wider cultural and social issues that
characterized the late medieval period and helped set the stage for the
Reformation, including the growing prosperity of European culture and
the cultural flowering of the Renaissance.
A. After 1300, we see Western culture emerging from centuries in
which European civilization was eclipsed by the Byzantine Empire
and Islamic civilization.
1. The political power of princes and nations starts to challenge
the power of the church.
2. Growing wealth and urbanization produce a middle class and
weaken feudalism.
3. A communications revolution takes place with the invention
of the printing press, which allows for more rapid and
expanded transmission of ideas.
B. The Renaissance is characterized by an explosion of learning and
creativity, in large part associated with a recovery of the Classical
learning of antiquity, especially that of the Greeks.

III. In 1517, in the midst of the Renaissance, the fuse of the Reformation is
lit when Martin Luther (1483−1546) nails to the church door in
Wittenberg, a small university town in southern Germany, his 95
Theses, beginning a process that splits European Christianity.
A. Luther’s primary target was the penitential system of the
Catholic Church.
1. Luther’s major theological insight was that human beings
were utterly powerless to effect their own salvation, that
works of penance accomplished nothing.
2. We do not justify ourselves through works but only through
faith in God’s free gift of grace.
3. Luther’s “justification by faith” does not mean that we effect
salvation by having faith, as if the act of belief accomplishes
what works cannot, but rather that we must learn to recognize
our own powerlessness and to trust in God’s power to save us
and in God’s great mercy.
B. The Reformers were influenced by nominalism.
1. Like the nominalists, they stressed God’s power, in
particular, God’s free gift of grace and salvation, and God’s
inscrutable will.
2. In contrast to the Renaissance humanists, they stressed the
deep corruption of human beings by sin.
3. Luther debated the Christian humanist Erasmus in arguing that
sin so corrupted us that we have no free will when it comes to
our relationship with God.
C. Luther’s view of faith and salvation has important ramifications for
his view of the role of the church.
1. The priest, for Luther, does not mediate God’s grace; rather,
the individual relates directly to God through God’s word, that
is, through Scripture. The Bible is the sole Christian authority
and the route to salvation.
2. Churches are, of course, still important, but as the site of the
sermon rather than the site of the sacraments. The sermon is
the preaching of God’s word and, thus, functions in a way
similar to the reading of the Bible.
3. The two mottos of the Reformation, then, are “Sola
Scriptura”—Scripture alone—and “the Priesthood of all
believers”—each of us encounters God on our own in reading
or hearing the word.

Suggested Reading:
Chidester, Christianity.
Luther, Grimm, and Leo, “On the Freedom of a Christian,” in
Christian Liberty.
Taylor, Sources of the Self.
1. How do the nominalists differ from Aquinas and other realists on the
issue of nature and grace?
2. What does Luther mean by “justification by faith”?

Lecture Four
Scientific Revolution and Descartes
Scope: The Protestant Reformation ushered in a period of political struggle

and intellectual revolution that marked the beginning of modernity.
Through the 16th and into the 17th centuries, Europe was beset by a
series of wars that pit Catholics against Protestants and new
economic and social forces against established structures. This also
was the time of the Scientific Revolution, associated with such
figures as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, through which a
radically new picture of the cosmos and the “natural laws” that
structure it took hold of European intellectual culture. These
achievements led René Descartes and other philosophers to rethink
the nature of intellectual authority and, thus, to seek new foundations
for human knowledge in reason rather than tradition and revelation.
Outline
I. Luther posted his 95 Theses in 1517, but until 1540, efforts were made to
prevent the church from splitting. After that point, the conflict between
Catholics and Protestants became more and more intractable, and the
stage was set for more than a century of conflict and chaos in Europe.
A. In 1545, Catholic bishops met at the Council of Trent; there, over a
period of 20 years, some reforms were made, but fundamental
church doctrines regarding justification and penance were
reasserted, repudiating all Protestant ideas.
B. The breakup of Christendom and the consequent series of alliances
between political states and either Protestantism or Catholicism led
to a series of conflicts we have come to call the “religious wars.”
C. By the mid-17th century, many were demanding new ways to think
about relations among religion, politics, and society.
II. One reason Hobbes was able to forge a political theory based on human
behavior rather than metaphysics and theology is that the achievements
of the Scientific Revolution were beginning to work with a conception
of nature separate from theological considerations.
A. With Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, we find the gradual
articulation of a conception of the universe as guided by laws that
give it the precision and predictability of a machine.

B. This established a new stage—which in large part is definitive of
modernity—in human conceptions of the cosmos, one that had
been in the works since the nominalists and the Reformers
challenged the classic Catholic view of the High Middle Ages.
III. As this new, modern cosmology emerged, so did a new conception of
human knowledge and new distinctions among different kinds of
knowledge, such as science, philosophy, and theology. René Descartes’
articulation of these distinctions was influential.
A. Descartes was writing in a context in which what had been the
main source of intellectual, moral, and metaphysical authority for
centuries in Europe—the Christian tradition—no longer offered a
unified picture. This situation produced a crisis of authority.
B. One of the major steps Descartes took in addressing this problem
was to elevate human reason, rather than divine revelation, to the
status of primary intellectual authority.
Suggested Reading:
Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism.
Descartes and Moriarty, Meditations on First Philosophy.
Lindberg and Numbers, When Science & Christianity Meet.
Stout, The Flight from Authority.
1. Why should we consider Thomas Hobbes as one of the key shapers of
the modern worldview?
2. How does the concept of “nature” for thinkers of the Scientific
Revolution differ from earlier views on nature?

Lecture Five
Descartes and Modern Philosophy
Scope: Descartes’ efforts to find new foundations for human knowledge

led him to make sharp distinctions between reason and revelation,
philosophy and theology. For many, this makes Descartes the first
truly modern philosopher. In his Meditations, Descartes proceeded
by a method of radical doubt, putting into question all the beliefs
he had previously considered true in search of a point at which he
would find an idea he could not doubt. Famously, this point was
the cogito, the “I think,” which in turn, led Descartes to assert “I
am, I exist.” With this “clear and distinct idea” as a foundation, a
starting point for all knowledge, Descartes then argued that we can
know that God and the world exist.
Outline
I. Descartes is considered one of the first philosophers of the modern
period, in large part because of his efforts to conceptualize new
foundations for human knowledge.
A. He was writing in a context in which the question of authority had
become sharper and sharper as the reliability of traditional forms of
authority was eroded by religious conflict and skeptical questioning.
B. But even as he doubts everything, Descartes immediately notices
that he is still thinking; thus, the method brings him to the
conclusion “I think, therefore I am.”
II. With this claim about his existence, Descartes makes not only a
philosophical claim about knowledge—an epistemological claim—but
also a crucial claim about himself as a human being, namely, that he is
“nothing but a thinking thing.”
A. Descartes sharply separates his clear and distinct idea of his own
existence from his knowledge of everything else in the world, from
all material reality, even the reality of the body.
B. Descartes thus develops an ideal of knowledge that is found only
in the self-consciousness of oneself, not in conversation with
others, nor in relations forged with others in community, nor in the
authorities of tradition.

III. But Descartes does have a way of getting from this self-consciousness
to God and the world.
A. He begins by arguing for the existence of God, picking up on a
tradition of arguments for God’s existence that goes back at least
to St. Anselm in the 11th century.
B. Having ascertained that God exists, Descartes argues as follows:
Given that God is supremely good, God, as creator, would not have
created a being, like Descartes, with the faculty for judgment that,
when used properly, could be in error about such matters as the
existence of things outside himself.
C. At issue here is not whether Descartes’ argument for the existence
of God is persuasive—most philosophers have found it
unpersuasive—but the kind of God Descartes is trying to prove.
D. Also at issue here is whether, in the end, his appeal to God does
not undermine his claim that the “I am” is the starting point for
knowledge because in order to argue for God’s perfection and
infinity, he acknowledges that “my perception of God is prior to
my perception of myself.”
Suggested Reading:
Descartes and Moriarty, Meditations on First Philosophy.
Stout, The Flight from Authority.
1. How does Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” reflect his basic
epistemological viewpoint?
2. How does Descartes get from the knowledge that he exists to the
knowledge that the world exists?

Lecture Six
Enlightenment and Religion
Scope: The Scientific Revolution and the philosophical modernism of

Descartes are crucial elements in the initial phase of modernity. In
the late 17th and 18th centuries, many thinkers came to explicitly and
triumphally embrace this modernity in the cultural and intellectual
movement known as the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers
embraced a natural, universal human reason that they saw as
promising freedom from the past and tradition. For some, this
entailed freedom from religious authority, superstition, and even
religion itself. These thinkers thus presented religion with the first
great challenge of the modern period: Can religion be rational?
Enlightenment thinkers, such as John Locke, defended a
“reasonable” Christianity, and others defended the concept of
“natural religion,” a universal religion based in reason and on the
idea of single supreme being, an immortal soul, and moral behavior.
Outline
I. In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, worldly, secular ways of
understanding ourselves and the world emerged, not only in the realm
of science but also in ethical, political, and historical thinking.
A. These presented many challenges to traditional religious—
especially Christian—ways of looking at things, and they raised all
sorts of questions for those who tried to understand the place of
religion in this new cosmos.
B. These challenges were taken up by thinkers in the period we call
the Enlightenment, which lasted until the end of the 18th century.
II. To understand what thinkers in the Enlightenment meant by “reason,” it
is necessary to consider two fundamental epistemological approaches.
A. Descartes exemplifies the rationalist approach to reason. For the
rationalist, true knowledge originates in what he called innate
ideas—intuitive, self-evident principles—that we then examine
and, through deduction, use to produce knowledge.

B. But where Descartes began with the self-evidence of ideas in the
mind, other thinkers began with those ideas formed through the
interaction of the mind and the world, the ideas made available to
us through our sense impressions. These are the empiricists.
III. Descartes gives us one way of addressing this issue by using rationalist
methods to prove the existence of God and the immortal soul.
A. A different approach, based more on empiricist arguments, can be
found in Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity.
1. Locke distinguished between two kinds of truths: those that
“can be made out by natural principles” and those that reason
finds “to be revealed from God.”
2. In other words, some truths are self-evident to reason and
others are truths “above reason,” that is, truths that cannot be
proved by reason but which it is reasonable to believe.
3. Locke argued that we can reasonably assent to these truths
above reason if they do not contradict reason and if reason
concludes that they were revealed by God.
4. The miracles attributed to Jesus by the Bible are evidence that
he was sent by God as a revelation from God.
B. Where Locke sought to show the reasonableness of Christianity,
the French thinker Voltaire defended religion from the perspective
of what we call “deism.”
1. Writing in a French context dominated by Catholicism and its
emphasis on tradition and church authority, Voltaire was a
scathing critic of traditional Christianity.
2. Deism is basically the idea that there is a God who created the
world, but this God does not interfere in human affairs and
desires us to conduct ourselves on the basis of reason.
3. Deists generally took an empiricist approach to arguments for
God’s existence by arguing that our experience of the world
leads us to conclude that it must have been designed by
a creator.
4. For Voltaire, God is not just the creator but is also good and
rewards and punishes according to the moral (or immoral)
behavior of human beings.
5. Voltaire thought that this point was particularly important
because he feared that without belief in God, morality would
disappear, a position held by many Enlightenment thinkers.

Suggested Reading:
Gay, The Enlightenment.
Hobbes and Rogers, Thomas Hobbes Leviathan.
Locke, Higgins-Biddle, and Michael, The Reasonableness of Christianity.
Taylor, A Secular Age.
1. What are the crucial differences between the rationalist and empiricist
views of knowledge?
2. How do these different epistemologies relate to ideas about how we
know that God exists?

Lecture Seven
Natural Religion and Its Critics
Scope: The Enlightenment idealization of reason meant that the question

of religion was tied up with the philosophical question: How do we
know? Not all Enlightenment philosophers followed Descartes’
“rationalism,” which found the origin of knowledge in innate
ideas. The empiricists, by contrast, argued that knowledge must be
founded on sense perception. Empiricists were among the strongest
Enlightenment critics of religion. In the late 18th century, the
Scottish philosopher and skeptic David Hume questioned whether
knowledge grounded in the senses could ever confirm the claims of
natural religion, Christian claims to miracles, or even empiricist
arguments for the existence of God. In France, Denis Diderot went
further than Hume by articulating an atheistic, materialist vision of
the cosmos.
Outline
I. Where Locke offers us a defense of something quite recognizable as
Christianity, in Voltaire, we see something else, a religion stripped of
much of its historical and doctrinal particularity. Like many
Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire defended a form of what was called
“natural religion.”
A. The concept of natural religion plays a crucial role in the emergence,
in the early modern period, of the generic concept “religion.”
1. Many languages around the world do not have a word that can
be translated into the “religion” of modern European
languages. Further, if we look at the premodern West, we see
that the English and Latin words for “religion” referred only to
a particular aspect of what today we would call the religious
life; these terms were used to denote a religious, a monk or a
nun, one who lived the cloistered life.
2. Three factors are instrumental in the emergence of the concept
of religion as we use it today: the Protestant Reformation,
Western colonialism, and the religious conflict between
Protestants and Catholics.

3. During the 17th century, thinkers, beginning with Herbert of
Cherbury, started to draw a contrast between “revealed” or
“positive” religion on the one hand and “natural religion” on
the other.
B. Natural religion can be described in terms of five
basic characteristics:
1. It is universally human.
2. It is rational.
3. It is compatible with natural laws.
4. It entails belief in a single supreme being and an immortal soul
that will be punished or rewarded according to its actions in
this life.
5. It was the original religion of humankind but has been
corrupted and has evolved into all the different positive
religions that exist today.
C. Most defenders of natural religion believed that the existence of
God could be proven through the argument from design.
II. In addition to defenders of Christianity and natural religion, the
Enlightenment gave rise to a number of strong critics of religion,
such as the Scottish philosopher David Hume and the French thinker
Denis Diderot.
A. Hume was an empiricist, but much of his influence stemmed from
his careful efforts to show the limits of the knowledge we can
derive from sense experience and, thus, the limits of our
knowledge more generally. From this perspective, he made three
important claims about reason and religion:
1. He argues that the analogy at the basis of the argument from
design is faulty because it reasons to a cause (a perfect
supreme being) that is not exactly proportional to the observed
effect (the world).
2. He argues that it is not reasonable to believe in miracles on the
basis of testimony, such as we see in the Bible.
3. He anticipates the development of 19th-century criticisms of
religion by arguing that religion has its origins not in any
divine action or reality but in human psychology and
particularly in human fear and the human desire for power.

B. Denis Diderot was one of the few professed atheists of the
Enlightenment period.
1. He not only argued, like Hume, that religious explanations for
the world and the cosmos cannot be rationally defended, but
he developed a materialistic theory to explain the origins of
various forms of organic and inorganic existence.
2. According to Diderot, we can understand and explain the
cosmos without reference to a creator or transcendent reality.
Suggested Reading:
Hume and Flew, Writings on Religion.
Livingston, Modern Christian Thought Volume 1.
Locke, Higgins-Biddle, and Stewart, The Reasonableness of Christianity.
1. What are the basic elements of natural religion?
2. What is Hume’s main criticism of the argument from design?

Lecture Eight
Kant—Religion and Moral Reason
Scope: Enlightenment thought reached a culmination in the work of the

German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Provoked by the skepticism of
Hume and seeking to find a way beyond the impasse between the
rationalist and empiricist theories of knowledge, Kant’s “critical
philosophy” made the radical claim that knowledge is based not in
the passive reception of sense impressions but in the mind’s active
organization of sense experience. Thus, for Kant, although all
knowledge is based in sense experience, we know the world only as
the mind organizes it, not as it is “in itself.” And because God is not
an object of sense experience, Kant argued, we cannot know God.
However, he also argued that, especially with respect to what he
called moral or “practical” knowledge, we must “postulate” God:
We cannot know God, but it is rational to believe in God.
Outline
I. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant is the most influential
Enlightenment thinker on religion and, arguably, the most important
Western thinker since Aquinas. He is most well known for the
epistemological revolution whose effects we still feel today.
A. Kant’s revolution owed much to the work of Hume, which led him
to the conclusion that neither rationalism nor empiricism gave a
satisfactory account of human knowledge.
B. For Kant, all knowledge of the natural world, that is, all scientific
knowledge, begins in experience, in sense impressions.
1. However, our experience of the world is not just based in the
passive reception of information from the world, as most
empiricists claimed, but is the result of active processes of the
mind in organizing these sense impressions.
2. This organizing is accomplished in large part by innate ideas,
such as the rationalists had argued for.
3. Our experience of the world—and, thus, our knowledge of the
world—happens only as the mind, specifically, the
“understanding,” organizes the information it receives from
the world by imposing patterns on sense impressions.

C. In Kant’s view, we know things in the world by virtue of the way
our minds organize sense impressions, but we know the principles
of this organizing activity in a different way.
1. Because knowledge is only possible given the organizing activity
of the mind, we know these things as they appear to us, not as
they might be apart from the organizing activity we bring to them.
2. And we know the categories of the understanding in a
different way, “transcendentally,” that is, as the necessary
conditions for us.
II. For Kant, God is not an object in or above the world because we do not
have sense impressions of God; therefore, we cannot know God
scientifically and cannot prove the existence of God as an entity.
A. Although we cannot know that God exists, Kant claims that it is, in
fact, rational to believe that God exists, that it is rational—indeed
necessary—to postulate the existence of God.
B. With respect to theoretical reason, Kant treats this rational faith in
God in terms of the regulative use of reason.
1. In addition to the categories of the understanding, crucial
elements of reason for Kant are the regulative ideas—
such as God, world, self—which bring unity at the highest
level to experience.
2. Reason needs to postulate these principles in order to make
sense of experience.
3. It is, therefore, legitimate—indeed necessary—to think God
(which is different from knowing God) as the origin of all that
is, but it is illegitimate to speculate about what God is like
beyond this.
III. Kant’s second and more influential approach to the question of God
comes through his examination of moral or “practical” reason.
A. The main argument of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason is that
to act morally is to bind oneself to a universal moral law and to
ignore all other incentives or motives to action, such as tradition,
emotion, or self-interest.
1. Reason gives the moral law to itself in the form of what Kant
calls the “categorical imperative,” according to which one
should always act in such a way that the principle of the act is
one that can be universalized.

2. To act according to the moral law is, for Kant, to
act autonomously.
B. Although we are free with respect to the will as rational beings, we
are also natural beings with desires and needs and limitations, most
importantly, the desire for happiness.
1. This means that although reason demands virtue, as finite,
limited beings, we always fall short of the demands of the
moral law because our natural desire for happiness always
affects our moral will.
2. We are left with the problem that virtue and happiness do not
necessarily coincide, a realization that may lead us to despair.
C. To address these problems of practical reason, Kant says that we
are obligated to postulate the existence of God and of immortality.
1. The postulate of immortality gives us confidence that we will
have an infinite amount of time in which to make progress
toward virtue.
2. The postulate of God gives us confidence that there is a power
that will guarantee our virtue will be rewarded with happiness.
3. Without these postulates, we will despair and have difficulty
following the moral law.
IV. Kant, like other Enlightenment thinkers, places enormous emphasis on
the authority and demands of reason, but he is by no means unaware of
other aspects of human life.
A. Kant goes beyond the Enlightenment in arguing that we can never
know, at least in this life, whether we are acting morally. Even if
we think we are following the moral law, our desire for happiness
is at work beneath the level of consciousness, influencing us and
tempting us to act in ways that go against the law.
B. In Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, particularly in two
essays in which he treats what he calls “radical evil,” Kant
examines a kind of natural propensity to be seduced to abandon
reason for the hope of happiness.
C. Although in many respects Kant treats religion as what we have
been calling natural religion, his awareness of the limits of reason
and the reality of radical evil make his religious thought look more
Christian than that of many other Enlightenment thinkers.

Suggested Reading:
Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason.
———, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
Kant, Weigelt, and Müller, Critique of Pure Reason.
1. What, for Kant, is the difference between believing in God or thinking
God, on the one hand, and knowing God, on the other?
2. Why does Kant, from a moral perspective, think that we are obligated
to believe in God?

Lecture Nine
Kant, Romanticism, and Pietism
Scope: Kant’s revolution in epistemology, moral theory, and religious

thought was extremely influential—and remains so today—but it
raised many questions for 19th-century religious thinkers. In
particular, many were dissatisfied by the idea of God as
“postulate.” The Romantics and the Pietists argued that God could
be experienced directly. Romanticism was a philosophical, literary,
and artistic movement that looked to overcome what it perceived
as the sterility and abstractness of the Enlightenment focus on
rationality. It stressed the feeling, creative subject and the lived
experience of religious faith. In a more theological vein, Pietist
thinkers emphasized the spiritual and moral regeneration that came
from the experience of Jesus Christ.
Outline
I. To understand developments in religious thought in the 19th century, it
is necessary to keep in mind Kant’s main ideas and the questions and
problems these presented to those who came after him.
A. Kant’s basic ideas are the following:
1. All knowledge of the world is based in sense impressions, as
organized by the operations of reason in applying the
intuitions of space and time; the categories of cause,
substance, and so on; and the ideas of God, world, and self.
2. For Kant, pure reason confronts itself with questions about
first causes and postulates the idea of God as a first cause.
3. With respect to practical reason, although we can formulate
the moral law for ourselves, in doing so, we must grapple with
the problem of happiness and, thus, must also postulate a God
who guarantees that in the fullness of time, happiness and
virtue will converge.
4. For moral progress to be possible, believers must organize
themselves into a church.
B. A major question Kant leaves us with is why it is rational to
postulate a God from whom we have no empirical evidence.

C. We can identify three other positions that Kant’s successors
will challenge.
1. Kant precludes the possibility of immediate or raw experience
of the world as it is in itself, but is it possible that we have
some sort of more immediate access to either the world or to a
realm beyond sense experience?
2. One of the major criticisms of Kant and the Enlightenment
more generally is that they were too rationalistic and
formalistic and that, consequently, they emphasize the
universal, not the particular, aspects of human subjectivity.
3. Kant’s emphasis on rational faith downplays the importance of
religious experience such that we have no immediate
consciousness of God, no dramatic religious experiences or
feelings, and for many Christians, no personal experience
of Jesus.
II. Two cultural and religious movements—Pietism and Romanticism—
shaped Western religious thought after Kant. In both, we see criticism
of the abstract rational universalism of the Enlightenment and an
emphasis on personal experience.
A. Like the Enlightenment, Pietism also had its beginnings in the
early modern period and the response to the religious conflict of
the post-Reformation era.
1. But where Enlightenment thinkers focused on reason as the
answer to these conflicts and raised the question of the
rationality of religion, the Pietists saw one of the main sources
of conflict as rigid adherence to doctrine and believed that too
much attention to doctrine led to both conflict and the
withering of the religious impulse more generally.
2. Consequently, the Pietists turned to religious experience and
the “religion of the heart.”
3. The main question for Enlightenment thinkers was: How can I
show that reason and religion are compatible? But for Pietists,
the primary question was: How do I know I am saved?
4. They found the answer to this question in the experience of
Jesus Christ and the moral regeneration that follows from
accepting Christ as the savior.
5. Pietism played a major role in German Lutheranism, in the
Methodism of John Wesley, and in the “Great Awakening” in
the American colonies in the early 18th century.

