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Religion: A Contested Site in Theology and


the Study of Religion

Francis Schüssler Fiorenza

Harvard Theological Review / Volume 93 / Issue 01 / January 2000, pp 7 - 34


DOI: 10.1017/S0017816000016643, Published online: 10 June 2011

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/


abstract_S0017816000016643

How to cite this article:


Francis Schüssler Fiorenza (2000). Religion: A Contested Site in Theology
and the Study of Religion. Harvard Theological Review, 93, pp 7-34
doi:10.1017/S0017816000016643

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Religion: A Contested Site in Theology
and the Study of Religion
Francis Schiissler Fiorenza
Harvard Divinity School

I first became acquainted with Richard Niebuhr' s scholarship and thought in a German
graduate seminar on Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ernst Troeltsch. Niebuhr's book,
Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, was a required text for the course and was
regarded as the most significant study on Schleiermacher.1 My interest in Karl Rahner's
theology had led me to go to Germany for doctoral studies. Once there, I discovered
that much of what I had admired in Rahner had already been anticipated a century and
a half earlier in Schleiermacher's work. Professor Niebuhr's study on Schleiermacher
was the source of this insight. It influenced my decision later to translate into English
Schleiermacher's On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr. Liicke.2 My topic for this
article, the theological retrieval of the category of religion, is obviously suggested by
Niebuhr's study of Schleiermacher, which sought to overcome the dichotomies asso-
ciated with the category of religion by the then-dominant Neo-orthodoxy. This topic is
also a theme of Niebuhr's ensuing book, Experiential Religion, in which he elaborated
his own constructive account of religion and experience.3 In addition, this topic appro-
priately relates to Niebuhr's activity at Harvard University, where he helped establish
a program of studies in religion within the Committee on the Study of Religion.
I shall begin by showing how religion, which was a contested site in theology
when Richard Niebuhr wrote his book on Schleiermacher, has once again become
controversial, not only in theology, but also in the study of religion. The differences

'Richard R. Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion: A New Introduction (New


York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964).
2
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr. Liicke (ed. and trans.
F. S. Fiorenza and J. Duke; AAR Texts and Translations 3; Chico: Scholars Press, 1981).
'Richard R. Niebuhr, Experiential Religion (New York: Harper, 1972).
HTR 93:1 (2000) 7-34
8 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

between then and now will be analyzed in relation to three distinct contestations of
the category of religion within theology and the study of religion. Since
Schleiermacher's theology is often identified as the historical root, if not the cause,
of the problem concerning the category of religion, I then analyze Schleiermacher's
position in regard to these three criticisms. I hope thereby to show not only that
Schleiermacher is not guilty as charged, but also that his theological and
philosophical position offers a way to appropriate the category of religion within
theology and the study of religion. In advancing this systematic claim, I shall inquire
about the relation between the categories of "religion" and "revelation." I shall then
explore the development of an understanding of religion that explicates the
historical particularity and individuality of religion without making the category
either a sui generis one or an exclusive and imperialistic one.

• Niebuhr's Overcoming of False Dichotomies in Theology and


Religion
My graduate studies in Germany took place during the initial years of Vatican II.
During this time Roman Catholic theology was in a process of retrieval, not only of
classical theology over against neo-scholastic distortions, but also of modern
philosophy, theology, and previously-banned positions ranging from that of the Catholic
Tubingen School to the modernism of the turn of the century. Professor Niebuhr was,
for me, a kindred spirit within Protestant theology. He sought to retrieve Schleiermacher,
the father of modern theology, over against his critics. His work initiated a retrieval of
liberal theology—a theology that sought to take seriously the importance of religion
and history. Such a movement was in full swing in Germany at that time.
Niebuhr's interpretation of Schleiermacher is a stunning achievement in several
ways. First of all, he crafted an image of Schleiermacher's theology that starkly
contrasted the caricature of him painted by representatives of the Neo-orthodox
movement, including Emil Brunner and, to a lesser extent, Karl Barth.4 As Niebuhr's
introduction to his interpretation of Schleiermacher notes, "the most violently adverse
interpretation of the theology of this father of modern Protestantism appeared in the
book entitled The Mystic and the Word by Emil Brunner."5 Niebuhr's interpretation
encompassed the breadth of Schleiermacher's entire corpus. It underscored
Schleiermacher's understanding of theology as the daughter of religion. It explicated
the importance of Schleiermacher's view of the human person as a religious

4
Barth's relation to Schleiermacher is much more complex and nuanced; see James O.
Duke and Robert F. Streetman, eds., Barth and Schleiermacher: Beyond the Impasse? (Phila-
delphia: Fortress, 1988).
5
Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, 7.
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 9

being. Niebuhr's retrieval was not just the retrieval of an individual author.
Instead, it involved the retrieval of nineteenth-century Protestant theology with
its important impulses concerning piety, religion, and history.
Second, systematically and conceptually, Niebuhr sought to overcome the very
dichotomies that Neo-orthodoxy had brought into currency, such as those between
religion and revelation, human experience and divine action, natural and revealed
theology, apologetic and Christocentric approaches, and universality and particularity.
Unfortunately, these contrasts still influence the debate and impinge upon the religious
consciousness of many. Because these supposed dichotomies and oppositions
dominated Neo-orthodox theologians, they misunderstood and mis-evaluated
Schleiermacher.
Niebuhr responded by arguing that certain assumed contrasts hindered the
interpretation of Schleiermacher. For example, he observed that we can better
appreciate the role that religion has in Schleiermacher's systematic theology, The
Christian Faith, if we remember "that the antithesis between religion and
revelation, which has become an unquestioned principle of theology in recent years,
is absent from this work and from the thinking of its author." In addition, Niebuhr
notes that "it would never have occurred to Schleiermacher that the category of
religion was in itself compromising of Christianity or that religion as a human
phenomenon stands in radical contradiction to faith mediated through Jesus Christ
and the Spirit of God."6 His own interpretation of Schleiermacher underscored the
"measure of Christ" and the "Christo-morphic" character of Schleiermacher's
theology. The key point of Niebuhr's exposition is the close interconnection
between Schleiermacher's understanding of religion and his understanding of the
faith mediated through Jesus Christ.
Moreover, against the Neo-orthodox attempt to derive the knowledge of God
exclusively from revelation in Jesus Christ, Niebuhr showed how Schleiermacher
developed his understanding of God from diverse sources. In so doing
Schleiermacher stood within a greater and more substantial theological tradition
than his critics. On this point, Niebuhr observes, Schleiermacher is closer to John
Calvin than is Karl Barth.7 Niebuhr also refuted the alleged contrast between
Christian particularity and the general category of religion in Schleiermacher's
work. For as Niebuhr argues,
Schleiermacher's idea of historical consciousness would have forbidden
him to state the relation of Christianity to the other religions from the
standpoint of an idea of universal religion. Whatever may be universally
present in all religions, so far as it is knowable, can be grasped only

'Ibid., 178.
7
Ibid., 212. See Brian A. Gerrish, Continuuing the Reformation: Essays on Modern Religious
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) for a sustained argument on importance
of Schleiermacher's relation to Calvin for an understanding of Schleiermacher's theology.
10 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

through an understanding of the full historical identity of the


particular religious faith that gives concrete form to the inquirer's
own self-consciousness.8
When Niebuhr wrote his study of Schleiermacher, the category of religion was
under attack in the Neo-orthodox criticism of Protestant liberalism and Roman Catho-
lic natural theology. Today, religion is contested from two radically different sides.
On the one hand, the Neo-orthodox contestation continues in a new form and ar-
gues that the category of religion is insufficiently theological and Christian. On the
other hand, the category of religion is criticized by certain voices in the academic
study of religion. Within this position, two arguments are particularly prominent,
and both take the opposite approach of Neo-orthodoxy. One views religion as a
category that is too theological, apologetic, and protective. The other sees religion
as an abstract, essentialist, Western, if not imperialist, category. This essay seeks to
sketch the contours of the contemporary contrasting contestations of religion and to
show how, in the face of these contestations, a retrieval of the best in Schleiermacher
can contribute to a theological retrieval of the category of religion.

• Religion as a Contested Category


The category of religion has become what is called a "contested category."9 The
term "contested category" applies to those categories whose evaluation and
definition are under debate. Today there is strong disagreement about the use and
value of the category of religion in relation to religious phenomena; there is also a
lack of consensus regarding just what religion is or what constitutes religion in
theory as well as in practice. Indeed, the category of religion is used not only with
diverse assessments, but also with different meanings and connotations.

