Book Review Series: 'The God of Israel and Christian Theology' - Detailed Review: Chapter Three
Christian Divinity Without Jewish Flesh
Summary of the Book So Far
In the first post, we introduced R. Kendall Soulen's "The God of Israel and Christian Theology," highlighting his critique of supersessionism—the belief that the Church has replaced Israel in God's plan. Soulen emphasizes the need for a non-supersessionist theological approach that respects the ongoing covenant with Israel. The second post explored the logic and limitations of the standard canonical narrative, which traditionally frames the Bible's story around creation, fall, redemption in Christ, and final consummation. This narrative often neglects the significance of Israel and promotes a supersessionist bias. By reexamining this framework, we aim to integrate the Hebrew Scriptures and Israel's history into a more cohesive and respectful theological approach, addressing the deeper issues within Christian theology as identified by Soulen.
From the early church period to the Enlightenment, a consistent view of Christian history was largely based on the standard canonical narrative. This standard view wasn't questioned much and formed the foundation for Christian thought. However, during the Enlightenment, new ideas emerged that challenged this standard view, leading to major changes in Christian theology. These changes aimed to explain and defend Christian faith using new philosophical ideas.
Soulen’s book doesn't go into all the details of this historical development but focuses on how these changes impacted the idea of supersessionism—the belief that the Christian church replaced Israel in God's plan. Soulen examines the works of philosophers Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher to show how they tried to keep parts of the traditional Christian beliefs while updating others to fit new intellectual and religious ideas. Kant and Schleiermacher kept the main story of creation, fall, redemption, and final consummation but removed the importance of Israel's role, viewing it as outdated.
Early modern theologians intensified the structural supersessionism already present in traditional Christian theology. They saw Israel's role as secondary and unnecessary, focusing more on the dramatic story between God and humanity. Soulen points out that by cutting out the Jewish background, these modern theologians made it easier to view Christianity as completely separate from Judaism. This separation allowed a new, often more aggressive form of Christian superiority over Jews to take hold, often called Christian Triumphalism. Previously Christian theologians accorded the Jews a slender but enduring rationale for their the existence as a distinct non-Christian people in the midst of Christen-dom. But once Christian theologians ceased to identify God as the God of Israel, that rationale disappeared. As a result, Jewish identity and religion were seen as outdated, something that would eventually disappear within a dominant Christian culture.
This shift also caused Christian theology to move further into abstract, spiritual concepts, losing touch with the concrete realities of the Hebrew Scriptures and the historical context. This not only distanced theology from Jewish history but also from the real-life figure of Jesus, a Jew from Nazareth. Soulen argues that to renew Christian theology, it must reconnect with its Jewish roots and the broader story of God's relationship with Israel.
Immanuel Kant’s Religion
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher who is considered one of the most influential figures in Western philosophy. He spent his entire life in the city of Königsberg, in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). Kant's work primarily focused on epistemology (the study of knowledge), metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics.
Immanuel Kant's relationship with religion and Christianity is complex and nuanced. While he was deeply influenced by his Lutheran upbringing, his philosophical work often approached religion from a rational and ethical perspective rather than from traditional theological viewpoints.
Kant's major work on religion is "Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason" (1793), where he explores the role of religion in moral life. In this work, Kant argues that true religion is essentially moral and that religious doctrines should be interpreted in ways that support ethical living. He believed that moral principles are grounded in human reason, not in divine revelation.
While Kant was not a traditional religious believer in the orthodox sense, his work deeply engaged with religious concepts and had a profound influence on the way religion, particularly Christianity, is understood and practiced. His emphasis on reason, moral autonomy, and ethical living continues to shape theological discussions and religious philosophy today.
Immanuel Kant spent a lot of his career thinking about religion. His key work on this topic, "Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone" (1793), has two main goals: to outline a religion based on reason and to show that true religion is grounded in reason. Kant also tries to demonstrate that traditional Christianity can be respected by rational people if it allows itself to be seen through the lens of rational religion. For Kant, the question is: what part of traditional Christianity can be interpreted rationally, and what part is devoid of lasting religious meaning?