B. Where the Pietistic movement was clearly a religious movement
that brought a new perspective to the lives of everyday Christians,
Romanticism was a movement of the leading artists, literary
figures, and philosophers of the early 19th century with only
tenuous connections to established religious traditions.
1. Romantics saw themselves as bringing life to what they
perceived as the sterility of Enlightenment thought.
2. They emphasized the spontaneous, emotional, and creative
side of human life; the concrete and the fragmentary over the
abstract and systematic; and immediate connections with the
world of living nature.
3. Some Romantics dismissed religion, but many others saw
“real” religion in an artistic-contemplative connection with the
world and in the idea that the divine works through our
creative imagination.
4. Enlightenment thinkers tended to stress the rational self and,
therefore, the abstract, formal, universal aspect of the self. In
contrast, Romantic thinkers placed a stronger value on the
individual as a concrete, living, expressive being, with a
particular place in the cosmos and, therefore, a particular
expression of the energy or life of the world-soul or nature.
5. In the Romantics Rousseau and Coleridge, we find appeals to
“conscience” and “imagination,” respectively, that serve as
points of contact, even mystical union, with the divine.
Suggested Reading:
Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century.
1. What are the main differences between Enlightenment and Pietist
approaches to religion?
2. How would Romantic thinkers respond to Kant’s views of the relation
between religion and reason?

Lecture Ten
Schleiermacher—Religion and Experience
Scope: Friedrich Schleiermacher is often called the father of modern

theology. Deeply influenced both by Kant’s philosophical
revolution and by Romantic and Pietist views of religious
experience, Schleiermacher provided a new way of defending
religion against its modern critics: He argued that religion was not
primarily a matter of our knowledge about the world or of our
ethical relation to others but was grounded in a “sense,”
“intuition,” or “feeling” of the whole of the universe. In other
words, religion is fundamentally a matter of “piety”—the basic
sense or experience of our relation to the whole of reality and our
receptiveness to it. Particular religions take shape in history as
people develop different ways of interpreting, expressing, and
living this piety. For Christians, this sense becomes concrete as a
sense of “absolute dependence” on God.
Outline
I. Friedrich Schleiermacher challenged the Enlightenment emphasis on
natural religion and contributed to the development of the generic
conception of religion.
A. He argued that religion is a separate, irreducible sphere of human
life, neither primarily a function of our knowledge about the world
nor derived from our moral sensibility.
B. Schleiermacher’s groundbreaking 1799 book, On Religion:
Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, was influenced by his Pietist
background and aimed at his friends who were leading figures in
the Romantic circles of Germany.
1. The first speech, “Apology,” is an effort to explain to the
cultured despisers, on their own terms, why religion is not
something to be despised but, rather, is at the heart of a
vibrant, thoughtful, and creative life.
2. To make this point, Schleiermacher agrees with the despisers
that the orthodoxies and traditions of existing religions, as
well as the over-rationalistic Enlightenment philosophy, are
only faint shadows of real, living, experiential religion.

3. He urges the despisers to look to their own experience to find
the essence of religion.
II. The essence of religion is “the sense and taste for the infinite.”
A. By talking about “sense and taste,” rather than about reason,
Schleiermacher aligns his view of religion with the Romantic
emphasis on feeling and experience.
1. He agrees with much of Kant’s philosophy but argues that
religion is something distinct from pure reason—knowing and
practical reason—acting.
2. Both knowing and practical reason look at the relationship to
the universe from the perspective of the human, where the
human is the center of the universe and human beings grasp
and act on the universe. In contrast, religion is concerned with
the way the universe acts on us and our intuition of that action.
3. Religion for Schleiermacher is rooted in a fundamental
experience of being related to the universe as a part within a
larger whole, as a particular being in the midst of and part
of infinity.
4. He wants to show to the cultured despisers, however—and
here he departs from his Pietist forebears—that this experience
of the infinite is not reserved for the elect, but something that
is part and parcel of every human experience.
5. For Schleiermacher, being religious is, at the most
fundamental level, being aware of this fleeting sense of
oneness and cultivating this awareness so that it can then
inform all aspects of our lives.
B. The experience Schleiermacher claims as the basis of all religion
can be summarized in four points:
1. Schleiermacher describes the experience using nature imagery
and the imagery of union and marriage.
2. But these are not just images; there is something mystical
about this experience for Schleiermacher because in it, he
says, self and universe become one.
3. It is an experience that certain refined and sensitive people—
like, Schleiermacher suggests, the cultured despisers—can
mediate to others.
4. Unlike defenders of natural religion, Scheliermacher claims
that all genuine religion is positive religion.

III. Most scholars generally agree that, along with John Calvin’s Institutes
from the 16th century and Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics from the
20th, Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith, first published in 1821, is
one of the great works in Protestant systematic theology.
Suggested Reading:
Schleiermacher, On Religion.
1. What are the primary differences between Enlightenment approaches to
religion and Schleiermacher’s?
2. How is Schleiermacher related to the Pietist tradition of Christianity?

Lecture Eleven
Hegel—Religion, Spirit, and History
Scope: With Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel must be considered one

of the most formative philosophers and religious thinkers of the
19th century. Unlike Schleiermacher, however, Hegel stressed our
conceptual, not just experiential, knowledge of God. With a historical
perspective that exerted a significant influence on 19th-century
thought, Hegel sought to overcome the static rationalism of the
Enlightenment. He argued that history was the process by which
Absolute Spirit, or God, empties itself in creation, then comes to
self-consciousness in and through the historical development by which
human beings achieve self-consciousness about themselves and
reality. In short, our self-consciousness, at the end of this process, is
God’s self-consciousness. For Hegel, this process is symbolized by
God taking human form in Jesus Christ and culminates in the
philosophical grasp of this process in his own thought.
Outline
I. G. W. F. Hegel is generally considered to be, with Kant, one of the two
greatest philosophers of the modern period.
A. He was critical of both Kant and the Romantics, of the inability of
Kantian philosophy to reconcile the subjective and the objective,
and of the Romantic emphasis on feeling and intuition.
B. According to Hegel, the major problem with Kant’s philosophy
was that its view of our relation with and knowledge of the world
was too static.
1. Hegel understood reality and our knowledge of reality as
something that changes, develops, over time.
2. Given that our thinking—and, thus, our philosophy—is part of
the reality it seeks to apprehend, our philosophy is developing,
as well.
3. Kant’s view of our inability to know things as they really are
is just a stage in the development of our knowledge of
ourselves and the world.
4. Perhaps Hegel’s main contribution was that he brought
historical consciousness to philosophy.

C. Like Plato, Hegel was an idealist, which means that ultimate
reality, in some sense, consists of ideas.
1. For Plato, ultimate reality is found not in the empirical, material
world but in a realm of essences he called “forms.” Things in the
world are echoes or shadows of these forms and, thus, not as real.
2. Kant, too, is a kind of idealist to the extent that for him,
nothing in the world takes shape as knowable until it is
processed by the human understanding. But Hegel called
Kant’s idealism “subjective.”
3. Hegel argues for an “absolute idealism,” claiming that
ultimate reality is rational and that through the use of our own
rational faculties, we can participate in and know this reality.
II. Hegel gives his account of the development of our knowledge of the
world, which as it turns out, is also the story of the cosmos, in his book
The Phenomenology of Spirit (sometimes translated as The
Phenomenology of Mind).
A. Here, Spirit, or God, begins as an undifferentiated, eternal essence,
then differentiates, separates from itself, to produce cosmos, world,
and humanity. The story ends with the reconciliation of Spirit with
itself in self-awareness.
1. This development proceeds by means of what Hegel calls
“dialectic” or “mediation,” a three-part process in which a
thesis is negated by an antithesis and both are then taken up
into a higher synthesis.
2. The life of Spirit and the development of human knowledge
share this structure.
B. Spirit begins in an undifferentiated, unconscious state, then is
negated in the creation of the world and humanity. This process
results in the synthesis whereby Spirit is reconciled to itself
through the world and, particularly, through the development of
human self-consciousness.
C. In other words, the process by which our knowledge of the world
and ourselves develops is the same process by which Spirit comes
to self-consciousness. Spirit is reconciled in us.

III. We can see in Hegel’s account of Spirit a particular way of thinking
about the story of the Christian God, where God is Spirit.
A. This reflects Hegel’s belief that Christianity, in particular
Protestant Christianity, is the “consummate religion.”
1. Religion for Hegel is essentially a social phenomenon; it is the
expression of the life and spirit of a particular people, perhaps
the most important means by which a people not only express
who they are but also reflect on that expression and, thus,
come to know who they are.
2. In this way, the religion of a people tells us something
very important about that people’s identity. Moreover, given
that human societies develop through history—along with
everything else—Hegel can look at the history of religion
as a way of telling his story about the history of humanity
and Spirit.
3. The doctrine of the Trinity reflects Hegel’s tripartite structure
of reality; the doctrine of the Incarnation is a way of
representing Spirit’s emptying out into the world; and the
Resurrection of God as Holy Spirit in the Christian community
is a representation of the idea that the end of the story of Spirit
is the divinization of human community.
4. The spiritual freedom of Protestantism that erases the
boundaries between church and world and makes priests of all
believers embodies the realization that the divine is to be
found not in the church but in the state.
B. A common interpretation is that Hegel, in the end, sees religion
giving way to philosophy or, more plainly, that religion is a
preliminary grasp of reality, a kind of knowing in pictures, that is
historically superseded by the more precise conceptual grasp of
reality that he identifies with philosophy.
Suggested Reading:
Hegel, Miller, and Findlay, Phenomenology of Spirit.
Hegel and Hodgson, Lectures on the philosophy of Religion.
Smart, Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West.

1. What is Hegel’s primary criticism of Kant?
2. Why does Hegel think that Protestant Christianity is the
“consummate religion”?

Lecture Twelve
Theology and the Challenge of History
Scope: Some Enlightenment thinkers had questioned whether historical

events—such as miracles—could help prove the claims of religion;
others had begun to study the Bible as a historical document. But
with the turn to history in the 19th century, led by Hegel, historical
consciousness came to dominate Western intellectual culture, thus
raising a new set of challenges for religious thinkers. Foremost
among these was the emergence of the historical-critical method of
studying the Bible as a human, historically constructed text. This
approach to sacred texts raised questions about traditional ways of
understanding the authorship of the Bible, the history related in the
Bible, and the importance of trying to identify the “historical
Jesus” beneath or behind the gospel witnesses.
Outline
I. Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel created the framework for religious
thought in the 19th century, especially in two respects.
A. They set the terms for a theological paradigm, dominant in
the 19th century and still important today, that has been called
“liberal theology.”
B. All three, but especially Hegel, bring a new historical
consciousness to philosophy and religious thought.
C. We can tie this belief not only to philosophical and religious ideas
but to events in the world.
II. Increasing historical consciousness, however, also made possible new
challenges to the worldviews of Christians and Jews, especially once
scholars began to apply historical methods to the examination of
the Bible.
A. Some important historical questions about the Bible were being
asked before the 19th century.
1. Scholars in the Renaissance had examined questions about the
transmission and translation of biblical texts.
2. Theological conflicts between Protestants and Catholics had
raised questions about the relation of the biblical text to the
early Christian tradition.

3. Enlightenment thinkers, especially on the issue of
miracles, had asked whether the Bible was an accurate
historical witness.
B. In the 19th century, these kinds of questions came to seem more
and more important for a few reasons.
1. Theological debates between Protestants and
Catholics continued.
2. More important was the work of 18th-century scholars, such as
J. G. Herder, who sought to examine the Bible just like any
other historical text or artifact, by bracketing its claims to
divine status and studying it as a product of human history.
3. This set the stage for the emergence of the historical-critical
study of the Bible.
III. Two examples serve to illustrate the kinds of challenges made possible
by historical-critical study of the Bible.
A. The first involves the study of the Pentateuch, the first five books
of the Bible, traditionally ascribed to Moses.
1. As scholars began to examine these texts in the original
Hebrew, of course they noticed that God is referred to by
different names that seemed to correlate with distinct styles
of writing.
2. In 1805, the German scholar de Witte argued that the book of
Deuteronomy could not have been written before the 7th
century B.C.E., that is, five centuries or more after Moses was
supposed to have lived.
3. In 1883, Julius Wellhausen put forward the “documentary
hypothesis,” which argued that the books of the Pentateuch,
including Genesis, were constituted by four different sources,
woven together, all of them later than Moses.
4. He argued that the detailed laws found in Deuteronomy,
Leviticus, and Numbers date from after 500 B.C.E.
B. In 1835, a German scholar named David Strauss published The
Life of Jesus, in which he argued that careful study of the New
Testament reveals little if any evidence that Jesus was divine.
1. Strauss argued that the people who wrote the Bible thought in
mythical rather than historical terms and that when we
separate myth from history in the Bible, we find little to
support Christian doctrines of Jesus.

2. Following Hegel, Strauss argued that mythical language is
what religion is all about, but that it does communicate a kind
of truth: The Bible is true, but it is not historically true.
3. Strauss asked whether the New Testament could serve as
historical evidence for the life of Jesus and questioned the
historical context in which the text was written.
C. These examples reveal some basic characteristics of historical
biblical criticism.
1. Literary and historical analysis of the language suggests
that texts that appear in the Bible as unified narratives are, in
fact, made up of distinct narrative threads that have been
woven together.
2. It is possible to link the text or parts of the text to historical
periods and, in this way, shed light on those periods or use the
knowledge of those periods to shed light on the biblical texts.
3. It is possible to apply historical knowledge and philosophical
ideas—for instance, Strauss’s distinction between myth and
history—to construct hypotheses and theories relating to
the Bible.
D. These examples also show why this approach to the Bible was
so controversial.
1. It challenged basic claims made by Christians and Jews.
2. It made it easier to treat the Bible as a human book and,
thus, to treat religion and history as a human, rather than a
divine, phenomenon.
Suggested Reading:
Strauss and Eliot, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined.
1. What are some of the main historical questions scholars pose to
biblical texts?
2. What does Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis suggest about the
way in which the Hebrew Bible was created?

Lecture Thirteen
19th-Century Christian Modernists
Scope: Nineteenth-century religious thinkers responded to the challenges

of Enlightenment philosophy and modern historical studies in
different ways. Liberal Protestants and modernist Catholics
attempted to show that there was no inherent conflict between
Christianity and modernity. The American Protestant Horace
Bushnell took on the problem of traditional Christian doctrine by
arguing that doctrines should be interpreted not as philosophical
propositions but as figurative or poetic expressions of religious
experience. Albrecht Ritschl, another Protestant, was a Kantian
who argued that in Christian community, we find Jesus as the
perfect embodiment of God’s ethical calling. The Anglican John
Henry Newman stressed obedience to the earliest traditions of the
church, which he claimed could be determined through historical
study. Finally, theologians of the Tubingen school of Catholic
theology stressed the importance of historical study for
understanding the development and continuity of God’s revelation
through the Holy Spirit.
Outline
I. Three primary groups of thinkers can be seen in 19th-century religious
thought in the West: fundamentalist and antimodern Christians who
perceived modernist scientific and religious developments as threats to
biblical and divine authority, Jewish thinkers who not only had to deal
with the challenges of modern thought and society, and the focus of this
lecture, progressive, liberal Protestants and modernist Catholics.
A. These lines of thought were shaped by two main influences.
B. First were the efforts of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel to
articulate a thoroughly modern vision of religious belief
and practice.
C. Second was a growing historical consciousness that expressed
great optimism about the present and future of Western civilization
but also gave scholars and scientists new tools for exploring
and, possibly, dismantling basic convictions at the foundations of
that civilization.

II. The work of Protestant thinkers Horace Bushnell and Albrecht Ritschl
offers good examples of liberal Protestant theology.
A. To understand Bushnell, it is necessary to consider the American
religious context.
1. This context has its roots in the English Reformation that
produced the Anglican Church, which was very close,
theologically and liturgically, to the Catholic Church but also
to more radical Protestant sects, such as the Puritans.
2. As a result of Anglican repression, many Puritans fled to the
New World to join what will become a heavily Protestant but
nonetheless diverse religious landscape.
3. In the early 17th century, the introduction of Pietism to the
colonies, with its emphasis on a religion of the heart rather
than a religion of doctrine, led to the First Great Awakening,
which created new lines of connection among diverse
Protestant groups.
4. This is the origin of evangelical Protestantism in the
United States.
B. Horace Bushnell decided on a career as a minister when he was
swept up in the Second Great Awakening in 1831.
1. Bushnell was influenced by both the Pietism of the
evangelicals and Romanticism: He thought that religious truth
is, first of all, an interior matter of the heart, but he was
orthodox enough to believe that traditional doctrines of sin and
salvation could not be dismissed.
2. He negotiated this tension by arguing that the language of
Scripture and the language of doctrine were more like poetry
than science. Given that such language is figurative, we should
not read the Bible as a “magazine of propositions and mere
dialectic entities, but as inspirations and poetic forms of life.”
3. Although the doctrines of different branches of Christianity
may appear, from a literal perspective, to make very different,
even contradictory, assertions, they can, in fact, be different
ways of pointing to the same basic truth.
4. As forms of life differ and change, doctrines will have to
change, not because basic Christian truths are no longer true,
but because different forms of life require that these truths be
brought to life in different forms of language.

C. The liberalism of Albrecht Ritschl was influenced less by
Schleiermacher than by Kant and his emphasis on religion
and morality.
1. The meaning of the grace we receive from God is a spiritual
freedom from natural necessity that makes possible
moral action.
2. It is only in the context of Christian tradition and Christian
community that this liberating work is fully experienced.
3. Christ’s ethical work justifies the Christian community, that is,
makes possible God’s forgiveness of our sins and inspires us
to act morally and, thus, to reconcile ourselves with God.
4. In this way, salvation, as forgiveness, is mediated only
through Christ and the church as a communion of believers.
5. Like Hegel, then, Ritschl saw in his own time and place, in the
Protestant Christianity of late 19th-century Europe, the
consummation of God’s plan for humanity.
III. Anglican thinkers, including John Henry Newman in England, and
Catholic thinkers, such as Johann Sebastian von Drey and Johann
Adam Mohler, defended the traditional role and authority of the church
but took modernist views of religious experience and history.
A. Newman and his colleagues stressed that even in true religious
experience, God’s truth remains mysterious and, thus, must be
approached with a sense of deep awe and reverence made possible
by submission to the authority and discipline of the church.
1. The Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura was too
individualistic and led to schisms in the Protestant churches.
2. One comes to know God only through an existential stance of
self-denial and obedience.
3. The church is the indispensable guide to the holy mysteries of
God and Christ.
4. The study of history allows us to identify a canon of doctrines
on which the church must base its authority.
B. In contrast to Anglicans in England and Catholics in France,
German Catholics demonstrated a greater openness to historical
criticism, in part because Catholic theology was more grounded in
German universities and, hence, worked in closer contact with
Protestant theologians and biblical critics.
1. Drey and Mohler argued that historical research could show us
how world history is moved by divine activity.

2. This historical study could not focus on the Bible, as it did for
many Protestants, nor could it confine itself to only the earliest
traditions, as in the Oxford movements, but it must be
understood in terms of the continuing development of
Christianity and the world, a kind of continuing revelation of
God and God’s purposes.
3. The end of this historical process is a universal ethical
Kingdom of God.
4. Mohler argued that Catholics must trust that God has given
the church the gift of infallibility and that church authority
is necessary to ensure the continued proper development of
the church.
Suggested Reading:
Ritschl, Mackintosh, and Macaulay, The Christian Doctrine of Justification
and Reconciliation.
1. How do modern conceptions of history find expression in the work of
Bushnell and Ritschl?
2. What are some of the ways in which modernist Catholics balance the
authority of the church with modern views of history?

Lecture Fourteen
19th-Century Christian Antimodernists
Scope: In contrast to the liberals and modernists, many Catholic and

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 Species was 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 20th 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 19th 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:
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture.
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 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
inaugurated 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 17th century, a Jewish form of Pietism, Hasidism,
took shape.
3. In the 19th century, Judaism split into three distinct branches:
Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative.
4. In the late 19th 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 punishment of 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 19th 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.
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 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
immediately, was Søren 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 Søren 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’s Fear 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.
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 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
and 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 from 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. To 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.
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 Eighteen
19th-Century Suspicion and Feuerbach
Scope: If Kierkegaard was a Christian critic of modernity,

Ludwig Feuerbach was one of the major 19th-century critics
of Christianity. Unlike Enlightenment critics of religion who
attacked religion’s supposed irrationality, Feuerbach—followed
in this by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—sought to “unmask” the
way in which religion prevents us from grappling with the reality
of life. Feuerbach reverses Hegel’s view of the relationship
between God and humanity, arguing that God is a creation, a
“projection,” of the human imagination by which we attribute to
God what are, in fact, crucial aspects of our own humanity. We
thus become alienated from our true essence. Feuerbach also
thinks, however, that it is precisely through the development of
Christianity that we come to recognize this projection and
alienation and, thus, overcome our belief in God and are able to
recover our own essence.
Outline
I. With Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, many of the 19th-century
thinkers we have discussed in previous lectures tried to show how
human beings can affirm religion in the context of modernity. But we
also have seen thinkers claiming to defend more traditional forms
of religion.
A. Catholic Ultramontanists affirmed traditional Catholicism and
rejected most aspects of modern social and political ideology.
B. Protestant fundamentalists and Orthodox Jews rejected
modern liberal religion, though they embraced other aspects
of modernity.
C. Kierkegaard also rejected many aspects of modern liberal religion
and was a strong critic of Christendom, though he was in many
other respects not an enemy of modernity.

