Posts Tagged G.W.F. Hegel

General Introduction
- Dr. Gilmour!!!
- We kid because we envy
- Listener feedback
- The delay in show notes
- What’s on the blog?

What Is Epistemology?
- It’s all indirectly Greek to me
- Mise en abyme
- Connection to metaphysics
- Epistemology junkies
- Invoking epistemology to affirm or deny metaphysics

Ancient Epistemology
- Forms and objects in Plato
- Another remove
- Innate knowledge
- Aristotelian observation
- Telos and the individual object
- Thomist epistemology and Thomist metaphysics
- The necessity of divine illumination

Descartes’ Epistemological Turn
- Hidey hidey hidey ho
- Doubt everything
- Je pense donc je suis!
- Augustinian influence
- Descartes’ unsatisfactory solution
- The Cartesian Reese’s cup
- The difficulty of refuting rationalists

The Rise of Empiricism
- Building ideas
- Nathan’s favorite skeptical atheist
- The elimination of causality
- Today’s inconsistent empiricists
- The cult of the scientist

Kant! Kant! Kant!
- The best(?) of both worlds
- Kant is hard
- Noumena and phenomena
- A priori categories
- On hating Kant more than you love Jesus
- Kant’s relationship to Hume

Post-Kantian Epistemology
- Analytic and continental
- Logical positivism and its heirs
- Hegel’s ghosts and organs
- Thomas Kuhn and the historical scientific question
- The epistemological humility of the Emergent Church
- Pragmatism

What Difference Does It Make?
- The message we must spread
- Breaking apart from the age
- Correcting the mistakes of others
- Avoiding the whig view of history

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Ayer, A.J. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Dover, 1952.

Berkeley, George. Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method and Meditations. Trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. New York: Dover, 2003.

Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of History. Trans. A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: And Other Writings. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.

Jones, Tony. The Church Is Flat: The Relational Ecclesiology of the Emerging Church Movement. Minneapolis: JoPa, 2011.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. Paul Guyver and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

—. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Trans. James W. Ellington. New York: Hackett, 2002.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von. Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays. Trans. Daniel Garber and Roger Ariew. New York: Hackett, 1991.

Lewis. C.S. “On the Reading of Old Books.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Oxford UP, 1979.

Peirce, C.S. The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings, 1867-1893. Ed. Christian J.W. Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Plato. Protagoras and Meno. Trans. Adam Beresford. New York: Penguin, 2006.

—. Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1991.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1981.

Lately a number of conversations around the God-bl0g-o-sphere have caught my attention, and all of them seem to take their impetus from the notion that theologians in the twenty-first century come to be known for “camps” more than by denominational or other official affiliations.  We’ve already linked to James K.A. Smith’s meditation on the topic, over at the Roger Olsen blog,  guest blogger Brandon Morgan wrote a critique of the Wild Goose Festival that called for Emergents to take a page from the post-liberals’ book and carve out a space as distinct from the liberal mainline as it is from the evangelical world.  In response to that, Tony Jones recently called for readers to propose alternatives to “Liberal” or “Progressive” as the identifier for those whose theology is after the same projects that Jones’s seems to be.  (“Incarnational Christians” won the contest.)  More recently, in a series of very good podcasts, Tripp Fuller and Deacon Bo (whose last name I cannot find on their website) discussed the terms liberal, progressive, emergent, and evangelical and the ways that their use as sociological markers blur the content of the philosophy that informs each.

I say all of this to note that my little contribution here is neither the first nor the final word, and although I write as an answer to the question that my good web-friend linda over at i wonder as i wander asked, I figured other folks who have been following all of this chatter might benefit from reading what an English teacher, not a made man in the Hauerwasian mafia but a self-identified post-liberal nonetheless, makes of the distinctions.  So I undertake this mini-taxonomy hoping to draw clarifying comments, not to shut the discussion down.