Religion as Humanistic and Insufficiently Theological


Karl Barth has set the tone for much of the theological reflection on religion in the
twentieth century; for him religion is the problem of theology. He most emphatically
underscores that "there is an obvious difference between regarding religion as the
problem of theology and regarding it as only one problem in theology."10 It is the
problem of theology because the basic and foundational issue of theology is whether
religion becomes the norm and principle that explains revelation or whether revelation
provides the critical norm and judgment of all religions. Barth's position underscores
the difference between faith as a form of human piety and Christian faith as the
revelation of God's grace and judgment. Barth further develops his critique of religion

8
Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, 230.
'The term is from W. B. Gallie, "Essentially Contested Concepts," Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 56 (1955-56) 167.
10
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. 1/ 2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956) 284.
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 11

in relation to his critique of modern theology. He views the development of theology


from the Renaissance to Schleiermacher as an increasing humanism and deification of
humanity. From this perspective, Ludwig Feuerbach's humanistic and naturalistic
interpretation of religion only makes explicit and public the secret that nineteenth-
century theology has hidden in the closet." In Barth's view nineteenth-century theology
has no answer to Feuerbach's critique because it is at its root Feuerbachian. This
understanding undergirds not only his interpretation of religion as a deification of
human piety, but also his interpretation of all forms of natural theology. His polemic
against the understanding of religion in Protestant liberalism is always conjoined with
a criticism of the natural theology of modern Roman Catholic theology.12
In addition to Barth' s historical judgment regarding the nineteenth century, there is
a basic systematic point concerning the study of religion. Barth's concern is that the
study of religion has become a study of humanity rather than a study of God. Recently
Johann Baptist Metz made a similar charge in observing that today everyone speaks of
religion, but no one speaks of God. Ronald Thiemann has sought to reconceptualize
Barth's insight in more contemporary categories.13He brings the critique of
foundationalism, developed in current pragmatic philosophy, to bear against what he
considers the foundationalism of Schleiermacher's appeal to religion and religious
experience. Thiemann uses the category of "divine prevenience" to emphasize that
religion and religious experience should not be foundational. The divine action is prior
to the human action of religion and to human theological reflection. His appeal to
God's prevenience emphasizes the priority of revelation in religion. Just as Luther
emphasized that divine grace comes before human works, so Thiemann emphasizes
the prevenience of revelation before human response. The critique of foundationalism
aims to deconstruct the transcendental grounding of religion prevalent in a construc-
tive conception of theology that emphasizes the human social construction of religion.
Among recent theological analyses of religion, George Lindbeck's The Nature of
Doctrine has wielded considerable influence. Ostensibly, Lindbeck advocates a
cultural-linguistic approach to religion and religious doctrines over what he labels
cognitivist and experiential-expressive models. He argues for the superiority of the
cultural-linguistic approach not only theologically, but also philosophically. In
addition, Lindbeck advances another line of argument—one that identifies a
cultural-linguistic approach to religion with what he calls an "intratextual" and
"postliberal approach." This advocacy of "intratextuality" and "postliberalism" is
important, for it sets the contours of his argument in several notable fashions.

"Karl Barth, Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl (New York: Harper, 1959).
12
For the parallels that Barth's interpretation draws among nineteenth-century theology,
Schleiermacher, and Feuerbach, see Francis Schtissler Fiorenza.'The Response of Barth and
Ritschl to Feuerbach," SR 7 (1978) 149-66.
"Ronald F. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospels as Narrated Promise (Notre
Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1985).
12 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

"Intratextuality" is identified with postliberalism and the cultural-linguistic approach,


whereas the experiential-expressive approach is identified with the erroneous view of
liberalism that has been represented by such diverse thinkers as Fredrich Schleiermacher,
Friedrich Heiler, Karl Rahner, and Bernard Lonergan.
The term "cultural-linguistic" is a very complex one because culture and
language can be understood in many different ways and with many different
functions. One of the functions of language is indeed its expressive function. Yet lan-
guage encompasses much more. Words and expressions have a surplus of meaning beyond
the intention of the communicating subject; further, language is the matrix that determines
and influences the subject Indeed, the linguistic turn in contemporary philosophy has gone
beyond the transcendental turn or the turn to the subject. However, one needs to examine the
theological import of Lindbeck's identification of the "cultural-linguistic" with the
"intratextual," for this identification serves as the basis of his polemic against a theological
tradition represented in his eyes by Schleiermacher, Lonergan, and Rahner.
What is at stake beyond the labels in this contrast? It is the "unsubstitutable identity"
of Christianity. Only an "intratextual," or perhaps only a "sola scriptura" (to use another
term), approach is adequate to establish this identity. In criticizing an expressive approach,
Lindbeck describes four characteristics of an expressive-experiential model of religion.'" The
first is the view that diverse religions are different objectifications of a common core of
religious experience. Although religious phenomena and experience vary with different
cultures, classes, or individuals, the basic presupposition is "the crucial affirmation of the
basic unity of religious experience."15 Second, an experience, though conscious, may be
not yet explicit. Third, such a religious experience is universally present in human life.
Fourth, experience is not only the source, but also the norm of objectifications. Thus, an
experiential-expressive approach to religion points to the universality and commonality of
religious experience as primary and makes that the source and norm of religious identity,
whereas an intratextual approach makes the Christian scriptures the norm. In Lindbeck's
words, "an intratextual reading tries to derive the interpretive framework that designates
the theologically controlled sense from the literary structure of the text."16 An intratextual
approach displays the "unsubstitutable identity" of Christianity and makes that the source
and norm of Christian identity rather than the appeal to religion, understood as universal,
common, and underlying all individual religions. Lindbeck's approach asserts the sui generis
nature of Christianity so that there cannot be a generic foundation or apologetic of Chris-
tianity from the nature of religion or the religious. Instead, an intratextual approach calls
for a non-apologetical narrative theology.17

"George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984) 31.
15
Ibid., 32.
16
Ibid., 120.
17
See William Placher, Unapologetical Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic
Conversation (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1989).
FRANCIS SCHOSSLER FIORENZA 13

Religion as Sui Generis or Too Theological?


If the previous criticisms, written from Christian theological perspectives, criticized
the category of religion for failing to take into account the primacy of divine revelation,
divine activity, and the specificity of Christian identity, another set of
criticisms of religion takes the very opposite approach. It argues that the attempts within
the study of religion to define religion as a specific and distinctive phenomenon and to
demarcate the unique and particular characteristics of religions introduce, in fact, an
implicit theological agenda into the study of religion. Lindbeck based his criticism on
the fear that the experiential and common features of religion would become the norm
for what is Christian. Consequently, his intratextual approach sought to establish the
sui generis nature of Christianity over against an interpretation of religion and its norms
that was drawn from religious experience in general. The critique of religion as sui
generis fears the very opposite. It argues that the consideration of religion as sui generis
might isolate religion apologetically from the rest of human culture and experience.
Those critical of religion as sui generis associate this view with a number of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century theologians and scholars of religions. Louis Jordan,
who wrote one of the first studies of comparative religion, argued that "every man's
Religion is unique, separate, and sui generis."18 Jordan describes several elements of
all religion. Religion is constituted through its utter uniqueness. It is constituted, on the
one hand, by an individualized personal experience of religion, and, on the other, by a
universal essence of religion. In addition to Jordan, the "founders" of the modern
scientific study of religion, such as F. Max Miiller and Cornelius Tiede, have been
interpreted as advocating an understanding of religion as sui generis.19 The historical
roots of the sui generis notion of religion within the modern study of religion have
been traced back to Romantic philosophers and theologians, such as Philipp Moritz,
Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Georg Friedrich
Creuzer.20 Schleiermacher is often singled out for attempting "to isolate the 'essence
of religion,' which he determines is a mode of immediate awareness having no
conceptual, prepositional, dogmatic or doctrinal components."21

"Louis Henry Jordan, Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth (1905; reprinted
Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986) 19.
"See the chapters on Max Miiller and C. P. Tiele in Donald Wiebe, The Politics of Reli-
gious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (New York: St. Martin's,
1998) 9-30 and 31-50.
20
See Hans H. Penner, Impasse and Resolution: A Critique of the Study of Religion (New
York: Peter Lang, 1989) 15-40.
21
Terry F. Godlove, Jr., "The Instability of Religious Belief: Some Reductionistic and
Eliminative Pressures," in Thomas A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan, eds., Religion and
Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences (Leiden:
Brill, 1994) 49. See also idem, "Religious Discourse and First Person Authority," Method and
Theory in the Study of Religion 6 (1994) 147-61.
14 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