II. The subject of the next few lectures, as we examine the work of
Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund
Freud, is what philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls the “hermeneutics
of suspicion.”
A. The hermeneutics of suspicion is an approach to religion that
criticizes it not by focusing on questions about the existence of
God or the rationality of believing in God but on how religion
masks and exacerbates fundamental forms of alienation
and suffering.
1. The term “hermeneutics” refers to theories and methods of
interpretation. A “hermeneutics of suspicion” is a way of
interpreting social and cultural phenomena that attempts to
uncover their hidden mechanisms, to show how various
aspects of society and culture are not actually what we think
they are.
2. Feuerbach thought that in projecting into reality the idea of
God, human beings alienated their true being from themselves.
3. Marx thought religion was a form of false consciousness, one
of the primary means by which people deluded themselves
about a miserable existence of inequality and oppression.
4. Nietzsche thought that religion and morality had their roots in
weakness and sickness and were a means by which the most
decadent of us wrested and kept power away from the strong
and healthy.
5. Freud thought that religion was an effect of repression and the
inability of human beings to confront unavoidable psychic
conflict and the inevitable gap between our hopes and reality.
B. During the Enlightenment, it was rare to see a straightforward
declaration of atheism among leading intellectuals. This remained
the case for much of the 19th century, during which time, leading
intellectuals were increasingly associated with universities.
1. Enlightenment critics of religion, such as Hume and Voltaire,
did not hold academic posts, and in the 19th century, Johann
Gottlieb Fichte, Strauss, and Feuerbach lost posts because they
were suspected of atheism.
2. Marx and Freud never held academic posts and Nietzsche
left his.

III. Feuerbach was the initiator of a form of suspicion that was radicalized
by and found its most famous expression in the work of Karl Marx.
A. Feuerbach was a Hegelian but rejected Hegel’s idealism for a form
of materialism.
1. Reality is ultimately material, and all human life and
knowledge begins with our engagement with the world we
experience through our senses.
2. Where Hegel begins with spirit projecting itself into the
universe and world, Feuerbach begins with human beings
projecting the concept of God.
3. What for Hegel are highest realities—self-consciousness,
reason, Spirit—are for Feuerbach simply aspects of humanity
that we alienate from ourselves: We attribute them to God
rather than to ourselves.
4. Feuerbach: “The secret of theology [the study of God]
is anthropology.”
5. But it is a secret—we don’t recognize that this is the case.
B. Although this idea makes Feuerbach an atheist—God is a human
creation and does not exist as an independent entity—he also
argues that this is a necessary and, ultimately, constructive process.
C. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach shows how this
alienation is resolved, and the concept of God overcome,
through Christianity.
1. For Feuerbach, as for Hegel, Christianity is the supreme
religion, as well as the end of religion, because it is the
religion of love: God sacrifices his divine status by
becoming human.
2. Recognizing God’s love, human beings should also renounce
God out of love for humanity; we should renounce the God
that requires exclusive faith commitments that separate us
from other human beings.
3. In this way, we come to a sense of ourselves.
Suggested Reading:
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

1. How would you distinguish the hermeneutics of suspicion from
Enlightenment questions about religion?
2. Why did Feuerbach think that religion contributed to the development
of human beings?

Lecture Nineteen
Marx—Religion as False Consciousness
Scope: Karl Marx believed that with Feuerbach’s reversal of Hegel, an

important step had been taken in the criticism of religion. But he
also believed that Feuerbach was philosophically mistaken in his
views on the power of thought to change human life. Marx argued
that a more materialistic interpretation of religion and culture was
needed, that religion was only symptom of a human alienation that
was grounded in social and economic structures. In “On the Jewish
Question,” Marx develops this idea by engaging the question of
Jewish emancipation. He argues that “freedom of religion” is not
the answer, that although this might bring the Jews the freedom to
participate as equal citizens in the political process, it would not
bring them “human emancipation.” This form of emancipation, he
argues, requires that we overcome the split between citizenship and
civil society, which he argues, is essentially a religious distinction.
Outline
I. Karl Marx is the philosopher and social critic who almost certainly has
had the most pervasive influence on world affairs of any Western
thinker in modern history.
A. Whether or not Marx’s socialist ideas have been discredited, he
moved Feuerbach’s criticism of Hegel and of religion in some
interesting and influential directions.
B. He wrote at a time, in the mid-19th century, when socialist and
revolutionary ideas were gaining popularity.
1. The Communist Manifesto, published with Friedrich Engels,
was published in 1848, the same year in which a series of
revolutions rocked Europe.
2. These weren’t the kind of proletariat revolutions Marx and
Engels were looking for, and the fact that they mostly failed
led the two men to believe even more strongly that revolution
from below was necessary.

II. Marx developed and radicalized Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel.
A. In his 1843 “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right,” Marx wrote, “For Germany, the criticism of religion has
been largely completed.”
1. He is referring to Feuerbach’s view of religion and his
materialistic inversion of Hegel.
2. But Marx thought that Feuerbach’s materialism did not go
far enough.
3. Like Hegel, Feuerbach overestimates the power of thought and
believes in the power of consciousness and reason to
overcome our alienation.
4. Marx believes, though, that life is conditioned by the concrete
material and social context in which it emerges: The
movement of history is not primarily a matter of thought but
of human productive activity in the world.
5. Thus he will write, with reference to Feuerbach, “The
philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways;
the point, however, is to change it.”
B. Feuerbach thought that religion is a kind of sickness in which we
split ourselves in two by projecting part of ourselves as God. For
Marx, however, religion is only a symptom, not the sickness itself.
1. This sickness is inequality and oppression and the miserable
material and spiritual conditions these cause.
2. Religion is the symptom of this sickness, but it also is a
palliative against it, the “opium of the people.”
3. Religion, in other words, makes us forget how miserable we
really are and, thus, mystifies our life in the world.
C. Religion, then, for Marx is a form of “false consciousness.”
1. Where Descartes, most modern philosophers, and Feuerbach
thought that consciousness could be made to be transparent to
itself, Marx, to be followed by Nietzsche and Freud, argues
that consciousness is not always the master of its own house
because it is shaped by forces that it hides from itself.
2. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud each developed modes of
interpretation, of cultural and social analysis, that take the
appearance of culture—religion, morality, ideals, norms, and
consciousness itself—and interpret them, look below the
surface to social, material, biological dynamics.

III. Important aspects of Marx’s approach to religion are illustrated in his
essay entitled “On the Jewish Question.”
A. He opens the essay by criticizing a follower of Hegel, Bruno
Bauer, who argued that the Jews will be emancipated only when
the state is no longer Christian, when Jews give up their Judaism,
and when religion is abolished.
1. For Marx, though, this abolishes only the symptom, religion.
2. The correct approach is, instead, to see that we will abolish
religion when we change society and politics.
3. This means abolishing the state, which Marx argues, functions
much like religion does.
B. The state, much like religion, promises us freedom in the abstract
while doing little to make freedom real in our concrete lives.
1. In the Bible, Paul says that there is neither slave nor free, there
is neither male nor female, yet he also defends the institution
of slavery and the subordination of women to men.
2. Marx argues that in similar fashion, the state makes us
equal as citizens while allowing deep inequalities to exist in
civil society.
3. The state cuts us off from our species being, keeping us
alienated from ourselves in the same way religion does.
4. What we need is not political emancipation but what Marx
calls “human emancipation,” which he says, will be complete
only when “the real, individual man has absorbed into himself
the abstract citizen.”
Suggested Reading:
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’” and
“On The Jewish Question” in The Marx-Engels Reader.
1. What does Marx mean by “false consciousness”?
2. What is the parallel Marx draws between religion and the modern state
in “On the Jewish Question”?

Lecture Twenty
Nietzsche and the Genealogy of Morals
Scope: Friedrich Nietzsche stands out from the other “masters of

suspicion” as a critic of both religion and modernity. Nietzsche
saw in the modern period a culmination of the nihilistic “slave
morality” that for him was at the heart of Judaism and Christianity.
This argument finds its clearest expression in On the Genealogy of
Morals. In the first essay of this book, Nietzsche presents an
account of the morality of altruism as having its origin in the revolt
of slaves against their masters. This morality is based in
resentment and the denial of self and contrasts with the self-
affirming morality of the nobles. The slave revolt begins with
Judaism and is victorious in its Christian form.
Outline
I. Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God became a touchstone for
20th-century theists and atheists alike.
II. Nietzsche’s attack on religion and Christianity is a complicated one
because unlike Marx and Freud, his attack on religion is also an attack
on modern thinkers who confidently proclaim a new age without God
and religion.
A. Because Nietzsche closely connects the death of God with a loss of
meaning, the question of how we live after the death of God
becomes a crucial one for him.
1. He is suspicious of religion but also of modernity and almost
everything human beings find valuable and meaningful,
including truth and morality.
2. Where does his suspicion lead us?
B. Nietzsche became a professor of philology at the remarkably
young age of 24, but after 10 years, he left the academy.
1. Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche criticized modernity from the
margins of European intellectual life and from an
“existentialist” perspective that, unlike the fundamentalists or
traditionalists, looked ahead to something beyond modernity.

2. Also like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche was a great writer who
refused to accept the limits and demands of modern
philosophical style.
3. He employed a number of strategies to complicate his message
and to show the reader a living thinker at work: misdirection,
aphorism, humor, and hyperbole.
III. For Nietzsche, the death of God is not primarily about the end of
religion but about the beginning of nihilism: After God, after morality,
after science, what can we affirm?
A. In its simple sense, nihilism is a state in which one’s life has no
overarching goal, no orientation or direction.
1. Nietzsche claims that for life to have meaning, our wills must
have a goal.
2. Human beings will gladly suffer, as long as they can be shown
that they are suffering in service of a goal.
B. But nihilism is more complex, and Nietzsche distinguishes two
forms of nihilism. Sometimes even when we have something to
will, we are in a state of nihilism, whether we know it or not.
1. We are in a state of nihilism when our will wills something
that, in fact, is really nothing.
2. Most people throughout history have been in this situation
because their lives have aimed at God and goodness, which
ultimately are forms of willing nothingness.
3. The problem is this: We either will nothingness when we
believe in God or we don’t have anything at all to will.
4. And we would rather will nothingness than not will at all.
IV. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche explains why human beings
have for so long willed the nothingness of God and why even those
who seem to accept the death of God still worship the “shadows of
God” and, thus, do not really confront nihilism.
A. Nietzsche’s genealogical approach to history rejects the idea that
there is some kind of overarching plan for or inherent logic to
history: History proceeds by fits and starts and is the product of
multiple contingencies, accidents, and intersecting stories.
1. Nietzsche’s is a naturalistic approach to history in which the
main focus is on how human beings try to maintain and
increase their power over themselves, over others, and over
life itself.

2. Nietzsche argues that our highest ideals emerge not out of
some connection with the divine or some basic moral
sensibility—such as altruism—but out of struggles for power
and self-possession.
B. Nietzsche devotes the first sections of the Genealogy to an account
of two types of morality, what he calls “master morality” and
“slave morality.”
C. He describes the victory of slave morality over master morality as
a “revaluation of values.”
D. For Nietzsche, morality as we understand it today is slave morality
because it is this category that was able to overcome master
morality through, first, the priestly religion of the Jews and,
then, with the emergence of a dominant Christianity out of the
Roman Empire.
E. The question is whether we can find a new nobility and cure the
moral sickness of humanity. Working our way further into the
Genealogy, we will see how Nietzsche connects the approach to
morality that he develops in the first essay to religion and what he
calls the “ascetic ideal.”
Suggested Reading:
Nietzsche and Smith, On the Genealogy of Morals.
Roberts, Contesting Spirit.
1. What does Nietzsche mean by “nihilism”?
2. What role does Christianity play for Nietzsche in the “revaluation
of values”?

Lecture Twenty-One
Nietzsche—Religion and the Ascetic Ideal
Scope: In the second and third essays of the Genealogy, Nietzsche treats
the moralization of religion and the ascetic ideal. Claiming that
religion was originally a non-moral phenomenon, Nietzsche
narrates a process by which the “bad conscience” uses religion to
increase feelings of guilt. This process culminates in Christianity
and its ascetic ideal. The ascetic ideal gives meaning to life but at
the expense of denigrating the body and this-worldly goals.
Nietzsche also argues, paradoxically, that modern ideals of science
and this-worldliness do not escape but are the latest stages of the
development of the ascetic ideal. Thus, Nietzsche does not see
modernity as a way beyond the life-denial of religion. The
Genealogy leaves us only with questions about possible
alternatives to modernity, but in The Gay Science, Nietzsche
suggests an affirmative “Dionysian faith” as a way beyond the
ascetic ideal.
Outline
I. As noted in the last lecture, Nietzsche claimed that morality as we
know it today is the result of a slave revolt in values.
II. The second half of Essay Two in Nietzsche’s Genealogy begins, like
Essay One, by examining the psychological consequences of a
sociological situation of domination: in this case, what happens to the
human psyche when people are thrown together in a society where
instincts of aggression and self-interest have to be controlled.
A. Here, at the origins of human society, human beings must
internalize what Nietzsche describes as an instinct of hostility and
cruelty toward others.
1. He calls the result of this internalization “bad conscience,” a
kind of cruelty directed against the self.
2. Although the bad conscience leads to a kind of sickness, it
also holds a good deal of promise because it is the origin of
the human soul, of inner depths of selfhood.

B. From here, Nietzsche moves to discuss the origin of religion,
which he says, is not related to bad conscience but to feelings of
indebtedness to ancestors.
1. As memory of them recedes, our ancestors take on the
attributes of gods.
2. This is a non-moral sense of indebtedness; it is more like an
economic debt: We owe the gods our lives and feel the need to
repay them.
C. But then, according to Nietzsche, bad conscience latches on to this
sense of indebtedness in an effort to increase human self-torture: It
moralizes it and, in so doing, creates the idea of sin.
1. Our debt to the gods now is seen as a consequence of
transgression for which we must pay.
2. This idea reaches its height in the Christian concept of original
sin: a sin so bad, so primal, that human beings condemn
themselves for it, seeing themselves as utterly corrupted.
3. To ensure that this self-torture does not lead to humanity
destroying itself, Christianity comes up with a “paradoxical
and horrifying expedient”: the idea of a God that sacrifices
himself for the guilt of humankind.
III. In Essay Three, Nietzsche further explores this moralization of religion
by explaining how the priest uses the bad conscience to infect both the
weak and the strong.
A. Here, Nietzsche introduces his famous idea of the ascetic ideal,
which is the key to the book and especially to the argument that
even after the death of God, we are still caught in a nihilism of
willing nothing.
B. Nietzsche is very interested in asceticism as a religious phenomenon.
1. It is a form of self-denial that gives meaning to life by
directing the bad conscience to an ultimate goal: One denies
this life for the sake of being saved. Thus, self-denial becomes
the meaning of life; it is the route to salvation.
2. By means of the ascetic ideal, the priest gains power not only
over those most sickened and weakened by bad conscience but
also over the strong by infecting them with guilt.
3. Thus, it is the power of the ascetic ideal that allows the priest
to accomplish the revaluation of values.

4. For Nietzsche, Christianity has been the main vehicle for the
ascetic ideal in Western civilization and has so shaped
Western civilization that it is not clear that Westerners can
imagine any other way to give meaning to their lives.
IV. Nietzsche asks whether it is possible to find another meaning, another
ideal, another goal for the will.
A. One possibility is that if the ascetic ideal were based on the
nothingness of the afterlife, the alternative would be a life of truth
focused on this world.
B. Nietzsche never directly answers the question of the alternative to
the ascetic ideal. He suggests that we may not be in a position yet
to answer the question, that the only real meaning to be found in
life is precisely in the very immersion in this predicament.
C. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche goes into a bit more detail
about the ways in which immersion in the problem of truth might
be meaningful.
1. He introduces the idea of the “free spirit,” not a simple
rejection of the idea of faith but a comparison and contrast
of one kind of faith, the “wish for certainty,” with another, a
faith that allows him to dance near, without plunging into, the
abyss of nihilism.
2. This is faith not in another life, not in progress toward a
utopia, but in the affirmation of life in all its strange and
confusing and painful reality.
3. One embraces life by both exploring it with a suspicious eye
toward all denials of life but also with a kind of creative,
artistic effort to make life beautiful.
4. It is a “tremendous, unbounded saying Yes and Amen” to life.
Suggested Reading:
Nietzsche, The Gay Science.
Roberts, Contesting Spirit.
1. What does Nietzsche mean by the “ascetic ideal”?
2. Why doesn’t Nietzsche think that science and atheism are the answer to
the ascetic ideal?

Lecture Twenty-Two
Freud—Religion as Neurosis
Scope: Sigmund Freud argues that religion can be explained and

demystified from a psychological perspective as an illusion that
helps us to repress the fundamental conflicts at the heart of our
psychic life. This repression leads to neurosis, which Freud defines
as a compromise formation that allows repressed desires to be
expressed and satisfied in coded ways. Religion, for Freud, is the
“universal obsessional neurosis of mankind” and has its origin in
the Oedipal complex, an emotional trauma caused by the conflict
between the simultaneous love and hatred of the father. Out of this
conflict comes the idea of God as a wish fulfillment—a father to
whom we can profess our love and who will forgive us for our
hatred of him, that is, our sin. An interesting application of these
ideas is found in Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which interprets
the history of Judaism as a paradigmatic spiritual and moral
religion grounded in the memory of intense historical trauma.
Outline
I. Aside from Marx, no thinker we explore in these lectures has had a
greater impact on Western society and culture of the past 100 years
than Sigmund Freud.
A. Where Marx examined religion through the lens of economics and
social organization and Nietzsche through the lens of the dynamics
of the will, Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, argued that
religion could be explained and demystified by looking at it from a
psychological perspective.
B. Freud claimed that there is an inherent and tragic conflict between
human psychological processes and the demands of civilization.
1. He argued that religion is a social mechanism by which human
beings try to manage this conflict.
2. We will consider his treatment of the origin of religion
and the tradition of Judaism in two of his most interesting
and challenging books, Totem and Taboo and Moses
and Monotheism.

C. Freud was the founder and primary intellect behind the
psychotherapeutic method of psychoanalysis.
1. He referred to psychoanalysis as the “talking cure”—a
procedure in which patients would talk about dreams and
fantasies, probing them with the analyst in order to work
through deep-seated psychic conflicts caused by repression.
2. Ridiculed at first, by the time of his death, Freud’s
psychoanalysis was one of the major intellectual and
therapeutic movements in the Western world.
D. In large part, these psychic conflicts are the product of conflict
between our individual psychic life and the demands of society, an
idea Freud treated in classic form in Civilization and Its Discontents.
1. Freud believed that religion is a form of false consciousness, a
way of hiding from awareness and wishing away crucial conflict.
2. Our psychic life is characterized by what Freud called the
“pleasure principle,” which is amoral and seeks the
satisfaction of all our instinctual desires.
3. This principle is always being frustrated by the reality
principle, because we are physically limited creatures who
cannot always physically satisfy our desires and because we
are also social beings who must learn to control our desires
and our drive to satisfy them for the sake of social peace.
4. This conflict produces neurosis, which is a kind of negotiation
between our unconsciousness and our conscious ego. In this
negotiation, the repressed desire is allowed some satisfaction,
while remaining hidden, through its expression in symbolic
forms, such as dreams, obsessional behaviors, and of
course, religion.
5. The goal of psychoanalysis is not to resolve psychic conflict—
that, according to Freud, is impossible—but to allow us to
more squarely and consciously face the reality of the
human condition.
II. Religion for Freud is a form of mass neurosis. At one point, he calls it
the “universal obsessional neurosis of mankind.”
A. The two elements Freud treats in Totem and Taboo, a study of
primitive humanity, help us see how Freud understood the origin
of religion and consider one of his central ideas, one that is both
famous and infamous, the Oedipus complex.

B. The Oedipus complex was Freud’s way of talking about the trauma
that children face—and the hostility and fantasy that go with it—
when they must start conforming to the expectations of society.
III. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud combines anthropological studies,
biblical criticism, and his psychoanalytic theories to reconstruct
the history of Judaism and, more generally, the power of the
monotheistic idea.
A. He constructs a history of Moses as a domineering father figure
who forces the Jews to renounce their original religion for a
difficult monotheism.
1. They kill Moses and give up monotheism, but later, out of
guilt, Mosaic monotheism starts to reassert itself. Increasingly,
the Jews come to worship the God who spurns sacrifices and
rituals and, as Freud puts it, “demands only belief and a life of
truth and justice.”
2. The psychic results of these traumas, which reverberate
through Jewish history, explain the uncanny persistence of
Judaism through centuries of suffering and persecution as a
uniquely “spiritual” religion based on instinctual renunciation.
3. Eventually, the hostile feelings toward Moses and monotheism
reemerge, producing a degree of guilt that leads to the
religious revolution that takes the form of Christianity, a
religion of the son, not the father.
B. Freud, a secular and very much assimilated Jew, counters the
tendency of almost all the thinkers we have discussed to this point
to cast Christianity as superior to Judaism.
Suggested Reading:
Freud, Civilization and its discontents.
———, The future of an illusion.
———, Moses and monotheism: three essays.
1. Why does Freud think that religion is the “universal obsessional
neurosis of mankind”?
2. What does Freud mean when he calls religion an “illusion”?

Lecture Twenty-Three
Barth and the End of Liberal Theology
Scope: Twentieth-century religious thought really begins with the

publication of Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans in the aftermath
of World War I. Shaken by the brutality of the war, Barth rejected
the close links between the gospel and modern Western culture
asserted by liberal religious thinkers of the 19th century. For him,
Schleiermacher and others had glorified the human at the expense
of the divine. Barth, however, like Kierkegaard, emphasized God’s
transcendence of all that is human, including religion. Indeed,
Barth goes so far as to say that critics like Feuerbach were right:
Religion is really just human beings talking about themselves; it is,
therefore, a lie, or “unbelief.” Unlike Feuerbach and the other
masters of suspicion, however, Barth contrasts “religion” with
“revelation” and views the task of the religious thinker as one of
“confession”—the acknowledgment of and reflection on God’s
saving message.
Outline
I. One of the fascinating things about studying history is reflecting on
how historians help us get a handle on the past. For a number of
reasons, this is a crucial issue for the study of religion.
II. In 1918, Karl Barth published the first edition of a book entitled The
Epistle to the Romans, a theological commentary on Paul’s letter from
the New Testament that almost single-handedly swept aside the liberal
tradition of 19th-century theology.
A. For Barth and others, the carnage of World War I shattered the
confidence in the promise of Western civilization that had
characterized the liberal theology of the 19th century.
B. In The Epistle, he announces his main criticism of liberal theology:
The gospel does not tell us that we are divine but proclaims a God
utterly distinct from us, a God we are incapable of knowing.