Progressive Christianity Oversimplified

To say that progressive theology is Hegelian is not to make a genetic claim: of course people were writing about human progress earlier in the Enlightenment (just think of Voltaire and Tom Paine and Immanuel Kant), and many (perhaps most) of those who would call themselves “progressive” in the early twenty-first Century Church have not read Hegel’s Philosophy of History.  Nonetheless, progressive thought tends to follow a narrative similar to Hegel’s: history tends to progress, not uniformly but in intelligible manners, from liberty limited to a few (a very few in places and times like the Egypt of the Pharaohs) towards freedom for more than before.  Although the content of history is quite complex, still there is an intelligible vector to it, namely from liberty-for-fewer-people to liberty-for-more-people.  There are places and times when the spirit of the age contradicts itself, like when post-Reformation Europe became part of the Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth (and seventeenth and eighteenth) centuries, but Hegel is a sophisticated enough philosopher to note that material conditions are entirely capable of slowing and even reversing spiritual urges towards liberty for a time.  But eventually, and always through the intentional and reasoned organization of human communities (often through events such as the rise of Christianity or the French Revolution), liberty progresses, and the spirit of the age (Hegel’s famous Zeitgeist) comes to impose its form on the world as it’s already been shaped the imaginations of the historically-important leaders.  When such revolutions take place (and I realize I’m mixing some Marx in with the Hegel here), old forms of enslavement cease to threaten liberty, no longer a threat because the intellectual frameworks that kept the many subservient to the few no longer stand as intelligible to the masses.  But in the long transition period, those who help the Zeitgeist take its form must articulate the reasoned arguments for the new way, exposing the contradictions inherent in the old order.  Otherwise, history stagnates or even regresses.

And that’s where Progressive Christians seem to find a sense of calling: whether through grassroots consumer changes or influence within educational institutions or the state power of the Democratic National Committee or (more often than not) a mix of all those and more, Progressive Christians seek to help the world considered more or less broadly to realize the spirit of freedom by means of large-scale shifts in consciousness, public policy, and patterns of consumption.  Some prefer the “Think Globally, Act Locally” approach of example-setting while some tend more towards nation-state partisanship as the best means towards such ends, but by and large there’s a sense that increasing the freedom of all individuals to actualize themselves must be close to the core of the Christian life.  That means a concern for the economic poor certainly, and it often (though not always) also involves advocating for political rights and social recognition of lesbians and gays; promoting the political power of racial minorities; and opposing traditions and laws governing sexual conduct that restrict the individual’s right to enjoy sexual contact on terms that the individual, not any super-individual community, deems appropriate.

Post-Liberal Christianity Oversimplified

The name Post-Liberal, as far as I can tell, comes from the subtitle of George Lindbeck’s seminal work The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Post-Liberal World.  (Do pardon the inconsistent capitalization and hyphenation of that term in this post, but it is a blog, after all.)  In that work Lindbeck, a Yale theology professor, attempts to articulate the difficulties that ecumenical conversations encounter by naming two tendencies in twentieth-century theology that work at cross-purposes.  One, which Lindbeck calls the cognitive/propositional model, holds that Christianity is best described as a core of true indicative sentences (the Father is co-eternal with the Son and Spirit, there will be a general resurrection of the dead, and so on) and the people who agree to their truth are Christians.  There certainly might be a set of practices and narratives of personal experience that follow logically from the content of the doctrine, but the propositions and their correspondence to divine reality is first and foremost.  The other, which Lindbeck calls the experiential/expressive model, holds that the core of Christianity is the religious experience, the sense of dependence on the “other” that leads to a conversion experience.  Within that model the symbols that one uses to name the experience might well be the vocabularies of the Scriptures and the Creeds, but they need not be.  As an alternative to those two, and as a model held forth as more adequate to ecumenical conversation, Lindbeck proposes the cultural/linguistic model, in which the Scriptures and the Creeds do in fact form a canon by which utterances and practices can be judged rightly as Christian or non-Christian but that the parameters are on the level of symbol and narrative rather than on the level of syllogisms and propositions constructed from those symbols and narratives.  In such a system theology, the formulation of syllogistic systems using those vocabularies; and emotive states of being, which flow from the realities to which the vocabularies point; do indeed have a place, but the systems and the experiences stand logically posterior to the complex of symbols, stories, and traditions that shape the parameters of historic Christianity.   Lindbeck’s hope seems to be that, within those loose but intelligible bounds, a genuinely Christian and genuinely ecumenical conversation can happen without as much fogginess as to what is Christian utterance and what doesn’t count as Christian utterance.