Kant's account of rational religion rests upon the foundation of his analysis of universal moral experience. Every person has know-edge of a moral law that demands obedience for its own sake. Kant argues that everyone knows an internal moral law that we should follow just because it's right, not to gain happiness. He believes that people who follow this moral law deserve to be happy. Since reality shows that moral people aren't always happy, Kant suggests we need to believe in God and an afterlife to reconcile morality with happiness. This idea forms the base of what he calls rational religion.
In his work, Kant outlines this rational religion in four books. The first discusses human nature and evil, the second covers the nature of Jesus, the third talks about the church and the rule of God, and the fourth contrasts true service to God with false service. Kant believes human nature is originally good but is corrupted by a basic principle of evil, which he calls "radical evil." This corruption flips our natural inclination toward good, leading us to act out of selfishness.
Kant insists that each person is responsible for their own moral failures and must work to atone for their past actions. After accepting the moral ideal, the "new person" bears the suffering that comes with striving for the moral good. These sufferings are actually the old self's punishments, providing a way to take responsibility for past wrongs. Each person must obey the moral law or fall miserably short of his or her vocation as a being mysteriously endowed with duty, freedom, and dignity. Yet each person fails to obey the moral law because of the radical evil of human nature, a fact for which each person bears personal responsibility. As a result, each person must be presumed to have already forfeited what would otherwise be the rational hope of a blessed immortality from the hands of a benevolent Creator-Consummator.
In Book Two, Kant proposes a solution to the problem of radical evil in the form of what might be called the christology of rational religion. By picturing this ideal pattern as a person who encounters all our trials in their most extreme form and who victoriously overcomes them, we retain a sure guide for our own moral conduct. By practical faith in this ideal, that is, by conforming our conduct to it, we effect the revolution or rebirth necessary to fulfill our moral vocation.
But this leaves unaddressed the problem of guilt incurred before conversion to the moral archetype, a problem that Kant takes with great seriousness. To solve this problem, Kant deduces a rational doctrine of justification. Because Kant holds that moral debt cannot be transferred from one person to another, he reasons that each person must atone for his or her own past life. This happens when after conversion the "new creature" willingly shoulders the sufferings that inevitably accompany the moral life for the sake of the good, although these sufferings are really due as punishments to another, namely, the "old creature."
In Book Three, Kant considers the establishment of an ethical commonwealth and the possibility of its progress to a point where "at last the pure religion of reason will rule over all". Kant holds that human reason necessarily forms the idea of an ethical commonwealth and recognizes a moral obligation to belong to it. In principle, therefore, a universal moral commonwealth should spring spontaneously into being through the free obedience of each person to the moral law.
Kant's vision of a moral community involves a universal moral society formed by people freely obeying the moral law. This society would eventually eliminate the need for religious rituals and laws. True religion, in Kant's view, focuses on reducing reliance on external religious practices and emphasizing the internal moral law.
In light of this situation, Kant foresees the necessity of a pact of cooperation between pure rational religion and the historical faiths that are based upon purported revelations. The success of the pact, in Kant's view, depends upon recognition that moral religion takes precedence over statutory faith at every point. One is justified in saying that "the kingdom of God is among us" when at last a community has been established that acknowledges and teaches the supremacy of the moral law over mere statutory law. God will be "all in all" when the exclusive sovereignty of moral religion of reason will at last wholly eliminate the need for statutory faith.
In the last book, Kant distinguishes true from false service of religion. The false servant of religion elevates statutory religion above the claims of the moral law and thereby cripples the moral enterprise of the human race. The true servant, in contrast, subordinates statutory faith to the service of moral religion.
Overall, Kant's rational religion reshapes traditional Christian beliefs to align with a universal moral experience. This challenges Christianity to prove its enduring religious significance based on rational religion, putting moral law at the center of religious life rather than historical or traditional doctrines.
