Deleting Theology: Examining a Curious Historiographical Phenomenon (Part 3)
Deleting Theology
The emergence of the history of science as an academic discipline was thus in part conditioned by the fact that it served as a battleground for the wider debate over the significance of science in Western culture. … [In other words, the history of science as academic discipline was] in part an offshoot of a major ideological disagreement over the relationship between science and religion.
—Peter Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion[1]
While no doubt many will rightly be focusing on just what it was Flew found convincing regarding the proofs of God such as fine-tuning, for example, what I want to focus on is rather the confession, mentioned only in passing, that Flew originally considered Aristotle as a sort of proto-naturalist or pagan secularist who de-supernaturalizes the world. That this could exist as a legitimate piece of historiography in Flew’s mind evidences the true and still lingering strength of positivism. As a recent work by Michael LeMahiue subtitled The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature argues, the reduction and flippant dismissal of logical positivism—especially in America—created a general forgetfulness regarding the actual widespread influence positivist historiographyplayed and continues to play on our anti-theological and anti-metaphysical reception of historical figures and schools of thought.[2]
It is no secret to say that theology has something of a public relations problem. A large part of this has to do less with the intrinsic power of theology, than it does with perceptions of its history of influence (akin to Flew’s early opinions of Aristotle). There is perhaps no better example of this than in a recent volume entitled Political Theology and Early Modernity. We could be forgiven for assuming such a volume might be dedicated to doing at least a little theology, but we would also be wrong. Or at least that is what its two editors Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton take great pains to emphasize in their essay introducing the collection. “Let’s get this straight,” they say. What is at stake for them and the essays in their volume is not a “turn to religion” but rather “the status of theology as operative fiction.”[3]
Indeed, they take the term “political theology” to mean a mode of discourse “that arises precisely when religion is no longer a dominant explanatory or life mode.”[4]Now, there might be truth to this—even a great deal—if we turn to specific historically contextual instances. No doubt there have been a lot of bad or just plain bizarre ideas promoted under the umbrella “the theological.” But of course, they mean it as a blanket statement: theology is, always and everywhere, an operative fiction which they intend to diagnose under the heading “political theology.” Commenting on this phenomenon, William Cavanaugh notes that, “despite the breakdown of the religious/secular dichotomy that political theology seems to recognize, ‘religion’ [and ‘theology’ proper] nevertheless reappear as the Other from the past against which political theology must guard.”[5]Theology proper, we might say, is being actively deleted from the historical record.
A particularly ironic example comes to mind with the figure of Leopold von Ranke, the German father of the American academic search for absolute historical objectivity.[6]Indeed, “almost every major debate in German or American historical thought on the nature and method of historical research has centered around, or at least involved, the acceptance or rejection of Ranke’s methodology and philosophy of history.”[7]And yet, particularly in America, Ranke’s Christian Idealism was (and is) shorn off by the very academy that embraced him as an icon.[8] His theological commitments searching for the hand of God in the objective nature of historical events[9] are conveniently forgotten or bracketed as irrelevant, producing a uniquely American image of the historian obsessed with a “purified” objectivity of documentary history.[10]
A particularly ironic example comes to mind with the figure of Leopold von Ranke, the German father of the American academic search for absolute historical objectivity.[6]Indeed, “almost every major debate in German or American historical thought on the nature and method of historical research has centered around, or at least involved, the acceptance or rejection of Ranke’s methodology and philosophy of history.”[7]And yet, particularly in America, Ranke’s Christian Idealism was (and is) shorn off by the very academy that embraced him as an icon.[8] His theological commitments searching for the hand of God in the objective nature of historical events[9] are conveniently forgotten or bracketed as irrelevant, producing a uniquely American image of the historian obsessed with a “purified” objectivity of documentary history.[10]
In fact, despite his own strong opposition to positivist historiography, this reworking of Ranke ironically made him appear to many, indeed most, in America as the father or founding figure of such an enterprise. This has affected numerous quarters of historical research, which until recently have neglected or omitted religious and theological aspects of history, including such religiously saturated events as the American Civil War.[11]As George Marsden once quipped, telling American history “without its religious history” is like “Moby Dick without the whale” (whether this is a favorable analogy for religion or not is left up to the reader).[12]
Such practices leave enormous, gaping holes in our knowledge. For our immediate purposes in this essay, such historiography is particularly important as it altered widespread conceptions of the Victorian period in particular, which was especially formative for our contemporary notions of the relationship between science and theology: “The secular interpretation of Victorian and general nineteenth-century intellectual life very much reflected the concerns of mid-twentieth-century American university intellectuals” as Frank M. Turner writes.[13]
On the one hand, religion or theology can simply be cut out of the picture of intellectual and practical history. In this way, we will receive a picture of history in which the Christian religion, or theology specifically, play no significant part in advancement and is seen as little more than a discarded hypothesis. One can observe this especially in the discipline of comparative religion, which as Josephson-Storm notes is “represented as a self-conscious reaction to theology from which it differentiates itself in the same moment that it is relying on a Protestant conception of religion itself.”[14]The notion of “religion,” and, indeed “world religions” emerged from the discipline of comparative theology,[15]but the discipline has subsequently spent a considerable amount of energy undoing this origin.
