The Role of the Secular in Abraham Joshua Heschel's Theology: (Re)Reading Heschel After 9/11

The task is to humanize the sacred and to sanctify the secular.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity

Before religion can humanize man, man must humanize religion.

Mordecai Kaplan, The Religion of Ethical Nationhood

Abraham Joshua Heschel is known as one of the most inspiring and influential Jewish theologians in America in the second half of the twentieth century. A refugee from war-torn Europe, Heschel arrived in the United States via England in 1940. He immediately began an academic career at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and moved to the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1946, where he taught until his death in December 1972.¹ His political activism in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements made him a familiar voice among many in the American counter-culture of the 1960s.² His political activism resulted in the popularity of his theological writings beyond his progressive American Jewish audience, becoming a source of inspiration for Protestant and Catholic American theologians to this day.³

In this essay, I engage the notion of the "secular" in Heschel's thinking and ask whether, in fact, the very particular Cold War context of his major theological works can stand the scrutiny of a post-9/11 reading where the religious/secular divide has arguably become significantly altered. Heschel lived in a world infused with the idea that secularism (communism, fascism, and materialism) was undermining the moral fiber of western civilization, and religion, in the form of belief and practice, could renew humanity's sense of morality and responsibility.⁴ I assume here that 9/11 has shifted the focus of the world's moral crisis questioning the notion that religion is, by definition, a positive moral force.

I begin with the assumption that until this decade most of the scholars who have written, or continue to write, about Heschel inhabit a world not dissimilar to his. By that I mean most scholars writing on Heschel in the 1970s through the 1990s shared with him the global context of the Cold War as their political and existential point of reference and with that the problem of secularism as the great threat to religious tradition and society. This will not be true for the next generation and, in fact, it is not true even now. The Khomeini revolution in 1979, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, and the rise of religious radicalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the past two decades has resulted in a significant shift in the parameters of theological discourse among liberal and progressive theologians. Whether we call it, with Peter Berger, the "desecularization of the world," or from the religious perspective the resanctification of the world, something has changed that requires revisiting the religious/secular dichotomy of the past half century.⁵ Bruce Lincoln's Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 is but one of many books that have begun to reframe the theological discourse for the next generation.⁶ In light of the rise of religious radicalism with its rejection of secularism as a constructive and even necessary component to religious life, scholars such as Talal Asad and Jose Casanova, among many others, have begun to rethink old (negative) constructions of the secular that were formed, in part, in response to communism, as a way of thinking about how this notion of the secular can be reframed in response to a new religious challenge.⁷

My claim in this essay is that the notion of the secular in Heschel's writings needs to be examined in order to understand what role, if any, it can play in Heschel's theology in a newly desecularized world, a world far from Heschel's own social and theological context. And, if we determine that the secular plays no positive role in Heschel's thought, we must ask ourselves how much his theology can offer a generation no longer threatened by the secular but, in fact, threatened by religion. This query, then, begins with an understanding that all thinking...