This advocacy of religion as sui generis has been developed in successive


generations of scholars from Rudolf Otto to Mircea Eliade. Rudolf Otto sought to
elaborate the distinctiveness and uniqueness of the experience of the mystery of
holiness.22 Others maintain that religion is universally distinguished from all else
by its consciousness of the holy, by its references to what is sacred, or by its
representations of what is irreducibly religious.23 Even where interconnections
with non-religious phenomena exist, the assertion is made that what is partially
religious points to what is irreducibly religious. For example, in the foreword to
Patterns in Comparative Religion, Mircea Eliade wrote:
Obviously, there are no purely religious phenomena. . . . Because religion
is human it must for that very reason be something social, something
linguistic, something economic—you cannot think of man apart from
language and society. But it would be hopeless to try to explain religion
in terms of any of those basic functions. . . .24

The Critique of Religion as Sui Generis


Although the criticisms of the conception of religion as sui generis are very diverse,
they have several common threads. A sui generis conception of religion is viewed
as a boundary-marking and privileging strategy. It appears as a quasi-theological
and apologetical interpretation of religion that seeks to protect religion from critical
scholarly analysis. Moreover, the critics of the conception argue that the interpreta-
tion of religion as sui generis does not take into account the complexity of religion,
which is interwoven and intertwined with other areas of human personal and social
life. As Robert A. Segal explains, "The issue is not whether the manifest nature of
the Bible, or of 'religion' generally is religious. Of course it is. Who would demur.
. . . The issue is whether religious texts and practices are most deeply, much less
solely irreducibly religious."25
Moreover, according to its critics, the understanding of religion as sui generis
also involves the claim that the special nature of the object (religion) requires
distinctive methods of analysis. Robert Brown has argued that the sui generis claim
has an anti-social, anti-cultural, and anti-natural explanation insofar as it has led to

"Melissa Raphael, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).
"Benson Saler, Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Na-
tives, and Unbounded Categories (Leiden: Brill, 1993) 102.
"Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958)
xiii. Eliade's emphasis on religion as sui generis has been followed by his student Lawrence
E. Sullivan; see Lawrence E. Sullivan, Icanchu's Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South
American Religions (New York: Macmillan, 1988).
"Robert E. Segal, "Reductionism in the Study of Religion," in Idinopulos and Yonan, eds.,
Religion and Reductionism, 6. See also idem, "In Defense of Reductionism," in JAAR 51(1983)
97-124.
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 15

the affirmation of an "autonomy of methods."26 Donald Wiebe has argued that the
academic study of religion owes its scientific status to the criticism of a
methodology based upon sui generis claims. In his view, "it was precisely because
of the adoption of precisely such a scientific agenda, clearly demarcated from
religio-theological concerns, that the study of religion achieved the academic
legitimation it sought from the university."27 Similar arguments have been made
recently by Hans Penner, Talal Asad, Thomas Lawson, Ivan Strenski, Bernard Salar,
and Russell McCutcheon against the understanding of religion as sui generis and
against an interpretive method that excessively privileges the autonomy of religion
in the name of anti-reductionism or anti-naturalism.28
Indeed, the conception of religion not only as distinct, but also as sui generis,
fails to acknowledge how religious beliefs and myths are intertwined with other
areas of life. Many examples can illustrate this interconnection.29 One in particular
is the Purusha myth. This Hindu creation myth describes creation in relation to
Purusha, who is sacrificed and dismembered and from whom all things, inanimate
as well as living, emerge. However, as Graeme MacQueen and Bruce Lincoln
have demonstrated, this myth also entails an account of the origin of the four-fold
social order, known as the varna system, with its sacred social hierarchy. Whereas
the priestly caste stems from the head of the dismembered Purusha, commoners
stem from the lower torso, and the servants and sociajly excluded groups stem
from the feet. Any interpretation of this myth exclusively as sui generis religious
does not take into account how the social, political, and religious are deeply
intertwined and interrelated. Interpretations of religion need to show what it is
about religion that makes possible such interrelations between religious myth and
the social-political order.30

"Robert F. Brown, "Eliade on Archaic Religion: Some Old and New Criticism," SR 10 (1982) 429-49.
"Donald Wiebe, "Religious Studies as a Saving Grace? From Goodenough to South
Africa," in Luther Martin, ed., Religious Transformations and Socio-F'olitical Change: Eastern
Europe and Latin America (New York: de Gruyter, 1993) 412-38. See also Donald Wiebe, "The
Failure of Nerve in the Study of Religion," SR 13 (1984) 401-22.
28
Hans H. Penner, Impasse and Resolution: A Critique of the Study of Religion (New York:
Peter Lang, 1989); Talal Asad, "Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,"
Man 18 (1983) 237-59, reprinted in idem, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of
Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1993); E. Thomas Lawson and
Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1990).
29
Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion
and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also the collec-
tion of essays on the study of religion: in idem, ed. The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study
of Religion (New York: Casell, 1999).
30
Graeme MacQueen, "Whose Sacred History? Reflections on Myth and Dominance," SR 17
(1998) 143-57. Bruce Lincoln, Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation
and Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
16 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

Religion as an Abstract Category in the Modern West


The third contestation of the category of religion concerns its abstract character as an
analytical category. As such it is viewed as a product of the rationalization of the
Modern West. This rationalization increasingly colonizes all areas of life, including
that which is holy and sacred. The objectifying and colonizing aspect of the category of
religion shows itself in two distinct criticisms. One underscores the abstract objectifi-
cation of the category within the West; the other points to its effects in interpreting the
beliefs and practices of people in other areas of the globe.
In The Meaning and End of Religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith challenges the
utility of the category of religion. He argues that the category of religion is an
abstraction and a reification of the complex reality of religion. It should,
therefore, be abandoned as an inadequate analytical category.31 Further, Smith
challenges its theological adequacy. Smith argues that religion entails two
aspects: external and internal. That is, it entails not only the observable and
external facts, such as historical events and central myths, but also the personal
and internal aspect, namely, inner piety. The use of the category of religion, ac-
cording to Smith, emphasizes the external aspect and downplays the decisive
personal and subjective element of religion, namely, personal faith. Therefore,
Smith proposes a double category: cumulative tradition and faithfulness.
Smith also argues that the category of religion is a category of the modern European
Enlightenment. It is not a category that the participants of religion originally used to
describe their own practice. Not only do many people lack an expression or term that
comes close to what Western scholarship means by the term "religion," but those who
use the term often have diverse understandings of its meaning. In accordance with the
priority that he attributes to the insider perspective in the study and interpretation of
religion, Smith argues for a more humanist account of religion that takes into account
the personal, subjective dimension.
Smith combines his critique of the category of religion as a product of the mod-
ern West with his emphasis on the centrality of personal subjectivity and internal
faithfulness. A major reason for rejecting the category of religion is that it does not
sufficiently take into account the subjective dimension of personal faith, inferior-
ity, and intentionality. But one can ask whether Smith's very emphasis upon
subjectivity is itself a product of a Western Protestant understanding of religion
and religiosity, which emphasizes the personal character of the individual's sub-
jective faith, especially faith as distinguished from belief.32 Underlying his criticism
is an implicit theological and, one could add, humanist agenda that includes but
goes beyond the issue of religion as an analytical category—for there is an evalu-
ative, if not theological, dimension to his critique.

"Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (1962; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991).
"Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 17

Thirty years after the publication of the The Meaning and the End of Religion,
Smith has had to draw out further the implications of his view that the category of
religion is unnecessary, misleading, and reifying. The modern notion of religion
is "au fond secularist;" it sets up a dichotomy between religion and what is not
religion.33 He expands the "anti-reifying" polemic of his book beyond religion
and applies it to modern culture as well. He contends that "our whole modern
culture" is "significantly skewed, or even distorted, by our inveterate reifying or
objectivizing of almost everything we thought or think about."34
Interestingly, for both Barth and Smith, religion is theologically inadequate, but
for different reasons. Whereas Barth's critique of religion is based on the primacy
of divine revelation over human experience, Smith's critique of the category is
based on the primacy of the experiential dimension of personal religiosity. Barth
rejects the category of religion because it is too humanistic and anthropocentric,
whereas Smith rejects the category of religion because it focuses too much on the
external rather than on the humanistic and experiential dimension of religion.