C. Barth agrees with such theologians as Schleiermacher that
religion is where human beings find their highest possibility and
search for the source of their fulfillment, but religion, he says, is
ultimately “unbelief.”
1. If you start with the human in religion, you will never get to
God, who utterly transcends the human.
2. The more we try to reach God through religion, the more we
get caught up in our own purposes and projects.
3. As in Luther and Calvin, Barth emphasizes our continuous
efforts to justify ourselves.
4. He even agrees with Feuerbach that religion is projection and
most theology is anthropology.
5. Barth is as suspicious of religion as Marx, Nietzsche, and
Freud are, but he sees such suspicion as not so much modern
as biblical: It is demanded by the gospel itself; thus, the
Christian is required to be suspicious of his or her own
religion and all human religion.
III. Instead of humans trying to reach God through religion, Barth says that
we must allow God to reach us through God’s revelation, which Barth
describes as “God’s self-offering and self-presentation.”
A. Theology, then, is reflection on God’s revelation and, thus, must
begin with the confession of faith in that revelation as it is received
through the gospel.
B. But how do we know that what Christians call revelation is indeed
revelation and not some other human construction?
1. Barth refuses the apologetic task of trying to prove that it is
revelation because it must be taken on faith.
2. He writes only: “The proof of faith consists in the
proclamation of faith. The proof of the knowledge of the Word
consists in confessing it.”
3. To try to defend the confession by means of rational or
experiential arguments that rely on warrants or criteria from
outside of Christian faith is already to acknowledge that
humans can judge the divine.
4. As Kierkegaard had argued, God gives us not only the
revelation but also the possibility of receiving the revelation.

IV. Theology must be based in the Bible and must read the Bible not as
revelation per se but as the witness to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.
A. Barth can accept much of biblical criticism because the truth of the
words of the Bible consists in their illumination of the event of
Jesus Christ.
B. But Barth argues that biblical criticism does not have the “creative
energy” that allows it to genuinely struggle with the “matter” of
the text, the enigma of God’s revelation.
Suggested Reading:
Barth and Green, On Religion.
Barth and Hoskyns, The Epistle to the Romans.
Ford, The Modern Theologians.
1. What is Barth’s primary criticism of liberal theology?
2. How can Barth criticize all religion as “unbelief” but still call
Christianity the “true religion”?

Lecture Twenty-Four
Theology and Suspicion
Scope: The masters of suspicion sought to decode “false consciousness,”

to explain how our conscious ideas, values, and beliefs are
caused by social, historical, and psychological dynamics that
ordinarily elude our conscious knowledge. Each of them, to
one degree or another, sees religion as a product of false
consciousness. With Barth, however, we see religious thinkers
integrating such suspicion—to a degree—into their theological
efforts, acknowledging the ways in which religion can foster
illusions and false, mystifying comforts. The philosopher Paul
Ricoeur shows how such an approach to suspicion and religion
can invigorate and deepen “the language of faith” by
understanding it as symbolic language that opens up new
possibilities for human existence.
Outline
I. In reviewing the contributions of the masters of suspicion to
modern religious thought, it is useful to reconsider Marx’s view of
false consciousness.
A. Modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, placed great trust in
the clarity and transparency of human consciousness.
B. But the masters of suspicion question consciousness at a radical
level, in particular, rejecting the autonomy and transparency of
consciousness and, thus, the ability of consciousness to completely
clarify and correct itself.
C. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur summarizes Marx, Nietzsche, and
Freud as follows:
1. For Marx, consciousness, as ideology, mystifies the social
origins of alienation and domination.
2. For Nietzsche, consciousness is a reflection of the will
to power.
3. For Freud, consciousness is shaped by the repression
of desire.

II. We can make some useful comparisons among the masters of suspicion
on the issue of religion.
A. Freud is a tragic thinker because he believed that the psychic
conflicts uncovered by psychoanalysis were an integral part of the
human psycho-social condition: “Every civilization must be built
up on coercion and renunciation of instinct.”
B. Freud and Marx are more resolute and clearly anti-religious in
almost all senses of the word, though Marx’s utopianism certainly
shares in a biblical vision of history.
III. As we see in Barth, however, we also need to acknowledge theological
forms of the suspicion of religion.
A. One might argue that such suspicion has always been a part of
biblical religion.
1. The 20th-century American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr,
influenced by Barth’s view of God’s transcendence, noted a
principle he called “radical monotheism.”
2. Monotheism requires its adherents to claim that theirs is the
only true God.
3. Monotheism is also a critical principle that aims suspicion at
those who would make themselves or their particular set of
allegiances, whether family, community, nation, or set of
dogmas and rituals, the ultimate value instead of God.
B. Kierkegaard, Barth, and Niebuhr stressed God’s transcendence in
part to push people to recognize that their views of God are always
ultimately inadequate, only analogies, approximations.
C. Paul Ricoeur argues that “atheism concerning the gods of men
pertains hereafter to any possible faith.”
D. Ricoeur is looking for a hermeneutics of suspicion that can destroy
idols in order to create space where we can hear and listen to the
word of God.
Suggested Reading:
Ricœur and DeFord, The Critique of Religion.
Williams, “The Suspicion of Suspicion”

1. Although Ricoeur, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are all masters of
suspicion, why might we want to distinguish Nietzsche’s suspicion
from that of the other two?
2. How does Ricoeur seek to integrate suspicion into the
theological project?

Lecture Twenty-Five
Protestant Theology after Barth
Scope: After Barth, the question of the relation of Christianity to modern

culture remained as vexing as ever, though Christian thinkers
tended to be more forceful in claiming Christian—as opposed to
modernist universal—justifications for religion and Christianity.
At one end of the Protestant spectrum of post-Barthian theology,
theologians sought to correlate the questions that arise from human
experience with the Christian revelation. In its concern with human
experience in general, “correlational theology” offered a revision
of the liberal apologetics of the 19th century by relating revelation
to modernity without assuming their convergence. On the other
end of the spectrum, evangelical theologians of the middle of the
20th century continued to stress a propositional view of revelation
as offering “fixed truths” and “moral absolutes” for all times. But
by the end of the century, some evangelicals were coming to view
revelation more along Barthian lines.
Outline
I. Barth’s theology set the agenda for much of the 20th century: It became
impossible to accept without reservation either Schleiermacher’s
starting point in experience or the theologically liberal connection
between Christianity and culture.
A. But criticisms of his project did emerge. The most important
criticism was that Barth does not show enough appreciation for
modern culture’s decisive shaping of the way in which Christians
understand the word of God.
B. In this lecture, we’ll explore two very different Protestant efforts to
address these issues—the work of Paul Tillich and that of the
fundamentalist theologian Carl Henry.
II. Criticisms of Barth were most directly addressed in theologies of
“correlation,” which focused on the relationship between human
concerns and questions and Christian answers to them.
A. Paul Tillich argued that Barth failed to appreciate fully the inherent
links between the human and the divine.

B. Tillich thought that meaninglessness was the most important
way in which the threat of non-being was experienced in the
modern period.
III. A second important strand of 20th-century Protestant thought was
evangelical theology.
A. Before the very public revival of evangelical Christianity and the
“religious right” in the 1970s, evangelical theology saw an
intellectual revival marked by the publication in 1947 of Carl
Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.
1. Henry affirmed the infallibility of the Bible, the uniqueness of
Christ’s redeeming work on the Cross, and the idea that God’s
grace is received through a personal act of conversion in
which one is “born again.”
2. But Henry was critical of the intolerant, separatist attitude of
fundamentalism and argued that it had lost sight of evangelical
responsibility for reforming and humanizing society.
B. Henry focused his theology on an objectivist understanding of
God’s revelation, on “fixed truths,” “moral absolutes,” and “a sure
and final hope.”
1. Like Barth, then, he has an objectivist view of revelation, but
unlike Barth, he defends this idea philosophically.
2. All forms of human thought, he argues, must begin with
presuppositions that cannot be proven but can be
rationally defended.
3. His presupposition is that revelation is the source of all
ultimate truth and that the Bible is the depository of this truth.
The Bible consists not primarily of stories and metaphorical
language but of direct, intelligible propositions.
Suggested Reading:
Ford, The Modern Theologians.
Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.
Tillich, Systematic Theology.
1. What does Paul Tillich mean by “correlation”?
2. How does Carl Henry see the convergence of reason and revelation?

Lecture Twenty-Six
20th-Century Catholicism
Scope: Much of the Catholic theology of the 20th century was dedicated to
overcoming the antimodernism that had been instituted at the First
Vatican Council in 1869. This meant rethinking the church’s view
of Thomas Aquinas. Proponents of the “new theology” argued that
the particular interpretation of Aquinas instituted by the church
was historically problematic, more modern than traditional in its
emphasis on a universal philosophy that provided a foundation for
theology. They sought to recover Aquinas the “theologian” and a
theology grounded not in tradition but in the spiritual life, guided
by the church. They also sought to recover the rich theological
resources of other premodern theologians, such as Augustine. This
allowed them to criticize the church’s sharp separation between the
natural and the supernatural that, they argued, was a product
of modernity.
Outline
I. The story of Catholic theology in the first six decades of the 20th
century centers on the effort of a range of Catholic thinkers to
overcome the antimodernist legacy of the 19th century.
A. The Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s institutionalized
many of the modernist reforms these theologians sought.
B. Following Vatican I, called in 1869, the church required
all clergy, pastors, and seminary professors to swear the
Anti-Modernist Oath.
II. In this lecture, we explore the theological innovations that led up to
Vatican II.
A. At the end of the 19th century, the church declared that all
teachings should be based in the official interpretation of the
philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas. This was the basis of
what came to be called “neo-scholastic” theology.
B. In 1914, Pope Pius X decreed that the basic theses of St. Thomas
were the foundations of church doctrine and not to be debated.

III. Although this form of neo-scholastic Thomism remained the official
teaching of the church up to Vatican II, many Catholic theologians
departed from it to greater or lesser degrees throughout the first half of
the 20th century. Their work is generally referred to as the “nouvelle
theologie,” or “new theology.”
A. A major line of criticism of the official teachings took the
form of historical study that questioned the reigning interpretation
of Thomas.
B. Neo-scholasticism, according to its critics, was based in an
interpretation of Aquinas that was deeply entwined with Counter-
Reformation polemics against Protestantism and with the kind of
modern universalistic rationalism we find in Descartes.
C. The theologians who were dissatisfied with neo-scholasticism
trained their historical lenses on that vein of theology, as well as
the early Christian tradition and Aquinas himself.
IV. In large part based on this kind of historical work, proponents of the
new theology stressed two themes in their effort to forge a modern
Catholic theology.
A. According to the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac, the neo-scholastics
had misunderstood Aquinas on the relationship between nature
and grace.
B. Some proponents of the new theology, most importantly Hans Urs
von Balthasar, argued that rather than starting from a general
philosophical understanding of reality and the human, theology
should begin with faith in a particular God encountered in and
testified to by the Bible and the church and in the context of the
life of worship.
1. Of all the new theologians, von Balthasar is the one who
perhaps developed these ideas most extensively, influenced
deeply by Karl Barth’s vision of theology as faith seeking
understanding and by de Lubac’s view of our natural openness
to God.
2. Balthasar argued that in the creation, God established a
relation among humans, nature, and God that was oriented to
the communion among them.

V. In addition to the new theology, another important trend in modernizing
Catholicism was Karl Rahner’s “transcendental Thomism.”
A. Rahner had much in common with new theology, though his was a
more philosophically oriented effort to link Aquinas’s thought to
Kant’s transcendental philosophy.
B. The transcendental question for Rahner was this: What are the
conditions that must be in place for us to experience the presence
of God at the center of our existence?
C. All human beings are oriented to what he calls “absolute being”
and “absolute mystery,” and we are attuned to this mystery in such
a way that we are able to hear it speak to us, not just or even
primarily in the form of propositions about its nature but in the
form of personal communion.
D. As human beings, we are constituted by an orientation to absolute
mystery, but as particular kinds of human beings, we live this
orientation in particular, concrete ways, for example, Christian,
Jewish, or Buddhist.
E. The Christian believes that all grace of God is mediated
through Christ and that all human beings, whether Christian or
not, also participate in this grace, even if they do so as
“anonymous Christians.”
VI. As these Catholic theologians tried to open the church to modernity,
they found that the strategies the church had used to combat modernity
were themselves modern, even if they were presented as the product of
Aquinas’s medieval thought.
Suggested Reading:
Kerr, After Aquinas.
———, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians.
Rahner and Dych, Foundations of Christian Faith.
1. What are the basic claims of neo-scholastic theology?
2. What claims did the “nouvelle theologie” make about Aquinas as they
sought to go beyond neo-scholasticism?

Lecture Twenty-Seven
Modern Jewish Philosophy
Scope: Jewish thinkers after World War I also stood at a distance from the
philosophical and cultural assumptions that had shaped 19th-
century religious thought. Like Barth, they did so in large part by
placing new emphasis on the idea of revelation. They also stressed
Jewish particularity to a greater degree than their predecessors,
such as Hermann Cohen. Martin Buber emphasized the “I-You”
relationship, in which two people are fully present and maximally
responsive to each other and in which we come into contact with
the divine. Franz Rosenzweig’s “New Thinking” focused on the
revelatory encounter with God’s love through which one is
released into the “flow of life” in an attitude of responsive
attention to the neighbor. Where Buber downplays the role of
Jewish law, Rosenzweig thought that adherence to the law helps
shape a life open to the encounter with God.
Outline
I. Like Karl Barth, Jewish thinkers, such as Franz Rosenzweig and Martin
Buber, challenged the assumptions of 19th-century religious thought.
Both questioned the earlier emphasis on Judaism as primarily a
rationalistic religion, and both forged an existentialist approach to the
question of religion and gave prominence to the concept of revelation.
II. The work for which Buber is most well known is I and Thou, published
in 1923.
A. It is a book of philosophy that, at first glance, does not appear to be
a particularly religious or Jewish book.
1. The relationship with God is an important part of the book,
but in the first two-thirds of the book, Buber analyzes the
I-Thou relationship primarily in terms of relationships
between people.
2. It appears that I and Thou occupies a space somewhere
between what Buber calls philosophy and religion.

B. Faith here is an issue of contact or encounter. It is less a
kind of knowledge or belief than it is a matter of participation
in an encounter.
1. Buber wants to emphasize that faith is not to be located simply
in the subject but emerges in relationships between people.
2. Faith is an “entrance,” not a “feeling”—a kind of doing,
acting, or relating or a kind of practice, an engagement with
the world, with other human beings, and with God.
C. I and Thou is Buber’s treatment of the way human beings
encounter each other, the world, and God and offers a philosophy
of dialogue based on two fundamental relationships: the I-Thou
relationship and the I-it relationship.
1. The I-Thou relationship is a relationship of dialogue and
mutuality in which the two partners are fully present and, thus,
maximally responsive to each other.
2. The I-it relationship, which people can have with other people
or with things in the world, is objective and instrumental.
3. It is impossible for anyone to maintain an I-You relationship
with someone else at all times, and it is inevitable that much of
life will be characterized by I-it relations. These relationships
are not bad or evil in themselves and, indeed, are important for
gaining knowledge about the world.
4. But to relate fully to another human being is to relate to him or
her on an I-Thou basis.
D. The I-Thou relationship is the site of the working of the divine in
human life: “the lines of relationships [with other Thou’s] intersect
in the eternal Thou. Every single Thou is a glimpse of that.”
III. Many Jewish thinkers of the 20th century credit Franz Rosenzweig with
exerting more influence on their work than any other thinker, even
though his life was cut short by Lou Gehrig’s disease and he wrote only
one major work, Star of Redemption, published just after the end of
World War I.
A. Following Nietzsche, Rosenzweig argued that the dominant strands
of Western philosophical and theological traditions are symptoms
of an alienation of thought from life and of the human from
the divine.
B. Revelation, for Rosenzweig, is the encounter with a God who has
fallen in love with the world and with human beings and
commands the return of this love.

C. Where Buber downplays the importance of law in Judaism,
Rosenzweig does not because he thinks adherence to Jewish law is
part of cultivating a life open to the encounter with God.
Suggested Reading:
Buber and Smith, I and Thou.
Jewish Philosophy.
Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life.
Rosenzweig and Galli, The Star of Redemption.
1. How does Buber think that God is manifested in the I-
Thou relationship?
2. Why does Rosenzweig insist on the importance of Jewish law?

Lecture Twenty-Eight
Post-Holocaust Theology
Scope: Because Jewish and Christian monotheism has traditionally held

that God is omnipotent and benevolent, it has always had to
explain the existence of evil and the suffering of the innocent. This
is the problem of “theodicy,” which came into especially sharp
focus in the wake of the Holocaust. Some Jewish thinkers have
argued that the only response to the Holocaust is to declare the
death of God. Others see the Holocaust as one more in a long line
of historical traumas that Jews should address by traditional means.
Still others see the Holocaust as something unique in history and,
thus, demanding new approaches to the problem of evil. For many
in this latter group, including some Christians, the effort to defend
God intellectually is misguided. They argue that the appropriate
response is to explore how Jewish and Christian traditions can
support practical responses to evil and suffering.
Outline
I. World War II, and particularly the implacable demand placed on
thought by the Holocaust, radically changed religious thought, but
where the post-World War I generation raised new suspicion about
human possibilities, human reason, and human progress, after the
Holocaust, religious thinkers were forced to ask questions about God.
II. Theological efforts to explain evil and give an account of God’s justice
go under the name of “theodicy.”
A. Traditionally, the biblical God is a God who is benevolent and
omnipotent, that is, all-good and all-powerful.
1. How could such a God allow the presence of evil in the
world? In particular, how could God allow apparently
innocent people to undergo horrendous suffering at the hands
of others?
2. Theodicy tries to show how evil—moral and natural—is in
some ways part of God’s plan.

B. These kinds of questions were being asked by Christians, Jews,
and critics of religion long before the Holocaust; indeed, one can
read the Hebrew Bible as an extended series of reflections and
confrontations with such questions.
C. Jewish and Christian thinkers have grappled with the question of
theodicy and have produced answers that can be divided into five
general categories.
1. Thinkers of the past and still today hold to the idea that
suffering is punishment for sin.
2. The free-will defense of God argues that God created human
beings with free will and, thus, the ability to do evil because a
world with human freedom is better than one without.
3. A third approach is to view suffering as somehow redemptive
in the sense that it makes us better people or that it is a test
that serves to draw us closer to God. Thus, good comes out
of evil.
4. A fourth paradigm for thinking about theodicy is what we
might call “eschatological”: Essentially, all suffering will end
and God will vanquish his enemies, the evil ones, at the end
of time.
5. Finally, thinkers often invoke God’s mystery as a way of
saying that we can’t always understand why certain things
happen even though we should have faith that it all fits into a
plan and turns out for the best.
III. The kinds of senseless, wasteful, and horrendous sufferings that
Dostoevsky confronts us with at the end of the 19th century are only
magnified when we consider the Holocaust.
A. One of the things we need to consider even before talking about
the religious responses is the problem of being able to
acknowledge and confront what happened.
1. Primo Levi claimed that the only ones who truly witnessed the
Holocaust in all its evil were its victims.
2. But he also says that it remains imperative to resist the
inevitable process of forgetting, to keep in front of us the stark
and terrifying thought that human beings can do this kind of
thing to one another.
3. Levi’s perspective has also been articulated by the Christian
thinker R. M. Brown in the preface he wrote to Elie
Wiesel’s Night.

B. Responses to the Holocaust are wide-ranging.
1. Richard Rubenstein argues that after the Holocaust, Jews must
acknowledge that the God of their traditions is dead: There is
no defense for the Holocaust.
2. Some argue that the Holocaust, though obviously a great evil,
is not qualitatively different from other tragedies of Jewish or
human history and that traditional resources of the Jewish
tradition for dealing with questions of evil are adequate.
3. Eliezer Berkovits proclaims the traditional Jewish notion of
Kiddush ha-shem, which refers to the maintenance of faith and
its proclamation even in the most terrible of circumstances.
4. Emil Fackenheim argues that the attempt to find an
explanation for the Holocaust is blasphemous. Nonetheless, a
voice speaks from Auschwitz that issues the 614th
commandment: that the Jewish people should survive as a
people who keep their covenant with God.
IV. In some ways, Fackenheim gives up the project of theodicy and,
instead, focuses on resisting evil and on the ways in which our
relationship to God can be part of this resistance.
A. This is also a response taken by a number of Christian thinkers to
the Holocaust and the problem of evil more generally. They argue
that theodicy intellectualizes and generalizes evil and, thus, cannot
focus on the concreteness of particular evils.
B. In this view, we take a more practical approach to the question of
evil, using the resources of the Christian and Jewish traditions to
resist evil and respond to those who are suffering. One Christian
example of such an approach is the so-called “political theology”
that emerged in Germany after World War II.
V. We see a trajectory taking shape in these responses to the Holocaust.
From the conceptual effort of classic theodicies, we end up with the
practical effort to bear with, witness, and resist human evil. From the
conceptual distance of theological and philosophical reflection, we
move to political engagement with the world.

Suggested Reading:
Berkovitz, “Faith after the Holocaust” in A Holocaust Reader.
Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History.
Leaman, Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy.
Rubenstein, After Auschwitz.
1. What are two traditional approaches to the problem of theodicy?
2. What does Fackenheim mean when he refers to the 614th commandment?

Lecture Twenty-Nine
Liberation Theology
Scope: The problem of evil and suffering in the 20th century has not been
confined to a focus on the Holocaust. In the wake of Vatican II,
Christian theologians and clergy in Latin America developed
“liberation theology.” This came in response to the enormous
poverty of the continent and to what these theologians perceived as
the evils of colonialism and the failure of the first world to spark
“development” in the third world. Liberation theologians work in
solidarity with the poor and argue that God is found as a liberating
presence in the midst of and in the effort to resist and overcome
suffering and oppression. This model has also influenced feminist
and black theologies in Europe and the United States since the
1960s and has since developed into “contextual theologies” around
the world and in a number of different religious traditions.
Outline
I. One of the most terrifying things about the Holocaust was the Nazis’
use of a scientific racism and a technological and rational approach to
mass murder, which made the Holocaust a quintessentially modern
form of evil.
A. Martin Buber and others were critical of the increasing dominance
of technological and instrumental forms of rationality in Western
culture and society.
B. Questions about particularly modern forms of evil were being
pressed by cultural and social critics in the West in the 19th
century, as well.
C. By the middle of the 19th century, voices from oppressed groups
were beginning to question the social, cultural, and intellectual
dominance of white European males and the ways in which their
traditions ignored their own Enlightenment ideals or, worse,
exploited them for evil.

