Tea at Trianon: "Religionless" Christianity

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

"Religionless" Christianity

From First Things:

Bonhoeffer called this way of life “religionless Christianity,” an explosive idea for his most radical interpreters. It suggested that the theological oppositions that had fractured modern thought could be overcome. Modern theology has been largely concerned with reconciling competing commitments: the value of human freedom with obedience to divine commands; the scientific account of the natural world with the doctrine of creation; the necessity of critical inquiry with the authority of revelation. Bonhoeffer hinted that these were false dichotomies. He even considered the possibility that the most intransigent of oppositions—between belief and unbelief—was perhaps not so intransigent after all.

Denying what seem like core Christian claims about God could be a way of affirming Christianity, perhaps the proper way for modern man. Thus the paradox of a theology without God. Paul van Buren’s The Secular Meaning of the Gospel was the movement’s first widely read publication. Van Buren, then a theologian at Temple University, argued that traditional religious language no longer makes sense in modern societies. The term God, he wrote in 1963, is “either meaningless or misleading.” Since it cannot tell us anything about reality as such—at least, nothing that can be made intelligible empirically—its only function is to express our attitudes, preferences, and feelings. And if that’s what the word God does, the essential ethical message of Christianity can be expressed without reference to the divine. One can be secular—living and believing without reference to a transcendent Supreme Being—and still be Christian.

Van Buren thought he had found a secular way of preserving the moral message of the New Testament, but to Thomas Altizer, a young theologian at Emory University, such an approach was theologically inadequate. It implied that modern Christianity should come to terms with the godlessness of secularity, showing how it can be accommodated in a secular interpretation of the Bible, rather than reject God outright. It will not suffice “to merely accept the death of God,” Altizer countered. Christians “must will the death of God.” (Read more.)