Religion and Colonialism


Another problem with the category of religion (according to this third contestation of
religion) is that it has often been defined from a Western, colonialist, and specifically
monotheistic perspective. With the new encounter of religions beginning in the
sixteenth century, one tended to a fourfold enumeration of the religions: Christianity,
Judaism, Islam, and "Idolatry." As Jonathan Z. Smith has observed, these three
Abrahamic religions were "set over and against the undifferentiated other."35 Frits
Staal has argued that the term "religion" is not so much a general category as it is a
naming term, derived from Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. However, its use
within South Asian contexts has often been incorrectly applied and is inadequate to
describe much of pre-modern and even modern South Asian culture.36 In his study of
South Africa, David Chidester points to an interrelation between colonialism and the
discipline of the comparative study of religion. He tries "to show this particular
human science, with its techniques of observation, conversation, and description, and
its procedures of analogical reasoning and theoretical generalization, can be resituated
in the historical context of colonial conflict."37

"See his address to the American Academy of Religion, "The Modern West in the History of
Religion," JAAR 52 (1984) 3-16.
"Wilfred Cantwell Smith, "Retrospective Thoughts on Tlie Meaning and End of Religion!' in Michel
Despland and Gerard Vallee, eds., Religion in History (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992) 12-22.
"Jonathan Z. Smith, "Religion, Religions, Religious," in Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms
for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 269-84, esp. 284.
"Frits Staal, "The Himalayas and the Fall of Religion," in Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter, ed.,
The Silk Route and the Diamond Path (Los Angeles: Univerisy of California Press, 1982) 38-51.
"David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern
Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).
18 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

Chidester notes the relation between the comparative study of religion and the
European discoveries of the absence of religion in other parts of the world.
Christopher Columbus wrote that the Arawak Indians "do not hold any creed nor are
they idolaters." This view was reinforced by Amerigo Vespuccis's comment that
"they have no church, no religion, and are not idolaters."38 Jacques Le Maire noted
that the people in the Pacific Islands were more like beasts than humans, living
without religion. Likewise, European travelers to Africa reported that the African
venerates fetishes. However, they did not consider such fetishism to be a religion.
William J. Shrewsbury, a Wesleyan missionary, wrote that the indigenous people of
southern Africa lived "without any religion, true or false."39 What is striking is that,
initially, fetishism was regarded as evidence that the indigenous people were without
religion; eventually, it came to be regarded as the beginning of religion.
These denials of religion in certain parts of the world can be attributed to a
diversity of causes, especially the lack of sufficient contact or observation and the
lack of knowledge of local languages and customs. However, Chidester asks whether
European travelers and missionaries had as their horizon a specifically, perhaps
implicitly, Christian definition of religion that prevented them from recognizing
and acknowledging the presence of religion. This alleged absence of religion was
coupled with stereotypes about, for example, indigenous people being less than
human. Chidester points out that after the colonial conquest it was affirmed that
the indigenous people in fact had religion: what was first identified as a lack of
religion (fetishism) became the sign of religion. Now religion, more than race and
ethnicity, provided the content of difference and otherness.
As this discussion has shown, the category of religion stands within the
crossfire of contrasting and diverse criticisms. One side offers a theological
critique of the category of religion. The use of religion is too humanistic and
anthropocentric. It fails to affirm the uniqueness of Christian revelation because
it subsumes the uniqueness of Christian identity within the generic category of
religion. Another side offers a quite different critique. It maintains that demarca-
tions of the specificity of religion lead to a definition of religion as sui generis.
Such a definition establishes protective boundaries. It privileges religion by re-
garding causal and functional analysis of religion as reductive. This critique
suggests that the sui generis category involves the surreptitious import of theo-
logical privileges into the academic study of religion. And still a third side
criticizes the development and use of the category of religion within the modern
West. It questions whether this category is an abstract reification or whether its
application or non-application to those outside reveals the residues of a
Christian and Western imperialism.

38
Ibid., 11.
"Ibid., 12-13.
FRANCIS SCHOSSLER FIORENZA 19

• Theology and the Category of Religion


Richard Niebuhr's interpretation of Schleiermacher in 1964 sought to overcome
the dichotomies that Neo-orthodoxy had introduced into theological discourse and
the interpretation it had offered of nineteenth-century theology. Today, however,
dichotomies are again being re-introduced into the theological discussion. The
slogans "postliberal theology" and "radical orthodoxy" reformulate the contrasts
between religion and revelation, universality and historical particularity,
metaphysics and theology, and the validity of other religions of the world and
Christianity. Another set of contrasts is between explanation and understanding,
reductionist and sui generis, naturalistic and autonomous, and objective rationality
and subjective personal beliefs. Unfortunately, the acceptance of these contrasts
forces one to take sides for one or the other.
In turning to the three sets of contested issues about religion, I shall ask what we
learn from Schleiermacher and whether he can once again help us overcome some of
the dichotomies underlying the current discussion. I shall argue that some criticisms of
Schleiermacher are actually misunderstandings of his thought. Going beyond this
interpretive claim, I shall argue systematically and constructively that Schleiermacher's
work contains possibilities and trajectories, which, if taken seriously and developed
further, offer a path toward a resolution of some of the basic issues in the debate about
the category of religion in theology and the study of religion.
These contestations of the category of religion pose many challenges for its
academic as well as theological use, especially in regard to the issues raised in the
discussion above. Each of these issues is genuine. Each poses serious challenges
to any theological appropriation of the category of religion and to the use of the
category of religion in the study of religion. Not one of these issues can be simply
cast aside by a slight of the hand, for they represent enduring issues within
theology and the study of religion.
First, the Neo-orthodox theological contestation dealing with the concrete
identity of revelation versus the category of religion is more than a simple question
of the priority of revelation. It is a question of whether the category of religion as a
generic category can make room for concrete and unmistakable identity.
It is a question of whether the study of religion is a study of human culture as such or
whether it explores what takes place in and through culture and yet transcends it,
pointing to what is beyond culture and is therefore capable of standing in critique
and judgment of it.
Second, the criticism often attempts to delineate the specificity of religion by
defining it as that which is sui generis and privileged, addressing the historical,
social, political, and psychological rootedness of religion. To postulate religion
independently of its context and function does not enhance religion, but devalues
the role, importance, and function of religion within human life. These first two
20 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

criticisms of the category of religion constitute a dilemma for scholars. If one interprets
distinctiveness as an isolated autonomy, then one overlooks the concrete, theoretical,
and practical role of religion in society. If one underscores the social-political origins
and consequences of religion, then one may fail to grasp the distinctiveness of
religious belief and practices. Is there a way to sail past the Scylla and Charybdis of the
alternative approaches without crashing into either one?
Third, the contestation of religion as an abstract product of Western rationalization
and its colonization of life and culture raises an important question not only for theol-
ogy, but also for the study of religion: how do we study religion in ways that do not
substitute or privilege our own categories and thereby misunderstand and devalue the
beliefs and practices of other cultures, past and present?

• Revelation and Religion


Proponents of the first contestation of religion outlined above associate its
problems with Schleiermacher. Their theological critique of Schleiermacher's un-
derstanding of religion revolves around the adequacy of the category of
religion and assumes a sharp contrast between the categories of religion and revela-
tion. Moreover, the category of religion, in Lindbeck's critique, as an expressive
category, is unable to provide and safeguard the unsubstitutible identity of Chris-
tianity. Because of widespread acceptances of these criticisms, it is assumed that
the category of revelation does not play a role within Schleiermacher's theology
and that the issue of identity is inadequately described. Such assumptions are false.
The reference to revelation in The Christian Faith has to be interpreted in relation
to Schleiermacher's exposition in his other writings, especially the lectures on psy-
chology.40

The Linguisticality of Revelation


It is obvious that Schleiermacher does not employ the concept of revelation as it
is developed within sixteenth-century Protestant confessional orthodoxy. Nor does
he follow the trajectory that understood revelation as part of the principles and
prolegomena to theology. Further, his understanding of revelation has little in
common with the Neo-orthodox conception and its novel contrast between
religion and revelation. Schleiermacher does not have Barth's atemporal
understanding of revelation as related to primordial eternal history.41
40
Hans Joachim Birkner, Hermann Fischer, and Arnulf von Scheliha, Schleiermacher-Studien
(New York: de Gruyter, 1996); and Theodor Holzdeppe J0rgensen, Das religionsphilosophische
Offenbarungsverstandnis des spdteren Schleiermacher (Tubingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1977).
41
See the criticisms that both Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jiirgen Moltmann make of Karl
Barth's understanding of revelation. Wolfhart Pannenberg, ed., Revelation as History (New
York: Macmillan, 1968) and Jiirgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the
Implications of a Christian Eschatology (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 21