II. Social criticism, especially as directed at capitalism, made its mark in
theological circles with the social gospel movement at the end of the
19th century, but it was not until the 1960s that a major theological
movement put social evils at the center of its thought.
A. This approach goes under the name liberation theology, and it took
shape in three distinct contexts.
1. Two Catholic women, the German Elisabeth Schüssler
Fiorenza and the American Mary Daly, published books
critical of the place of women in the church and in the
Christian tradition more generally.
2. In Latin America, following the reforms of Vatican II, such
theologians as Gustavo Gutierrez developed a new approach
to the cultural, economic, and theological forces that had
condemned the vast majority of the Latin American
population to poverty.
3. The civil rights and Black Power movements in the United
States, the former very much shaped by black church
traditions, led to the emergence of black theology, first
articulated explicitly in James Cone’s A Black Theology
of Liberation.
B. In Christian contexts, liberation theology has become a global
phenomenon, reflecting the emergence of distinct Christian voices
around the world, particularly in Africa and Asia. It is no longer
only a Christian phenomenon but has taken Jewish and Native
American forms, among others.
III. Let’s begin with a look at the common characteristics of liberation
theologies, then turn to Latin American liberation theology
in particular.
A. Despite important differences among these liberation theologies,
they share five key elements.
1. They insist on the political, worldly relevance of theology and
religion and draw a close link between political and social
liberation and God’s work in the world.
2. They are “contextual theologies” that, in their Christian form,
focus on the meaning of the Bible and Jesus Christ for
particular contexts of suffering and liberation.

3. They are concerned to elucidate and give voice to particular
forms of human suffering, not just in critical terms but as an
essential part of the process of making the God who suffers
with us a liberating and saving presence.
4. They are theologies of praxis, theologies that emerge as
reflection on the struggle against particular forms
of oppression.
5. They are deeply influenced by the hermeneutics of suspicion,
which they apply not only to oppressive systems of sexism,
racism, and economic exploitation but also to dominant
theological perspectives and religious institutions.
B. The Latin American vein of liberation theology was shaped by the
long history of colonization in that region and the wide gap
between the rich and the poor that it had produced. It criticized the
complicity of the church in this oppression.
C. Liberation theologians emphasize the preferential option
for the poor as seen in the biblical books of Exodus and the
Prophets. God responds in liberating fashion to concrete forms of
human suffering.
IV. Why might liberation theologies be called contextual theologies?
A. In certain respects, the church’s saving work comes from the poor.
B. To call liberation theologies “contextual theologies” is to
acknowledge a point that is crucial to Marxist theory: that the way
people see, analyze, and think is decisively shaped by their social
and material locations.
C. This shifts the site of the church from the institution to what
liberation theologians called “base Christian communities,” where
theologians and poor together study the Bible and form a new
Christian vision and life.
D. Some have argued that liberation theology conflates political
liberation and Christian salvation.
V. Liberation theology gives us a new perspective on the hermeneutics
of suspicion.
A. It is quite explicit in its use of a hermeneutics of suspicion
directed against both secular and religious sources of domination
and oppression.
B. We tend not to find explicit theodicies in liberation theology.

C. Oscar Romero’s “beautiful but harsh truth” that “the Christian faith
does not cut us off from the world but immerses us in it” is a key
for thinking about the way liberation theologians seek to reimagine
the task of religious thought.
Suggested Reading:
Chopp, The Praxis of Suffering.
Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation.
Daly, Beyond God the Father.
Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation.
1. What do liberation theologians mean when they speak of a “preferential
option for the oppressed”?
2. How does the liberation theology approach to evil and suffering differ
from that of traditional theodicies?

Lecture Thirty
Secular and Postmodern Theologies
Scope: The growing secularization of the first world also challenged

religious thought in the latter half of the 20th century. The
“death of God” movement responded to secular suspicions of
religious other-worldliness by embracing secularization. A major
influence on these theologies was the German theologian Dietrich
Bonhoeffer’s call for a “religionless Christianity.” A second set of
influences, particularly on the secular theologies of contemporary
thinkers, such as Mark C. Taylor and Gianni Vattimo, is found in
the “postmodern” reception of such philosophers as Nietzsche,
Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida. Taylor and Vattimo view
secularization not as a threat to religion but as the end to the
otherworldly “metaphysics” that characterizes traditional religion
and modern philosophy. Echoing Hegel, they read the incarnation
of Christ as marking the end of such otherworldliness and divine
transcendence as the emptying of divine love into the world.
Outline
I. The term “secular theology” sounds like an oxymoron but has in fact
been a significant movement in European and North American
Christian theological circles since the middle of the 20th century.
A. Secular means “worldly,” and many see the process called
secularization—a process in which, in one way or another, religion
ceases to play as crucial a role in a society as it did previously—as
central to what we have been calling modernity.
B. This transformation has occurred in one or more of the
following ways:
1. In the early modern period, we see the separation of church
and state.
2. We see a significant decrease in the number of people who
consider themselves religious or who regularly worship,
especially in European societies.
3. We see the privatization and individualization of religion such
that it exerts less influence on public life.

4. Today, the apparent resurgence of religion has led some to argue
that the secularization thesis has been shown to be false. Others
suggest that secularization is the context for a new kind of religion.
II. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theologian and pastor who was arrested and
executed by the Nazis for participating in plots against Hitler.
A. Although his work owed much to Barth, he thought Barth put too
much emphasis on the distance between God and the human.
B. His writings in prison reflect a turn to what he called “religionless
Christianity.” He wrote about a “world come of age,” in which
“before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself
be pushed out of the world on to the cross.”
C. Bonhoeffer’s work was taken up in the 1960s by the “death of
God” theologians, who also affirmed the secular.
D. More recently, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has
described his book Belief as an effort to treat “‘secularization’ as
the constitutive trait of an authentic religious experience.”
III. Vattimo and many other contemporary theologians have been
influenced by philosophical postmodernism, particularly by Nietzsche
and Martin Heidegger.
A. Postmodernism is not a rejection of modernity but refers to a complex
and ambivalent attitude toward modernity grounded in a hermeneutics
of suspicion directed at some of modernity’s foundational ideas.
B. For Vattimo and many others, Nietzsche and Heidegger are crucial
thinkers for postmodernists.
1. Nietzsche’s death of God and his claim that as a result, we
must embrace a certain kind of nihilism is one way to
understand this influence.
2. Heidegger argued that Nietzsche’s death of God should be
understood as the death of a certain way of thinking and
doing philosophy.
C. Vattimo appropriates the postmodernism that comes out of
Nietzsche and Heidegger by describing secularization as a
“purification” of Christianity.
1. God’s revelation, according to Vattimo, is a revelation of love
that we are to embody in the world, but there is no final end to
this process, no guarantee that we will ever perfect or embody
this love.

2. Thus, nihilism means that we have to give up, empty ourselves
of, our human dreams for and pretensions to such power.
IV. Let’s now turn to what we might call postmodern traditionalism and the
work of the Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas.
A. A common criticism of postmodernism is that it is a destructive
relativism that only takes things apart.
B. In contemporary theological circles, we see an interesting
convergence of postmodern criticisms of metaphysics with
theologies of divine transcendence that find resources for an
affirmative postmodernism in engagement with religious traditions.
1. These can be called “traditionalist postmodernism.”
2. This phrase should open us to the possibility that religious
traditions themselves are forms of reasoning.
C. We can see how this combination of postmodernism,
transcendence, and tradition is at work in the thought of Emmanuel
Levinas, a Jewish philosopher who was born in Lithuania and
spent most of his life teaching in Paris.
1. He was influenced by Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and
took from it the idea that ethics should not be subordinated to
metaphysics or epistemology.
2. Levinas begins his thinking from the experience of obligation,
which he considers to be grounded in a transcendent
imperative that is at the core of all human relationship and that
is something simply given to us.
Suggested Reading:
Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison.
Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’” in The Question
Concerning Technology, and Other Essays.
Marion, God without Being.
Vattimo, Belief.
Levinas, Otherwise than Being.
1. How does Vattimo understand the relation of secularization
and Christianity?
2. What does Marion mean by “icon”?

Lecture Thirty-One
Postmodernism and Tradition
Scope: For some, postmodernism extends modern suspicion revelation and

tradition. For others, however—whom we might call “traditionalist
postmodernists”—postmodernism offers resources for recovering
elements of premodern traditions that were rejected or masked by
the modernists. The Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas and the
French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion both stress the way in which
the divine interrupts our efforts to ground knowledge and ethics in
the autonomy of human reason. Both also appeal to their respective
religious traditions to articulate the significance of this interruptive
revelation. We find a similar postmodern traditionalism in the turn
by a number of contemporary theologians to the category of
“narrative” as a way of understanding how God’s revelation, not
human reason, is the primary shaping force of life, religion,
community, ethics, and reason.
Outline
I. For Levinas, it is in the ethical relationship with the other that we find
ourselves related to God. He argues that God did not really give the
Jews the choice to enter into the covenant, that they were essentially
commanded to enter into it.
II. Levinas saw a need for the continual study and revision of revelation as
a way to work out the meaning of the Jewish tradition in the
contemporary world. This line of thinking brings us to the next step in
our consideration of postmodern religious thought.
A. Levinas owed much to modern philosophy even as he criticized its
metaphysical orientation. He also remained a devout Jew whose
thought was informed by the traditions and discourses of Judaism.
B. Modern philosophy insisted on the autonomy of reason as
humanity’s sole intellectual tradition.
C. One way to distinguish postmodern religious thinkers is through
their understanding that, after all the criticism, all the self-
consciousness, and all the suspicion, it is faith that allows us still to
live, make decisions, find meaning, and act morally.

D. One of the most important intellectual developments of the 20th
century is the linguistic turn—the idea that language is not simply
a transparent medium for thought but is constitutive of thought and
of the way we experience the world.
E. We have identified two problems with the idea of revelation.
1. The appeal to revelation seems to set substantial limits to
human autonomy.
2. Even if we are willing to question autonomy, how might we
ever identify an idea or imperative as coming from God?
III. Rowan Williams, the current archbishop of Canterbury, brings together
the threads of the discussion so far in his treatment of revelation.
A. Williams acknowledges the value of the hermeneutics of suspicion
in providing interpretive frameworks that make possible incisive
insights into human behavior, but he is critical of the scientific
pretensions of Marx and Freud.
B. For Williams, suspicion in the context of faith is a kind of spiritual
practice or spiritual therapy.
C. Williams’s approach to the question of how we know that
something comes from God rather than the human is that we don’t.
But if we assume from the start that everything comes from the
human, we will not be able to attend carefully enough to claims of
revelation or religious experience to open ourselves to the
possibility that something does come from God.
D. Williams rejects two of the most common ways of thinking about
revelation in the modern period—both the liberal and the
fundamentalist.
E. He suggests that history and interpretation are the means by which
we continue the process started in the Bible, the process of learning
what God is saying to us.
F. Revelation is the grace and the forgiveness that allows us to break
out of these patterns, to bring creativity into our lives, and to forge
new patterns of connection with others and with God.
IV. Levinas and Williams think about revelation through their traditions,
and in each case, they treat revelation as something that calls us out of
the ways of seeing, feeling, and acting that we construct for ourselves.
A. Revelation calls us out of ourselves by calling us to the other.

B. In this postmodern return to tradition, then, traditions are seen as
processes of thinking, believing, and imagining that guide our
engagement with the world.
Suggested Reading:
Levinas, Otherwise than Being.
Jewish Philosophy.
Williams, On Christian Theology.
1. What does Levinas mean when he calls ethics “first philosophy”?
2. How does Rowan Williams’s concept of revelation differ from
revelation in someone like Carl Henry?

Lecture Thirty-Two
Fundamentalism and Islamism
Scope: In retrospect, Barth’s radical appeal to revelation is a useful way of

thinking about the trajectory of 20th-century religious thought up
through secularist and traditionalist postmodernisms. Where the
former tends to extend the modernist criticism of revelation, the
latter thinks about revelation in a postmodern context. The
ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a
general approach to this traditionalist view by pointing us toward
the “trust” and the community that ground all forms of human life.
Rowan Williams’s theology of revelation as God’s call to a new
world gives us a notion of Christian revelation that is at once
postmodern and grounded in the Christian tradition. It also shifts
the terms of suspicion, suggesting that suspicion directed at
particular beliefs and practices, rather than an abstract “religion in
general,” would fit better with the views of reason and cultural
criticism that are emerging at the end of modernity.
Outline
I. This lecture focuses on two examples of the resurgence of conservative
political and fundamentalist religion around the world, particularly
Christianity in the United States and Islam in the Middle East.
II. The term “fundamentalism” can be very useful to identify important
commonalities among such groups as the Moral Majority, Al-Qaida,
Hindu nationalists in India, and ultra-orthodox settlers in Israel.
A. The Fundamentalism Project, based at the University of Chicago,
defines fundamentalism in terms of two basic characteristics.
1. It invokes a pure religious past based on a selective recovery
of tradition as the basis for a present religious vision.
2. Central to fundamentalism is a struggle against
secular modernity.
B. Christian fundamentalism includes a range of groups from the
heirs of earlier American fundamentalism to groups that might
more appropriately be called conservative evangelicals.

C. In the case of Islam, we find the militant assertion of a purified
faith based on the absolute authority of Scripture. But here we find
ideas and patterns that differ significantly from those in Christian
fundamentalism. To mark this difference, we will use the term
“Islamism” instead of “Islamic fundamentalism.”
III. After World War II, especially in the context of the Cold War,
fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals articulated a more
politically active, nationalistic, and capitalistic message.
A. The sense of alienation of these groups from the mainstream of
U.S. political opinion and policy was heightened in the 1960s and
early 1970s with Supreme Court opinions banning prayer and
Bible study in schools and legalizing abortion and with the rising
visibility of the left-wing counterculture.
B. For many of the figures and groups loosely aligned as the
“religious right,” the connection between religion and politics is
focused on the perceived need for a moral revival, a return to
“traditional values,” in American society.
C. In the past decade, there have been some indications that a more
liberally oriented evangelicalism is emerging.
IV. The history of modern Islamism is rooted in response to Western
colonialism and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early
19th century.
A. In the 19th and 20th centuries, we can identify three distinct types of
response to Western colonialism: “commanding the good,”
adopting modern Western attitudes toward nationalism and
secularism, and returning to the fundamentals of the Qu’ran and
the Sunna.
B. Another major reform group originating in Egypt prior to World
War II was the Muslim Brotherhood.
1. The Brotherhood’s founder, Muhammad Abduh, wanted to
purify Islam in Egypt by setting it up as a kind of grassroots
charitable, social activist group that established hospitals
and schools.
2. But by the end of the 1930s and especially after World War II,
debates within the Brotherhood over the use of politics and
force to achieve their goals moved the organization in a more
radical direction.

C. The most important figure for understanding this movement was
Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who, in writings from the 1950s and
1960s, created what became for many the intellectual framework
for Islamism.
V. Fundamentalism and Islamism have played a significant role in
reenergizing that form of modernist secularism and atheism that sees in
religion a profound threat to the modern project of a humanity guided
by reason.
Suggested Reading:
Grenz and Roger, 20th Century Theology.
Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.
Lawrence, Shattering the Myth.
Quṭb, Milestones.
1. What were some of the crucial events and movements in the United
States of the mid-20th century that led to the revival of fundamentalism
and conservative evangelicalism?
2. What are the key elements of Islamism that distinguish it from other
forms of Islam?

Lecture Thirty-Three
New Atheisms
Scope: With the rise of the Christian right and militant Islam has come a
rise in vocal atheisms warning us of the irrationality and violence
inherent in religion. Sam Harris’s recent The End of Faith is a
much-lauded contribution to this chorus. Although deeply
problematic, the book highlights four issues to explore in the
remaining lectures: religion as a cause of violence, the possibility
of religious “progress,” the capacity of religions to acknowledge
the truth of other religions, and the relation between faith and
scientific reason. This lecture examines the first two. How do we
identify the historical causes of something like the Holocaust?
What weight do we assign, respectively, to Christian anti-Semitism
and Enlightenment theories of race? And can we argue that the
work of a Barth or a Schüssler-Fiorenza represents an advance in
religious thinking, or do they simply represent religious
capitulation to modernity?
Outline
I. Over the course of these lectures, we have examined numerous
religious approaches to the question of faith.
A. In the Enlightenment, some philosophers and religious thinkers, for
example, Locke and Kant, argued for a rational, moral faith.
Schleiermacher argued for a religion based in experience.
B. In the 19th century, Christians and Jews articulated a variety of
liberal perspectives that, in one way or another, meshed the
thinking of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.
C. In the 20th century, such thinkers as Barth and Rosenzweig turned
to a vision of revelation critical of the religious thought of the
Enlightenment and the 19th century.
II. The entry of conservative political forms of Christianity and Islam onto
the world stage in the 1970s has led some scholars and cultural critics
to raise questions about the dangers of religion in the modern world.
A. Especially since the events of September 11, 2001, a rash of books
and articles have been written that some refer to collectively as the
“new atheism.”

B. Exploring some of the arguments made in these texts gives us the
opportunity to consider the question of atheism and suspicion
today, which in turn, can allow us to consider some of the most
important issues religious thought needs to address in our
contemporary situation.
C. Two questions will organize the rest of the lectures in the course:
1. Is religion rational?
2. Does religious faith lead to intolerance and, thus, to violence?
III. Sam Harris is an uncompromising critic of religion whose position can
best be summed up in his own words: “Religious faith represents a so
uncompromising misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind
of perverse cultural singularity.”
A. Harris’s basic points are as follows:
1. The first prong of Harris’s argument is that religion is
essentially irrational fundamentalism and that modernist
religious thinkers are caught in an untenable position between
this irrationality and modern reason.
2. The inherent intolerance of religion leads to violence. Religion
is the cause of much of the violence that afflicts the world
today. The second prong of Harris’s argument is that religion
is not simply irrational but inherently dangerous.
B. Harris fails to think historically enough about religion, and as a
result, he takes modern fundamentalism and its literal
interpretation of Scripture as the essence of religion without
realizing that, as we have seen in this course, fundamentalism is a
distinctly modern phenomenon.
IV. Let’s turn briefly from the question of the rationality of religion to
consider the question of the rational study of religion through Daniel
Dennett’s 2006 book, Breaking the Spell.
A. One of the key points Dennett makes is that we can only really
understand religion if we examine it in the same way that we
explore and study any other human phenomena.
B. But to say this is to threaten to break two spells—first, the
religious spell, and second, the taboo against thinking of religion as
a natural phenomenon among many.
C. Dennett’s project is twofold. First, he seeks to give an account of
how religion emerged as the powerful form it is today. Second, he
wants to evaluate whether religion is good or bad.

D. He is correct when he says that many have refused to break the
taboo against the naturalistic study of religion, but he ignores the
religious thinkers we have discussed who have shown great
willingness to direct the hermeneutics of suspicion to their own
religious traditions.
E. We should note that this fits very well with Barth’s criticisms of
religion, of those who, as Dennett puts it, believe in belief as
opposed to believing in God.
V. If we are to carefully and reasonably study religion, it seems that we
should start from the idea that religion has taken many forms over the
course of human history—some have been intolerant and violent, and
some haven’t; some have been open to philosophical reason and critical
thinking, and some haven’t. Like other human endeavors, human
religiosity is always mixed with the best and worst that human beings
have to offer one another.
Suggested Reading:
Dawkins, The God Delusion.
Harris, The End of Faith.
McGrath, Dawkins’ God.
1. Why does Sam Harris believe that real religion is inherently intolerant?
2. According to Daniel Dennett, what spells do we break when we study
religion in the same way that we study any other human phenomena?

Lecture Thirty-Four
Religion and Rationality
Scope: Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins also base their criticisms of
religion on the claim that it is irrational. Both tend to contrast a
positivist view of knowledge, with science as the ideal, to a
propositionalist view of religious doctrine, missing, many would
argue, the complexity of both religion and science. Nonetheless, it
remains important to understand the relation of reason and religion.
Philosophers of religion explore this issue in a variety of ways.
Some view religious doctrines as “properly basic beliefs” that can
be experientially and communally justified and, therefore,
considered rational. Others argue that not all religious language
makes claims about the world or reality. They view religious
doctrines as pictures or frames through which we see the world, as
rules that shape our lives and our reason, or as analogous to poetry
in their capacity for opening up new ways to see the world.
Outline
I. Is there such a thing as religious reason?
A. The world of late antiquity that saw the formation of Christianity
and rabbinic Judaism was deeply shaped by Greek philosophy,
which was the paradigm for rationality.
B. In the medieval period, Greek philosophy continued to play a
major role for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
C. In the later medieval period and into the Reformation and
modernity, some well-known conflicts developed, particularly as
reason came to be defined in terms of scientific reason.
II. Mainstream thinkers in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have had
extensive debates regarding the relation among faith, revelation,
and reason.
A. Mainstream thinkers in each tradition have held sophisticated
views of the relation between religious faith and reason.
B. In the past lectures, we have seen a number of answers to the
question: How are we to understand the role that reason plays
in faith?

III. Certain kinds of religious faith are rational.
A. Throughout the modern period, some religious thinkers and
philosophers have offered arguments that take what is called an
evidentialist approach to the knowledge of God.
B. If one’s criterion of rationality is modern scientific evidentialism, then
it would be difficult to show persuasively that religion is rational.
C. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein offers some ideas regarding
faith and religious belief that have been influential on this issue.
IV. There are some good reasons to doubt whether strict rationalistic
criteria are appropriate when it comes to the question of religion
and reason.
A. Philosophers Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff suggest
that belief in God is not a matter of evidence and that one can be
rationally justified in believing in God without evidence if this
belief serves as what is called a “properly basic belief.”
B. The theologian George Lindbeck distinguishes among three ways
of thinking about religion and religious doctrine: a cognitivist
approach, an experiential-expressivist approach, and a
cultural-linguistic approach.
V. We can reasonably draw two conclusions on the question of reason
and religion.
A. If religious beliefs can be rationally justified, it likely will not be in
a way that will be universally accepted.
B. However, one thing we have seen over and over is that religious
thought can be self-correcting and self-critical.
VI. For many religious thinkers, faith must take itself through the trial of
suspicion, and such critical thinking is one mark of rationality that is as
close to universal as we can get.
Suggested Reading:
Lindberg and Numbers, When Science & Christianity Meet.
Kitzmiller, Tammy et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al.
Peterson, Reason and Religious Belief.
Plantinga and Wolterstorff, Faith and Rationality.
Ruse, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?

1. What does Wolterstorff mean by “basic belief” and how does this idea
help us understand such religious thinkers as Barth and Henry?
2. Is going back to the original sources essentially a conservative activity,
or might this process produce surprising new insights into faith?

