...
When viewed not from the contemporary theologian’s ghetto but from a broader historical perspective, one that includes the consequences of theological ideas in practice, arguably the single most important element in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theology has been missed or ignored, with few scholars even noting it and even fewer recognizing its broader significance. Schleiermacher’s masterpiece, Der Christliche Glaube, or The Christian Faith, is rightly regarded as one of the great works in Christian theology and the founding work of modern theology. Attention has been lavished upon countless details of his theology but no systematic analysis has been given to the simple fact that Schleiermacher is the first theologian who is both recognized as a great Christian theologian and who accepts the crucial dogmatic position enunciated by Marcion: the rejection of the Old Testament as Christian Scripture and the explicit elimination of Judaism as a constitutive part of Christianity. [emphasis added] The fact that this position has received practically no serious, systematic treatment in its connection to Marcion is remarkable. For Schleiermacher’s Marcionism must be a crucial part of any answer to the question, why has Marcion been of such interest, even if largely subterranean, in modern theology?
...
Um ... Emil Brunner didn't miss it when he wrote The Mediator roughly a century ago. Factor in the Marcionite element in Schleiermacher's formative theological writings, and their influence on liberal German Protestantism, and it's possible to say that neither the late Richard Taruskin nor John Borstlap are necessarily right in dismissing George Steiner's suggestion in In Bluebird's Castle that the Holocaust could be seen as a culmination of a battle between advocates of Mosaic religions and Eurocentric paganism. Much as I have loved Taruskin's work I think he gave Steiner's work short shrift. I can understand being skeptical of a partisan of that Old Time Art Religion because I am, too. But I mention this for a reason longtime readers won't struggle to understand.
But what Loncar has pointed out, among others, is that the elephant in the room about Schleiermacher in particular and liberal Protestant in general is how anti-Judaic it has been, how eager German liberal Protestantism has been to shuffle off the Hebrew Bible and completely sever Christianity from any and all forms of Judaism. On the one hand Loncar's observation is not only not original it even suggests a possibility that he hasn't (maybe?) spent a ton of time engaging evangelical and neo-orthodox rejections of the Schleiermacher project. Pointing out that the liberal Protestant project in Europe was devoted to purging Christianity of all models of atonement predicated on Jewish sacrificial rites that were consider "savage", "barbaric" and "primitive" was one of the big over-arching complaints that emerged in Emil Brunner's The Mediator back in the last century. While conservative Christians express anti-Judaic sentiments with a heavy dose of supercessionism (no, I'm not going to explain all this for the unfamiliar in a links for the weekend, sorry), liberal Christians tend to go straight for some form of the Marcionite heresy, which says that Jesus is the real and true god and not like the evil duplicitious bloodthirsty child-murdering Jewish god. This is one of the oldest and most pernicious heresies in the history of Christian dogmatics and it's been necessary in each and every generation to reaffirm that the kinds of people who say this stuff explicitly or implicitly have shown themselves heretics. Brunner was direct, you can't call yourself an actual Christian if you dispense with what we call the Old Testament. If your only engagement with the Jewish scriptures is to say none of that matters cuz we got Jesus you're not on the same team.
Which is to say I can't take Borstlap seriously on religion because he hasn't demonstrated enough competency in any issues of dogmatics or debates about theology to take him seriously. If he has been binge-reading Reformed theologians and can wade into Bavinck's use of Schleiermacher's concept of pre-cognitive knowledge, fine, let him write about that. If he wants to discuss how Dutch Reformed theology has a mixture of pro-apartheid concepts that have been offset by Gerardus van der Leeuw's expansion of Schleiermacher's aesthetic pluralism, alright! That would be fun ... but van der Leeuw regarded African American spirituals as just as sacred and legitimate musical traditions as masses by Haydn or Palestrina. Guy Beck contended that the advocacy of real, global aesthetic pluralism that would seem a natural outworking of the ideas of Schleiermacher and Otto have not been embraced in much scholarship. Maybe Beck oversells that point but I take the point.
As I have said before, Borstlap makes theologians and thinkers like Schleiermacher and Herder into cardboard cut-out heroes and scapegoats and I have been reading contemporary scholarship tackling questions about the white supremacist defaults in 18th and 19th century European philosophers and theology. What that means is I have reason to believe that Philip Ewell has the more nuanced approach to Schenker than Borstlap has to anyone he valorizes or demonizes. When I finish the Vial book on how both Schleiermacher and Herder contributed, despite their aspirations toward pluralism and aesthetic generosity, to white supremacist categories, I may have a book report post about that.
Meanwhile, I know what I will not be reading moving forward, North American Anglican.