Schleiermacher develops a philosophical understanding of revelation in his


philosophical ethics, philosophy of religion, and systematic theology, as well as in his
lectures and treatises on aesthetics, hermeneutics, and psychology. Within the section
on philosophical ethics in The Christian Faith, the concept of revelation is revealed
in the communication among humans themselves in a way that allows genuine
community to emerge.42 Schleiermacher introduces language about revelation in the
context of the introduction of the term "God" and the idea of God in relation to the
experience of the feeling of utter dependence: "If we speak of an original revelation
of God to humans or in humans, the meaning will always be just this."43 In section ten,
he follows this thought and reflects upon the category of revelation as applied to the
origin of religious communities. The idea of revelation points not only to the origin
and originality of such communities, but also to the constitution of their individuality.
By linking revelation and communication, Schleiermacher underscores the social and
linguistic nature of religion, which constitues the communication within and the
specific identity of a religious community.44

Religion and Identity


It is in the context of section ten that Schleiermacher develops an understanding of
revelation that is actually diametrically opposed to the opinion that many attribute to
him. Lindbeck argues that Schleiermacher assumes a basic religious experience that
is universal and that underlies and is common to all religion. In his critique of the
Enlightenment, however, Schleiermacher states that natural religion can never be the
basis of a religious community; it is simply an abstraction. In Schleiermacher's words:
"It simply betrays a misapprehension when people attempt to distinguish the actually
existing religious communions from each other by the principle that the positive
element is found in one at one point and in another at another point, e.g., that in
Christianity it is the doctrines, in Judaism the commandments."45 Instead, he argues
that the individual content depends upon the innovative historical origination of a
community. Within this context, he develops his understanding of revelation.
Two references might help to illustrate Schleiermacher's understanding of the
relation between religion and revelation as developed in his philosophical ethics
and in his introduction to the The Christian Faith. The first is Augustine's use of
the category ecstasis to refer to the self-transcendence of the soul to express rev-

4Z
See also The Christian Faith, § 6.2.
"Ibid., § 4.4, translation modified.
"For a criticism of those interpretations that do not take sufficiently into account the centrality
that the quesiton of individuation plays in Schleiermacher's interpretation of Christianity, see
Markus Schroder, Die kritische Identitdt des neuzeillichen Christentums: Schleiermachers
Wesenbestimmung der christlichen Religion (Tubingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1996), 48-55.
"Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, § 10.
22 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

elation.46 The second is Judith Butler's term "excrescence of logic," which she
uses to express the paradox of agency that is indeed agency and yet subordinate to
power.47 The human subject is not a subject apart from being determined by the
structures of power; the human subject is not a subject, except within the cross
determination of social and cultural history. The question is: how can the human
person be an instrument of agency and at the same time be subject to social,
cultural, and political conditioning? The "subject is neither fully determined by
power nor fully determining power."48 There is a surpassing, transcending, and
going-beyond surplus of human agency within historical and cultural subjectivity.
In a similar way, there is a revelation in and through religion.

Overcoming the Dichotomy between Revelation and Religion


This overcoming of the dichotomy between revelation and religion has
implications for the acknowledgement of a genuine religious pluralism. When
revelation is understood in contrast to religion, then the revealed truth is what one
possesses, and religion, perhaps even false religion, is what others possess. Even
when one attempts from this perspective to illumine positively the religions of
others, these religions are nevertheless often viewed in one's own terms. This is
the case with both Barth and Rahner. In Church Dogmatics, Barth evaluates other
religions not with the category of unbelief, but as reflections and mirrors of the
light of the one revelation in Jesus Christ.49 Likewise, Rahner refers to good
persons in other religions as anonymous Christians.50
Where religion and revelation are intertwined in such a way that revelation
points to the creativity of religion, its transcending creativity, then the distinctive
contributions and values of many religions can be appreciated. It then becomes
possible for "us" to view the "other" also as a source of truth and divine presence.
The creativity and surplus of religion is located not simply in its originating and
individuating moment, which Schleiermacher emphasized. It can be elaborated in
the ongoing working out of the originating individual moment within the
serendipitously creative development of religion.

"See, for example, Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 30,1.1. For an exposition, see the section
"Offenbarung durch Ekstase," in Wolfgang Weiland, Offenbarung bei Augustinus (Mainz: Matthias-
Griinewald, 1978) 94-99.
47
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1997).
48
Ibid., 17.
"Compare Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/ 2, 344 with idem, Church Dogmatics, IV/ 3 (Edinburgh:
T. & T . Clark, 1961) 38-164.
50
Karl Rahner, "Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions," Theological Investigations (New
York: Seabury, 1966) 5: 5-34. "Anonymous Christianity and the Missionary Task of the Church,"
Theological Investigations (New York: Seabury,1974) 12:161-78, and "The One Christ and the
Universality of Salvation," Theological Investigations (New York: Seabury, 1979) 16: 199-224.
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 23

• Distinctive but Not Sui Generis


The second issue mapping religion as a contested site in the contemporary
discussion concerns the demarcation of what is specifically religious and the alleged
sui generis character of religion. The problem revolves around the meaning of "sui
generis." Derived from the Latin, the term is translated literally as "of his or her own
kind." Criticisms of religion as sui generis often combine several elements. At issue
is not just whether what is religious can be specifically demarcated as such. In
addition, a basic methodological issue is at stake—that is, whether religion and all
that is religious is so sui generis that it requires its own methodological approach. Do
functional, social, or naturalistic interpretations of religion fail to get at the heart of
what is religious? Are they, therefore, necessarily reductionist? Is religion so
distinctive that it cannot be analyzed and criticized from any other perspective than
its own without such an analysis being reductionistic?
Critics of the conception of religion as sui generis see it as an apologetic
theological presupposition. In contrast to Neo-orthodoxy, these critics see the
understanding of religion as sui generis as much too theological. They view
Schleiermacher as the originator of the distinction of religion from metaphysics
and ethics, and they therefore regard this distinction as the historical foundation
of the many theories of religion as sui generis. Moreover, they argue that
Schleiermacher's emphasis on the non-derived character of piety and its
non-deducibility from philosophical categories makes piety sui generis and
uncriticizable. In his recent critique of conceptions of religion as sui generis,
Russell T. McCutcheon makes this argument about Schleiermacher. In his own
words, we can find "a related aspect of the discourse on sui generis religion
apparent at least as early as Schleiermacher: religion constitutes a private, interiorized
dimension of experience that, although manifested outwardly in various forms, is
shared across all religions regardless of their historical differences."51
McCutcheon's criticism raises several distinct issues. The first, an historical
issue, is whether Schleiermacher is in fact the root of the sui generis view of
religion. I shall argue that such a view is historically unjustified. A second issue,
more systematic and methodological, is whether religion is distinctive and, if so,
whether the specificity of religion can be delineated. This issue, however, needs
to be separated from a third, that is, whether such a delineation necessarily leads
to a view of religion as sui generis. In other words, one can view what is religious
as distinctive (the second issue) without at the same time requiring a sui generis
understanding of religion that excludes functional, social, and naturalistic
interpretations of religion (the third issue).