Lecture Thirty-Five
Pluralisms—Religious and Secular
Scope: The kind of suspicion of religion found in atheistic standpoints,

such as Sam Harris’s, depends in significant part on the claim that
religion is intrinsically intolerant. The question of religious
diversity has occupied religious thinkers throughout the modern
period, as has been evident already in earlier discussions of natural
religion and Hegelian views of the history of religions. The
question of how we compare and categorize religions is a primary
concern of the academic study of religion, which has been
especially interested in recent decades to uncover Christian and
theistic assumptions in theories of religion. Most important,
Christian and Jewish thinkers have grappled with how to
understand traditional claims about “the chosen people” or the idea
that “there is no salvation outside the church.” This has led to the
“theology of religions” and to “exclusivist,” “inclusivist,” and
“pluralist” attempts to articulate a coherent theological attitude
toward religions.
Outline
I. We examine what has become a basic tenet of the modern worldview:
that one of the main sources of violence in the world is the clash
between religions.
A. One of the reasons for believing this to be the case is that such
religious traditions as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each make
fundamental and seemingly mutually exclusive claims to
God’s revelation.
B. Sam Harris argues that, for this reason, religions are intrinsically
intolerant and that such intolerance is at the root of violent conflict
among these three and other religious groups.
C. This view is extremely complicated and prompts several questions.

II. Let’s consider historical aspects of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
A. With few exceptions, most notably since the creation of the state of
Israel, Jews have lived under foreign occupation or in the diaspora
for the past 3,000 years.
1. Particularly in Christian contexts during the medieval period,
Jews were subject to persecution and pogrom at the hands
of Christians.
2. In the modern period, Western nation-states struggled with the
“Jewish question”; anti-Semitism was always present; and
under the Nazis, this anti-Semitism became genocide.
3. It is not surprising that examples of Jews imposing their
religion on others or triumphantly exclusivistic Jewish
theologies are few and far between.
B. After three centuries of persecution by the Romans, the Byzantine
Christian Empire emerged in the East; in the West, Europe became
dominated by the Catholic Church.
C. Traditionally, Muslims have not forcibly converted Jews or
Christians because they are understood to be “religions of
the Book.”
1. Muslims tended to allow Jews and Christians to practice their
religions in Muslim-controlled territories, though they were
required to pay special taxes.
2. In the medieval period, we find Muslim polemics directed
against Christians and Jews, criticizing them for corrupting the
message of God and, in the case of Christianity, committing
idolatry by claiming that Jesus is divine.
3. From its start, Islam expanded rapidly; through most of the
medieval period, it was practiced in the context of expanding
and powerful Islamic empires.
4. In the modern period, however, Muslims have had to grapple
with what it means to practice their religion in contexts where
they may be in a majority but living under secular or only
nominally Muslim governments.

III. A range of models exists for thinking about religious pluralism from
conceptual and political perspectives. The first three, exclusivism,
inclusivism, and pluralism, can be found in many of the discussions of
religious diversity in the last 20 or so years. Two others we will
consider are postmodern confessionism and secularism.
A. Exclusivism is the position that only one tradition or conception of
God is true and that salvation or liberation is only possible through
one tradition.
B. The inclusivist believes that the god fully reveals itself only in one
tradition, and this tradition articulates the truth of reality and the
conditions necessary for salvation; however, the inclusivist also
believes that the conditions necessary for salvation can be met by
other religious traditions.
C. Pluralism usually involves both a conceptual element and a
practical element.
D. Postmodern confessionalism argues that there really is
no such thing as pluralism, that pluralism is itself a kind of
disguised exclusivism.
E. The final approach to religious diversity deals with the political
question of how we organize religiously diverse societies.
1. In Western societies in the modern period, the generally
accepted answer to this question is one or another form
of secularism.
2. In the generally accepted narrative of modernity, the secular
state emerged as a solution to the religious conflict raging in
Europe at the dawn of modernity. This state is the condition
for the politics of liberalism, that is, a politics of liberty and
the pursuit of happiness.
3. Fundamentalists and evangelists in the United States have,
since the 20th century, railed against the “secular humanism”
of American culture.
4. Secularism is not neutral because it seeks to create a context in
which people from all faiths and people with no religious faith
will debate and engage on a level playing field.

IV. We can discuss a strong form of secularism and a weak form, both of
which separate church from state at the same time that they guarantee
religious freedom. We’ll conclude this lecture with a discussion of the
strong form.
A. Strong secularism guarantees basic religious freedom but holds
that public discourse should be free from religious language
and commitment.
B. The way that secularism has developed in the United States
in the modern period has led a number of legal scholars,
historians, and religious thinkers to question the very possibility of
a neutral secularism.
1. Yale law professor Stephen Carter (The Culture of Disbelief,
1991) argued that the courts and media in the United States
have trivialized religion.
2. Philosopher Richard Rorty, reviewing Carter’s book, argues
that restrictions on religion are the price of the compromise
reached by the Founding Fathers—religious freedom is
allowed on condition that it is privatized.
3. Scholar Michael McConnell treats strong secularism as
secularism organized on the principle of separationism, where
the public sphere is strictly secular and religion is deemed
irrelevant to the determination of citizens’ civil obligations.
4. Legal scholar Noah Feldman has described the predominant
view of the Supreme Court over the past 50 years as
“legal secularism.”
5. Carter, McConnell, and Feldman argue that rather than simply
providing a neutral space for people of different backgrounds
and beliefs to engage in political decision-making, strong
secularism is an ideology that is decidedly not neutral when it
comes to religion.
Suggested Reading:
Carter, The Culture of Disbelief.
D’Costa, Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered.
Eck, A New Religious America.
Feldman, Divided by God.
Hick and Knitter, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness.

1. What are the different approaches modern religious thinkers have taken
to religious pluralism?
2. What are some of the arguments against the possibility of a
neutral secularism?

Lecture Thirty-Six
Faith, Suspicion, and Modernity
Scope: Even if we agree that not all religious language is propositional, it

does seem that the religious life involves making claims about the
nature of reality. What kind of claims? In this concluding lecture,
we categorize the approaches to religion we have explored
throughout the course with respect to their views on the relation of
faith and reason.
Outline
I. One of the most important questions in the world today is how we
understand and engage the issue of religious diversity and tolerance.
A. The answers to this question are crucial for thinking about how we
respond to conservative and fundamentalist forms of religion
around the world and how we engage in the political and cultural
debates about abortion, stem cells, and education.
B. It is appropriate to close out these lectures by continuing our
discussion of pluralism and secularism because in some ways, this
topic brings us back to where we began and gives us a way to think
about the trajectory of faith and suspicion in modernity.
II. At the dawn of the modern period, intellectuals were forging new ways
of thinking about knowledge, truth, morality, and politics.
A. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the dominant view was that if
religion was to survive, it would have to prove itself before the bar
of reason.
B. Many argued that religion could prove itself in this way, though
others, the masters of suspicion, argued that religion was illusory
and dangerous.
C. In the 20th century, many started to question modernity itself.
D. Increasingly, as we moved into the 21st century, criticisms of
modernity led thinkers to question secular ideologies and to ask
whether secular societies could allow robust freedom of religion.

E. In this lecture, we’ll contrast strong secularism with a weaker
version of secularism, then move to a discussion of secularism,
democracy, and tradition. Finally, we’ll conclude with a discussion
of how rethinking the religious and the secular might lead us to
think differently about how we educate our children.
III. Jeffrey Stout has argued that we should distinguish a weaker form of
secularism, or what he calls “secularization.”
A. As a defender of secularization, Stout argues that freedom requires
discourse in which religious people are not required to relinquish
their religious beliefs.
B. For Stout, secularization occurs when people step from diversity to
pluralism: In engaging with others, they must accept that their
interlocutors will not bring the same assumptions and sources of
authority into ethical and political debates.
C. Stout’s secularization does not require people to relinquish their
religious beliefs or to refrain from giving them as reasons. His is a
“come as you are” public sphere.
D. But what happens when fundamentally different religious or non-
religious assumptions are brought to bear in public debate?
1. Stout argues that public discourse in a democracy must be a
combination of both “normal discourse” and what he calls
“conversational improvisation.” One such improvisation is
what Stout calls “immanent criticism.”
2. Here, we might want to invoke the religious pluralism
of Diana Eck, who points out that pluralistic dialogue is
not a matter of coming to agreement but of making and
keeping connection.
IV. Let’s think about Stout’s secularization in terms of democracy.
A. Stout’s main argument is that democracy is, first of all, a tradition,
that is, a set of ideals and practices handed down through time and
modes of cultivating in one another and in our children a certain
kind of political character.
B. This idea brings us back to George Lindbeck’s claim that “[t]o
become religious … is to interiorize a set of skills by practice
and training.”

C. Stout is saying the same thing about democracy and makes
the point that religious pluralism requires a commitment to the
value of diversity and engagement with people across different
religious traditions.
V. Is religion bad for kids? Let’s look at the way we educate our children
in the United States.
A. Daniel Dennett, in the midst of discussing the “pros and cons” of
religion, suggests that we need to consider carefully whether it is
morally defensible to teach belief systems to children.
B. From the perspective of such thinkers as Stout and Lindbeck, this
is an astonishingly misguided question. For them, it is a modernist,
classically liberal illusion to think that selves can be shaped in any
significant way outside of traditions.
C. It may be that those whom Dennett mentions assume that there is
some fundamental distinction between religious beliefs and other
kinds of beliefs.
VI. Our concluding question takes us beyond the parents to
consider schools.
A. Given the topic of these last couple of lectures, we might ask: How
do we in the United States educate our children to live
constructively in a religiously plural world?
B. Let’s consider the debate over intelligent design in schools, which
is really the latest phase of the long-standing battle in our country
over the teaching of evolution in schools.
C. The American public school system is dominated by what Noah
Feldman calls legal secularism, which makes it difficult to figure
out how to teach religion in the schools.
D. If schools are sites of acculturation and we live in a pluralistic
democracy, then its seems to follow that schools should be sites
for cultivating the skills by which people with different religious,
ethnic, and cultural backgrounds can come together in
constructive interaction.

VII. In Lecture One, we noted that one of the identifying marks of
modernity was that it was an epoch of universalism and, as such,
promised to overcome certain kinds of human difference.
A. The balance between faith and suspicion that we have seen in
many of the West’s best modern religious thinkers emerged as
these thinkers engaged their traditions, traditions that give them a
sense of identity and grounding but also demand of them a certain
vigilance with respect to the ways they assert themselves and their
own identities over others.
B. Perhaps, then, the modern solution of erasing religious difference
was a mistake; perhaps the engagement with religion and religious
difference has something to teach us about human difference more
generally and about how to live with deep diversity.
Suggested Reading:
Eck, A New Religious America.
Feldman, Divided by God.
Fraser, Between Church and State.
Stout, Democracy and Tradition.
Westphal, Suspicion and Faith.
1. Do you think schools should take on the task of cultivating the skills
necessary for religious, ethnic, and cultural understanding among
children of diverse backgrounds?
2. Which do you think is the better solution—strong or weak secularism?

Timeline
1077 ................................................ Anselm publishes Proslogion.

1273 ................................................ Aquinas publishes Summa Theologica.
1302 ................................................ Pope Boniface VIII issues papal bull
Unam Sanctum.
1520 ................................................ Martin Luther publishes On the
Freedom of the Christian.
1535 ................................................ English clergy abjure the authority of
the pope.
1543 ................................................ Copernicus publishes On the
Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres.
1545 ................................................ Council of Trent.
1562–1598 ...................................... French Wars of Religion.
1618–1648 ...................................... Thirty Years’ War.
1632 ................................................ Galileo publishes Dialogues on the Two
Chief Systems of the World.
1641 ................................................ Rene Descartes publishes Meditations
on First Philosophy.
1648 ................................................ Treaty of Westphalia.
1651 ................................................ Thomas Hobbes publishes Leviathan.
1687 ................................................ Isaac Newton publishes
Principia Mathematica.
1695 ................................................ John Locke publishes The
Reasonableness of Christianity.
1730s–1740s ................................... First Great Awakening in England and
American colonies.
1740 ................................................ Mohammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab and
Muhammad ibn Saud, ruler of the
Arabs, forge alliance that marks the
beginning of Wahhabism.

1746 ................................................ Jonathan Edwards, American
theologian, publishes A Treatise
Concerning Religious Affections.
1749 ................................................ Diderot publishes Letters to the Blind
for the Use of Those Who See.
1750 ................................................ Baal Shem founds the Jewish
Hasidic movement.
1759 ................................................ Voltaire publishes Candide.
1762 ................................................ Rousseau publishes Emile,
which includes “The Creed of a
Savoyard Priest.”
1769 ................................................ James Watt patents the steam
engine helping to spark the
industrial revolution.
1775 ................................................ The American Revolution.
1779 ................................................ Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion published posthumously.
1781 ...................................................Kant publishes Critique of Pure Reason.
1783 .................................................... Moses Mendelssohn publishes Jerusalem.
1784 ................................................ John Wesley’s Deed of Declaration, the
charter of Wesleyan Methodism.
1789 ................................................ The French Revolution.
1790 ................................................ Jews in France are granted
civil liberties.
1794 ................................................ Thomas Paine publishes Age of Reason.
1799 ................................................ Schleiermacher publishes On Religion:
Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.
1801 ................................................ Napoleon concludes concordat with the
Papacy allowing Catholicism to
function freely in France as long as it
supports the government.

1806 ................................................ Hegel publishes The Phenomenology
of Spirit.
1807 ................................................ U.S. Evangelical Association holds its
first convention.
1809 ................................................ Friedrich Wilhelm University,
considered by many to be the original
model of the modern university, is
founded in Berlin.
1813 ................................................ Methodist Missionary Society founded.
1814 ................................................ George Stephenson constructs the first
practical steam locomotive.
1829 ................................................ Catholic Emancipation Act in England.
1830’s ............................................. Second Great Awakening in the
United States.
1832 ................................................ John Nelson Darby and others form the
Plymouth Brethren, begin to popularize
dispensationalism.
1835 ................................................ David Strauss publishes The Life
of Jesus.
1840s ............................................... Reform movement in Judaism begins
to establish separate congregations
in Germany.
1841 ................................................ Feuerbach publishes The Essence
of Christianity.
1843 ................................................ Søren Kierkegaard publishes Fear and
Trembling; Karl Marx publishes “On
The Jewish Question” and
“Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right.”
1845 ................................................ John Henry Newman converts
to Catholicism.
1848 ................................................ Political revolt and unrest in France,
Austro-Hungary, Italy, and Germany.

1849 ................................................ Horace Bushnell publishes God
in Christ.
1859 ................................................ Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin
of Species.
1864 ................................................ “Syllabus of Errors” issued by Pope
Pius IX.
1870 ................................................ Bismarck removes Catholic and
Protestant clergy for overseeing local
education in Germany; First Vatican
Council promulgates doctrine of
papal infallibility.
1878 ................................................ Julius Wellhausen publishes
Prolegomena to the History of Israel.
1880 ................................................ Fyodor Dostoevsky publishes The
Brothers Karamazov.
1887 ................................................ Nietzsche publishes the fifth book of
The Gay Science and On the Genealogy
of Morals.
1896 ................................................ Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism,
publishes The Jewish State.
1905 ................................................ Napoleonic Concordat revoked in
France leading to full separation of
church and state.
1907 ................................................ Papal encyclical “Pascendi gregis”
condemns modernism.
1909 ................................................ Scofield Reference Bible popularizes
dispensational premillenialism in the
United States.
1910 ................................................ Milton and Lyman Stewart publish The
Fundamentals.
1913 ................................................ Sigmund Freud publishes Totem
and Taboo.
1914–1918 ...................................... World War I.

1919 ................................................ Karl Barth publishes Epistle to
the Romans; Hermann Cohen publishes
The Religion of Reason from the
Sources of Judaism.
1920 ................................................ Franz Rosenzweig publishes The Star
of Redemption.
1923 ................................................ Led by Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk),
Turkey declares a secular, independent
republic, marking the end of the
Ottoman Empire.
1925 ................................................ Hebrew University founded
in Jerusalem.
1927 ................................................ Freud publishes The Future of an
Illusion; Heidegger publishes Being
and Time.
1928 ................................................ Hasan al-Banna’ founds the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt.
1934 ................................................ Gemany’s Confessing Church issues
the Barmen Declaration opposing
Nazi-aligned “German-Christians.”
1938 ................................................ Freud publishes Moses
and Monotheism.
1940–1945 ...................................... World War II and Holocaust.
1945 ................................................ Dietrich Bonhoeffer executed by
the Nazis.
1946 ................................................ Henri de Lubac publishes Surnaturel
(The Supernatural).
1947 ................................................ Carl Henry publishes The Uneasy
Conscience of Modern
Fundamentalism; The Dead Sea Scrolls,
dating from about 22 B.C.E. to 100 C.E.
are discovered in Qumran.

1948 ................................................ Establishment of the state of Israel;
World Council of Churches organized
in Amsterdam.
1951 ................................................ Paul Tillich publishes the first volume
of his Systematic Theology.
1954 ................................................ Evangelist Billy Graham holds revival
meetings in New York, London,
and Berlin.
1956 ................................................ Pakistan becomes an Islamic republic.
1962 ................................................ Supreme Court rules in Engel v. Vitale
that prayer in public schools violates
the Constitution.
1962–1965 ...................................... Vatican II called by Pope John XXIII.
1965 ................................................ The United States Congress passes the
Immigration and Nationality Act which
opens the door to more immigration
from non-European countries and leads
to expanded religious pluralism in the
United States.
1966 ................................................ Cover story of Time magazine on the
death of God theology; Richard
Rubenstein publishes After Auschwitz.
1967 ................................................ Sayyid Qutb executed by the Egyptian
government; Six-Day War between
Israel and Arab nations.
1968 ................................................ Latin American bishops conference at
Medellin, Columbia, which many
consider to be the official launching of
liberation theology; Martin Luther King
Jr., Baptist minister and leader of the
civil rights movement is assassinated.
1971 ................................................ Gustavo Gutierrez publishes A
Theology of Liberation.

1973 ................................................ Mary Daly publishes Beyond God
the Father.
1974 ................................................ Emmanuel Levinas publishes Otherwise
than Being.
1979 ................................................ Revolution in Iran leads to
establishment of an Islamic republic;
Reverend Jerry Falwell forms the
Moral Majority.
1980 ................................................ Oscar Romero is assassinated.
1989 ................................................ Barbara Harris, in Massachusetts
becomes the first woman ordained as
bishop in the Anglican communion.
1990 ................................................ The Persian Gulf War.
1991 ................................................ Jean-Luc Marion publishes God
Without Being.
2001 ................................................ Islamist terrorists fly planes into the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
2003 ................................................ Rowan Williams becomes archbishop
of Canterbury.
2005 ................................................ Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
tried in U.S. District Court.
2006 ................................................ Daniel Dennett publishes Breaking
the Spell.

Glossary
agape: Greek for self-giving love, as distinguished from two other Greek
words for love: eros meaning desire, or erotic love; and philia, love for a
friend. Generally viewed as the basic Christian form of love.
alienation: In Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, the projection of the essence of
something so that it appears to belong to something else. In Feuerbach,
human beings project their essence to produce God; in Marx, human beings
become alienated from themselves when they give up the products of their
labor to be sold by the capitalists.
apocalyptic: from the Greek apokalypsis, or “uncovering.” A biblical
genre, as in the Hebrew Bible’s book of Daniel or the New Testament’s
Revelation, in which the writers claim that God has uncovered or revealed
to them imminent events that will bring about the end of the world.
apology: A genre of theology that focuses on defending the faith against
external critics.
argument from design: An empirical argument for the existence of God
holding that the perfect, beautiful, and/or intricate arrangement of the
natural world is evidence of an intelligent and/or morally good designer.
atheist: One who denies the existence of God or gods.
autonomy: Literally, to give the law to oneself. This concept was the basis
for Kant’s moral theory: Reason gives itself the moral law.
basic beliefs: For contemporary philosophers of religion, such as Alvin
Plantinga or Nicholas Wolterstorff, these are beliefs at the foundation of the
structure for all our beliefs and knowledge and therefore do not receive
supporting evidence from other beliefs.
concilarism: The view that the power of the pope in the Catholic Church is
limited by the decisions made by bishops in church councils.
contextual theology: Closely related to liberation theology, a form of
theology that attends carefully to the relationship between the content and
the particular social and historical setting in which it is done.
correlational theology: Theology addressing questions and issues that
emerge in our modern situation with answers from the tradition.
cosmos: The universe considered as a harmonious and orderly system.

