On History in Analytic and Systematic Theology: A Plea for Clarity - Initial Draft Part One

Thesis: without totally discarding their use, systematic theology needs to develop more awareness that transcendence and immanence as a dialectical pair are not perennial theological terms or problems that are naturally part of the Christian task of theology, but rather are historically specific. They came to bear only with Immanuel Kant who coined their pairing as a dialectical couplet, which was then further developed and perpetuated within the post-Kantian Idealist reception of theology. This is not to commit the genetic fallacy and discard the terms because of their newly rediscovered origin. It is, rather, to exhort theologians to be more dutiful as to the provenance and perhaps continuing connotations of many of the terms that they utilize as if they were merely part of a common sense analytic theological lexicon. Part of the irony of this lack of historical awareness, especially in some quarters of analytic theology, is that transcendence and immanence, nature and supernature, the idea of "worldview" and the idea of "religion," are all part of the same secularizing historical trajectory. More on that momentarily.

Moreover, regardless of what one thinks of secularization, very often these terms are not coherent vehicles to perpetuate Christian theology and constitute what Cyril O'Regan has termed "misremembering." That is, a formal framework change that is so extensive that even in an attempted act of preservation fundamental Christian concepts are altered in their deep structure and grammar even if superficially they look the same. O'Regan points in particular to how Hegel changes Christian discourse even in the act of shoring it up and preserving it. Transcendence and immanence as a dialectical pair (for the terms existed on their own before Kant, but without the meaning he gave to them, and certainly without their now dialectical relation) without proper historical understand can and often do perpetuate just such theological misremembering. 

And insofar as theology utilizes these terms like transcendence and immanence without further historical nuance, it is repeating the same trajectories that secularized Christian theology, often in the very act of defending against said secularization.And this, too, is ironic, for it was often in the act of apologetic defence that the most extensive secularizations originally occurred (for example, the thesis of Michael Buckley in At the Origins of Modern Atheism, Amos Funkenstein in Theology and the Scientific Imagination, Etienne Gilson in Being and Some Philosophers, and so on). As Johannes Zachhuber writes in a recent article detailing some of this history of the pairing transcendence/immanence:

"What we can conclude at this point is that the dichotomous pair of transcendent and immanent is a product of this particular intellectual transformation [with Kant]. Major philosophical developments played an important role in its emergence along with the evolution of a new kind of religious concern, for which the main decision was no longer one between particular doctrines or articles of faith, but more fundamentally between religion and its rejection." (Zachhuber, "Transcendence and Immanence," 167)

In other words, without proper nuance, the use of transcendence and immanence within systematic theology (again, just as one example) has a tendency to transpose the discourse into philosophy of religion rather than theology proper. This is not an automatic process, nor does it recommend simply jettisoning transcendence and immanence, as we said. What it does do is give a credible reason to call for a thoroughgoing historical nuance within systematic and analytic theology and demand that systematic theology cannot and must not be done apart from not just historical theology, but deeply considered theo-historiographical concerns. 

While analytic theology has gotten better at situating its discourse within history the notion that theological terms have intrinsic logic that can be symbolically manipulated apart from the thick-description of formation, perpetuation, and reception context is often part of this secularizing process that transposes Christianity out of its tradition-based historical network and produces the somewhat abstract category "theism" or "Classical Theism" that many feel the need to either defend or debunk. For some improvement on this, see: McCall, Introduction to Analytic Theology which rightly notes that analytics need not automatically perpetuate the historical amnesia on display in its early iterations. One might note his own Analytic Christology and the Theological Interpretation of the New Testament as proof of this. Cf. also for example, Pawl, In Defense of Conciliar Christology, or the many works of Oliver Crisp which integrate historical thought into analytics. Nonetheless, sed contra: history is still often integrated as a hunting ground for developing an ultimately ahistorical spectrum of options harvested from their formation contexts. This not only creates inaccurate histories, but can often create false problems for theologians to solve (here especially see John Inglis, Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy ). As Zachhuber notes, 

"The result [of the historically specific formation and reception contexts of transcendence and immanence] was not one univocal understanding of the pair. Rather, the emerging duality of immanence and transcendence could serve very different ends depending on the philosophical, theological, or ideological standpoint of the author. ... Yet, all of these conflicts bespeak the emergence of a new frontier that was to dominate much nineteenth-century debate on religion across Europe. Increasingly, theism itself moved to the center of public controversy. More and more, what was under scrutiny was no longer the detail of doctrine but the plausibility of belief in God as such. Religious debate became a debate about religion, and questions about its essence, its history, and the role of Christianity in it consequently became urgent. The career of the duality of transcendence and immanence closely mirrors this evolving conflict line as it was perfectly suited to express and symbolize the options individuals and groups were able to choose" (Zachhuber, "Transcendence and Immanence, 174-175)

 As another scholar Jason Josephson-Storm has noted, what is often overlooked is how philosophy of religion was formed precisely to debunk its own subject by co-opting Christian discourse to turn it upon itself. Yet, such is still quite often taken right back into the heart of systematic theology without diagnosis:

The changing language [of religious studies and its relation to theology] marks a critical [break]. This shift in meaning seems to represent the vanishing of God, and words like transcendence [immanence], infinite, or sacred are attempts to cover for an absence, to describe a shadow. ... The very category of 'religion' was formulated around a Christian concept of God. In talking and writing about religion, it is often mistakenly assumed that religions have a common essence [describable in terms of transcendence and immanence] that make them 'religious.' In excluding God from its explanatory apparatus, however, 'religion' remains a category structured around a hole or a fissure [whose circumference is described by the coordinates 'transcendence and immanence' or the infinite or the sacred]. In other words, we find ourselves in a discipline organized around a core that no longer exists and [that by design we cannot] reconstruct. (Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment, 121)

Without a deep interaction with history, historiography, and genealogy, systematic theology and analytic theology are themselves threatening to be turned into a discipline whose core no longer exists and whose essence is the play of logic around terms like transcendence and immanence whose provenances have not been analyzed and which have been taken to represent a clearly demarcated area of theological inquiry in which logic can navigate toward a problem-solution set.