Kant judges Christian doctrine's moral worth, dividing it into three categories: positive, neutral, and negative. For Kant, positive elements include teachings that align with moral laws, such as the story of creation, fall, redemption, and the end times. Kant finds much of value in Genesis 3, not of course as a historical report but as an illustration of everyone's fall into a condition of radical evil. Similarly, Kant finds the ideas of final judgment and heaven and hell to be philosophically sound and morally beneficial, although their portrayal can be unsettling. He greatly respects the New Testament, particularly for its depiction of a teacher who demonstrated moral integrity even in suffering. Kant also interprets the Trinity as a useful metaphor for understanding God's relationship with humanity as Legislator, Ruler, and Judge. In these respects, Kant regards Christianity as well suited to the task of providing the positive, historical vehicle for the propagation of rational religion.
However, Kant is cautious about parts of Christianity that focus on divine grace, admitting these aspects only if they support moral law. He argues that while God might act graciously, we cannot be certain, and should assume grace is given only to the morally worthy. Thus, divine grace should complement moral living, not replace it.
Kant outright rejects elements of Christianity that hinder its role as a vehicle for rational religion. This includes doctrines that clash with basic moral principles, such as the doctrine of original sin as an inherited condition, a teaching that obviates the role of human freedom in moral action. He criticizes the preservation of outdated beliefs within the church.
The biggest issue for Kant is the portrayal of the Christian religion as though it stood in a necessary relationship to Judaism and the Jewish people.. He believes Christianity should stand on its own, focused on moral law and internal obedience rather than any ties to Jewish customs or laws. Judaism, according to Kant, is more of a political system rooted in divine legislation, hoping for a future Messiah to restore its fortunes. This political nature and the Jewish emphasis on external laws and their unique covenant with God [as the chosen people] make Judaism seem incompatible with the universal nature of Christianity. Kant regards this last belief as especially obnoxious to the character of rational religion:
Judaism fell so far short of constituting an era suited to the requirements of the church universal, . . as actually to exclude from its communion the entire human race, on the ground that it was a special people chosen by Jehovah for Himself-[an exclusiveness| which showed enmity toward all other peoples and which, therefore, evoked the enmity of all.
Kant deliberately uses the term "Jehovah" to highlight the difference between the Jewish God and the God of rational religion. By using the transliteration of the Tetragrammaton conventional in his day, Kant clearly intends to underscore the drastic distinction between the nationalistic deity of the Jewish people and the God of rational religion. He views Christianity's rejection of Jewish customs, like circumcision, as a move towards a universal faith not bound by specific laws. For Kant, the special character of Christianity comes to light precisely in the fact that it liberated its followers from servile obedience to the arbitrary statutes of Judaism and freed them for obedience to the moral law. An emblem of this, for Kant, is the church's rejection of circumcision:
The subsequent dispensing with the corporal sign which served wholly to separate this people [the Jews] from others warrants the judgment that the new faith, not bound to the statutes of the old. nor, indeed, to any statutes whatever, was to comprise a religion valid for the world and not for one single people.
By abandoning circumcision, Christianity sought to distance itself from Judaism, emphasizing its universal and spiritual nature. Kant believes this was crucial because any notion of continuity with Judaism undermines Christianity's pure moral principles. Initially, connecting Christianity to Judaism was meant to ease the transition for converts, portraying the new faith as a fulfillment of the old. Christianity thus succeeded in freeing itself from the yoke of Jewish law only to remain mired in Jewish belief. The result, in Kant's view, was nothing short of a calamity for the Christian religion. By retaining the history of the Jews as an essential part of its doctrine, the church made itself guilty of a host of absurdities:
[The] procedure [of appealing to the Jewish Scriptures], wisely adopted by the first propagators of the teaching of Christ in order to achieve its introduction among the people, is taken as a part of religion itself, valid for all times and peoples, with the result that one is obliged to believe that every Christian must be a Jew whose Messiah has come (153, italics in original).