On the one hand, religion or theology can simply be cut out of the picture of intellectual and practical history. In this way, we will receive a picture of history in which the Christian religion, or theology specifically, play no significant part in advancement and is seen as little more than a discarded hypothesis. One can observe this especially in the discipline of comparative religion, which as Josephson-Storm notes is “represented as a self-conscious reaction to theology from which it differentiates itself in the same moment that it is relying on a Protestant conception of religion itself.”[14]The notion of “religion,” and, indeed “world religions” emerged from the discipline of comparative theology,[15]but the discipline has subsequently spent a considerable amount of energy undoing this origin.
The importance of this point is not to insist that Christian theology was ultimately beneficial to the study of “religions” (though there may have been some benefits), since this history is a largely tragic one of colonialism and fragmentation. Rather, it is to point out that the category “religion” (ironically) led both to the bracketing-out of theology as a discipline,[16]and to the active and retroactive distortion of the very notion of what religion is.[17]To summarize tersely for space’s sake: a way of life was turned into religion, a worldview. And this in turn dictated the course that events would take.[18]
On the other (not unrelated) hand, religion and theology can be represented as a marginal and ultimately sublimated phase of the intellectual journey of humankind. Quite famously, Hans Blumenberg asked about the “legitimacy of the modern age” in his magnum opus by the same title. In it he was challenging the “secularization thesis”—but not in a way we might associate with religious challenges to secularization. Rather than question the thesis in the name of religion, Blumenberg wants to question what he calls the “expropriation model” in the history of ideas.[19] By this he means a transference of “goods” (in this case, ideas and practices) from the Church to the world.
In his famous spat with the philosopher Karl Löwith, Blumenberg is specifically contesting Löweth’s thesis that in essence modernity was merely Christianity in secularized form. Specifically, Löwith demonstrates how “providence” became “progress.”[20] Thus Blumenberg notes that secularization is “the final theologoumenon … which seeks to impose upon the heirs of theology a guilty conscience …” for forsaking or having forgotten “its true presuppositions” in theology.[21]Over-against secularization as merely a “guilty theological conscience,” Blumenberg wants to argue precisely for the “legitimacy” of modernity, by noting that, as one of Löwith’s students, the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, puts it “modern thought had to face the challenge by filling the gaps left by the theological answers that had become impossible to accept.”[22] Whence the gap and ruin caused by theology, to which modernity had to rush in? While Blumenberg typically likes to speak in terms of “Gnosticism” what he means is the “absolutism of grace” found in theological voluntarism. As Blumenberg notes,
On the other (not unrelated) hand, religion and theology can be represented as a marginal and ultimately sublimated phase of the intellectual journey of humankind. Quite famously, Hans Blumenberg asked about the “legitimacy of the modern age” in his magnum opus by the same title. In it he was challenging the “secularization thesis”—but not in a way we might associate with religious challenges to secularization. Rather than question the thesis in the name of religion, Blumenberg wants to question what he calls the “expropriation model” in the history of ideas.[19] By this he means a transference of “goods” (in this case, ideas and practices) from the Church to the world.