The later Post-Liberal (or Yale School) theological tradition takes that same disposition towards Christianity-as-culture and brings it to bear on questions of relationships between the Church and the regime of multinational capitalism; of Christians’ relationships to other human communities; and a range of other questions.  If the role of Christians for Progressives is to alter the world, broadly conceived, the role of Christians for postliberals is to sustain the core of the Christian tradition, embodying a way of life (a culture, to use Lindbeck’s terminology), among the nations but not identical with them, for the sake of pointing the nations (bearing witness, to borrow from Acts) to a way of life beyond the horizons of the systems of unredeemed politics, philosophy, and cultural expectations.  Where those aims coincide with the aims of other such communities, we can rejoice that we share common ground, but our main thought processes in doing ethical discernment have to do not with making the world emerge into new forms by our efforts to grab its levers of power but in living in manners that throw the ideologies and the sins of the world into stark relief, in hopes that the Spirit might convict some of the sinfulness of the status quo (whether that status quo be ahead of the curve or behind it) and bring them to desire a way of life intelligible only in the resurrection of Christ.

The Complications

The tricky thing, of course, is that neither of these philosophies necessarily excludes all elements of the other.  To use myself as an example (and I’ll write simply for myself for the rest of this essay, not as someone speaking for any other post-liberal), I find both Hegel’s model and Marx’s model of history as a non-uniform progress towards individualism helpful for articulating differences between the way I experience the world and the way Dante does.  In other words, I think that Hegelian historicisms are good tools for making sense of the content of history.  But I’m not sure that movements towards individualism are always good, and I’m inclined to say that some historical developments that have advanced the ability for the individual to become one’s own law, separate from intermediate institutions as the Church and the guild and the extended family, have in fact not empowered the human soul but made us more the thralls of the State.  Likewise, although I see good things going in many iterations of Liberation and Feminist theology, I see other iterations as turning the soul over to its own worst impulses, a sort of slavery that I fear often escapes the notice of certain practitioners of materialist (or functionally materialist) philosophies.

Certainly any extended conversation with a self-named Progressive (and once again I point to Tripp and Bo’s recent series of podcast discussions as a fine exemplar of fair treatment of difference) will reveal similar reservations, and one of the singular vices of my own generation of Christian thinkers (and I’ve got three fingers pointing back at myself here) is our tendency to refuse labels for ourselves while insisting that we can brand gigantic swaths of people who disagree with us simply as “liberal” or “fundamentalist” or some other such name and therefore cease to listen to them.  The point in writing little primers like this one is not to say that “you” or “they” are in this category or that and thus unworthy of attention but to give some sort of framework in which particular thinkers make sense relative to one another.  So if in one encounter I seem to think of history in Hegelian terms but in another hold that a resistance to certain central tenets of modernity should be part of Christians’ core mission in the twenty-first century, I’ll admit that I’ve been inconsistent in terms of these categories, but I would maintain that consistency is ultimately less important than intelligibility and (more importantly) faithfulness to Christ in the terms of the “school” of theology we can most honestly call faithful.

In that spirit, once again I invite clarifications, especially from self-identified Progressives or Liberals, where my account of things muddies the water or gets things outright wrong.