The preservation of Jewish belief within Christianity has led to the bizarre situation in which Christians identify themselves with reference to the Jewish people and to Jewish hope! Kant criticizes Christians for maintaining Jewish beliefs and practices, arguing it leads to absurd situations where Christians identify too closely with Jewish traditions and hopes.
Another absurdity is that Christians, who ignore the statutory law of the Hebrew Scriptures, nevertheless preserve the holy book of the Jewish people as "a divine revelation given to all men." The very idea that humankind's well-being might depend upon Scriptures preserved in a poorly understood language is absurd.
Kant also challenges the idea that God's providence is evident in the survival of the Jewish people, attributing it instead to natural causes. Christians and Jews interpret this survival differently, with Jews seeing it as God's faithfulness and Christians as a reminder of their historical sins.
Kant believes that holding onto Jewish elements in Christianity is more than a misfortune; it's a catastrophe for humanity. The ills associated with Christian history are in fact the fault of the Jewish element in Christianity:
Christianity's first intention was really no other than to introduce a pure religious faith, over which no conflict of opinions can prevail: whereas that turmoil, through which the human race was disrupted and is still set at odds, arises solely from this, that what, by reason of an evil propensity of human nature, was in the beginning to serve merely for the introduction of pure religious faith, Le., to win over for the new faith the nation habituated to the old historical belief through its own prejudices, was in the sequel made the foundation of a universal world-religion.
As this astonishing passage makes clear, Kant views the preservation of Jewish thought in Christianity as the original sin of Christian history. The Jewishness of Christianity is the product of "an evil propensity of human nature," and therefore is nothing less than the historical manifestation of radical evil. The Jewish dimension of Christianity elevates statutory faith above the claims of moral religion and therefore stands at the source of the church's fanaticism, bloodthirsty hatreds, wars, and ecclesiastical tyranny.
Properly understood, the Christian church stands in no necessary connection to Judaism whatsoever. Kant elaborates this point in a footnote directed against his contemporary, the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. In a book advocating the political enfranchisement of the Jews, Mendelssohn rebuffed the demand that Jews convert to Christianity by pointing out that Judaism is the foundation of Christian religion." In reply Kant admits theologians traditionally presented Christianity as though it were grounded upon the Jewish faith. Precisely this, however, is the "weak spot" of traditional doctrine:
Mendelssohn very ingeniously makes use of this weak spot in the customary presentation of Christianity wholly to reject every demand upon a son of Israel that he change his religion. For, he says, since the Jewish faith itself is, according to the avowal of Christians, the substructure upon which the superstructure of Christianity rests, the demand that it be abandoned is equivalent to expecting someone to demolish the ground floor of a house in order to take up his abode in the second story. His real intention is fairly clear. He means to say: First wholly remove Judaism itself out of your religion (it can always remain, as an antiquity, in the historical account of the faith); we can then take your proposal under advisement. (Actually nothing would then be left but pure moral religion unencumbered by statutes.)
Kant's point could not be more plain. Christianity falls short of moral religion just insofar as it retains rudiments of Jewish belief, while it approximates to true religion just insofar as it breaks in principle with the Israelite dimension of traditional Christian faith.
Kant's critique is that Christianity falls short of being a true moral religion as long as it retains any Jewish elements. The true service of Christianity, according to Kant, lies in expelling these remnants and focusing on universal moral principles. He suggests that identifying and addressing this fault line can help Christianity adapt to modern rationality, emphasizing the triumph of universal spirit over historical particularity. This purification is not a distortion but a necessary expression of Christianity's fundamental genius.
Friedrich Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith
Next we will look at Friedrich Schleiermacher's attempt to redefine Christianity to fit with modern thought after the Enlightenment. Schleiermacher proposed that religion is essentially about human feelings and that theology is a way of expressing these feelings precisely. He argued that Christian doctrine could be understood as a specific expression of universal religious feelings centered on the redemption brought by Jesus.
