Andrew Dole

Is sceptical religion adequate as a religion

I argue that J. L. Schellenbergs sceptical religion faces two problems of religious adequacy. The first has to do with its relationship to the goal of bringing persons into proper alignment with an ultimate good; the second, with the desideratum of sceptical religions becoming sufficiently well-established as to be a vehicle for the accomplishment of great things on the stage of history. I argue that actual sceptical religion would need to accommodate itself to the requirements of historical existence, and that such accommodation might well lead to a blurring of the distinctions Schellenberg draws between ‘sectarian’ and sceptical religion.

The Case of the Disappearing Discourse: Schleiermacher’s Fourth Speech and the Field of Religious Studies*

factor influencing to a greater or lesser degree human existence, has no real existence. It is only religion in some organized form that we encounter in the history of mankind. To be sure, this tendency towards organization is part of the general disposition of mankind to unite for the purpose of carrying out aims felt to be common, but the reality of the tendency is for that reason all the more worthy of consideration. Thus Jastrow associated Schleiermacher with theories that ignore religion’s “tendency towards organization,” presenting religion instead as a collection of abstract principles or emotions, or indeed perhaps even as a single emotion—a “simple feeling of dependence” (which might invite comparison to a dog’s feeling of dependence on its master). That part of Schleiermacher’s thought whose task is precisely to bridge the gap between an “essence” describable in abstract terms, on the one hand, and the characteristics of actual religious communities and traditions, on the other (including their particular forms of social organization, doctrines, and rituals, and their entanglement with civic life), is so thoroughly absent that reflecting on religion’s “tendency towards organization” represented for Jastrow a new scholarly endeavor. These passages constitute one of the most poignant moments in the history of the reception of Schleiermacher’s work: in this “Classic in Religious Studies,” the fourth of Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion—and the whole of Schleiermacher’s writing on the social dynamics of religion that it represents—has disappeared without a trace. 75 Ibid., 152. 76 Ibid., 169. Schleiermacher and the Field of Religious Studies 25 vii. summary: on schleiermacher’s postmortem intellectual development The heirs of Hegel had developed an accessible summary judgment on Schleiermacher’s understanding of religion that fit neatly into a powerful developmental narrative. It should surprise no one that attempts by scholars of religion outside the theological disciplines to lay out the history of theology should show the influence of this interpretive tradition. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to review the extent to which the “subjectivism” critique had drifted away from its initial moorings by the beginning of the twentieth century. Hegel and his first students were convinced that any adequate scholarly account of religion should meet two requirements. First, such an account should make it clear that religion provides “objective knowledge of God”; second, it should issue a negative judgment on religious diversity and incorporate a drive toward the state of affairs in which the entire human race belongs to a single, “universal” religion (Christianity). Schleiermacher’s account of religion, in their eyes, provided for neither of these. The “subjectivism” of his account referred, for them, not only to its epistemological inadequacy but also to the fact that Schleiermacher seemingly condemned religion to a perpetual plurality, historicity, and sociological malleability. The most interesting (and accurate) refinement of this charge saw Schleiermacher insinuating contingent, historical elements into religion too intimately for the goal of “absolute” religion to be realized—in effect “obstructing” the universalization of Christianity by “protecting” its diversification by local conditions. Jastrow, like Pfleiderer, noted the epistemological “subjectivism” of Schleiermacher’s account of religion, but since “objective knowledge of God” did not figure among his concerns, he found this to be no cause for lament. His concern, rather, was that scholarship acknowledge religion’s embeddedness in historical particularity and contingency, in particular so that the historical development of religion could be understood. As a result of the changes the “subjectivism” charge had experienced between Hegel and Pfleiderer, by Jastrow’s day the problem with Schleiermacher’s account of religion was not that it validated a lamentable religious diversity by binding religion too closely to the cultural and the historical but that it effectively precluded reflection on religion’s entanglements with history and culture. There is not a direct line of influence, so far as I can see, from The Study of Religion to Proudfoot, although Jastrow’s text had been reissued by the American Academy of Religion five years before the publication The Journal of Religion 26 of Religious Experience. Between Jastrow and Proudfoot lie two influential trends in Schleiermacher interpretation. The first of these comprises characterizations of Schleiermacher presented by Karl Barth and other partisans of Christian neo-orthodoxy; the second, the repercussions of the ambivalent presence of Schleiermacher in the pages of Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. Proudfoot’s “protectivism” charge grows out of the second of these, as it assumes a fundamental continuity between Schleiermacher’s and Otto’s accounts of religion, and concerning Otto’s desire to “protect” Christianity from naturalist critique there is no debate. Nevertheless, against the nineteenth-century background sketched in this essay, the recent history of Schleiermacher interpretation assumes an interesting character. Combining the idea that Schleiermacher says nothing about religion’s social or historical side with Proudfoot’s “protectivism” charge takes what