Responsibility Ethics and Postliberalism: Rereading H. Richard Niebuhr's The Meaning of Revelation

Abstract

Postliberals have hailed H. Richard Niebuhr's The Meaning of Revelation as a harbinger of narrative theology. A careful reading of Niebuhr's argument, however, suggests a theological ethic that is at once attentive to the narrative formation of agency and yet distinct from postliberalism because of its attention to the divine object of Christians' stories. Niebuhr's theocentrism yields a view of narrative as opened from the inside because it requires appropriation of what he calls "external" narratives in order to do justice to the sovereignty of God. The result is a theological ethic which is sharply critical of modern conceptions of agency and yet continually sifted by contemporary insights and experience.     

Response to Langdon Gilkey's Inaugural Address at the Niebuhr Society, 22 November 2003 in Atlanta

Abstract

After applauding Professor Gilkey for focusing attention on Reinhold Niebuhr's book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, I framed my response by setting forth seven salient elements of Niebuhr's political theory. After affirming Gilkey's portrayal of the differences between our contemporary situation and that which Niebuhr addressed in the 1930s, I focused on a third characteristic of Niebuhr's thought that Gilkey neglected to mention, namely, the impact of his thought on African-American activists in their struggle for racial justice in the United States. That impact mainly pertained to his perceptive analysis of power conflicts among social groups and especially the societal power of racism. Niebuhr's sensitivity to that problem was heightened during his ministry in Detroit and thereafter. Thus, Martin Luther King, Jr, his protégé, Jesse Jackson and many others came to view Niebuhr as a major source of inspiration for their struggle. But, in spite of Niebuhr's appreciation of Gandhi and his support of King's non-violent resistance approach, they disagreed about the moral value of pacifism. Most importantly, I join with another African-American scholar in pointing out Niebuhr's uncritical paternalistic assumptions about African Americans and their struggle.     

The Contribution of Reinhold Niebuhr's ‘Moral Ambiguity’ to Contemporary Discussions on the Morality of Intervention and the Use of Force in a Post-Cold War World

Abstract

The post-Cold War world poses challenges to traditional principles guiding the ethics of the use of force. Military intervention and the current war on terror are two phenomena that challenge just war criteria such as just cause, right authority, and reasonable hope for success. The just war tradition is helpful but needs to be expanded and re-thought to address the pressing issues of our time. This paper suggests Reinhold Niebuhr's category of ‘moral ambiguity’ as a contribution to the discussion. His application of moral ambiguity to his situation during World War II and the Cold War witnesses to the depth that such a category can add to current international circumstances fraught with moral complexity. Though it too requires critique, contemporary discussions on military intervention reflect many of Niebuhr's evaluations of the ambiguity in the use of force as different global actors seek humane alternatives to provide relief to intense human suffering.     

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and the Theological Origins of Secular International Politics

Abstract

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Reinhold Niebuhr's scholarship. Many scholars have drawn upon Niebuhr's work in the run up to World War II when drawing analogies to the contemporary struggle with Islamic radicalism. This article explores Niebuhr's writings on Communism in the run up to Vietnam as another possible source for analogies to the current struggle. It concludes with an analysis of contemporary Islamic radicalism using the categories of Niebuhr's analysis. While neither period in Niebuhr's work provides a perfect analogy to the present, there are significant insights to be drawn from this later period in Niebuhr's writing.     

Pride,Sensuality and Han: Revisiting Sin from the Underside

Abstract

This paper critically reconsiders the earliest feminist critiques of Reinhold Niebuhr's doctrine of sin and sketches out succeeding developments in feminist understandings of human sin and alienation. Borrowing the concept of "han" from Korean minjung theologians to name the experience of broken-heartedness/being sinned against that the feminist literature highlights, it argues that han can be a precondition (along with anxiety) for human sin. Finally, it asks whether there is room in Niebuhr's system for an understanding of han as a precondition for sin, and concludes that there is.     

