13 - Modernist Theologies: The Many Paths between God and World

Summary

On November 7, 1917 Max Weber offered his comments on “Science as a Vocation” before an assembly of students and faculty at the University of Munich, declaring that “disenchantment” was an “inescapable condition” and “the fate of our times.” But history tells us that nothing is truly inevitable. Although modern European intellectual history is replete with narratives of disenchantment and religious decline, the fact remains that religious speculation and formal discourses of theology survived well through the end of the twentieth century. For intellectuals who have shed the last remnants of personal faith, the endurance of theology in late modernity may seem perplexing, a symptom of what Nietzsche called Unzeitgemäßigkeit, or a decalibration in time. Already in 1882 Nietzsche’s madman declared that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” But even the madman recognized that he had come “too early.” What he called the “tremendous event” of God’s death was “still on its way”; it had “not yet reached the ears of men.” Critics who harken to the madman’s prophesy may likewise insist that European religious thought is a remnant of an earlier and more pious age.