General Introduction
- The end of an era
- What we want on our statues
- What’s on the blog?
- Freshman comp clichés
- More on DVD players in cars

What is a Canon?
- The Biblical Canon
- Inclusion and exclusion
- The Western Canon
- The six types of criticism and canons
- Lack of communication
- The relationship of canons and universities
- The element of suppression
- Multiple canons

The Biblical Canon
- Canons within canons
- The Lectionary as a cure
- The deuterocanonical books

Shakespeare! Shakespeare! Shakespeare!
- The center of the British canon?
- Poet or dramatist?
- Decentering Shakespeare
- Can we say who’s “better”?
- We take on the Shakespeare cottage industry
- Shakespeare and the “performative”

The American Canon
- Who’s our Shakespeare?
- Taking down Twain
- Creating the American canon (yes, I meant World War I)
- Modifying the canon
- Longfellow’s disappearance
- The broadening of American-ness

And Now…David Grubbs Talks Beowulf
- How Beowulf misleads the masses
- The dearth of copies and references
- Possible replacements/supplements
- The tyranny of anthologies
- Chaucer’s similar situation
- Exilic literature

Blank Studies and the Canon
- Affirming specialized studies
- Do studies courses go too far?
- Biting the hand that feeds you
- Using studies tools in service of the canon
- A whiter shade of pale

The Canon and the Classroom
- How to shove it all in?
- Make them do the work
- Derrida and core curriculum
- Advice for laymen

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anglo-Saxon Poetry. Ed. S.A.J. Bradley. New York: Everyman, 1995.

Beowulf. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Norton, 1993.

Derrida, Jacques. Deconstruction in a Nutshell. Ed. John D. Caputo. New York: Fordham UP, 1996.

Dickinson, Emily. Collected Poems. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York: Tribeca, 2011.

Felix. Felix’s Life of Guthlac. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Tribeca, 2011.

Freer, Coburn. The Poetics of Jacobean Drama. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.

Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, 2002.

Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. Trans. Andrew Galloway. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan U Medieval P, 2006.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. Trans. Bernard Bosanquet. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Hemingway, Ernest. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner, 1998.

Lauter, Paul. Canons and Contexts. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Poems and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 2000.

Lydgate, John. The Troy Book. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan U Medieval P, 1998.

Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. New York: Norton, 2004.

Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 2008.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2008.

—. Pudd’nhead Wilson. Lawrence, Kansas: Digireads, 2005.

Wilson, Harriet. Our Nig. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

The Christian Humanist crew got an email from Ford Seeuws,  listener and friend of Michial Farmer, last week, and the questions were interesting enough that I wanted to deal with them at some length on the blog.  One section of his email read as follows:

A recent tweet sparked my curiosity, and I’d like to hear your thoughts on the questions it raised for me.

A gentleman posted the following: “two great myths: the newspaper model is broken and the Internet is going to save us.”

Reading that made me wonder if there may have been a similar gut reaction to the printing press after it was introduced. What was the prevailing reaction to the printing press? Did people think it was going to go away? Do you think the printing press and the internet are analogous in the scope of their influence?

What do you guys think about the new media? About the influence of the internet and blogs on journalism and the future of news in general?

As far as I can tell historically (and I’ll rely on our readers to correct me if I’m wrong here), there wasn’t a great deal of reflection on technology in its own right in the fifteenth century when Gutenberg and Caxton and company were doing their thing.  In those times people were certainly excited about intellectual changes, but with regards to the tools by which folks delivered those changes to one another, the impression I get from reading around is that people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, by and large, considered those tools media in a fairly straightforward sense: they were tools by which the content (i.e. the important stuff) got from hither to thither, simply the middle term between the two.

More sophisticated reflections on tools as epistemologically significant seem to start around the career of Francis Bacon, who I think of as one of the first great technological thinkers, and in the ensuing centuries, folks like Giambattista Vico and G.W.F. Hegel follow his lead in Vico’s The New Science and Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, both of which explore in fairly lengthy passages the strong changes in thinking that come with movable type and inexpensive printing.  Hegel especially advances the idea that each historical epoch derives its particular character not only from the “great men” who drive its major events (though he does write a fair bit about great men) but also from the spiritual and material conditions within which and against which people had options to think.