Being Wrong and Being Right: A Response to Larry Rasmussen and Robin Lovin

Abstract

Larry Rasmussen and Robin Lovin have offered compelling perspectives on Reinhold Niebuhr's legacy, asking whether he was wrong or right on the economy, and whether Stanley Hauerwas's analysis of Niebuhr's work is wrong or right. In this reply, Scott Paeth argues that Niebuhr was a complex theological thinker and social critic, and is best understood as a "pragmatic idealist" who was willing to change strategies in response to changing circumstances. He was also quintessentially a public theologian who, contrary to the arguments of Stanley Hauerwas, was a vociferous critic of his social context rather than an assimilated spokesperson for it. Finally, Paeth offers some suggestions about what Reinhold Niebuhr's legacy might mean in light of the American election of 2004.     

The Politics of the Good Samaritan

Abstract

Liberals usually misconstrue the recent political movements, worldwide, that have been motivated by fundamentalist religious ideologies. We often dismiss the representatives of these movements both morally and intellectually as fanatic, benighted anachronisms that cling to medieval absolutes. We would be better served, however, if we regard these movements and their representatives in the light of Reinhold Niebuhr's psychology of sin. The purpose of such a construal would not be the cheap, ironical pleasure of accusing fundamentalists of sin, but to provide a more nuanced grasp of their beliefs and behavior, and to open a more promising avenue in our attempts to defuse the furor and mitigate the damage caused by their movements on the national and international stage.     

THE UNRESOLVED PROBLEMS OF LATE CRITICAL THEORY

Martin Jay's sweeping account of reason in Western philosophy provides the context for understanding the crisis that the Frankfurt School thinkers faced when they spoke of the “eclipse of reason.” In the background of the thinking of the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse is a hankering for a more substantive conception of reason that bears affinities with what Hegel called Vernunft (reason), which he contrasted with Verstand (understanding). According to Jay, the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers never quite succeeded in elaborating this substantive concept of reason and grew increasingly pessimistic in the face of the self‐destruction of reason. Habermas sought to elaborate a communicative theory of rationality that did not fall into the misleading promises of Hegelian Vernunft but could nevertheless provide a normative basis for the critique of instrumental, strategic, and systems rationality—a normative basis for critical theory. Jay presents an extremely lucid account of Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative rationality. He concludes by reviewing some of the outstanding problems and questions that have been raised about the adequacy and success of Habermas's project. I seek to do justice to the strengths and weaknesses of Jay's narrative, and I focus on a number of deep, unresolved issues that confront the future of critical theory in its attempt to develop an adequate conception of rationality. I also raise concerns about what precisely is distinctive about critical theory today.     

Barack Obama's Political Theology: Pluralism,Deliberative Democracy,and the Christian Faith

Abstract

Obama won the 2008 election precisely because he crafted a political theology that enabled him to create a truly progressive Democratic Party religious and racial-ethnic minority platform that welcomed pro-choice and pro-life social-justice leaning Catholics and Evangelicals into a new coalition. His political theology was directly influenced by Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright and the black church civil rights tradition, white liberal Protestantism, his mother Ann Dunham's skepticism and free spirit, and Evangelical and Catholic leaders, advisors and opponents. Obama's best and most comprehensive statement on his political theology is his chapter on "Faith" in his New York Times No.1 best-selling autobiography The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006). Obama contends that religiously motivated people must learn the art of compromise, proportion, and how to find shared values. They must translate their religious concerns and vision for America into universal rather than religion-specific values, which must be subject to debate, amenable to reason, and applicable to people of all lifestyles and faiths or no faith at all. They should also be willing to sublimate their ultimate theological and religious convictions for the common collective good. Secular people likewise must adopt a similar approach towards religious people and activists.     

On reading the scriptures as literature

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's thought has been seen by many scholars to be derivative of German Idealism, especially Kantian critical philosophy. The present article challenges that claim by offering an analysis of Coleridge's interpretation of Francis Bacon's founding of the empirical method. Through the course of this discussion, Coleridge's understanding of the distinction between the intellective faculties of reason and understanding will be established, and will be shown to run counter to Kantian epistemology. Coleridge's dialectical approach to the role of reason in the operations of the understanding will be applied to their uses in scientific discovery, aesthetics, and religious thought. The various uses of symbolic representation in the context of these different endeavors will be given critical expression, revealing the unity of the human mind and nature, of subject and object. Ultimately, it is by appeal to the existence of God that the intelligibility of these various fields of symbolic representation are established. Coleridge's interpretation of Bacon offers a way of reconciling Baconian empiricism with Platonic Forms, in a genealogical recovery of the concealed methodology established in his Novum Organum. The overall argument proceeds critically, through a discussion of the subjective operations of the symbol-making powers of human thought, in the sciences and mathematics, in aesthetic, and in theological speculation and religious representation, revealing the Romantic origins of modernity.     