5l
Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion
and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 60.
24 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

Overcoming Dichotomies: Schleiermacher's View


Interpreting Schleiermacher with respect to these issues is very complex, especially
in view of the diverse criticisms and interpretations of his theology. Schleiermacher
is often criticized for advocating either a humanistic conception of religion or a
fideistic affirmation of religion through mere feeling.32 The distinction of religion
from metaphysics and ethics is often seen as his central contribution to the under-
standing of religion and is identified with Rudolf Otto's conception of the
distinctiveness of religion—both of which are misinterpretations. In interpreting
Schleiermacher, we need to avoid a humanistic as well as a fideistic interpretation.
His position should not be conflated with Otto's. Moreover, Schleiermacher's claim
as to the distinctiveness of religion should be seen against the context of the Enlight-
enment and should be read in the context of his whole corpus of writings.
Schleiermacher faced a similar debate concerning religion, but with different theo-
retical and scientific presuppositions. The debate was between the "supernaturalists"
and the "rationalists." Concerning these labels he writes, "even the names of the
contending parties are most unfortunate. The one refers to the nature of the event, the
other to the source of knowledge of doctrine."53
Schleiermacher insists that the feeling of utter dependency does not take place
in isolation. Rather, it arises in connection with an empirical- and world-conscious-
ness.54 This assertion is clearly his polemic against the pietistic theology of
conversion of his day. If one understood this feeling of dependence as inexpress-
ible and isolated, "then it would not be the ground of existence, but the ground of
a particular religious existence alongside life within the world and thereby exactly
not in truth a feeling of utter dependence."55 Moreover, the feeling of utter depen-
dence stands in relation with sensual self-consciousness. It involves the person not
as an isolated individual but in his or her relation to the world and in relation to
community. Schleiermacher explicates the importance of this intertwinement not
only in The Christian Faith but also in his philosophical ethics.
This intertwinement becomes more evident when one considers Schleiermacher's
understanding of language. Manfred Frank has noted that "the oldest version of
Wittgenstein's thesis, according to which the subject has no privileged knowledge
of its experiences of consciousness, can be found in Schleiermacher: it is the germinal cell
52
The critique of Schleiermacher has taken two different, almost opposing, paths. Roman
Catholic theology, especially the Neo-scholasticism that formed the background to Vatican I's
document on faith, viewed Schleiermacher primarily as a fideist and misinterpreted his understand-
ing of feeling as non-rational and individualist, whereas Karl Barth and George Lindbeck underscored
the humanism of his general anthropology and the universalism of his conception of religion.
"Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre: Two letters to Dr. Liicke, 8.
S4
The Christian Faith, § 5. See Gerhard Ebeling, "Schlechthinniges Abhangigkeitsgefiihl
als Gottesbewusstsein," in idem, Wort und Glaube (Tubingen: Siebeck, 1975) 116-36.
"Dietz Lange, "Das fromme Selbstbewusstsein," in Giinther Meckenstock, ed., Schleiermacher
und die Wissenschaftliche Kultur des Christentums (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991) 196.
FRANCIS SCHOSSLER FIORENZA 25

of the linguistic turn of modern philosophy."56 Schleiermacher's approach to


hermeneutics and language entails four correlations. As his thoery of sciences shows,
the material correlatives (nature and reason) are crossed with the formal correla-
tives (empirical and speculative). In hermeneutics, the material categories, language
(general) and author (individual), are joined with the methodic comparative and
divinatory approaches.
Moreover, one should place Schleiermacher's demarcation of religion from
metaphysics and ethics into its correct context. The distinction between religion
and doctrine or between religion and metaphysics did not originate with
Schleiermacher. It represents an older tradition. Schleiermacher took up this older
tradition and modified the Enlightenment's treatment of this distinction. The
Enlightenment distinguished between religion and metaphysics insofar as it
translated religion into a rational metaphysics. In so doing, the Enlightenment
undermined the very distinction itself. Where Schleiermacher's originality should
be located is in his modification of the distinction between religion and meta-
physics and in his specific analysis of the relation between religion and morality.
Schleiermacher's writings, especially those on philosophical ethics, clearly show
that the distinction of religion from metaphysics does not involve a false isolation
and hypostatization of religion as something sui generis. Schleiermacher locates
religion within the context of his "ethic." The word "ethic" might be misleading,
conjuring up narrow issues of morality. For Schleiermacher, philosophical ethics
refers to that side of philosophy that embraces all social relations, human activity,
and human creativity. "Therefore, the ethic is the knowledge (Wissenschaft) of
history."57Philosophical ethics addresses the knowledge of the principles of
history. It investigates the structure and forms of human life. This task is so
all-encompassing that interpreters have suggested that "social philosophy" or
"cultural philosophy" are more appropriate terms than "ethics."58
Philosophical ethics functions as a basic discipline in relation to all those disciplines
that relate to human and historical life. Consequently, as is evident from the second
edition of the The Christian Faith, the statements regarding religion (piety) and
religious community (church) are borrowed propositions (Lehrsdtze)fromethics. The
division between the The Christian Faith and philosophical ethics is important. The
Christian Faith presupposes a particular Gestalt of God-consciousness as historically
given; philosophical ethics, however, cannot simply stand with reference to the histori-
cal facticity of God-consciousness, but has to raise both critical and foundational questions.
"Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)
212.
"Friedrich Schleiermacher, Schleiermachers Werke, Vol. 2: Entwiirfe zu einem System der
Sittenlehre (ed. Otto Braun; Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1927) 80. The quotation is from
Schleiermacher's Brouillon zur Ethik of 1805/1806.
58
Yorick Spiegel, Theologie der biirgerlichen Gesellschaft; Sozialphilosophie und
Glaubenslehre bei Friedrich Schleiermacher (Munich: C. Kaiser, 1968) 12.
26 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

Consequently, even though Schleiermacher seeks to distinguish religion from


knowing and doing, he seeks also to interrelate them rather than to make religion
sui generis. In his philosophical ethics, Schleiermacher maintains that,
just as thinking and speaking, so also feeling and presenting in moral
meaning are one. . . . The proper sphere of feeling in moral reality is
indeed religion. For one cannot become conscious of the moral life if one
is not conscious of its enlivening principle as reason, that is, in its identity
with the absolute. And this relation is immediately given precisely in
religion. Religion and art should coincide, and the moral aspect of art
consists in its identity with religion.59

Human religiosity, as an activity of human beings, is present in and through history.


It is a part of human culture. Therefore, it is open to investigation just as other elements
of human culture can be examined. The various spheres of human cultural creativity
are both distinct and interrelated: even though artistic and musical creations are
distinct, they are also interrelated with other aspects of culture. To maintain that one
creative activity of culture is distinct from another is neither to deny their interrelation
nor to neglect their location within culture.
Most importantly, Schleiermacher did not make a distinction between the cultural and
the natural sciences as possessing different methods in the way that Wilhelm von Helmholtz
and Wilhelm Dilthey did. Instead, Schleiermacher viewed the two as interpenetrating
and as sharing the same method. Further, Schleiermacher did not subscribe to Johann
Gustav Droysen's distinction between explanation and understanding as contrasting
tasks.60 Today, following Dilthey and Droysen, many still sharply distinguish the natural
sciences from the cultural sciences, arguing that the former employ an explanatory method,
whereas the latter proceed by an interpretive method. Further, the former are sometimes
viewed as reductive and the latter as descriptive. Whereas Droysen considered the ethical
and historical sciences to be interpretive sciences, Schleiermacher argued that such sci-
ences, which deal with the principles of history, involve structural explanation. This
argument is further developed in Schleiermacher's lectures on hermeneutics, and espe-
cially in his philosophical ethics, his Dialektik (which refers to induction and deduction,
but not interpretation). What is required, according to Schleiermacher, is not simply a
technical or psychological interpretation of a text, but also a grammatical interpretation
that pays attention to the structure and style of language.61 In contemporary parlance, it
involves both explanatory and interpretive methods.

59
My own translation from Schleiermacher, Schleiermachers Werke, Vol. 2: Entwiirfe zu
einem System der Sittenlehre, 99-100.
60
See Gunther Scholz, Ethik und Hermeneutik. Schleiermachers Grundlegung der
Geisteswissenschaften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995) 78—79.
"See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik, in Heinz Kimmerle, ed., Abhandlungen der
Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse (Heidelberg:
C. Winter, 1959); See the English translation, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 27

H Cultural-Linguistic Interpretation of Religion


I propose that Schleiermacher's understanding of religion be developed in the
direction of a cultural and linguistic interpretation of religion. Such a proposal might
be surprising. After all, George Lindbeck has set forth his cultural-linguistic
understanding of religion as a critique and alternative to what he calls Schleiermacher's
experiential-expressive approach. Three points need to be underscored.
First, Lindbeck uses the category of "intratextuality" to signify the "cultural-
linguistic" approach to religion. In so doing, he actually undermines the very meaning
of "cultural-linguistic." He treats the religious narrative of the biblical text as itself
quasi sui generis and therefore as sheltered from and independent of its embeddedness
within human experience and culture. In other words, an intratextual interpretation of
a particular religion moves in the opposite direction of a cultural-linguistic
interpretation of religion. Moreover, the category of "thick description" as first
employed by Gilbert Ryle and as developed by Clifford Geertz does not support
intratextuality, but rather the interpretation of culture in relation to human creativity in
thought and practice.62
Second, as my interpretation above suggests, Schleiermacher underscores the
creativity and individuality of religion precisely at the point of the concrete
linguistic communication through which religious communities are established.
Consequently, for Schleiermacher, there is no such thing as a "universal religion"
or "natural religion." Indeed, this was his main criticism of the Enlightenment's
conception of religion. He dismisses the term "natural religion" as "a confusing
use of words."63 For Schleiermacher, only concrete religious communities with
concrete historical language, beliefs, and practices exist. It is these communities
that can be compared and analyzed within the philosophy of religion.
Third, as Schleiermacher's lectures on hermeneutics underscore, linguistic
communication is susceptible to a psychological as well as a technical
interpretation.64 Thus, Schleiermacher argues that language (religious language
included) should not only be understood as an expression of an individual community's
experience (a psychological interpretation), but also in terms of the very style, form,
and structure of its linguistic communications (a technical interpretation).

