Books The Politics at God's Funeral:
Baum, Gregory
I I I I I I I I l l l l II I I I I I I I IIII , I Books: IS GOD DEAD, OR CONSTANTINE? A N ADMIRER of Michael Harrington's work, I looked forward to reading his new book on religion and the...
...Recent Hegel interpreters as different as Emil Fackenheim and Rudolf Siebert have brought out this aspect with great clarity...
...Existentialist religion has no social power...
...The extraordinary creativity come a "cult...
...Indirectly it protects the status quo...
...The task contemporary theologians have set for themselves is to explore and clarify the meaning of the Gospel after the collapse of the socio-political theism that legitimated Western civilization...
...Sometimes this leads to distortions...
...I find this curious, it was after all "practical reason," reason as the organ of human emancipation and the creation of a truly human society, that belonged originally to the Enlightenment, that following Kant became fruitful in Hegel and German idealism, that was endorsed by Marx in his own way, and that critical Marxists of today are trying to retrieve...
...Sociologically speaking the new minority Christianity is becoming a movement, a movement defined by its '0 February 1984:91 task or mission in the global society...
...He affirmed a non-dualistic theism that recognized the transcendent God as immanent in human history, present to people as critical judgment and progressive thrust...
...Harrington acknowledges Barth's progressive political witness, but he doe.s.not ask how the political stance of the Swiss theologian was related to his theology...
...Positivism reigned...
...The book makes indeed very interesting reading...
...In fact, however, Harrington does not remain faithful to his thesis...
...Existentialist reflections as found in Bultmann and Rahner, moreover, reveal God's presence only in personal life, in subjectivity...
...He argues that fundamentalists and some conservative denominations try to negate modernity and return to the settled security of the past, an endeavor that is clearly unrealizable...
...Fair enough -but what is the meaning of that "he lived...
...Rationalism, pluralism, secularism, i.e., the culture of industrial capitalism, have killed the divinity...
...Thinking has always been an exceptional calling: as German culture with its fine distinction between a 'scholar' and a 'thinker' (ein Denker) knows...
...An Admirable Woman is Arthur Cohen's most challenging work to date...
...ii ,, lectures with slides...
...She is also a thinker forced to live a life of thought in an age of rampant thoughtlessness...
...Erika Hertz is a thinker...
...Harrington would that by establishing subjectivity people have discovered in the political theoloacquire the identity and personal integ- gians the same (Frankfurt School inspired) critique of "privatization" that he himself offers...
...SUMMER LANGUAGE PROGRAM Biblical Greek and Hebrew JUNE 4 - JULY 27 For full information write: Summer School Office Princeton Theological Seminary CN821 Princeton, N.J...
...Erika Hertz Commonweal: 92...
...Gregory Baum has no metaphysical implications, and that his analysis of the Western predicament and his proposals for reconstruction may be acceptable to atheists as well as believers, his treatment of the philosophical issues implies that his thesis is wider...
...He makes himself insensitive to those aspects of modem thought that sought to overcome the spiritual crisis...
...It is, therefore, overly hasty to anticipate the end of Christianity as a politico-cultural presence in the world...
...The inner contradiction of this new intellectual movement was that on the one hand it provided universal values such as rationality and freedom and that on the other it accepted the new industrial capitalism which assigned the great masses to conditions of grave oppression...
...It becomes a cult...
...A thoughtful life / i AN ADMIRABLE WOMAN Arthur A. Cohen Godine, $14.95, 220 pp...
...The wider community knows Arthur Cohen as one of our best novelists -- a novelist of ideas, persons, atmospheres...
...Religion establishes subjectivity...
...By that rare set of choices, we discover, as the story unfolds, that she forms a character which is unquestionably admirable and a life which is a believable life here and now...
...He realizes, moreover, that such a project is very much in keeping with the traditional Catholic endeavor to formulate natural law imperatives...
...As a secular, humanistic Marxist Harrington asks himself the corresponding question: Where do we now find the values that religious and non-religious people may endorse to promote the reconstruction of society...
...This God is no longer alive...
...Yet even the philosophers who endorsed liberalism lamented the decline of virtue and the loss of values...
...In Christian theology this is called the end of the Constantinian Age...
...The God in whom Christians continue to believe is no longer the old, political God...
...This thesis is not startling...
...The theological community knows his work as that of one of our leading Jewish theologians...
...The challenge is one that few novelists have attempted and fewer still have achieved: what is it like tothink...
...The Christian church prior to Constantine was something like a movement, defined largely in ascetical and other-worldly terms...
...In specifying the critical role of the Christian community these theologians base themselves on the experiences of ordinary Christians for whom the Gospel has become a divine summons to justice and emancipation...