Council of Trent: A council of bishops called by Pope Paul the III in 1545,
primarily to respond to the Protestant Reformation. The Council held
sessions until 1563.
deism: A form of natural religion especially influential during the
Enlightenment. Deists hold that religious truths can be arrived at through
the use of reason and that God created the universe but does not intervene in
human affairs or the physical universe.
demythologization: A form of Biblical criticism that emerged from
historical-critical scholarship in the 19th and early 20th century. It interprets
Biblical texts expressed in mythical terms so as to expose their continuing
existential or practical relevance.
dispensationalism: A Christian theological interpretation of history that
became popular among conservative, evangelical Christians in the 19th and
20th centuries. It divides history into a series of dispensations, characterized
by different covenants with God, and puts a strong emphasis on prophecies
of the end times.
documentary hypothesis: Originally advanced by Julius Wellhausen in
1878, the hypothesis holds that the Pentateuch was constructed out of four
independent texts that were written centuries after the events they portrayed.
ecclesiastical: From the Greek ekklesia, or congregation; having to do with
the Christian church, understood as an individual church community or the
total body of Christians.
empiricism: A theory of knowledge holding that knowledge and justified
belief must be grounded in experience.
epistemology: The study of the nature of knowledge and justification.
enlightenment: A period in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe
and North America, spanning roughly from 1650 to 1800 and characterized
by the emergence of the authority of human reason and an emphasis on
human rights.
eschatology: Doctrine of the end times or day of judgment.
evangelical: From the Greek evangelion, or good news. In the modern
period, has come to designate a form of Protestantism that emphasizes the
saving experience of Jesus Christ, the final authority of scripture, and
leading a holy life.

evidentialism: The position that it is not rational for a person to accept
theism unless one holds her religious convictions on the basis of other
beliefs of her which give to those convictions adequate evidential support.
existentialism: A philosophical, theological, and literary movement
anticipated by 19th-century figures such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and
Dostoevsky that came into prominence in Europe after World War II. It
focused on the uniqueness of each human individual and questions of guilt,
death, and the “bad faith” of conventional behavior.
“Faith Seeking Understanding”: A definition of theology first formulated
by Anselm of Canterbury in 1077 and reemphasized by Karl Barth in the
20th century.
false consciousness: A concept developed largely by Marxist theorists to
designate those forms of illusion generated by unfair economic
relationships. Used in a more general way by Paul Ricoeur to refer to
illusions and self-deceptions grounded in cultural and social relationships.
genealogy: A historical method developed by Nietzsche and prevalent
among contemporary postmodern thinkers. It holds that the meaning or
essence of an idea, value, or practice is not to be found in its origin, but is
constructed in history through conflicting interpretations.
hadith: A set of collections, based in oral traditions, of the words and deeds
of the prophet Muhammed. They are the source for determining the Sunna,
or the model of the perfect: Muslim life as established by Muhammed.
hermeneutics: The study of methods of interpretation.
hermeneutics of suspicion: As coined by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, a
method of interpreting cultural phenomena to uncover hidden or
suppressed meanings.
hester panim: A Hebrew term translated as “the eclipse of God” or “hiding
the divine face.” Jewish thinkers such as Eliezer Berkovitz appeal to this
idea to address the Holocaust.
historical-critical method: An approach to biblical interpretation
developed primarily in German universities in the early part of the 19th
century in which the Bible is examined and explained as the product of
human, historical processes and in which the attempt is made to determine
the meaning of the text in light of what it would have meant in the context
in which it was written.

idealism: A philosophical orientation that can take many forms (Kant’s
transcendental idealism, Hegel’s absolute idealism) all of which have in
common the idea that reality is in some sense not independent of cognizing
minds, but reflects mental operations.
Islamism: Often referred to as Islamic fundamentalism; referring to modern
Islamic revivals that stress the political nature of Islam and seek to return
Islam to its roots in the Qu’ran and hadith.
Jewish question, the: As the modern nation-state developed in Europe and
the political rights of citizens was emphasized, the question of the status of
Jews as citizens was much-debated through the 18th and 19th centuries.
jihad: An Arabic term that is most literally translated as struggle or striving.
A religious duty of Muslims, it refers both to the inner struggle to follow
God, and the external struggle to improve society. Jihad is the only form of
warfare allowed under Islamic law and it has as its aim not the conversion
of non-Muslims but the defense and expansion of the Islamic state.
kenosis: A Greek term translated as “self-emptying.” Used theologically to
describe God’s surrender of omnipotence and glory in Jesus Christ.
kerygma: From the Greek word for a herald’s message, it is used
theologically to refer to the church’s proclamation of Jesus Christ.
kiddush hashem: From the Hebrew for “sanctification of the name of God,”
the term is used to describe actions that bring honor or glory to God. In the
context of the Holocaust it is used to refer to those who were killed simply
for being Jews and those who maintained their faith in the most terrible
of circumstances.
liberal theology: Theological school, in large part Protestant, that is often
traced to the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher at the beginning of the 19th
century. In general, it refers to theologies that emphasize the convergence of
modernity and Christianity.
Liberation Theology: Originating in Latin America in the 1960s, it
interprets Christianity from the perspective of the poor, oppressed,
and exploited.
natural religion: Religion arrived at without revelation but through the use
of reason. Many during the Enlightenment appealed to natural religion as
the original human religion and/or the rational alternative to “positive” or
“revealed” religions such as Judaism and Christianity.

neo-scholasticism: A 19th- and 20th-century Roman Catholic movement
based on the theology and philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and supported by
the Vatican as the official Catholic theology.
neurosis: In psychoanalysis the expression of unconscious psychic conflict
through physical and mental disturbances.
New Atheism: Used to describe a group of loosely connected publications
of the past two decades by authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris,
and Daniel Dennett, claiming the destructiveness and irrationality
of religion.
nihilism: The belief that there is no ultimate meaning or purpose of life.
nominalism: The philosophical view that universals, such as beauty,
are not real but are mere names or words, abstractions created by our minds.
See realism.
nouvelle theologie: School of Catholic thought emerging in the mid-20th
century as a critical response to the dominance of neo-scholasticism.
ontotheology: A term popularized by the philosopher Martin Heidegger
referring to the tendency within Western theology and philosophy to
identify God with being.
Orthodox Christianity: variously referred to as Greek Orthodoxy or
Eastern Orthodoxy. A branch of Christianity centered in Constantinople,
separated from Latin or Roman Catholic Christianity during the early
Middle Ages, and was the religion of the Byzantine Empire. Today,
Orthodox Christians account for about 3 percent of the world’s population
(Catholics are about 19 percent and Protestants about 8 percent).
Pentateuch: The first five books of the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.
Pietism: A 17th- and 18th-century Protestant movement reacting against
Lutheran Orthodoxy and the growing rationalism of Protestant theology. It
emphasized a Christianity of deep feeling and personal salvation and was at
the root of the evangelical movements of the 19th century.
political theology: Theology that develops the political implications of
faith. The form developed by German theologians, such as Jürgen
Moltmann after WWII, was an important precursor to liberation theology.
positive religion: Revealed, as opposed to natural religion.

postmodernism: A much used and abused term with a very wide range of
meanings. In these lectures, it refers to a philosophical orientation that
questions the possibility of universal, rational principles and a theological
orientation that relies more on tradition than most modernists did, though
without rejecting, like many fundamentalists or other conservatives, the
importance of critical reason.
preferential option for the poor: A central tenet of Latin American
liberation theology holding that God sides with the poor and that theology
must be done in solidarity with the poor.
premillenialism: The doctrine that Christ will reign on Earth for 1,000
years upon his second coming. Today, many conservative and evangelical
Christians hold to dispensational premillenialism, which holds that Jesus
will return before a seven-year period of tribulation and then return again to
rule with his saints.
presuppositionalism: The idea that all systems of thought—theological,
philosophical, and scientific alike—are grounded in first principles that
cannot be proven with certainty though they can be rationally defended.
rationalism: In general, the epistemological position that reason is
the primary or even unique way to knowledge; more specifically, we can
arrive at knowledge deductively from first principle and without appealing
to experience.
realism: The metaphysical position, held by Aquinas and many other
medieval theologians and philosophers, that universals are real, not just
abstractions constructed by the mind. See nominalism.
Renaissance: A European cultural movement spanning the 14th and 15th
centuries that saw the rebirth of humanistic learning, the recovery of
classical texts and ideas, and great advances in the arts.
Reformation: A revolution in Christianity, in the 16th century, that saw
Protestantism emerge from and break away from the Catholic Church.
Many historians today speak of Reformations, in the plural, to indicate
that in response to Protestantism, the Catholic Church underwent a series
of reforms.
revelation: The disclosure to human beings, by God, of his nature, will, and
design for humanity.

Romanticism: A cultural movement that swept through Europe and North
America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that criticized what it saw as
an overly-rationalistic Enlightenment and emphasized feeling, particularity,
nature, and creativity.
sacrament: A sign of something divine; an action or ritual in which
physical things become the channel or symbol of God’s activity
and promise.
Salafism: As a contemporary form of Sunni Islam, an influential form of
Islamism that views the first three generations of Muslims as the exemplary
models of the Islamic life.
scholasticism: A form of theology that dominated Catholic thought in the
High Middle Ages and reached a pinnacle in the work of Thomas Aquinas.
The goal of the scholastic method was to show how the Bible and the great
authorities of early Christianity cohered with one another, despite apparent
differences and contradictions.
Scientific Revolution: An intellectual movement in Europe during the late
16th and 17th centuries in which figures such as Copernicus, Galileo,
Newton, and Bacon developed scientific method and made great discoveries
in cosmology, mathematics, and the life sciences.
secular: Literally, of the world; the worldly, as opposed to the divine realm.
secularization thesis: The position that in modernity the influence of
religion declines, is relegated to private life, or will disappear altogether.
species being: In Feuerbach, this term refers to human nature; the concept
is refined in Marx to refer to the nature of human beings as established
through the totality of social relations.
structural sin: A concept central to liberation theology; the idea that
sin inheres not only in individuals but is manifested also in unjust
social structures.
sublimation: In psychoanalytic theory the channeling of drives and psychic
energy that cannot be directly expressed in positive, socially useful rather
than neurotic or pathological directions.
Sunna: The model of Muslim life as lived by the prophet Muhammed.
suspicion: For Paul Ricoeur, the doubt that drives the interpretation of
consciousness as false.

teleological suspension of the ethical: A Kierkegaardian concept,
developed in Fear and Trembling’s account of Abraham; the idea that
God’s command suspends, without negating, ethical principles.
theodicy: The theological or philosophical effort to explain God’s justice,
especially in the face of innocent suffering.
tikkun olam: Hebrew for mending or repairing the world.
totemism: A form of religion centered on kinship or clan relations in which
an animal or object represents a particular group of people. In the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, many scholars, including Freud and the sociologist
Emile Durkheim theorized that totemism was the original form of religion.
transcendental: For Kant, a transcendental argument is one that elucidates
the conditions of possibility for a phenomenon. It proceeds from the
premise that the phenomenon exists to a conclusion about the conditions—
themselves not empirically verifiable—that make the phenomenon possible.
For example, using this kind of argument, Kant deduced the categories of
the understanding, such as causality.
Trinity: The Christian God understood as the relation between God the
Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
ultramontanism: A Catholic movement, especially powerful in the late 19th
century that claims absolute power for the pope.
Wahhabism: A form of Salafism with roots in the 18th-century scholar and
reformer Mohammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab; dominant today in Saudi Arabia
and very influential in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Zionism: A movement founded by the Austro-Hungarian Theodor Herzl in
the late 19th century that advocated the establishment of a Jewish homeland
in Palestine. Originally primarily a secular movement and resisted by many
religious Jews, contemporary Zionism has deep religious support.

Biographical Notes
al-banna’, Hasan (1906–1949): Egyptian social and political reformer who

founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. The Brotherhood was perhaps
the most important and influential Sunni revivalist organization of the
20th century.
Aquinas, Thomas (c. 1225–1274): Christian scholastic theologian known
for his integration of theology and Aristotelian philosophy and generally
recognized as the most important Christian thinker of the Middle Ages. In
1914, Pope Pius X declared Aquinas’s as the “foundations upon which the
whole science of natural and divine things is based.”
Barth, Karl (1886–1968): Swiss Reformed theologian whose 1919 book
Epistle to the Romans and its criticisms of liberal theology and humanism
radically changed the direction of 20th-century Christian thought.
Berkovitz, Eliezer (1908–1992): Modern Orthodox Rabbi educated in
Germany and taught in Berlin until 1939. He argued that the Holocaust
could be understood through traditional Jewish categories, particularly the
concept of hester panim, “the hiding of the divine face.”
Buber, Martin (1878–1965): Jewish philosopher and ethicist; author of
I and Thou (1923). Worked closely with the Zionist in Germany into the
1930s and collaborated with Franz Rosenzweig on a German translation of
the Hebrew Bible. Left Germany in 1938 and settled in Palestine as a
Professor at Hebrew University.
Bushnell, Horace (1802–1876): American evangelical theologian whose
ideas about the figurative nature of religious doctrine allowed him to argue
for a liberal vision of doctrinal change through history.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (1906–1945): German theologian aligned with Karl
Barth and one of the founders of the Confessing Church in Germany. He
was involved with a plot to assassinate Hitler, was arrested in 1943 and
executed by the Nazis in April 1945.
Cohen, Hermann (1842–1918): Jewish neo-Kantian philosopher and one
of the leading liberal Jewish thinkers of the 19th century. In 1876, he was
the first Jew to receive a full professorship in a German university.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834): British Romantic poet, essayist,
and philosopher. He was instrumental in bringing Kantian philosophy to
England but supplemented Kant’s epistemology with the concept of
imagination which, he argued, is grounded in God and makes possible the
intuitive apprehension of reality.
Cone, James (b. 1938): His 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power
was one of the first works in African American liberation theology. There,
Cone argued that “God has chosen black people.”
Congar, Yves (1904–1995): French Catholic theologian and member of the
Dominican Order. He was an important critic of neo-scholastic theology
and one of the leading ecumenical thinkers of the 20th-century church.
Daly, Mary (b. 1928): Her 1968 book The Church and the Second Sex was
one of the first major works of feminist liberation theology. By the time she
published Beyond God the Father in 1973, she had left the Catholic Church
to embrace a radical feminist ethics and religious thought.
de Lubac, Henri (1886–1991): French Jesuit whose historical studies of
Aquinas were influential for the 20th-century critics of neo-scholasticism.
Dennett, Daniel (b. 1942): American philosopher and author of Breaking
the Spell (1996), the most philosophically sophisticated critique of religion
offered by the “new atheists.” There he argues that religion’s
imperviousness to reason is its most dangerous characteristics.
Descartes, René (1596–1650): French philosopher, scientist, and
mathematician whose method of radical doubt and arguments for grounding
all knowledge in “clear and distinct ideas” are often credited with initiating
modern epistemology.
Diderot, Denis (1713–1784): A major figure of the French Enlightenment.
In his late work, he embraced a materialist metaphysics that led him to be
one of the few professed atheists of the Enlightenment period.
Drey, Johann Sebastian (1777–1853): German Catholic theologian whose
views on the work of the Holy Spirit in the church allowed him to embrace
a modernist understanding of the development of Christian doctrine.
Fackenheim, Emil (1916–2003): Jewish philosopher and Reform Rabbi.
He argued that the uniqueness of the Holocaust demanded a radical
reorientation of Jewish thought centered on the “614th commandment,” a
“voice” emanating from Auschwitz: “Thou shalt not hand Hitler
posthumous victories.”

Feuerbach, Ludwig (1804–1872): German philosopher, follower, and
critic of Hegel, Feuerbach argued that God was a human projection and that
all theology must be interpreted as anthropology.
Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939): Viennese Jewish doctor and founder of
psychoanalysis. He argued that God is an illusion, that is, an expression of
infantile wishes. He described religion as the “universal obsessional
neurosis of mankind.”
Guttiérez, Gustavo (b. 1928): Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest.
A founder of Latin American liberation theology, his 1971 book has exerted
immense influence on Christian thought.
Harris, Sam (b. 1967): Perhaps the best known of the “new atheists,” his
The End of Faith was a best seller and won numerous awards upon its
release in 2004.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831): A towering figure of
modern philosophy whose epistemology and philosophy of history was
instrumental in shaping 19th- and 20th-century philosophy. He argued that
Protestantism was the “consummate religion,” the end-point of the
development of “Spirit.”
Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976): German philosopher whose criticisms of
philosophical and theological “metaphysics” has been influential in shaping
postmodern philosophy and religious thought.
Henry, Carl (1913–2003): An American evangelical theologian, his 1947
book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism criticized
fundamentalism for its theological isolation and its failure to engage the
broader society.
Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679): British philosopher and political theorist. He
argued that religion was rooted in human fear and desire for power. In
Leviathan, he theorized a political state that would be free of religious control.
Hume, David (1711–1776): Scottish philosopher whose epistemological
skepticism challenged empirical arguments for the existence of God and
provoked Kant to develop his critical philosophy.
Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804): German thinker generally recognized as the
greatest philosopher of the modern period. He revolutionized modern
epistemology with the argument that the mind is active in shaping our
experience. He argued that we can think, but not know God and that faith is
both rational and moral.

Kierkegaard, Søren (1813–1855): Danish philosopher and theologian,
critic of Hegelianism and modernist Christianity. Kierkegaard mocked the
rationalist faith of Enlightenment thinkers and Hegel and stressed instead
the faith of the passionate individual.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1906–1995): Jewish philosopher and Talmudic
commentator, born in Lithuania, spent most of his life teaching in France.
Developed the idea of an ethics of responsibility that precedes objective
knowledge and from which comes human experience of God.
Locke, John (1632–1704): British philosopher and political theorist. He
wrote important treatises on tolerance, empiricism, and on Christianity as a
“reasonable” religion.
Luther, Martin (1483–1546): Augustinian monk whose interpretation of
the Bible and theological views on justification played the central role in the
Protestant Reformation.
Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946): French philosopher and one of the leading
contemporary Catholic thinkers. He argues that God cannot be understood
through the categories of existence and being but is revealed only
through love.
Marx, Karl (1818–1883): Jewish intellectual and political theorist whose
analysis and criticisms of industrial capitalism were the theoretical basis for
socialism and communism. Described religion as the “opiate of the people.”
Mendelssohn, Moses (1729–1786): German philosopher and one of the
leading thinkers of the Jewish Haskalah, or enlightenment. His Jerusalem
aligned Judaism closely with natural religion.
Moltmann, Jurgen (b. 1926): German Protestant theologian who was one
of the founding figures of “political theology” in Germany after World
War II.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900): German philosopher and radical critic
of Christianity. Largely through the work of Heidegger, his work has
exerted an enormous influence on postmodern philosophy.
Qutb, Sayyid (1906–1966): The leading intellectual of the Muslim
Brotherhood before his execution by the Egyptian government in 1966,
which had accused him of plotting to overthrow the government. His ideas
have had a major influence on contemporary Islamist movements.

Rahner, Karl (1904–1984): German Catholic theologian who sought to
reorient neo-scholastic theology of the 20th century by grounding it in
Kantian philosophy.
Ricoeur, Paul (1913–2005): French philosopher, biblical interpreter, and
religious thinker. Coined the term “hermeneutics of suspicion” to describe
criticism of religion and culture in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
Ritschl, Albrecht (1822–1889): German theologian whose work followed
Schleiermacher and particularly Kant and is often viewed as the pinnacle of
the liberal Protestantism of the 19th century.
Romero, Oscar (1917–1980): Roman Catholic bishop from El Salvador
who became archbishop of San Salvador in 1977. Originally quite
conservative, as archbishop he became more and more sympathetic to
liberation theology. He was assassinated by Salvadoran “death squads”
while celebrating the Mass.
Rosenzweig, Franz (1886–1929): German Jewish intellectual and close
collaborator with Martin Buber. Is 1920 book, The Star of Redemption,
which examines the relationship of God, world, and man, has become
increasingly influential for religious thinkers in recent decades.
Rubenstein, Richard (b. 1924): American Jewish thinker whose 1967
book After Auschwitz argued that after the Holocaust Jews could no
longer believe in the covenant with God and must explore new ways of
being religious.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1768–1834): Most influential Protestant
thinker of the 19th century. In response to Enlightenment efforts to
rationalize religion, he argued that religion has its source in experience, or
“the sense and taste for the infinite.”
Schüssler-Fiorenza, E. (1938–): Catholic biblical scholar and theologian.
Her best-known work, In Memory of Her (1984), developed influential
methods for retrieving forgotten, suppressed, or ignored contributions of
women in the early church.
Strauss, David (1808–1874): German theologian who wrote The Life of
Jesus in 1835. Influenced by Hegel and the historical-critical study of the
Bible, the controversial book attempted to distinguish the historical Jesus
from the Jesus of myth.

Tillich, Paul (1886–1965): German theologian and Christian existentialist
who wrote and taught for many years in the United States. He viewed faith
as “ultimate concern” and argued that theology was a matter of showing
how our existential questions are answered by Christian revelation.
Vattimo, Gianni (b. 1936): Italian philosopher and religious thinker who
argues that secularization is the process by which we wean ourselves from
the God of transcendence and power and come to recognize that the biblical
God is the God of love.
Voltaire (1694–1778): French writer and philosopher of the Enlightenment
period. He was a bitter and scathing critic of the clergy who viewed natural
religion as a necessity for human morality.
Von Balthasar, Hans urs (1905–1988): Swiss theologian and Jesuit who
was a critic of neo-scholastic theology but rather than simply seeking to
modernize Catholicism, argued, like Barth, that Christian thought and life
must challenge modern sensibilities and ideologies.
Wellhausen, Julius (1844–1918): German biblical scholar best known for
proposing the Documentary Hypotheses, one of the great early
achievements of the historical-critical method. The Hypothesis argued that
the Pentateuch was constructed out of four independent texts that were
written centuries after the events they portrayed.
Wesley, John (1703–1791): An Anglican priest and Christian theologian
who was instrumental in founding Methodism, one of the most powerful
movements to emerge out of early modern Christian pietism.
Williams, Rowan (1950–): Theologian and current archbishop of
Canterbury (head of Anglican and Episcopal churches). He views the
Christian tradition as a process in which we come to learn what God is
saying to us.

Bibliography
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Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2007. This book uses anthropology, archaeology,
and linguistics to elucidate the role played by domesticated horses and
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Aquinas, Thomas. St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica Complete
English Edition in Five Volumes. Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1981. The
pinnacle of medieval scholastic theology, it remains one of the most
influential works of Catholic thought.
Barth, Karl, and E. C. Hoskyns. The Epistle to the Romans. London: Oxford
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modern period. Like Augustine and Luther before him, Barth goes back to
the letters of Saint Paul to revolutionize Christian thought.
Barth, Karl, and Garrett Green. On Religion: The Revelation of God as the
Sublimation of Religion. London: T & T Clark, 2006. An excerpt from
Barth’s massive Church Dogmatics that contains his definitive discussions
of “religion” and “true religion.” Garrett Green’s introduction to the volume
offers a useful overview of Barth’s work.
Berkovitz, Eliezer. “Faith After the Holocaust” in A Holocaust Reader:
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uniqueness of the evil of the Holocaust, Berkovitz offers a powerful argument
for viewing the Holocaust in the same light as other major traumas of Jewish
history, and so for interpreting it through traditional concepts.
Bernstein, Richard J. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science,
Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1983. For decades Bernstein has been one of the most admired
commentators on contemporary philosophical issues. This is a clear and
accessible account of philosophical efforts of the late 20th century to take a
pragmatic approach to rationality that can walk the fine line between
discredited claims to objectivity and self-defeating claims to relativism.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters & Papers from Prison. London: Folio Society,
2000. A collection of letters and other writings from Bonhoeffer’s time in a
Nazi prison from 1942–1944. As such it does not develop any particular
argument or position in detail, but is full of fascinating ideas that had a
major influence on later theology. It presents a compelling portrait of a
courageous, spiritually mature human being.
Buber, Martin, and Ronald Gregor Smith. I and Thou. S.l: Hesperides Press,
2006. A classic statement of relational thinking, and of 20th-century existential
criticism of the growing instrumentalism of modern life and rationality.
Buber, Martin. Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion
and Philosophy. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999. An interesting
collection of essays in which Buber addresses topics such as love, and
philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre. The title essay is a sobering
reflection on faith in the modern world.
Buckley, Michael J. At the Origins of Modern Atheism. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990. A densely argued and illuminating study of debates
over atheism in the early modern period.
Carter, Stephen L. The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics
Trivialize Religious Devotion. New York: Doubleday, 1994. Carter, a
professor of law at Yale, argues that dominant media and judicial discourse in
the United States is driven by a secularist bias that, rather than ensuring
religious freedom, relegates religion to political and cultural insignificance.
Chidester, David. Christianity: A Global History. San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 2000. An accessible, incisive and informative single-volume
account of the story of Christianity.
Chopp, Rebecca S. The Praxis of Suffering: An Interpretation of Liberation
and Political Theologies. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986. An incisive
and accessible analysis of political and liberation theologies by one of the
leading feminist theologians of the past 25 years.
Cohen, Hermann. Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism.
Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995. Cohen’s last work, in which he offers a
classic modern statement of Jewish chosenness, and Jewish ethics.