Criticism and Other Writings, (ed. Andrew Bowie; New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998). See Paul Ricoeur, "Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics," Monist 66 (1977) 181-97; and
Yong Huang, "The Father of Modern Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Age: A Reinterpretation
of Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics," Philosophy Today (1996) 251-62.
"See Francis Schilssler Fiorenza, "Schleiermacher and the Construction of a Contemporary
Roman Catholic Foundational Theology," HTR 89 (1996) 175-94; and idem, "History and
Hermeneutics," in James Livingston and Francis Schiissler Fiorenza, Modern Christian Thought,
Vol. 2: The Twentieth Century (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999) 341-85.
"Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, § 6, postscript.
"Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings.
28 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

In short, Schleiermacher's view of the distinctiveness of religion is very


complex and nuanced. Though he affirms the distinctiveness of religion, he also
intertwines and locates religion within the panorama of human history and culture.
Thus, philosophical ethics studies religion in relation to the principles and forms
of history. Schleiermacher does not thereby give religion the protected status that
would be granted it by an intratextual approach, which underscores the autonomy
of the biblical text. This is a protective strategy that the critics of religion as sui
generis rightly criticize.
In addition to these interpretive points about Schleiermacher, I have also been
suggesting a constructive and systematic one: Schleiermacher provides a prototype of
a solution to the problem of how to delineate religion's distinctiveness from and its
interrelatedness to other human activities within human culture. His proposal that a
philosophy of culture, or philosophical ethics, provides a framework for thinking about
this problem is an important suggestion. That said, there are several aspects of
Schleiermacher's philosophical ethics that need rethinking. One might want to
challenge, for example, his emphasis on description and on the indicative as the basis
of the imperative. Likewise, one might challenge (or affirm) Schleiermacher's
approach to philosophical ethics, which involves the development of virtue, the
centrality of the good (summum bonum), and the employment of the categories of
organism and totality. Nevertheless, Schleiermacher's approach raises important
questions. Just what does or should constitute a philosophy of culture is a decisive
question, for such a philosophy would need to be able to take into account the
significant role that religion plays within culture and to think through the relation
between the religious and the ethical in a way that shows their mutual reciprocity.

• Religion: An Objectified, Abstract, and Imperial Category of the


West?
The third group of criticisms of the category of religion concerned its adequacy in
two ways: as an abstract category and as a Western prejudice. As an intellectual
abstraction the category of religion tends to objectify and reify the concept, as
Smith, for example, has argued. This view has also become very predominant in
post-modern thought. It is likewise prevalent among those influenced by Jacques
Derrida's critique of the violence of metaphysical thinking.65 Such a criticism im-
plies that violence is done to the personal dimension of religion by subsuming it
under such an abstract category as religion. These criticisms revive Martin
Heidegger's observations in his early lectures on the phenomenology of religion,
and point to the problem of treating religion as if it were a phenomenological

"Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphyscis: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel


Levinas," in idem, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) 79-153.
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 29

object. As Heidegger argues, an interpretive dilemma occurs when one subsumes


religion under a universal concept, because one then interprets the historical world
in relation to a preconception that is fixed upon an ahistorical object.66

Categorical Abstraction
First, it is important to note that the charge of "categorical abstraction" raises a
problem that Schleiermacher himself observed. As Richard Niebuhr noted:
By the nature of the case, Schleiermacher believed, as soon as this
articulation of feeling is reduced to philosophical categories, the level of
meaning has been transposed to a new plane upon which the realities
ingredient in the religious self-consciousness as such can never be
projected without the appearance of a certain concomitant distortion.67
Moreover, Schleiermacher himself had pointed to the lack of clarity of the notion of
religion. Therefore, he proposes its exclusion from theological vocabulary. Since its
academic use is too recent, Schleiermacher prefers the terms Glaubensweise (way of
believing) and "piety."68 This preferred terminology brings to expression the results
of the distinction between religion and theology in Protestant theology.69
Second, the distinctiveness of the category of religion within modern
Protestant theology has a history prior to Schleiermacher. In the Enlightenment,
religion was adopted as an inclusive category that embraced more than
Christianity, so that one distinguished between religion and Christian
theology.70 Enlightenment thinkers sought specifically to express this greater
inclusiveness of the term "religion" through the category of natural or rational
religion. A correlation, however, if not a correspondence, was made between
rational, natural religion and Christianity. Thus, this effort to make the term
more inclusive failed. Schleiermacher opposed precisely this notion of religion
as natural religion. He thereby radically changed the problematic. He replaced
the category of natural religion with the issue of the specificity and
individuation of religion.

"See Thomas Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993) 159.
"Niebuhr, Schleiermacher, 190. See also Schleiermacher, Dialektik, 297-314.
"Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith § 6. In the first edition of The Christian Faith
(§ 12.3; footnote 6), Schleiermacher notes that the notion of religion has its roots in paganism
and is a difficult word to explain. Schleiermacher's suggestion of Glaubensweise as a preferred
term is close to Smith's own proposal to emphasize the personal pole of religion.
69
Hans-Joachim Birkner, "Beobachtungen und Erwagungen zum Religionsbegriff in der neueren
protestantischen Theologie," in Dietrich Rossler and Gottfried Voigt, eds., Fides et Communicatio:
Festschrift fur Martin Doerne zum 70. Geburtstag (Friedrich Wintzer: Gottingen, 1970).
™For the distinction between theology and religion in Semler, see Trutz Rendtorff, Church and
Theology: The Systematic Function of the Church Concept in Modern Theology (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1971).
30 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

In other words, his theology sought to confront both the problem of categorical
abstraction and the abstractness of natural religion. His choice of the term
"feeling" might be misleading today because of the connotations we associate with it.
However, by using this term Schleiermacher sought to designate the
presence of the total self (spiritual, sensual, and unified) in its spiritual and
material world. He selected the term "feeling" rather than "knowing" or "doing" to
express this experience of the unity of the self, since he viewed thinking as ordered
toward objects via logical abstraction and as constituting this unity as an
objectification. Schleiermacher aimed to avoid the objectification that the
category of religion might entail. Both his choice of terms, and his very
understanding and location of religion, are directed toward this goal. Thus, the
interpretive emphasis upon feeling as pre-linguistic overlooks the significance of the
linguistic within Schleiermacher's understanding of religion.
Thirdly, categories such as conversation, discourse, and dialogue have
become commonplace within philosophical and theological parlance.71 Both
the acknowledgement and the recognition of the other have become a central
goal. This emphasis upon dialogue and upon otherness emphasizes that truth
is not the possession of an individual or even of an individual group—as if
truth were a set of coins, which some people have in their pockets but others
do not. Instead, truth is what emerges within conversation. Truth is that
toward which the dialogue constantly moves in increasing spiral, zigzagging
and emerging through serendipitous turns and creative moments.72

The Dialectic of Thinking: Discourse


On this point it is important to understand the role of dialogue and conversation in
Schleiermacher's workfromhis early Christmas Eve Dialogues to his mature Dialektik.
It is significant that Schleiermacher emphasizes in his Dialektik the importance of
dialogue and conversation to thinking itself.73 It is not a case, for Schleiermacher, that
we have a thought with certitude and firmness, as if we were Cartesian foundationalists,
seeking absolute certitude in our knowledge. Instead, thinking is constituted through
discourse and dialogue. In the development of his view of thinking and its relation to