...When did any of us last read a novel whose main character actually thinks7 Not daydreams, not fantasies, not attempts at one more round of alienated "self-expression...
...We follow the main character, Erika Hertz, through her life from childhood in a secularized Jewish family in the Berlin of the twenties and thirties to her later life as an intellectual "celebrity" (that peculiarly American fate) in New York...
...God supplied the values and the vision that offered stability to society and promoted renewal and reform...
...But he does not analyze these new phenomena...
...Her very commitment to thought in this age forces her, contrary to her desires, into a life of publicness: a life dedicated to thinking upon action, history, politics, the public realm...
...In a sense, in this novel both of Arthur Cohen's audiences meet...
...At the same time, the praxis of Harrington's book is fully in accord with the aspiration of progressive Christians...
...Cristians and radicals lamented the waning of human values in Western civilization...
...He even mentions in passing the new political theology made famous by writers such as Metz, Moltmann, and SSlle...
...Some sociologists, for of theologians in the twentieth century, instance Talcott Parsons and Robert Bel- including Catholic theologians over the lah, have defended the social function of last decades, must surely be interpreted a highly personal religion...
...Theologians have become subtle and vague when dealing with the central beliefs of Christianity, God, and eternal life...
...As we shall see, this hidden, not fully acknowledged identification affects Harrington's reading of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers and theologians...
...It is imperative, Harrington argues, that those who love humanity, atheists and believers alike, following the thrust of practical reason, try to formulate emancipatory values that claim universality and sustain people's struggle for a just society...
...It is, however, not without its puzzlement...
...He would have found the effort to find the appropriate, Gospel-inspired, politico-cultural role of the church after the collapse of the Constantinian Age and the rejection of ideological religion...
...Harrington regards the shift of many contemporary theologians from classical theism to what is called "panentheism" as a watering down of the traditional religion...
...he is simply the gracious ground of their own subjectivity...
...The characters, the atmosphere, the life of each of his stories move the reader to a characteristic Cohenian sensibility of thoughtfulness: this is the way we live in this place and time...
...If Harrington had acknowledged Hegel's attempt a t synthesis, he would have gained a better understanding of contemporary theologians...
...Eventually Enlightenment culture simply promoted instrumental reason...
...Here Michael Harrington's book makes an important contribution...
...this is the way we could, if we would but dare, think...
...The same impoverishment of reason also took place in Marxism, except for the revisionist Western Marxists that sought to retrieve Marx's own concern with overcoming alienation in a reconciled society...
...Again, reading Hegel, Harrington concentrates on his contribution to the death of God...
...Harrington reads twentieth-century Christian theologians as witnesses to the death of God...
...Historians and social scientists tend to be in agreement with it...
...Harrington intends to demonstrate that the God of the inherited Judeo-Christian religion, who was the integrating principle of Western civilization, has died and been buried...
...In his last chapter, Hardngton himself turns to practical reason to establish values that lay claim to universality...
...For Erika Hertz, as a Jew and a thinker, has been forced by the history of her place and time to abandon the traditional protective device of the thinker: to withdraw from the public realm...
...Once again, his work extends through a series of astonishingly different novels: In the Days of Simon Stern and A Hero in His Time to Acts of Theft...
...A more careful reading of Hegel's philosophy of religion would have allowed Harrington to gain a more faithful understanding of theologians today...
...Hegel recognizes the unbridgeable gap between the old religious consciousness and the new secular consciousness...
...Harrington's tacit expansion of his principal thesis has significantly weakened his study...
...It can be shown that this trend has been" endorsed by the leadership in the churches, most remarkably even in the papal and episcopal teaching of the Catholic church...
...At one time God was of fundamental political importance: God legitimated the social institutions and the self-definition of society...
...In fact, they all sought a new principle of social integration, a substitute for the old political God who had lost his power...
...Some authors, such as Hegel and Marx, realized that the new capitalism based on the quest for material gain was creating " an inverted world," a w o r l d - as Hegel said-- in which good is evil and evil good...
...Harrington rightly refutes this argument...
...Han'ington's study begins with the Enlightenment...
...The left itself has lost its vision of the humanum...
...Throughout his study he seems to suggest that the political God of Western civilization is identical with the God of the Bible and that for this reason, the Christianreligion itself has come to an end...
...An Admirable Woman answers that troubling question...
...It has been reported that Heidegger, in his lectures, could only bring himself to give the following information on the life of a great predecessor-thinker: "Aristotle was born, he lived, he thought, and he died...
...What does it mean to live a life given over to thinking then or now...