Both Vico and Hegel are marked by a fairly thoroughgoing progressivism, so while they both acknowledged that history includes bad phenomena as well as good, they tend to think of them as “setbacks” in a story that is in large part heading towards something good, which Hegel famously called universal freedom.  With the coming of Karl Marx, the first shades of suspicion crop up, though his suspicion does not extend to that inarticulable reality that will come after the revolution.  Really Friedrich Nietzsche starts the industry of being skeptical of the progress of ideas.  His writings on Christianity and on liberalism label them as parts of an ongoing degeneration rather than progression, not from lesser freedom to greater but from resentment of greatness to positive restraint of greatness.  As the twentieth century’s intellectual contests took shape, more often than not the descendants of Hegel and Marx, who thought of history as a grand parade headed for good things, clashed with those suspicious of that progressive metanarrative, sometimes Fundamentalist and evangelical Christians (those who had not been appropriated by Capitalist versions of Hegel’s progressivism) and sometimes by Foucaultian and other nihilist skeptics.  Technology becomes something very different depending upon where one sits: for the Marxist, each labor-saving advance means that, if a society can be done with the mental baggage that remains when a new tool comes into being, one can advance another step towards the classless society, one in which the laborer and the owner have negated one another, leaving in their wake at this point along the way the weekend, at that point the forty-hour work week, and so on.  That few Westerners can imagine a week that doesn’t have a weekend testifies to the fact that Marx has, to some extent, won.  On the other hand, for the Foucaultian, the weekend is itself a mechanism of the system’s power, turning what was once festival and recreation into another sort of work, one that doesn’t leave “the office” and “the home” separated but demands that what was once “private” life now be consumed by “public” matters.  (Foucault has a way of inspiring scare-quotes.)

What does this have to do with newspapers, you ask?  My answer is that a newspaper makes most sense not as some sort of brute fact nor primarily as a commodity, whose place in the world is exhausted by buying and selling.  The newspaper, like the printing press before it, inhabits a place in a moral world that, in my own thinking, has priority over the economic.  Whether one imagines newspapers as vehicles by which freedom expands its purview and thus advances history towards its free end or whether one imagines newspapers as just one more technological subtlety in the never-ending recurrence of the system’s exertion of power means everything for how one imagines “the end of the newspaper” or the rise of whatever comes next.

For my money, when I read writings on media ecology (that sub-discipline of philosophy and sociology which examines the ways in which media constitute the world in which we live), I prefer the progressives.  Although I’m skeptical of simplistic narratives of historical inevitability (the sort which I critiqued when I reviewed Brian McLaren’s book), when I do think about such things as newspapers and the Internet, I do tend to agree with folks like David Simon that the dead trees and easily-smeared ink aren’t the real point of the alarm, that something like democracy (which is not the Kingdom of God but does most things better than does hereditary rule) loses its particular character when those who stand to solidify their power and pass it on to hand-picked successors (the nature of hereditary rule does not always involve consanguinity) have the ability to control the information that goes to the people.  Without a robust and funded apparatus of investigation, one which in the modern world requires professionals who do not have another job to perform or children to tend to all day, the politicians have resources to spare that they can and will dedicate to presenting their own “message” to the consumer-public, and as long as people don’t see the rot, they happily ignore the rot and keep buying stuff from the rotten machine.  That’s why folks like David Simon put the decline of newspapers not with the rise of the Internet, much less with Craig’s List, but with the consolidation of newspapers in the late eighties and early nineties, the time when local ownership and control gave way to international media empires and when the moral connection to and duty to be investigators for particular communities gave way to ever-thicker profit margins.  (It’s funny how someone who at first appears, as Simon does, to be a classical Leftist becomes upon inspection a localist and in some ways a conservative.)