R. Kendall Soulen states that Schleiermacher's understanding of the relation of philosophy and theology is examined in detail elsewhere and need not detain us within this book. Our interest once again is the impact of Schleiermacher's project on the shape of the standard model. Schleiermacher's reconstruction of Christian doctrine epitomizes the process whereby the truth of Christian faith comes to be articulated solely in terms of Jesus Christ's significance for the creaturely universal dimension of human existence, while the Israelite dimension of Christian faith is cut away altogether. This trend is especially evident in Schleierma-cher's great work The Christian Faith, which forms the basis of the following discussion.
In "The Christian Faith," Schleiermacher starts with a lengthy introduction followed by a section on the doctrine of faith. He aims to sort and clarify religious expressions, purging any foreign elements from Christian doctrine. By the end of his introduction, Schleiermacher prepares readers for a view of Christianity that has removed its Jewish roots.
The Christian Faith: The Introduction
The task that Schleiermacher sets himself in The Christian Faith is to sort, clarity, and organize the religious expressions of contemporary Protestantism in light of Christianity's distinctive essence as a particular modification of religious feeling. Schleiermacher first defines what a religious community is, then how the various communities can be distinguished from one another, and then what is the distinctive essence of Christianity.
Schleiermacher argues that all religions stem from a basic feeling of dependence on a higher power, which he calls God. The feeling of utter dependence is thus at once an awareness of God and of being a creature. God-consciousness and creature-consciousness correspond. God-consciousness is an essential component of all human experience, although it may remain dim and indistinct for long periods of time, both in the history of the individual and of the race. The feeling simply awaits the proper stimulus in order to grow into a dominant feature of individual and communal life.
Different religions show this dependence in various ways, ranging from fetishism to monotheism. They differ from one another because of the disparate ways in which they combine God-consciousness with "obiective consciousness." that is, ordinary human awareness of the world.
The different religions can be ranked in three stages according to the clarity with which God-consciousness forms the controlling moment in this union. The lowest stage is fetishism, which identifies the whence of utter dependence with a particular object of sensual experience and limits its sphere of influence to a particular sensual realm. The intermediate stage is polytheism, which dimly refers the feeling of utter dependence to a single source but represents that source with reference to a plurality of sensuous objects. The highest stage of religious consciousness is monotheism, which regards the whence of utter dependence as perfectly simple and extends its power over the whole world.
History shows only three great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He views Judaism as the most primitive monotheistic faith, still tied to old forms of worship, limiting God's love to the people of Abraham and thus betrays a lingering affinity with fetishism. Schleiermacher describes Judaism as "almost in process of extinction," while the other two still contend for mastery of the human race. Islam betrays a resemblance to polytheism by the strong influence of sensuous ideas on religious emotions. Christianity, being free of both these weaknesses, is the most highly developed religion known to history. Christianity combines awareness of God and human consciousness.
Schleiermacher sees Christianity as distinct from Judaism, emphasizing the redemption accomplished by Jesus. Redemption in Jesus is the historical origin of Christianity and the individuating factor that gives monotheistic moral God-consciousness a distinctively Christian caste. He argues that Christianity’s connection to Judaism is historical and no longer essential.
At this point, Schleiermacher's procedure has already produced two noteworthy results. First, he has substituted the philosophy of religion for the Hebrew Scriptures as the essential context for identifying the God of the Christian confession. The God of Christian confession is the whence of absolute dependence rather than the God of Israel. Second, he has transformed Christianity's relation to Judaism from an internal to an external relation. Christianity and Judaism are no longer linked by their common reference to the God of Israel but are ranged alongside one another as irreducibly distinct instantiations of monotheistic moral God-consciousness.