...More exactly, what is it like to give a life over to thought in this incredible century...
...08542 Princeton Theological Seminary admits students o f an), race, color and national or ethnic origin, without regard to sex or handicap...
...This privatization- Harrington uses this term -- is a sign that the old political God is no more...
...A N ADMIRER of Michael Harrington's work, I looked forward to reading his new book on religion and the spiritual crisis of Western civilization...
...Weber spoke of "specialists without spirit and hedonists without heart, non-entities who imagine themselves to have climbed to the never-before-achieved stage of humanity...
...After the collapse of the Constantinian Age., the minority church may again become a movement, yet this time defined by an outer-oriented, critical, humanizing mission, by what has been called "the option for the poor...
...Harrington suggests that the major churches promote a religion that has become highly personal...
...Cohen is a theologian's theologian whose exceptionaUy thoughtful sensibility pervades but never controls his novels...
...His theological range is unusual: extending Natural and the Supernatural Jew, to his extraordinary theological reflection on the Holocaust entitled The Tremendum...
...Harrington's brief proposals in the last chapter do not come as a surprise...
...This is his declared thesis...
...David Tracy A N ADMIRABLE WOMAN is a remarkable novel by one of our best novelists and theologians, Arthur A. Cohen...
...While he insists minded himself that in early Christianity, THE POLITICS AT GOD'S FUNERAL Michael Harrington Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $16.95, 273 pp...
...In Troeltsch's term religion has here berity necessary to make the present social system work well...
...Most of their critics were scholars...
...If he had used the expression, "the end of the Constantinian Age," he would have reminded himself that in early Christianity, prior to Constantine, the biblical God had a different, more critical socio-political thrust...
...In fact, the principal thesis of the book remains somewhat ambiguous...
...As we do so, we find ourselves compelled to agree with the subtly ironic rifle: Erika Hertz is an admirable woman living and thinking in a time of the tremendum...
...I I I I I I I I l l l l II I I I I I I I IIII , I Books: IS GOD DEAD, OR CONSTANTINE...
...He overlooks Hegel' s attempt to 10 February 1984:89 overcome the spiritual crisis of Western civilization...
...Harrington shows that because of its built-in contradiction, Enlightenment reason tended to shy away from reflecting on human values and emancipation and identified itself more and more with empirical science and technology...
...No questions were asked about the end, about values, about the human substance...
...No, Erika Hertz is a rare but entirely believable creation: she thinks and she shows what it means to think not as a withdrawal from life but as an entry into it...
...In reading Kant he stresses the Critique of Pure Reason which confines certain knowledge to the scientific exploration of the material world, and belittles the Critique of Practical Reason as Kant's attempt to assure ordinary people that their inherited faith has a rationality of its own, even if not a scientific one...
...Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt were thinkers...
...Karl Barth proclaims the God who is absent...
...Erika Hertz rejects sentimentality and embraces thoughtfulness...
...Harrington does acknowledge new Christian groupings in the third world and to a lesser extent in the first world...
...Indeed the novels, in a manner rare in our time, are from his early groundbreaking book, The empowered by ideas but never give into . . . . . . . the temptation of becoming, in effect, R PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY "The ancient languages are the scabbard which holds the mind's sword" [Goethe...
...he realizes that t o f i n d legitimating values for a truly human society there is no going back to the traditional divinity...
...Harrington reads philosophers and theologians almost exclusively to demonstrate their contribution to the death of God...
...Capitalist culture with its egoism and search for personal satisfaction is undermining the very basis of civilization, including the critical movements that work toward social reconstruction...
...Schillebeeckx's attempt to reread the Christian message in the new horizon created by modem society -- something done by all contemporary theologians -- is understood by Harrington as an attempt to change the old religion: the result is really no longer Christianity...
...They argue as a sign of vitality...
...Yet he envisioned bridging the gap through a new consciousness that was both religious (without being separate and otherworldly) and secular (without being Godless...
...Capitalism created a society of selfpromoters who used reason only to achieve their purposes...
...The protector of human values has disappeared...
...Because his thesis is not just that the Constantinian Age has collapsed but that Commonweal: 90 Christianity has come to an end, Harrington does not ask himself what sociological form the new minority Christianity( will take in the modern world...
...The death of the political God, Harrington argues, has profoundly shaken Western civilization...
...Christianity as a political reality has ceased to exist...
...It is even more in keeping with the self-understanding of the post-Constantinian minority church, which looks for allies among secular humanists and in the world religions in order to work with them for the transformation of society...
...Harrington tends to identify the God who is dead and buried with the God of the Christian message...
Vol. 111 • February 1984 • No. 3