Among the other progressive-narrative writers who have written interesting things on media ecology in general and on newspapers and television in particular are my favorite media-ecology odd couple, Al Gore and Neil Postman.  Postman spent much of the late eighties and nineties attacking Al Gore at every turn, not for being a Democrat (Postman didn’t seem much to like Democrats or Republicans, which is part of his appeal for me) but because he was such a vocal cheerleader for the Internet.  As far as Postman was concerned, the Internet was consumerism gone mad, the device that would signal an even more massive setback for enlightenment (and the Enlightenment) than did television.  What makes Al Gore’s book great (and I’m not by any means a cheerleader for Al Gore as a politician) is that he takes as his starting point (citing Postman liberally along the way) that the character of print is to encourage linear argument and to dispel picture-thinking (ideology) in favor of rigorous deliberation, a central assertion in Postman’s own philosophy and one of the things that made him think that the Internet and its biggest cheerleader were bad for progress.  Gore’s brilliant turn is to demonstrate that the Internet, though it has the tendency to maintain and even to extend consumerism, also has the potential to realize with greater power even than dead trees with easily-smeared ink, the vision that Postman had for the newspaper, namely a form of textual discourse with global reach and a cost of entry so low as to be zero in growing parts of the world.

Between those two arguments, the call for linear textual discourse and the vocation of professional investigation and reportage, I think, along with Gore, that the Internet, conceived rightly, can and will become a vehicle for civilization (considered in a moral sense) even as it continues to feed the crass desires of the already-crass.  (Yes, Avenue Q, I acknowledge that the Internet is indeed for porn.)  As Neil Postman taught me years ago, the Internet, like all technologies, involves some sort of Faustian bargain, and whatever it brings, it won’t be a simplistic “progress.”  But to bring forth a bit of Postman that doesn’t get quoted as often, I’d also say that to be “against technology” is somewhat akin to a fish’s being “against water”–one doesn’t really have that choice, and if one opts to go “off the grid,” the preposition in the phrase already concedes that the grid is still defining the situation.  Instead, and here I’m drawing on all of these complex but progressive thinkers, whatever happens next is by definition going to be revolutionary, but the human task after any revolution is not simply to sit about and marvel at the revolution but to keep working at being human in the Brave New World.  I’d contend that part of that good humanity is a translation of the investigator/writer that necessarily changes in translation but nonetheless remains analogously related to the newspaperman of the age of print.

Nathan Gilmour has (publicly and privately) referred several times to Emergent theology—or, so I’m sure not to oversimplify a complex and varied intellectual movement, to the version of Emergent theology set forward in Brian McLaren’s latest book—as a sort of Neo-Hegelianism.

Nor is he the only critic to make that claim. McLaren’s friend Scot McKnight, writing in the March edition of Christianity Today, remarks that “Brian, though he is thinking more systematically, has fallen for an old school of thought. . . . For me, Brian’s new kind of Christianity is quite old. And the problem is that it’s not old enough.” (McKnight, it must be noted, connects McLaren not to Hegel directly but to Adolf von Harnack, but the nineteenth-century liberalism represented by von Harnack owes a big enough debt to Hegel that in making such a comparison McKnight is in effect calling McLaren a Neo-Neo-Hegelian.) The Neo-Calvinist Kevin DeYoung, meanwhile, notes that McLaren’s theological forbears are “a lot of process theologians from the last century”—another movement that never could have existed without Hegel’s progressive and evolutionary view of history.

I can neither confirm nor deny these claims; I’ve not yet read A New Kind of Christianity, nor have I read Hegel. My notions of what it means to be a Hegelian have been formed mainly from people like Kierkegaard who write in conscious rebellion against him—hardly the most accurate or charitable way to learn a person’s ideas. I still haven’t read him, but at least I’ve now read a sympathetic reader’s account of him (Walter Kaufmann, in From Shakespeare to Existentialism), and I am going to attempt to delineate what I think Gilmour and others mean when they call McLaren a Neo-Hegelian.