In his famous spat with the philosopher Karl Löwith, Blumenberg is specifically contesting Löweth’s thesis that in essence modernity was merely Christianity in secularized form. Specifically, Löwith demonstrates how “providence” became “progress.”[20] Thus Blumenberg notes that secularization is “the final theologoumenon … which seeks to impose upon the heirs of theology a guilty conscience …” for forsaking or having forgotten “its true presuppositions” in theology.[21]Over-against secularization as merely a “guilty theological conscience,” Blumenberg wants to argue precisely for the “legitimacy” of modernity, by noting that, as one of Löwith’s students, the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, puts it “modern thought had to face the challenge by filling the gaps left by the theological answers that had become impossible to accept.”[22] Whence the gap and ruin caused by theology, to which modernity had to rush in? While Blumenberg typically likes to speak in terms of “Gnosticism” what he means is the “absolutism of grace” found in theological voluntarism. As Blumenberg notes,
The denial of universals directly excludes that God would limit the possibility that God’s restriction of himself to his potentia ordinata [ordained power] in nature could become comprehensible for the benefit of man and his reason. Divine spirit and human spirit, creative and cognitive principles, operate as though without taking each other into account.[23]In other words, “theological absolutism had its own indispensible atheism and anthropotheism” that arose out of it in response.[24] Modernity is legitimate, argues Blumenberg, precisely because it arose out of the ruins caused by nominalism and voluntarism in order to construct a new edifice. Others, like James Faubian (following Max Weber), agree
The existential threshold of modernity [is found] in a certain deconstruction: of what [Max Weber] speaks of as the ‘ethical postulate that the world is God-ordained’ … The threshold of modernity may be marked precisely at the moment when the unquestioned legitimacy of a divinely ordained social order began to decline.[25]Such decisions are not isolated to history as a discipline. As Christian Smith has recently shown, through the 1880s-1920s sociology texts repeated like a mantra the death of theology: “[A]ll … phenomena are now satisfactorily explained on strictly natural principles. Among people acquainted with science, all … supernatural beings have been dispensed with, and the belief in them is declared to be wholly false to have always been false.”[26] Smith continues, quoting another text that pointedly suggests religion is “the anthropomorphic projection of savages,” and that such projection constitutes the basis for all religious and theological ideas.[27]
Others, though perhaps less sensationalist than Smith, have nonetheless noted that an extremely ascetic notion of “objectivity” has hamstrung sociology’s self-awareness as a discipline.[28] In bolder terms, “Sociologists have a vested interest in maintaining the secularization thesis. The foundation of their discipline was the critique of religion at the forefront of the Enlightenment agenda. The critique opened an intellectual space for the investigation of society as such. … Religion, for those sociologists, was an effect, and what was needed was to understand the cause of this effect [society].”[29]
For example, Patrick Riley, attempting to uncover the roots of the mystery behind the origins of the notion of “general will” before its use in Rousseau, discovered that historians’ perplexity came about because the concept was originally of a theological, rather than primarily political or sociological, provenance.[30] This follows an observation of a general historical trend, as Michael Allen Gillespie and others have pointed out (and which Blumenberg was attempting to counter), in which theological categories migrate into “secular” discourse, eventually forgetting they were ever theological to begin with while nonetheless remaining covertly dependent upon their origin.[31]
[1]Peter Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 86.
[2]Michael LeMahiue, Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1945-1975(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[3]Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Introduction,” Political Theology and Early Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 5.
[4]Ibid., 1.
[5]William Cavanaugh, “The Mystical and the Real: Putting Theology Back Into Political Theology,” in William Cavanaugh, Field Hospital: The Church’s Engagement With a Wounded World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2016), 99-121, quote at 100.
[6]See: Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ And the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21-47.
[7]Georg Iggers, “The Image of Ranke in American and German Historical Thought,” History and Theory vol. 2, no.1, (1962): 17-40. Quote at 17.
[8]Ibid., 18.
[9]Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 202n.46: “For Ranke, history provides the locus where God is witnessed, and historians stand as the ‘priests’ who decipher its divinely guaranteed coherence.”
[10]Dorothy Ross, “On the Misunderstanding of Ranke and the Origins of the Historical Profession in America,” in Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell, eds., Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 154-169.
[11]See the emerging literature appreciating the religious and theological dimensions (for good or ill) cited in Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crises (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 9-16. Cf. 11: “[S]erious consideration of theology in the civil war era is now riding the crest of a historiographical wave.”
