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5. Two Types of Continental Philosophy of Religion
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two types of continental philosophy of religion 87 f i v e two types of continental philosophy of religion Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus reports the case of one Dr. Hjortespring, who was converted to Hegelianism by a miracle on Easter morning at the Hotel Streit in Hamburg.1 My own story is not as dramatic. Still, if truth be told, in the present work I fear I will shock my friends by declaring myself a born-again Hegelian, and this in order to distinguish myself from the Kantians. My reasoning is as follows. The event is an event of truth. The insistence of the event may also be called its insistent “truth.” The “democracy to come” means the truth that insists on coming (true) in democracy, that is trying to come (true) as democracy. Just so, the name of God is the name of an event that is trying to come true in and under that name. It is at this point—truth—that I call upon the approach to religion and religious truth taken by Hegel, who is, by my lights, the father or (if Tillich is the father) the grandfather of radical theology and the predecessor of the new species of theologians for which I am calling. Hegel offers a new analysis of Christian theology and a new paradigm for the philosophy of religion by formulating a new idea of religious truth that constitutes for me a predecessor form of the theology of “perhaps” and consequently of theopoetics. We can now turn to the question of two types of continental philosophy of religion.2 Hegel on the Revealed Truth Before Hegel—which is not to say that this paradigm is not alive and well today—the distinction I am making between confessional theology and radical theology was treated as a distinction between “revealed” theology and “rational” theology, each of which provided access to a stratum of truth proper to itself. Revealed theology had to do with the truth of revelation , with all those truths that were revealed to humankind by God that humankind by its own lights, by the light of unaided human reason (lumen rationis), was unable to know. Thus the Trinity and the Incarnation are the content of theologia sacra, of a sacred or revealed theology, whose ultimate 88 theopoetics: the insistence of theology presupposition is faith in the Word of God. “Rational” theology (theologia rationalis) gets what is left over, the relatively small core of “rational” truth that is not off-limits to reason, the bit that unaided human reason can come up with on its own—which mostly reduces the philosophy of religion to a bad infinity of endless anthologies of proofs for the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and resolutions of the problem of evil. “Rational” theology meant the tradition of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury scholasticisms that reached their most famous systematic form in Christian Baumgarten, which Kant labeled “onto-theology,” a term later made famous by Heidegger, who to the unrelieved joy of almost everyone wanted to “overcome” it. Kant rightly and famously criticized these rationalist excesses and proposed instead an alternate radical theology that cut through to the taproot of religion in reason alone, albeit in practical reason , in the sole fact as it were of pure reason, the unconditional givenness of the Moral Law. In the Moral Law we can have a rational faith, with the result that for Kant religion is reduced to ethics and the rest is superstition. Hegel on the other hand took the opposite view.3 He was interested in exactly what rational theology ruled out—above all in the Trinity, Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension—in which he said everything truly interesting about Christianity is to be found. He thought rational theology removed the chicken from the soup. So far from treating these defining Christian themes as supernatural mysteries that needed to be delivered to earthlings by an Über-being come down from the sky, Hegel treated them as a Vorstellung, an imaginative-sensuous presentation —or what for me will be the stuff of a “poetics”—of something that required conceptual clarification. “Christian” then would refer to something not of “supernatural” but of figurative (or as I will argue poetic) provenance , as a certain imaginative presentation of the truth. “Christianity” would be a determinate historical formation whose so-called mysteries are mysterious not because they “transcend” natural reason and require a dispatch from a supernatural source and angelic messengers, but because they elude...