Building Foundations

Europe Rejecting the Enlightenment

• Different course from that taken in America

Placement along various continua

• Traditional <—> Progressive
• Catholic <—> Protestant
• Open to Science <—> Reactive or rejecting
• Religious language as literal <—> Figurative

Definitions

• Romanticism: p.233 change is not always for the best, appreciate national traditions, value feeling over scientific analysis
• Not "natural theology": p. 205 the basic truths about the existence of God and human morality known to good people in all societies

2 Romantics

Schleiermacher

• religion as a feeling not thought "feeling of absolute dependence"
• every event is a miracle, a "sign"
• revelation is "every original and new communication of the Universe to man"
• embrace the "genius" of one's own tradition

Coleridge

• tradition is not conservatism but interpreting Christianity in terms of Romanticism
• "factual accuracy of the Bible does not matter" but whether it finds me

Hegel

Structure of Reality & How we can know it

• everything we see and experience is bound by historical setting
• thus: How can we know anything with certainty?
• triadic structure of reality p. 237
• http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-half-hour-hegel.html

https://youtu.be/q54VyCpXDH8

David Strauss

• until Strauss, miracles whether either
  1. happened as described (literal) or
  2. some "rational" explanation or
  3. "fraud"
• Strauss proposed that they consisted of "myth" (religious language that conveys sacred truth)

Ludwig Feuerbach

• "theology is anthropology"
• many college freshman can say, "God is just a projection of the human imagination." (a function of low-level thinking? or pervasiveness of Feuerbach's position)

Søren Kierkegaard

• writing in pseudonyms to make the point that we always only know from a certain perspective
• "We understand backwards, but we must live forwards."

Development of Religious Person

• aesthetic stage
• ethical stage
• religious stage
  • The "Knight of Faith"

Roman Catholic Reaction

• interplay of Church/State authority (Papacy reluctant to abandon)
• condemnation of "modernism" (Syllabus of Errors)
• immaculate conception as dogma by means of papal infallibility
• Leo XIII & Catholic social justice concerns

English Response

John H. Newman

• recognizing that the Protestant claim to return to apostolic origins was fraught with historical perspectives (Hegel)
  • doctrine had developed from the very beginning of the church
• "England would improve "were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion …" p. 242

Frederick Maurice

• high church / evangelical wing
• rejecting both Maurice sought a 3rd alternative, identifying with the working class, argued for a gospel that could be embraced by all
• Darwin / Huxley couldn't explain "the philosophical and theological implications of these new scientific conclusions."

Liberal Theology

• Albrecht Ritschl
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Adolf Harnack
• Ernst Troeltsch