First, a disclaimer. My knowledge of Hegel is, obviously, second-hand and limited. Kaufmann himself would be disgusted at this project; he notes scornfully that of the “analysts, pragmatists, and existentials” who criticize Hegel, “very few indeed have read as many as two of the four books that Hegel published.” He spends more than thirty pages savaging Karl Popper’s chapter on Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies, a masterpiece, we’re told, of shoddy scholarship that relies not on primary texts but on Scribner’s Hegel Selections.

I am even worse, so I will attempt to keep my criticisms of Hegel himself to a minimum. My perceptions of the Emergent Church’s utilization of Hegelian thought is less ill-informed, but they by no means come from an expert. Input from actual experts in Hegel and/or McLaren would be much appreciated.

I should also note that I have nothing in particular against McLaren, that I read A New Kind of Christian in graduate school when I was struggling with reconciling Christianity and poststructural philosophy and that I found it quite helpful. If I’ve turned away from my interest in such a reconciliation now, it doesn’t imply any particular judgment on those who have not; I think what the Emergent Church is doing has value, even if it’s only as a dialectical tension for more traditionalist forms of Christian theology. So I hope no one reads this as an attack on McLaren or anyone else.

I was surprised how complimentary of Hegel Kaufmann is, given his many connections to existentialism. (His are the canonical translations of Nietzsche and Buber, and he edited the excellent anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre.) But he seeks to destroy the myth of Hegel that has built up in academic and popular circles at least since Kierkegaard and Marx revolted against him. He admires Hegel because of Hegel’s attacks on Christianity, frankly, which means that the relatively religiously conservative among us may be biased against Hegel for entirely different reasons after reading Kaufmann’s account.

But the connections to the Emergent Church come rather naturally. Hegel is one of the great proponents of what we today would call political liberalism, positing that “man’s freedom to develop his humanity and to cultivate art, religion and philosophy” is made possible by the State, in fact “are possible only in ‘the State.’” This does not seem to me a ridiculous idea—though it could easily result in a blind liberalism, especially once you throw religion into the mix. (In its rebellion against the “religious right,” the “religious left” strikes me as equally infantile and reactionary.)

One of the major tenets of the Emergent Church—one of its most attractive tenets, in my view—is so-called narrative theology, the belief that (to put it simply) the Bible should not be understood as a series of propositions to be affirmed or denied but rather as a story told by God. McLaren himself notes on his website that narrative theology has much in common with process theology, and he’s right: they both flow forth from Hegelian views of history.

“Hegel,” says Kaufmann, “like Augustine, Lessing, and Kant before him and Comte, Marx, Spengler, and Toynbee after him, believed that history has a pattern and made bold to reveal it.” He is separated from these other thinkers mainly by two components of his thought: (1) the idea that history is steadily improving; and (2) his refusal to make real predictions about the future. Kaufmann notes that Hegel lived totally in the present, which in his case meant that he viewed the 6,000 years of recorded history were aiming directly at him, his time, and his thought. (Neither Kaufmann nor I mean this to sound as self-centered as it probably does.)

Narrative and process theology seem also to take this viewpoint, especially once one incorporates progressive revelation into the mix; if the world is not getting steadily better for the narrative or process theologian, we at least know more about God and Christ than any generation that came before us—again, not necessarily in a self-centered way. What else would “narrative” and “process” mean? As the story progresses, there is more story to consider, and if this is indeed a narrative or a process, we’re headed toward a particular end, which God either knows (traditional Christianity) or can make a pretty good guess about (openness theology).