Pfleiderer and Jastrow had noted as a mere defect of Schleiermacher’s account of religion and portrays this as a strategically essential component of that account—essential, that is, to the project of resisting the scientific investigation of religion. There is considerable irony to this development, for, so far as I know, Schleiermacher was not suspected of harboring “protectivist” leanings until his work came to be conflated with Otto’s—in fact, Barth more clearly represented the “majority report” of the interpretive tradition when he accused Schleiermacher of betraying Christianity by describing it as an aspect of human culture rather than as something established by divine revelation. So over the course of the past century the purported “subjectivism” of Schleiermacher’s account has grown considerably in historical significance and gravity and has in fact acquired a new and morally significant motivation. No longer the product of a simple theoretical myopia, it now represents nothing less than the core 77 By Proudfoot’s day the idea that Otto was a “faithful follower” of Schleiermacher was well established in the secondary literature. The earliest appearance of this idea that I have located is from Gustav Mensching, who argued in 1948 that Otto’s work represents the “culmination” of the approach to the study of religion that begins with Herder and runs through Schleiermacher; see his Geschichte der Religionswissenschaft (Bonn: Universitäts-Verlag, 1948), 84–85. 78 I have argued for a rather different understanding of the relationship between the two in “Schleiermacher and Otto on Religion” (Religious Studies 40 [2004]: 389–413). 79 Schleiermacher appears as a villain in several writings by Barth and figures importantly in what could be termed Barth’s “genealogy of apostasy” in sec. 17 of the first volume of the Church Dogmatics. Theology’s growing interest in religion understood as a human phenomenon during the previous centuries, according to Barth, represented nothing other than a falling away from faith itself: “The real catastrophe was that theology lost its object, revelation in all its uniqueness. And losing that, it lost the seed of faith with which it could remove mountains, even the mountains of modern humanistic culture. That it really lost revelation is shown by the very fact that it could exchange it, and with it its own birthright, for the concept ‘religion’” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 1, no. 2 [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956], 294). Schleiermacher and the Field of Religious Studies 27 of resistance to the advance of knowledge concerning religion—the proper business of the field of religious studies. viii. conclusion: disciplinary pluralism and historical selfunderstanding This history illustrates, I think, one of the more problematic aspects of the field. Historical self-awareness is certainly a good thing for scholars, and so the project of recounting the history of attempts to examine and account for religion is an important one. But the methodological breadth of the field of religious studies—the fact that a variety of distinct disciplinary approaches have shaped and continue to shape it— presents multiple opportunities for the distortion of the historical record. No one of us is competent to understand the entire range of pertinent scholarship, and none of us has infinite time at our disposal, so at some point all of us seeking understanding come to depend on the historical narratives created by our forebears. But it also must be said that in our field interpretive charity often seems to have difficulty crossing disciplinary lines, with predictable results. The project of seeking collective, historical self-understanding thus faces twin perils: the natural limitations of human abilities and the consequences of crossdisciplinary hostilities. Only one of these is avoidable. The “subjectivism” charge against Schleiermacher was originally the product of a polemic in which such hostilities (between theology and philosophy) played a significant role, although it also incorporated an interesting disagreement about the appropriate social and political embodiment of religion. After a series of historical adventures, it eventually came to accuse Schleiermacher of something close to the opposite of what was originally charged. But thereby an important part of the field’s history has been obscured: for along with the fourth of the Speeches, much in Schleiermacher’s work that should be of interest to those concerned with the “objective” study of religion has largely disappeared from view in the literature. Those who want to kn

Direct Warrant Realism

Direct Realism often emerges as a solution to a certain type of problem. Hume and, especially, Berkeley, wielding some of the most powerful arguments of 18 Century philosophy, forcefully attacked the notion that there could be good inferences from the occurrence of one’s sensations to the existence of external, mind-independent bodies (material objects). Given the success of these attacks, and also given the assumption, made by Berkeley and arguably by Hume as well, that our knowledge of and rational belief in the existence of material objects would depend upon there being such good inferences, a problem arises: We cannot know of or rationally believe in the existence of material objects. Reid’s Direct Realism then emerges as the solution to this problem. Reid admits the success of Berkeley’s and Hume’s attacks against the possibility of successfully grounding our material world beliefs on inferences from our sensations, but claims that our belief in the existence of material objects can be perfectly rationally acceptable, and can amount to knowledge, despite the lack of such inferences. Though he did not use the terminology, it seems to be Reid’s position – and it’s this position that I will be referring to as his “Direct Realism” here – that certain perceptual beliefs whose content is such that they imply the existence of material objects are properly basic: they are rationally held, and if true can amount to knowledge, without having to be based on any other beliefs, including, most notably, beliefs about one’s own sensory experiences.