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205  Chapter 8 Dialectical Theology (Gogarten, Barth, Bultmann) I certainly do not want to debate with Bultmann, which of us is the more radical. —Karl Barth, preface to the third edition of Römerbrief The confrontation between Protestantism and the modern spirit, whose hour has likely come today, is not a theoretical matter. —Friedrich Gogarten, afterword to the republication of Luther’s Der unfreie Wille (The Unfree Will) Western philosophy had taken its course and reached its end in the death of God. Theology and religion would have to be reconceived out of the collapse of logos. Indeed, this collapse was seen, after the disaster of the First World War, as the consequence of a three-hundredyear development of “modernity.”We will look at two attempts to formulate a theology in light of these developments, both decidedly post-Nietzschean and often in tandem with Heidegger. First, in this chapter, Protestant theology as it formed in the first half of the twentieth century (Gogarten, Barth, and Bultmann) and second,in the following chapter, Jewish “new thinking” (Rosenzweig and Buber).1 Hegel saw theology aufgehoben in philosophy. Nietzsche and Heidegger saw the end of philosophy as the dawn of an epochal possibility of a new relation to the world/Being. The thinkers we will address will try to reformulate this new possibility in theological terms. At some level they all address the issue of God as “wholly Other.” That is, once some notion of an unthought and, with the tools of logos unthinkable, “wholly Other” of philosophy has been raised as a necessary consequence of philosophical thought itself, then 1. On historical connections between these two simultaneous and largely parallel movements, see Lazier’s excellent study and Smith, “Heretical Thinking.” 206 DIALOGUES BETWEEN FAITH AND REASON “God” can reemerge from the dead to stand in for this radical response to a self-limiting reason. Excursus on “The Sacred” as “Wholly Other” Rudolf Otto’s work on the sacred (das Heilige) was important as background for the developments in early twentieth-century theology and philosophy of religion. While he recognized the need to apply clear and meaningful predicates and concepts to the deity, he rejected the notion that the divine was a “rational object” that could be fully grasped in this way. On the contrary, the irrational creates the larger context for such rational understanding: “But if rational predicates have usually been in the foreground, they do not exhaust the idea of the deity but rather receive their validity from and in an irrational element” (Das Heilige, 2). Such rational concepts can only be properly used “if they are ascribed to an object that itself is not grasped by them but must be grasped in some other manner” (ibid.). Although thinkers like Heidegger will distance themselves from Otto’s use of psychology to get at this notion of the deity—Otto uses as his point of departure our feeling and experiences of dependency—Otto radicalizes the relationship between the human and divine in ways that will have a powerful impact.2 In particular,he stresses the experience of our “feeling of creature-liness”(Kreatur-gefühl) that separates us completely from the realm of “the numenous” (das Numinose). It is experienced not as a moment of piety but as a “mysterium tremendum,”a moment of fear and terror vis-à-vis the mystery of that which radically surpasses our realm of being (as creatures). Since he consistently associates this with the example of Abraham, he thereby associates his approach to Kierkegaard’s. He thus circles time and again around “the religious mystery, the authentic mirum, [or] to express it perhaps most appropriately,the‘wholly Other,’the thateron, the anyad, the alienum, the foreign and estranging, that which lies beyond the sphere of the known, understood, familiar and thereby ‘canny,’ that which opposes all sense of ‘at home’and thus that which fills the spirit with transfixing wonder” (Das Heilige, 28). As he says in his essay on “The‘Wholly Other’”(“Das‘Ganz Andere’”): “And this uncanny, this ‘wholly Other’ that stands opposed to all that is human,is the mysterious foundation on which all rationality is built up and which shines through all ‘human likeness’” (Aufsätze, 16). Where Otto has an impact on Christian theological thinking is in his effort to show that the early Christian community experienced Jesus pre2 . Heidegger does refer explicitly to Otto in his lectures on the phenomenology of religious experience. DIALECTICAL THEOLOGY 207 cisely in this radical way...

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