Schleiermacher takes up the question of Christianity's historical relation to Judaism. He acknowledges that Christianity originally stood in a special historical connection to Judaism because Jesus "was born among the Jewish people". But ultimately this connection is insignificant for the nature of Christianity. Jesus was a wholly new phenomenon in the sphere of human piety, and he founded a community that was equally discontinuous with Judaism and paganism. Even Paul, who in Galatians wrote of Abraham as the prototype of Christian faith, did not mean that Christianity was a continuation or renewal of Jewish faith. Paul's real point of view was that Jew and pagan stand equally far from God and are equally in need of Christ.
Schleiermacher puts the reader on notice that his dissolution of Christianity's special relation to the Jewish people implies two important revisions of traditional Christian doctrine, First, he indicates that the ancient Irenaean conception of a single economy of salvation from Adam to Christ must be reconstructed in such a way that no special significance is accorded to the Jewish people. In one sense, all human history may be interpreted as a striving of human nature toward Christianity.
Second, the "Old Testament" drops out entirely as an authority for Christian theology. 'The Old Testament is, after all, the production of a fundamentally different form of religious consciousness. At best, it approximates only faintly to those Christian religious emotions that are rather general in character, while "whatever is most definitely Jewish has least value". Moreover, since the New Testament is by all accounts the definitive record of Christian consciousness, the Old Testament is superfluous as an authority for the church. Later Schleiermacher suggests that the Scriptures of Israel be relegated to an historical appendix of the Apostolic Witness in order to make clear its lack of religious authority for Christianity. In their present location, the Scriptures of Israel give rise to the mistaken impression that "we must first work our way through the whole of the Old Testament if we are to approach the New by the right avenue".
Schleiermacher's work highlights his effort to reshape Christianity by stripping away its Jewish heritage and focusing on a universal religious feeling centered on Jesus.
The Christian Faith: The Glaubenslehre
Schleiermacher’s "The Christian Faith" is split into two main parts: the first deals with the general aspects of religion, and the second focuses on the specifics of Christian redemption. In Part One, Schleiermacher talks about Christian consciousness as a form of recognizing oneself as a creature dependent on a creator. This awareness expresses itself in three ways: understanding oneself, understanding God, and understanding the world. He emphasizes that the feeling of dependence shapes how Christians perceive creation, God's attributes, and the perfection of the world.
Part Two delves deeper into Christian redemption through Jesus, dividing it into discussions on sin and grace. Schleiermacher highlights how all Christian teachings connect to the awareness of redemption in Christ. The Christian story is about God's consummation of the human race through the perfection of humanity's natural capacity for God-consciousness. He explains that Jesus, the Second Adam, perfectly embodies God-consciousness and fulfills humanity's potential for this consciousness.
Schleiermacher believes Jesus's role as the Second Adam is central, highlighting a shift from Jewish traditions to a broader, more inclusive Christian faith. He argues that Jesus transcends Jewish identity, bringing a new universal message. This shift implies that Judaism and Christianity are no longer interconnected as they once were.
From the very beginning of his discussion of Christ, Schleiermacher signals his intention to shape Christian doctrine in what we previously called a Scotist direction. To recall, a Scotist account of the standard model holds that God's work as Consummator is oriented from the very beginning toward the incarnation. Schleiermacher's Scotist posture becomes clear in his preference for the title Second Adam over Redeemer as the most fitting term for Christ's person and activity. Schleiermacher's failure to give priority to the title of Redeemer may seem surprising in view of his definition of Christianity as a religion centered on the experience of redemption. Nevertheless, Second Adam is in fact much more characteristic of Schleiermacher's vision of Christ's basic role in human history.
While Redeemer is not incorrect, it suggests that Christ's religious significance is ultimately contingent upon sin. In contrast, the term Second Adam exhibits Christ's significance in God's plan in a more comprehensive and positive way by locating him in the context of God's work as the Consummator or Completer of creation.
Schleiermacher's depiction of Christ as Second Adam reinforces the impression that for him the basic trajectory of the Christian story is from creation to consummation.