71
Schleiermacher's own understanding of dialogue is connected with his translation of the
Platonic dialogues. For background, see Rudiger Bubner, "Die Entdeckung Platons durch
Schelling und seine Aneignung durch Schleiermacher," in Innovationen des Idealismus (Gottingen:
Vandenhoeck, 1995) 9-42.
72
See Gordon D. Kaufman, God, Mystery, Diversity: Christian Theology in a Pluralistic
World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).
"See the recent collection of essays, Dieter Burdorf and Reinhold Schmiicker, eds., Dialogische
Wissenschaft: Perspektiven der Philosophie Schleiermachers (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1998).
See Friedrich Kaulbach, "Schleiermachers Idee der Dialektik," Neue ZeitschriftfUr systematische
Theologie 10 (1968) 225-60.
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 31

dialogue, Schleiermacher divides thinking into various types: a thinking for the
sake of knowledge (called pure thought), a thinking for the sake of a practical end
(called gesellchaftliche, or societal thinking), and an artistic thinking (to which
religion belongs). The latter produces creativity in a free and open conversation.
For Schleiermacher, interestingly, it is in linguistic communication that the cat-
egory of revelation emerges.
Schleiermacher's emphasis on dialogue and discourse is relevant to my
discussion for several reasons. Historically, for an understanding of his view of
religion, revelation, and reflection, scholars have turned to The Christian Faith,
with its description of the feeling of utter dependence, instead of his Dialektik,
with its emphasis on thinking and dialogue. Second, Schleiermacher's emphasis
in the Dialektik upon the interrelation between discourse and thinking underscores
the centrality of linguistic communication for his view of religion. This
interconnection is present in the Speeches as well as in The Christian Faith.
Unfortunately, some interpretations focus upon personal and experiential
dimensions of his view and fail to take into account the role of sociolinguistic
communication involved in the origin and spread of religion.
Third, for Schleiermacher there are no a priori answers to questions insofar as one
has to take into account the insights of the conversation partner. This should lead to the
ability to rethink categories. Our own categories need to be considered as
exemplars rather than norms, as working hypotheses and prototypes in need of
further additions and modifications. In other words, as we work with a category we
need to change and expand it, especially as we in the West encounter other
categories that deal with what we call religion and transcendence. Religion has been
described and defined very diversely. The term has a long history in the West that
predates the Christian use of the term and that has undergone several significant changes.
Recent studies on the history of the notion of religion by Michel Despland74 and Ernst
Feil75 have complemented and nuanced earlier studies such as Smith's.
We are faced with a dilemma with regard to the category of religion. As Rodney
Needham notes, the category of religion is insufficiently precise and "too
polysemous, indistinct, and malleable to serve any steady analytical purpose." At
the same time, as he also maintains, "it still possesses a certain odd-job
connotation that makes it somewhat useful in the preliminary assortment of social
facts and general descriptions."76 Or, as Gerald Larson notes, rather than rejecting

"Michel Despland, La Religion en Occident: Evolution des Idees et du Vecu (Montreal:


Fides, 1979); see also Despland and Vallee, eds., Religion in History.
"Ernst Feil, Religio. Bd. I: Die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs vom
Friihchristentum bis zur Reformation (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986) and idem,
Religio. Bd. II: Die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs zwischen Reformation and
Rationalism (ca. 1540-1620) (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1997).
''Rodney Needham, Circumstantial Deliveries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) 73.
32 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

the category of religion, it may be more important to rework the notion of


"religion" along with that of "philosophy" in a manner that allows these
categories to be less dependent upon their European discourse.77
Today we have to seek and adopt categories that are much more reflective and
flexible than they have been regarded in the past. Wittgenstein's notion of family
resemblance provides a flexibility that language about "essences" or "nature" or
"principle" does not.78 Likewise, the growing use of the category of prototype
rather than archetype provides a category allowing for change and opposition. In
addition one has to attempt to avoid an ethnocentric methodology. One would
thereby seek not only to avoid the issues of essentialism and abstraction, but also
those of ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism. Such an approach would diminish the
contrast between "ours" and "theirs" by seeking also to use the categories of
other people as categories for the study of religion.79
The ambiguity regarding the Western, Christian, and colonial context of the
modern use of the term "religion" (in distinction from its classical uses) remains an
important and contested issue. Nevertheless, not only our definitions of
religion, but also our concepts of society, economics, gender, kinship, race, and
nature have been developed within the horizons of Western culture. All of these
categories are often used as abstract concepts or as neutral and analytical
categories within various academic and intellectual disciplines. In addition, they
are indeed understood in culturally specific ways. We use the category of
economics to study exchanges within ancient societies just as we use the categories
of gender and kinship to describe those societies. Such categories may not have
been used by those very people within the society we are studying. Nevertheless,
because a group or society may not have used the category of "economics" or of
"gender" to describe itself does not mean that the category cannot or should not be
used. These categories have an analytic significance. Likewise, the category of
religion, if used with flexibility, can have a significance for the study of society.

• Conclusion
In interpreting Schleiermacher within the context of the current and very diverse
debate about the category of religion, I have advanced three arguments. First, I have
underscored the importance of communication and linguisticality for Schleiermacher's

"Gerald James Larson, "Is South Asian Yoga 'Philosophy,' 'Religion,' Both or Neither?" in Ugo Bianchi,
ed, The Notion of Religion in Comparative Research (Rome: "L'Erma" di Bretschneider, 1994) 261-69.
78
See also John Clayton, "Was ist falsch in der Korrelationstheologie," Neue Zeitschriftfiir
systematische Theologie 16 (1974) 93—111. See also Tim Murphy, "Wesen und Erscheinung
in the History of the Study of Religion: A Post-structuralist Perspective," Method and Theory
in the Study of Religion 6 (1994) 119-46.
"Benson Saler, Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Na-
tives, and Unbounded Categories (Leiden: Brill, 1993).
FRANCIS SCHUSSLER FIORENZA 33

understanding of religion, noting particularly that Schleiermacher's understanding


of communication undermines the usual dichotomy between religion and identity
and between religion and revelation. It allows him to conceive of the historical
particularity, individuality, and origination of concrete religious communities.
Second, I have argued that Schleiermacher's interpretation of religion within the
context of a philosophy of culture and history (more appropriate terms than "ethics")
seeks to specify the distinctiveness of religion without exempting it from critical
examination, thereby avoiding what the critics of a sui generis conception of religion
fear. Schleiermacher's hermeneutics relates to his philosophy of culture and to his
dialectics. Hence, any interpretation of religious communication involves diverse forms
of the interconnection of interpretation and explanation.
Third, in relation to the charge of religion as a categorical abstraction of the
West, I noted Schleiermacher's own reservations about the term, pointing to his
modification of the Enlightenment view and his emphasis on the centrality of
dialogue, exchange, and conversation for thinking itself. Schleiermacher's
conception of knowledge in his dialectic is aptly described as a "dialogical
science." It is this openness and dialogical character of thought that should lead
us to employ our notions of religion as preliminary prototypes. Such prototypes
should be open to revision and to new and different understandings.
The modern West has indeed had diverse understandings of religion, as
Richard Niebuhr has noted:
Religious man is magic-making man (Malinowski), fearing-man (Hume),
and man directed toward the Unconditional (Tillich), he is man
shuddering before manifestations of the numinous (Otto), devoting
himself to and denying himself for the sake of universal ideal-energies
(Dewey), like loving and dealing justly and other virtues. Religious man
is man feeling his absolute dependence (Schleiermacher), man arrogantly
seeking deity and deification (Barth). He is man homesick for a primeval
time (Eliade), myth-making man (Cassirer), and man giving himself to
transcendent beauty (Jonathan Edwards).80
Today, we stand at the threshold of a scholar, teacher, and friend retiring from
Harvard. We stand at the threshold of a new millennium. As we approach this third
millennium in the history of Christianity and Christian theology, we are
increasingly aware of the new challenges and tasks that the twenty-first century
will bring to us. Its increasing diversity and pluralism will require that we face the
otherness of other peoples and their religions and that we dialogue with them in
their understanding of the mystery and meaning of life. In this task we may need
new tools and resources, but some of these will entail our drawing on the riches and
resources of the tradition. One of Richard Niebuhr's greatest services as a scholar

!0
Niebuhr, Experiential Religion, 33.
34 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

and teacher over the last four decades of this century has been to show the resources
of the eighteenth century in Jonathan Edwards, the nineteenth century in Friedrich
Schleiermacher and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the twentieth century in North
American pragmatism, especially in Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.
The work of his many students throughout the country testifies to this legacy. It is a
legacy that could have been left only by someone with the breadth of historical
knowledge and the creativity of theological reflection that Richard R. Niebuhr's
work displays. I have tried to honor him in a very limited fashion by suggesting that
Schleiermacher offers us some resources for dealing with religion as a contested site
in the twenty-first century.

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