[12]Quoted in Jay Tolson, “That New, Old Time Religion,” U.S. News and World Report (December 8th, 2003), 38.
[13]Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 5.
[14]Jason Ā Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 94.
[15]Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012), 22: “In fact, it may be credibly suggested that the popularity of world religions was more a legacy of the religious-evangelical enterprise of comparative theology than of the arcane technical and scholarly tradition of the nineteenth-century science of religion.” Cf. Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of the Modern Concept(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 18: “We know [religion] when we see it … Because of the pervasive use of the word religion in the cultures of the modern western world (the “we” here) we already intuitively know what religion is before we even try to define it: religion is anything sufficiently resembling modern Protestant Christianity. … Most of the debates about whether or not this “ism” (Confucianism, Marxism, etc…) is reallya religion boils down to the question of whether or not they are sufficiently similar to modern Protestant Christianity.”
[16]Nongbri, Before Religion, 1-2: “During the past thirty years, this picture [of religion as a universal category] has been increasingly criticized by experts in various academic fields. They have observed … that terms and concepts corresponding to religion do not appear in non-Western cultures until after those cultures first encountered European Christians. … More generally, it has become clear that the isolation of something called ‘religion’ as a sphere of life ideally separated from politics, economics, and science is not a universal feature of human history. …[T]he act of distinguishing between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ [for example] is a recent development. Ancient people simply did not care up the world that way.”
[17]Peter Harrison in his work The Territories of Science and Religionnotes that a key transition to “theChristian religion” can be seen with different translations of John Calvin’s Institutes: “Explicit belief was certainly not intended to be a substitute for personal piety—what Calvin refers to as ‘training in godliness.’ Rather the idea was that such training necessarily involves some familiarity with doctrines. While Calvin links such knowledge with what he calls ‘true religion’ (vere religionem), tellingly, this was typically translated as ‘the true religion.’ This rendition appears as early as the first English translation of the Institutes(1561). This subtle insertion of the definite article signifies an important change in how religion is conceptualized. For Calvin, the profession of explicit beliefs is directed toward the promotion of an inner quality—‘true religion.’ But the expression ‘the true religion,’ places the primary focus on the beliefs themselves, and the religion thus becomes primarily an existing thing in the world, rather than an interior disposition” (92-93). Harrison continues, noting how this trend spread: “Tangible evidence of this profound shift in the meaning of ‘religion’ can be seen in the increasing frequency of the deployment of the definite article before ‘religion’ (see the chart on 93). In English books printed during the first decade of the seventeenth century, the expression ‘Christian religion,’ (without the definite article) is used five times more frequently than ‘the Christian religion.’ By the final decade of the century the latter expression is much more common. … A largely unintended consequence of an insistence on explicit belief and creedal knowledge was thus the invention of the Christian religion, constituted by beliefs. Henceforth both Protestant and Catholic reform movements will emphasize the importance of doctrinal knowledge, with the consequence that propositional beliefs become one of the central characteristics of the new ‘religion’” (93).