Cone, James H. A Black Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis
Books, 1990. This is one of the earliest and most influential statements of
liberation theology. The 1990 anniversary edition includes very illuminating
introductory material including critical reflections on Cone’s work by six
leading theologians.
Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's
Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. Though it is relatively moderate by
the standards of her later work in Gyn/Ecology and Pure Lust, the book was
a groundbreaking event in feminist theology that saw Daly turning her back
on Christianity to seek a new way of thinking about God.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006.
One of a number of books in which Dawkins excoriates—often with wit,
often with a biting sarcasm—the irrationality of religion.
D’Costa, Gavin. Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a
Pluralistic Theology of Religions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990. A
response to The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, this is a collection of essays
by leading Christian thinkers, most of whom are critical of a coherent,
orthodox Christian pluralism for the reason that at its core Christianity does
claim a radical uniqueness.
Descartes, René, and Mike Moriarty. Meditations on First Philosophy: With
Selections from the Objections and Replies. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008. For many, the text that inaugurates modern philosophy. It
contains the mature versions of Descartes’ arguments for his own existence
(“I think, therefore I am”) and for the existence of God.
Dupré, Louis K. Passage to Modernity: Essay in the Hermeneutics of
Nature and Culture. Yale University Press, 1995. A challenging but
exceptionally rich account of the philosophical and theological shift from
the premodern to the modern world view. It is especially helpful for
thinking about changing conceptions of nature.
Eck, Diana L. A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has
Now Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. San Francisco:
Harper San Francisco, 2001. Eck is the director of the Pluralism Project at
Harvard University, a wide-ranging, on-going study of religious pluralism
in the United States. Based on this research, this book offers a very readable
treatment of different forms of inter-religious engagement and dialogue in
the country today.

Fackenheim, Emil L. God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and
Philosophical Reflections. The Deems lectures, 1968. New York: Harper &
Row, 1972. An influential Jewish post-Holocaust theology arguing that we
need to see the Holocaust as a break with the past that requires a new way
of thinking about God and Judaism.
Feldman, Noah. Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem—and
What We Should Do about It. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
A rich, interesting exploration of the church-state problem in American
history with a fascinating account of the 20th-century trends that have lead
to the current debates between secularists and evangelical Christians.
Feldman offers thoughts of his own on how to settle these debates about the
role of religion in the public sphere.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Dover philosophical classics.
Mineola, NY: Dover, 2008. The link between Hegel and Marx, Feuerbach’s
argument that God is a human projection, is one of the most sophisticated and
theologically informed expressions of atheism in the 19th century.
Ford, David. The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian
Theology in the Twentieth Century. New York, NY: B. Blackwell, 1989. A
comprehensive collection of essays by leading scholars and theologians on
the major figures and movements of 20th century Christian theology. Ford’s
introduction to the volume offers a clear and useful overview of the period.
Fraser, James W. Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in
a Multicultural America. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. An examination
of the church-state problem as it has been played out in the history of public
education in the United States. Fraser argues that we should think about
teaching religion in the schools as part of a multicultural education.
Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Civilization and Its Discontents. New
York: Norton, 2005. One of the more sobering major works of the modern
period in which Freud addresses the intractable conflict between the
individual drive for pleasure and the needs of society. He also introduces
here one of the more fascinating ideas of his late work: the death instinct.
Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays. International
psycho-analytical library, no. 33. London: The Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1974. Perhaps Freud’s most interesting
treatment of religion, in which he interprets the history of Judaism as a form
of rigorous spirituality resulting from the repression of historical trauma.

Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Great ideas, 55. London:
Penguin, 2008. Freud’s most comprehensive effort at theorizing religion as
the product of deep-seated wishes.
Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and
Salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005. The most well-known and
influential work of liberation theology.
Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. New York, London:
W. W. Norton, 1996. A classic historical account of the culture and thought
of the definitive period of early modernity.
Grenz, Stanley J., and Roger E. Olson. 20th-Century Theology: God & the
World in a Transitional Age. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992.
A useful survey of major 20th-century theologians and theological
movements with useful introductory chapters on the Enlightenment
and 19th century. The authors argue that modern theology can be seen as
moving back and forth between conceptions of divine immanence and
divine transcendence.
Halevi, Yossi Klein. At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden. New York:
Perennial, 2002. Halevi, an Israeli journalist, vividly traces his encounters
with Christians, Muslims and other Jews in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza
as he endeavors to find out whether religion can be a source of unity rather
than division.
Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.
London: Free Press, 2006. A best-selling contribution to the “New
Atheism.” Harris’s is no-holds-barred polemic against religion, in all its
forms, moderate as well as extremist. The arguments are, by and large,
deeply flawed, but as a sign of the times it is a must read.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Arnold V. Miller, and J. N. Findlay.
Phenomenology of Spirit. Norwalk, CT: Easton Press, 1995. One of the
most influential philosophical texts of the modern period. This is grand
narrative at its grandest as Hegel covers the history of human thought,
politics, culture, and religion in telling the story of “Spirit” coming to
self-consciousness in human beings.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and Peter Crafts Hodgson. Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion. Hegel lectures. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. These
1827 lectures find the mature Hegel discussing his views of the knowledge of
God, the history of the world’s religions and his interpretation of Christianity
and, in particular, Protestantism as the “consummate religion.”
Heidegger, Martin. “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’” in The Question
Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
As with everything Heidegger wrote, this long essay is extremely dense and
difficult. But it offers an excellent account of the way Heidegger transformed
Nietzsche’s idea of the death of God into a widely influential account of the
“metaphysical” trajectory of Western philosophical thought.
Henry, Carl F. H. The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.
Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2003. Leveling a challenge to his
fellow evangelicals, Henry criticizes the fundamentalists for their failure to
take social concerns seriously enough and to engage their contemporary
culture. Leveling a challenge to his fellow Christians, especially liberal
Christians, he asserts the priority of a strong biblical theism.
Hick, John, and Paul F. Knitter. The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward
a Pluralistic Theology of Religions. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005.
Subtitled “Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions,” this collection of
essays from leading Christian thinkers presents a range of arguments
defending a rich religious pluralism based in Christian faith and ideas.
Hobbes, Thomas, Karl Schuhmann, and G. A. J. Rogers. Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan. Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003. With Descartes’ Meditations, one of
the formative texts of early modern philosophy. Hobbes’s arguments about
religion as a human creation, and for necessity of the “earthly god” of the
Leviathan, set the stage for a non-theological tradition of political theory.
Hume, David, and Antony Flew. Writings on Religion. La Salle, IL: Open
Court, 1993. Collected from a range of Hume’s works, these writings on
miracles, the natural origins of religion, and arguments for the existence of
God, among other topics, offer incisive criticisms of the arguments of
Enlightenment defenders of religion.
Kant, Immanuel, Marcus Weigelt, and F. Max Müller. Critique of Pure
Reason. London: Penguin, 2007. With this book, perhaps the single greatest
work of modern philosophy, Kant revolutionized western thinking about
knowledge and about how the mind works. Here Kant explains how we can
limit reason to make room for faith.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Thomas Kingsmill
Abbott. Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2006. The most important of Kant’s
writings on religion, this account of morality argues that although we can
know the moral law through reason alone, and must follow that law simply
because it is our moral duty, we are obligated to postulate the existence of
God and human immortality in order to make sense of our moral efforts.
Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. New York:
Harper, 1960. Here Kant explains the existence of “radical evil” and why
the moral progress of the human race depends, at least for the time being,
on an institutionalized church.
Katz, Steven T. Jewish Philosophers. Jerusalem: Keter Pub. House
Jerusalem, 1975. Although now a bit out of date and therefore lacking
discussions of important Jewish thinkers such as Levinas, this is an
excellent introductory survey of Jewish thought from the biblical period
through the modern period.
Kerr, Fergus. After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers, 2002. A fascinating contemporary reappraisal—after neo-
scholasticism and its critics—of the work and reception of the theologian
who still remains at the center of Catholic thought.
Kerr, Fergus. Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From
Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2007.
Here, Kerr narrates the story of how a range of 20th-century theologians
succeeded in broadening Catholic theology beyond the neo-scholastic
paradigm they inherited from the 19th century. It includes chapters on the
thought of Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) and Joseph Ratzinger (Pope
Benedict XVI).
Kierkegaard, Søren, C. Stephen Evans, and Sylvia Walsh. Fear and
Trembling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. One of the more
evocative, passionate, and challenging portrayals of religious faith of the
modern period. The book centers on a series of Kierkegaardian reflections
on Abraham’s response to God’s command that he sacrifice his beloved
son, Isaac.
Kierkegaard, Søren, David F. Swenson, Niels Thulstrup, and Howard
Vincent Hong. Philosophical Fragments, or, A Fragment of Philosophy.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962. A complex, confounding
parody of Hegelian philosophy that is also a serious treatment of what it
means to be a follower of a “teacher” who is really a god in human form.

Kitzmiller, Tammy et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al., Federal Case
No. 04cv2688. To date, the most important federal decision regarding the
teaching of intelligent design in the public schools. The decision provides
detailed discussions of the scientific status of intelligent design and of
establishment law.
Lawrence, Bruce B. Shattering the Myth: Islam Beyond Violence. Karachi:
Oxford University Press. 2000. A historical examination of the place of
violence in the thought and practice of modern Islam. Lawrence attends
closely to the diversity of types of Islam, the development of the concept of
jihad, the role of Western colonialism in shaping modern Islam, and the
place of women in Islam.
Leaman, Oliver. Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge
studies in religious traditions, 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997. A strong, exceptionally clear treatment of the different approaches to
the questions of evil and suffering in the Jewish tradition from the book of
Job up to recent efforts among Jewish thinkers to ground their thought more
firmly in the Bible.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne University Press, 2002. An extremely challenging work
whose influence on contemporary philosophy and religious thought is
enormous. Lévinas challenges our very notion of philosophy by arguing for
the priority of ethics and argues for a conception of subjectivity based on
the call to hand oneself over to the other.
Lilla, Mark. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West.
New York: Knopf, 2007. A challenging but accessible examination of the
modern separation between religion and political theory and the challenges
to this separation by philosophers and religious thinkers such as Kant,
Hegel, Barth, and Rosenzweig.
Lindbeck, George. The Nature of Doctrine. Philadelphia: The Westminster
Press, 1984. An influential work of what Lindbeck and others have
described as post-liberal theology, that is a theology that takes as its point of
departure the idea that religion is not based in some fundamental, universal
experience but that a religion is like a culture or language that shapes
human subjectivity and experience.

Lindberg, David C., and Ronald L. Numbers. When science & Christianity
meet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. A collection of essays by
historians, covering the medieval period to the present, that challenges the
received idea that religion and science have always been inherently opposed.
Livingston, James C. 2001. Modern Christian Thought Volume 1: The
Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century; John C. Livingston, Francis
Schüssler Fiorenza, Sarah Coakley, and James H. Evans, Modern Christian
Thought Volume 2: The Twentieth Century. HORIZONS -VILLANOVA-. 34
(2): 372–373. An excellent, comprehensive survey of Christian thought,
Protestant and Catholic, from the early modern period to the present—
perhaps the best single source for an overview of the period covered by
the lectures.
Locke, John, John C. Higgins-Biddle, and Michael Alexander Stewart. The
Reasonableness of Christianity: As Delivered in the Scriptures. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1999. An early modern effort to show and negotiate the
relationship between faith and reason and from that perspective to explain
why the Bible remains important.
Luther, Martin and Harold John Grimm. “On the Freedom of a Christian” in
Christian Liberty. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1957. One of Luther’s most
important essays and one of his clearest statements of the central idea
behind the Protestant Reformation, “justification by faith.”
Marion, Jean-Luc. God without Being: Hors-Texte. Religion and
postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Rejecting
traditional philosophical approaches to the question of God, as well as
Catholic neo-scholastic theology, Marion argues that we should not think
about God through the category of “being” but rather through agape, or
Christian love.
Marx, Karl. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of right’”
and “On The Jewish Question” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. Edited
by Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. These essays contain
some of Marx’s most pointed and memorable thoughts on religion.
In both, he pursues the idea that religion is a symptom of deep social
conflict and suffering.

Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping
of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006. A masterly social and intellectual history of
American evangelicalism of the late 19th century and the development, in
the early 20th century, of fundamentalism. Marsden is very good at
connecting religious ideas and movements to their social contexts.
Martin, William C. With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right
in America. New York: Broadway Books, 2005. A very accessible account
of the reemergence of the religious right between the 1950s and the 1990s.
McGrath, Alister E. Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of
Life. Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2007. McGrath is very good at writing
about difficult theological and philosophical issues for the layperson. Here
he argues forcefully against Richard Dawkins’s attacks on religion and
raises interesting questions about the supposed antagonism between science
and religion.
Mendelssohn, Moses, and M. Samuel. Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem. Bristol:
Thoemmes, 2002. One of the key works of Enlightenment Jewish philosophy
in which Mendelssohn tries to show the affinities between Judaism and
natural religion and to argue for full rights of citizenship for Jews.
Morgan, Michael L., and Peter Eli Gordon. The Cambridge Companion to
Modern Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge companions to religion. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007. A collection of essays by leading
scholars of Jewish thought on the central thinkers of the modern Jewish
tradition from Spinoza to Levinas and Jewish feminism.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Douglas Smith. On the Genealogy of
Morals: A Polemic: By Way of Clarification and Supplement to My Last
Book, Beyond Good and Evil. Oxford world's classics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008. Nietzsche is a great stylist and fun to read, but since
many of his books are constructed from loosely connected aphorisms, it can
be hard to get a sense of the big picture. This is his most closely-argued
work and one of his most influential.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Thomas Common. The Gay Science.
Dover philosophical classics. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006.
Books III and V are crucial for understanding Nietzsche’s views on
religion. Book V is one of the highlights of Nietzsche’s corpus, at once
scathing, impassioned, and far-sighted.

Plantinga, Alvin, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Faith and Rationality: Reason
and Belief in God. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004.
A collection of essays edited by two of the most important Christian
philosophers writing today. Perhaps most important is Wolterstorff’s
argument against the idea that adherence to Christianity is rational only if it
is supported by evidence.
Qutb, Sayyid. Milestones. New Delhi: Islamic Book Service, 2005.
Executed by the Egyptian government in 1966, Qutb is seen by many as the
most significant theological guide to contemporary Islamism. This is the
work for which he is best known.
Peterson, Michael L. Reason & Religious Belief: An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
An accessible and comprehensive survey of modern philosophical and
theological arguments on issues such as religious belief and experience,
the relation of faith and reason, the problem of evil and the nature of
religious language.
Pippin, Robert B. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the
Dissatisfactions of European High Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999.
Pippen is a master at clearly explaining difficult philosophical ideas. This
book is not easy, but it is a very clear and engaging account of the idea of
modernity as it has been debated by philosophers such as Kant, Hegel,
Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
Putnam, Hillary. Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber,
Levinas, Wittgenstein. Bloomfield, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. A
short, compact, and exceptionally clear discussion of Wittgenstein,
Rosenzweig, Buber, and Levinas from one of the most well respected
American philosophers of the present day.
Rahner, Karl, and William V. Dych. Foundations of Christian Faith: An
Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. New York: Crossroad, 1998. One
of the most important 20th-century contributions to Catholic theology.
Rahner pushes beyond Catholic neo-scholasticism by reinterpreting
Aquinas through Kant.

Ricœur, Paul, and Lewis Seymour Mudge. Essays on Biblical
Interpretation. London: SPCK, 1981. Ricoeur is not only one of the most
important philosophers of the 20th century, but as a philosopher is
unmatched in his engagement with and knowledge about modern religious
thought. In these essays, he articulates a fascinating modern approach to the
Bible and revelation.
Ricœur, Paul. “The Critique of Religion” and “The Language of Faith” in
The Philosophy of Paul Ricœur: An Anthology of His Work. Edited by
Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978. In the
first essay, Ricoeur offers his most complete discussion of the
“hermeneutics of suspicion.” Its companion piece explores how we can
make the language of faith speak to us in the contemporary world.
Ritschl, Albrecht, H. R. Mackintosh, and Alexander Beith Macaulay. The
Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive
Development of the Doctrine. Library of religious and philosophical
thought. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004. This is perhaps the most
important work of late 19th-century liberal Protestant theology. Deeply
Lutheran, but indebted to Kant, Ritschl provides a rich and masterful
treatment of the core elements of Protestant doctrine.
Roberts, Tyler T. Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. A close examination of the
religious themes in Nietzsche’s writing that takes issue with received
interpretations of Nietzsche’s atheism
Rosenzweig, Franz, and Barbara E. Galli. The Star of Redemption.
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. This book is
notoriously difficult, but its influence has been growing rapidly over the
past two decades to the point where it has become a touchstone not only for
Jewish thinkers but for scholars of religion and cultural theorists as well.
Rubenstein, Richard L. After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and
Contemporary Judaism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Originally published in 1966, this is one of the first efforts to understand the
Holocaust from a theological perspective. It remains one of the most
radical, for Rubenstein concludes that Auschwitz shows that the God of
traditional Judaism is no longer tenable.

Ruse, Michael. Can a Darwinian be a Christian?: The Relationship
between Science and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004. From an expert on the debates between evolution and creationism,
this is an engaging and well-argued challenge to the idea that evolutionary
theory and Christianity are necessarily incompatible.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.
Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996. Fascinating. The romantic prose takes some getting
used to, but it is hard to overestimate the influence on Christian theology,
and how his definition of religion in terms of experience has shaped the way
scholars and laypeople understand religion even today.
Schuሷssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological
Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad, 1983. This is
one of the groundbreaking works of feminist scholarship in religion.
Schuሷssler Fiorenza explores the role of women in biblical texts and
develops powerful methods for reaching behind the texts to consider how
some of these roles may have been obscured over the centuries.
Smart, Ninian. Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West. vols.1–3.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Three volumes of solid
essays by leading scholars on the major thinkers, movements, and scholarly
concerns of 19th-century religious thinkers.
Stout, Jeffrey. The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest
for Autonomy. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006. An excellent
treatment of the epistemological issues at the heart of early modern
philosophical efforts to turn away from the cultural and intellectual authority
of tradition. Stout provides a very good account of Descartes’ philosophy.
Stout, Jeffrey. Democracy and Tradition. New forum books. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005. Stout’s effort to find philosophical,
theological, and political space between the secular liberalism of much
contemporary political theory and Christian-centric theology that he calls
the “new traditionalism.” Stout argues for a modified conception of the
secular that would allow engagement with theological voices in the
public square.

Strauss, David Friedrich, and George Eliot. The Life of Jesus: Critically
Examined. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1998. Hugely controversial when it
was published in 1835 because Strauss argued that most of what we learn
about Jesus from the Bible should be understood as myth not history. The
book helped bring the historical study of the Bible to wide attention.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2007. A magisterial treatment of secularization in
the modern age. A major philosophical voice, Taylor always writes clearly,
with a balanced, non-polemical tone.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. A sweeping historical and
philosophical examination of the emergence of modern conceptions of the
self and identity.
Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology. London: S. C. M. Press, 1978. A major,
Protestant, theological statement of the 20th century. Most of the three
volumes deal with major theological concerns, but the first part of the first
volume offers detailed discussions of Tillich’s view of “correlational
theology” and his influential definition of faith as “ultimate concern.”
Vattimo, Gianni. Belief. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. In
this short, very accessible, and personal book, Vattimo explains why he
returned to Christianity and why he thinks the process of secularization is at
the heart of Christianity.
Wallis, Jim. God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left
Doesn't Get It. Oxford: Lion, 2006. The editor of Sojourners magazine,
Wallis is an evangelical Christian who is critical of the contemporary
alliance of evangelical Christianity and right-wing politics. He argues that at
the heart of the Bible is a call to social justice and that evangelical
Christianity needs to heed this message.
Welch, Claude. Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Eugene, OR:
Wipf & Stock, 2003. An extremely well-respected intellectual history.
Welch offers useful introductory chapters on the Enlightenment and
pietism, and separate chapters on major thinkers and movements of
the period.

Westphal, Merold. Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern
Atheism. New York: Fordham University Press, 1998. This book provides
good introductions to the thought of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud while
arguing, like Ricoeur, that their methods of suspicion can not only challenge
religion but be employed by religious thinkers to purify and deepen faith.
Williams, Rowan. On Christian Theology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. One of
the most charitable, wise, and insightful religious thinkers of our time, the
current archbishop of Canterbury offers a comprehensive and challenging
account of what it means to do Christian theology today.
Williams, Rowan. “The Suspicion of Suspicion” in The Grammar of the
Heart: New Essays in Moral Philosophy & Theology. Edited by Richard H.
Bell. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1998. Focusing on Wittgenstein,
Bonhoeffer, and Ricoeur, Williams questions the claims of figures such as
Freud to provide a final explanation for religion.
Young, Julian. The Death of God and the Meaning of Life. London:
Routledge, 2003. Young isn’t always on target with his interpretations,
but this is a highly readable and engaging treatment of the perennial
question of the meaning of life before and after Nietzsche’s declaration of
the death of God.

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Skeptics and Believers:

Skeptics and Believers: Religious Debate

“A serious force in American education.”

Professor Tyler Roberts

Professor Tyler Roberts, a scholar of Western religious

THE GREAT COURSES ®

THE GREAT COURSES

Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2009

Printed in the United States of America

This book is in copyright. All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

Tyler Roberts is Professor of Religious Studies at Grinnell College in

©2009 The Teaching Company. i

Professor Biography .................................................................................... i

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Lecture Twenty-Five Protestant Theology after Barth ....................... 82

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Scope: What are we saying—and what are we doing—when we profess

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Scope: The Protestant Reformation ushered in a period of political struggle

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Scope: Descartes’ efforts to find new foundations for human knowledge

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Scope: The Scientific Revolution and the philosophical modernism of

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Scope: The Enlightenment idealization of reason meant that the question

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Scope: Enlightenment thought reached a culmination in the work of the

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Scope: Kant’s revolution in epistemology, moral theory, and religious

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Scope: Friedrich Schleiermacher is often called the father of modern

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Scope: With Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel must be considered one

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