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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2016
In The Theological Project of Modernism, Kevin Hector of the University of Chicago Divinity School offers a nuanced and timely defense of what he sees as an unjustifiably maligned tradition in modern Christian theology. He focuses on what is commonly labeled the liberal or revisionist tradition, centered in its early stages on figures such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel, Albrecht Ritschl, Ernst Troeltsch, and, more recently, Paul Tillich. By carefully reconstructing key arguments from these thinkers, Hector shows not only how this trajectory hangs together as a tradition, but also how its animating impulse differs from what many critics have assumed. Hector's central claim is that this tradition is fundamentally concerned with a distinctive problem, namely, how to relate religious faith to a sense of one's life as one's own—or, put differently, how one's faith can be self-expressive. Hector labels this the problem of “mineness,” or the problem of “how persons could identify with their lives or experience them as ‘mine,’ especially given their vulnerability to tragedy, injustice, luck, guilt, and other ‘oppositions’” (viii). Hector argues that for his chosen thinkers in this tradition, faith—more specifically, faith in a God who is able to reconcile such oppositions—plays a crucial role in resolving this problem.
Kevin W. Hector, The Theological Project of Modernism: Faith and the Conditions of Mineness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 288 pp. $110 hb. Page references appear in parentheses in the text.
1 Hector, Theology without Metaphysics: God, Language, and the Spirit of Reconciliation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
2 The labels used here to characterize this debate are a matter of some dispute, but they are nevertheless widely used in accounts of modern Christian theology. In recent decades, prominent figures associated with a liberal or revisionist perspective include Edward Farley, Gordon Kaufman, Schubert Ogden, and David Tracy, while those associated with postliberalism include George Lindbeck, Hans Frei, Stanley Hauerwas, and Ronald Thiemann. By some accounts, figures associated with “radical orthodoxy,” such as John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, might also be identified with a postliberal perspective. For informative overviews of these movements, see James J. Buckley, “Revisionists and Liberals,” and Fodor, James, “Postliberal Theology,” in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Thought since 1918 (ed. Ford, David F. with Muers, Rachel; 3rd ed.; Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)Google Scholar. Recent works mapping out areas of agreement and disagreement in this debate include Kamitsuka, David G., Theology and Contemporary Culture: Liberation, Postliberal and Revisionary Perspectives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Knight, John Allan, Liberalism versus Postliberalism: The Great Divide in Twentieth-Century Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
3 Barth, Karl, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History (trans. Cozens, Brian and Bowden, John; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002)Google Scholar. A similar narrative, focused more narrowly on Kant but also giving some attention to the post-Kantian trajectory of modern theology, can be found in Michalson, Gordon E. Jr., Kant and the Problem of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)Google Scholar. Such strongly anthropocentric readings of Kant have been challenged in a series of works by Hare, John E., including The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)Google Scholar; and God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); as well as Insole, Christopher J., Kant and the Creation of Freedom: A Theological Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Hector mentions in a footnote, a narrative that shares some similarities with his own approach to modern theology is Dorrien, Gary, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Carter, J. Kameron, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Ibid., 373.
6 King, Martin Luther Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can't Wait (New York: Harper and Row, 1964)Google Scholar.
7 Barth divides his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century into sections on the “background” and “history” of modern theology, and he situates Kant and Hegel as part of the “background,” rather than as part of the actual theological “history.” Coming from another perspective, a prominent philosophical reading of Kant and Hegel that downplays their theological contributions is Pippin, Robert B., Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (2nd ed.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)Google Scholar. Hector briefly mentions Pippin in a footnote.
8 Frei, Hans W., Types of Christian Theology (ed. Hunsinger, George and Placher, William C.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) 2 Google Scholar.
9 Ibid., 5.
10 Ibid. 3–4.
11 Freud, Sigmund, The Future of an Illusion (ed. and trans. Strachey, James; New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961)Google Scholar.
12 Daly, Mary, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973)Google Scholar.
13 Cone, James H., A Black Theology of Liberation (20th anniv. ed.; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990) 28 Google Scholar.
14 Ibid.
15 The relationship between religion and race in the work of Kant and Schleiermacher, as well as J. G. Herder, is carefully examined in Theodore Vial, Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
16 The disparaging treatment of Judaism in Kant and Schleiermacher is just one instance of this problem, and numerous other examples could be given as well.