Reinhold Niebuhr: Impact and Implications

Abstract

Reinhold Niebuhr's realistic theology and ethics provided a stark contrast to the optimistic Protestant liberalism of a previous generation. His success in reshaping the political theology of his contemporaries has led some recent critics to dismiss him as simply an echo of a cultural consensus which he in fact did much to create. The quite different realities of our time suggest, however, that we cannot be Niebuhrian realists simply by repeating his insights. Realism at the beginning of the 21st century has to shift its attention from the center of established moral and religious traditions to the growing edges where new institutions are being formed and new understandings of the human good are coming into focus. Such thinking runs the risk of what Niebuhr would call "utopianism," but a Christian realist in the 21st century will be someone who takes all of those possibilities seriously, in contrast to 20th-century realists who attempted to deal with the pace and unpredictability of change by returning all political questions to the management of the nation-state system.     

Political Phenomenology: Radical Democracy and Truth

Abstract

In light of the "theological turn" in recent phenomenology, a question arises for contemporary thought of how the relationships among philosophy, religion, and democratic politics might be recontextualized and understood from a specifically phenomenological perspective. Essential in addressing this question is a critical examination of the method of reduction, or epoche instituted by Edmund Husserl as the original, core practice of phenomenology. Reinterpreting the epoche in terms of its social, historical, and political dimensions, later phenomenologists Enzo Paci and Jan Patocka demonstrate how phenomenology's conception of truth is necessarily coordinated with a commitment to collective democratic praxis. In Paci, the practice of epoche initiates critical resistance to ideological and idolatrous social and political forms through contrast with the infinite openness of truth's real universality. In Patocka, phenomenological method as applied to historically-embedded religious and philosophical traditions helps to clarify what in particular distinguishes democratic from autocratic forms of life. By drawing the insights of Paci and Patocka into conjunction, a new conception emerges of the unique religio— the collective, existential commitment— of phenomenology as such: to express the experience(s) of truth through democratic praxis in collaboration with other analogous philosophical, religious and scientific traditions.     

A Religious Response Veiled in a Presidential Address: A Theological Study of Bush's Speech on 20 september 2001

Abstract

The speech met the moment. The moment was like none experienced before. The speech transformed a presidency and rallied a nation. But what was this pivotal response to a critical moment in American history? Was it a call to a just and holy war? Is God really on the president's ‘side’? This article analyzes the speech delivered by President George W. Bush on 20 September 2001, to a joint session of Congress and to a troubled nation. It was a speech that depended on intimations of righteous indignation, a clear demarcation of good and evil, and a God who is not neutral. The article looks at the religious themes overtly and subtly stated in this speech, to discern what was actually a religious response to a global crisis that took the form of a presidential address.     

Convictions,Loyalties and the Secular State

Abstract

The article examines the relationship between communal religious identity and the secular, liberal state. It addresses the concern that religious allegiance undermines an individual's or group's political loyalty. The liberal secular state is threatened when a religious community participates in public discussion because this challenges the positioning of religious belief as personal and private. Currently this issue is brought into sharp focus by the identities of Muslim people although it is by no means restricted to this religious group. The early Christians negotiated the difficulties of loyalty to the empire and worship of the one true God as uniquely divine. The work of William Cavanaugh and Maleiha Malik is utilized to argue that religious communities can participate in public discussions in secular liberal states while living by narratives not shared by these polities. In fact religious communities can deepen the moral discussions of liberal secular states by bringing to its instrumental rationalism convictions established on alternate beliefs and narratives about the human condition. The recognition of the public role of religions need not induce panic in the liberal secular state and may secure religious communities sufficiently to allow mature, critical debate and discussion of their loyalties.     

Salafism in Modern Egypt: Panacea or Pest?