[18]On the evolution of religio, see: Michael J. Buckley, S.J., “The Study of Religion and the Rise of Atheism: Conflict or Confirmation?” in David F. Ford, Ben Quash, and Janet Martin Soskice, eds., Fields of Faith: Theology and Religious Studies for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3-25. On the evolution of religio and the Greek threskeia, see Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 24-38; Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 60-69. Buckley corrects Cavanaugh slightly; Cavanaugh notes religio had primarily to do with ecclesial activities, whereas Buckley claims that it was not so narrowly confined in the church. Nongbri notes that religio could even have a broad “non-religious” meaning like “scruples” and gives the example of the Latin author Plautus, who ruefully notes how he could not avoid a dinner invitation: “I had scruples [religio fuit] and could not decline” (Nongbri, Before Religion,26). It is also worth noting that Nongbri has a small section in Before Religion analyzing the Greek term for religion (that is used in the New Testament) and finds that it has a largely parallel evolution to the Latin religio(33-38): “The term [threskeia] is common in Ancient Greek as well, but threskeia like religion, has a long history of changing senses. In its earliest appearances (in the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote in the fifth century B.C.E) threskeia seems to mean something along the lines of ‘rituals.’ ... This meaning of ‘rite’ or ‘ritual’ persisted for centuries. In the first century C.E., the philosopher Philo of Alexandria used the term to refer to the actions that occur in the temple, namely sacrifices (thusiai). The word occurs four times in the New Testament, and the meaning is usually ‘worship,’ as in the phrase threskeia ton angelon (‘worship of angels’) in Colossians 2:18. In the writings of Josephus, a historian in the latter part of the first century C.E., threskeia generally means either the activities that go on in a temple or ‘veneration’ of a god more generally. For example, in Josephus, the ‘threskeia of the Judaean people’ is often tied to the proper performance of sacrifices, but foreigners could also come to the temple in Jerusalem for the purpose of worship (eis threskeian) (Nongbri,Before Religion, 34). And again, “The term also occurs in James 1:26-27 and Acts 26:5, where the meaning is something along the lines of ‘manner of worship.’ ... [There is a] connection [for example] between the phrase ‘sect [hairesin] of our threskeia’ in Acts 26:5 and the action associated with such haireseis in Acts 24:14, namely, worshipping (latreuo) (Nongbri, Before Religion, 175, n.64). What Nongbri seeks to convey is that such terms emphasize one’s orientation to God as a total life direction rather than mere doctrinal compliance.
[19]Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1985), 21.
[20]Specifically in Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1957).
[21]Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 72-73.
[22]Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Christianity as the Legitimacy of the Modern Age: Thoughts on a book by Hans Blumenberg,” in Wolfhart Pannenberg, The Idea of God and Human Freedom (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1973), 181.
[23]Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 153-154.
[24]Ibid., 149.
[25]James Faubian, Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4.
[26]Christian Smith, “Secularizing American Higher Education: The Case of Early American Sociology,” in Christian Smith, ed., The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 111.
[27]Ibid., 119.
[28]Robert C. Bannister, Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). E.g. 233: “Objectivism also represented both a rejection and a secularization of nineteenth-century American Protestantism. … By extension, the rejection of the Christian conception of the ‘soul’ translated to the behaviorists’ repudiation of the ‘self.’ But in this very opposition, objectivism was in several ways a secular manifestation of the Protestant spirit. Its vision of an ‘efficient’ social order contained more than a little missionary zeal. So also, the celebration of ‘hard facts’ and the ‘rigors’ of research brought the Protestant ethic into the rigors of modern professionalism. Finally, by reifying existence in the manner of behaviorism, the objectivist gained control over self and others, in effect having the exquisite pleasure of playing God while denying His existence.”
[29]Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Post-Material Citizens (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 121.
[30]Patrick Riley, The General Will Before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4-5: “But if, as Shklar correctly insists, Rousseau ‘made the history’ of the ‘general will’ without inventing it, who, then, should be credited with the invention? Not Diderot; for, as Shklar shows, Montesquieu had already used the terms volunté général and volunté particuliére in the most famous book … of De l’esprit des lois (1748). But, where, then, did Montesquieu find those ideas? And how could he count on their being immediately understood, since he used them without explaining them? The mystery is solved when one realizes that the term volunté général was well established in the seventeenth century, though not primarily as a political idea. In fact, the notion of ‘general will’ was originally a theological one, referring to the kind of will that God (supposedly) had in deciding who would be granted grace sufficient for salvation, and who would be consigned to hell. … From the beginning, then, the notions of divine volunté général and volunté particuliére were parts of a larger question about the justice of God; they were always ‘political’ notions, in the largest possible sense of the word ‘political’---in the sense that even theology is part of what Leibniz called ‘universal jurisprudence.”
[31]Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), 273: “Viewed from this perspective [of nominalism and voluntarism’s influence] the process of secularization or disenchantment that has come to be seen as identical with modernity was in fact something different than it seemed, not the crushing victory of reason over infamy, to use Voltaire’s famous term, not the long drawn out death of God that Nietzsche proclaimed, and not the evermore distant withdrawal of the deus absconditus Heidegger points to, but the gradual transference of divine attributes to human beings (an infinite human will), the natural world (universal mechanical causality), social forces (the general will, the hidden hand), and history (the idea of progress, dialectical development, the cunning of reason).”
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