There appears to be a blithe optimism in Hegel’s view of history that I’m not sure I can accept. Says Kaufmann:

His attitude depends on his religious faith that in the long run, somewhere, somehow freedom will and must triumph: that is Hegel’s “historicism.” Those of us who lack his confidence should still note that he does not believe that things are good because they succeed, but that they succeed because they are good. He finds God’s revelation in history.

So do I, obviously, but the revelation I see in history is primarily negative; what seems to triumph on earth is not what is good but what is ugly, unjust, and debased. (Tune into MTV any given night and let me know what you think.) This is the reason behind the traditional Christian belief in the Second Coming of Christ—this world is not, in fact, steadily improving, but staying the same or getting worse, and we need a deus ex machina to rescue us. I believe this; the Emergent Church seems to believe it less and less as time goes on. I think there’s a steady Hegelianism behind that disbelief.

McLaren’s alleged Hegelianism may also explain the curious fact that, as many reviewers have noted, his “new kind of Christianity” is in fact not all that new, that it rings strikingly true with traditional nineteenth-century liberalism. But if we believe in progressive revelation, McLaren must claim that his thoughts are new—otherwise, he wouldn’t be a progressive theologian. Hegelianism demands a denial of Hegelianism.

The most interesting section of Kaufmann’s Hegel discussion, for me, was the chapter on “The Young Hegel and Religion,” which examines a series of early essays by Hegel collected under the title Early Theological Writings, a title which Kaufmann dislikes:

Are these early papers really theological? Only insofar as Webster defines one meaning of theology as “the critical, historical, and psychological study of religion and religious ideas.” By the same token, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Nietzsche’s Antichrist, and Freud’s Future of an Illusion could also be called “theological writings”—which would certainly be most misleading.
Hegel’s essays are not antireligious but consistently depreciate theology in any customary sense of that word.

I don’t think it would be fair to call most of the Emergent writings I’ve read “anti-theological theology,” but many of the things Kaufmann reports about Hegel’s religious beliefs seem to apply strikingly to many Emergent thinkers. Allow me to quote Hegel himself: “Objective religion is fides quae creditur, . . . can be systematized, presented in a book or a lecture; subjective religion expresses itself only in feelings and acts. Subjective religion is all that matters.” In this assertion we see the common Emergent distaste for systematic theology—always opposed against narrative theology—which reaches its apex in a pitting of Christ against Paul. (I am not, please note, accusing McLaren or any other individual of such a move.)

Notice also that Hegel’s attack on theology leads to his own “new kind of Christianity”; Kaufmann notes that “he is opposed not only to theology but also to all Christian institutions—not only to the Catholic Church, for which he never developed any sympathy, but also to the Reformation.” Certainly we see a similar opposition in the three-tiered view of history McLaren suggests in A New Kind of Christian—the Catholic Church represents the premodern world; the Reformation represents the modern world; and that “new kind of Christianity” represents some form of Hegel’s “subjective religion,” freed from the strictures of intellectual or systematic theology.

In the end, Hegel’s attack on traditional Christianity comes from the same place as all theological liberalism; for Christianity to be valid in Hegel’s eyes (and in von Harnack’s, Whitehead’s, Schleiermacher’s, Tillich’s, et al), it “must not contain anything that universal human reason does not recognize—no certain or dogmatic claims which transcend the limits of reason, even if their sanction had its origin in heaven itself” (Hegel’s words). In other words, for Christianity to be valid, it must conform to the premises of the Enlightenment—nearly every heresy of the past three hundred years has flowed forth from this pronouncement.

To their credit, I don’t see this attitude in Emergent theologians, which may be where their progressive theology differs from the progressive theology of past movements. The postmodern mind is no great friend to the Enlightenment. With this in mind—and if McKnight and DeYoung are to be believed about A New Kind of Christianity—it may be more correct for McLaren to refer to A New Kind of Hegelianism. From what I’ve been told, it takes an old view and makes minor tweaks to an existing critique of traditional Christianity.

And again, if I’ve got Hegel or McLaren wrong, please let me know. I am open for correction.