Abstract

The aim of the article is to introduce the reader to the nature of Salafism in Egypt and its growing influence on the population. It sets out to explore the degree to which Egypt's current Salafi networks may justifiably be described as a Saudi Arabian phenomenon, and as promoting behaviours that clash with Egyptian religious and cultural traditions. The paper is divided into three sections: (1) It begins with an overview of what Salafism means in the modern global context; (2) It briefly describes Salafism's development in Egypt since the early twentieth century; (3) It explores the ways in which Salafism acts in concert with, as well as confronts, Egypt's cultural and religious traditions.     

Agamben and the Migrations of Glory

Abstract

In the American political imagination, there is a longstanding and wide-ranging discussion about the separation of church and state. Though Americans argue about whether it should be a ‘‘high wall,’’ or whether certain ‘‘breaches’’ in it might be desirable, they all take ‘‘separation’’ to describe an institutional arrangement. From Giorgio Agamben's perspective, however, ‘‘separation’’ is an image that conceals much more than it reveals about the religious character of the state and the global economy. Agamben traces ‘‘the migrations of glory’’ from church, to state, to global capitalism. For part of this task, Agamben accepts Michel Foucault's diagnostic approach to power. By one reading, certainly, governmentality has us in its grip. But now government itself is overshadowed by the power of global capitalism. While Foucault sought only to make us ‘‘a little less governed,’’ Agamben is interested in a deeper iconoclasm and a greater emancipation. According to Agamben, our less-than-free condition can be illuminated by reflection on: (1) the state of exception and the camp, which are only made possible by a form of idolatry in which the sovereign assumes to themself a power that they should not have; (2) On another of the ‘‘maps’’ drawn by Agamben, however, there is a further ‘‘migration of glory,’’ away from national sovereignty, toward postmodern global capitalism; (3) The Coming Community provides the barest sketch of Agamben's hope for a remedy, while his reading of Paul's Letter to the Romans in The Time that Remains brings a more visible kind of messianic expectation or vocation back into the discussion of political life. A concluding section discusses five sorts of questions that might be put to Agamben about the overall shape of his project.     

Was Fichte a Remonstrant?

On reading Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation (1806–7), one is struck by the numerous references to religion it contains. The religious aspect of Fichte's writing is interesting in itself as it touches upon wider issues of theology and political thought, but it is also surprising given that Fichte had been labeled an atheist. The purpose of this article is to explore the ‘religious’ aspect of the Addresses looking specifically at the relationship between Fichte's work and the idea of ‘a chosen people.’ I argue that though not restricted to Reformed theology or even to the Christian faith, the idea of a chosen people can be found in Fichte's work but that it cannot be understood in a Lutheran nor Calvinistic manner but rather through the teachings of Jacob Arminius and the Remonstrants.     

Muslim Theologies of Solidarity and Disavowal and the Challenge of Religious Pluralism

ABSTRACT

Rawls' conception of political liberalism does not reckon exclusivist salvation religions to be, for that reason alone, unreasonable. He posits, however, that exclusivist doctrines of salvation are likely to become more generous in their views of the religious other with the experience of toleration. While the religious welcome toleration by the majority, relaxation of doctrines of salvation dilutes the urgency of religious truth, and so reduces a religion's ability to justify its existence. Paradoxically, political toleration creates a countervailing demand within a religious community to articulate more precisely what is intolerable in the religious other. This paper explores the dialectic between toleration and nontoleration in the history of Muslim sects and suggests that this history offers lessons on the kinds of strategies that can be successful in promoting religious tolerance in a Muslim society, as well as the limits that might reasonably be expected in those societies.     

‘Global Capitalism’ vs ‘End of Socialism’: Crux Theologica? Engaging Liberation Theology and Theological Postliberalism

Abstract

This article offers a critical assessment of two political theologies: liberation theology and theological postliberalism, as represented by the writings of Gustavo Gutiérrez and John Milbank. Paying particular attention to the concepts of society and Church, a partial defence of liberation theology is offered in tandem with a critical affirmation of some aspects of postliberal political theology. The discussion is then contextualized historically in relation to the ‘victory’ of global capitalism and the ‘end’ of socialism. I conclude that the renewal of political theology in the twenty-first century will aim to overcome the ironic crux theologica of this article's title.