Schleiermacher’s idea of final consummation envisions a future where Christianity achieves global spiritual influence, overshadowing other religions, including Judaism. Christ brings the corresponding Jewish institution to an end in its narrow nationalistic and particularistic form and replaces it with the community-forming power of his own ideal God-consciousness. He concludes that Christianity, guided by Jesus's example, will eventually lead humanity towards a perfect God-consciousness.
After Christ's death, the church continues to mediate the power of Christ's God-consciousness to the world in undiminished form. Although each Christian falls short of Christ's absolutely powerful God-consciousness, the Christian community as a whole preserves the ideal power of his piety. Schleiermacher represents final consummation as the time when the church will finally achieve the "spiritual fecundation" of the whole human race. So understood, final consummation entails the hope that Christianity will attain geographical mastery of the world and that no other religions will survive as organized fellowships alongside it.
Surveying The Christian Faith as a whole, one cannot but be impressed by two things. The first is the remarkable consistency with which Schleiermacher reconstructs Christian doctrine around a Scotist or christocentric understanding of Christ as the Second Adam. The second is the remarkable thoroughness with which Schleierma-cher rids Christian doctrine of all lingering reference to Jewish flesh.
Soulen's review of Schleiermacher’s work shows a significant effort to redefine Christianity by focusing on universal religious feelings and distancing it from its Jewish roots. This new perspective presents Christianity as the ultimate expression of human religious experience, centered on Jesus Christ's redemption.
Schleiermacher’s work is described as focusing on making every part of Christian faith about Jesus and redemption. This approach, called christocentric, places Jesus at the heart of all teachings, even viewing God's role as Consummator through this lens. Schleiermacher uses this focus to introduce his idea that understanding God is a core part of being human.
However, Soulen questions whether Schleiermacher’s focus on Jesus is enough to avoid reducing Christian faith to just a general sense of religion. Schleiermacher's broader goal seems to be making Christianity about human awareness of God. While Jesus is central in Schleiermacher's teachings, he also emphasizes the human ability to be aware of and connect with God.
Soulen points out that Schleiermacher’s followers appreciated his focus on Jesus but were concerned that his teachings drifted away from the traditional understanding of God in the Bible. They wanted to revive the connection to the biblical God while keeping Schleiermacher’s emphasis on Jesus. Soulen raises the question of whether this balance can be achieved, given Schleiermacher's tendency to simplify Christian theology into broader human spirituality.
Disembodied God
Schleiermacher and Kant both played a part in transforming Christian theology to fit the modern world by removing its Jewish elements. This process, which Soulen refers to as "de-Judaization," meant that Christianity was stripped of its Jewish roots and redefined. Schleiermacher believed that Christianity could still be coherent and meaningful even without its connection to the God of Israel.
Soulen explains that by doing this, Schleiermacher introduced a version of Christianity that seemed foreign to its Jewish aspects. Schleiermacher and Kant's emphasis on universal human connection with God continued an ancient strategy used during early Christian debates with pagans, Jews, and gnostics. They emphasized the church's legitimacy by contrasting it with Jewish spirituality and underscored God's role as Creator and Redeemer.
However, this shift had significant consequences. By subordinating or even expelling the Jewish elements from Christianity, it provided a rationale for the diminishing role of Jews in Christian theology and even in society. This led to a view where Jews were seen as a people whose time had passed, further marginalizing them.
Soulen highlights that this redefinition also led to a focus on Jesus's inner life and consciousness, moving away from the historical and public aspects of his life as presented in the Bible. This shift resulted in a loss of connection with Jesus as a Jewish figure, emphasizing instead a more abstract, universal spirituality.
In summary, Soulen's review critiques how Schleiermacher’s and Kant's efforts to modernize Christianity led to a significant departure from its Jewish roots, resulting in a theology that often overlooked the historical and cultural context of Jesus and the early church. This shift had profound implications for both Christian doctrine and the perception of Jewish people within that framework. This redefinition led to a more abstract spirituality, distancing Christian theology from its biblical and historical foundations, and highlighting the need for a renewed connection to Jewish traditions and the Hebrew Scriptures.