The place of religiosity after modernity in Buber and Rosenzweig’s approach to Christianity

Many secularists share the opinion that a sharp division has been achieved between the premodern sacred worldview and the modern, secular one. Others suggest that sacred categories of thought have lingered in the modern world where they have been transformed into secular ones, that is, that the Bible encodes Western culture’s central myths of collective identity, such as modern nationalism. In any case, the existence of religious performances which hold on to their old shape is still plainly noticeable today. They are untranslated or reinterpreted narratives that ignore the changes of history; namely, what is commonly called “fundamentalism.” ¹ Indeed, the overall intensity of religious activity since the end of World War II proves that we live in a “post-secular” era. That is, we see a return to religiosity, although not to a specific religious affiliation. Those who hold that the sacred belongs to premodern history are naturally panicked by any kind of religious “resurrection,” and with good reason—namely, fear from fanatic ideologies, as I will discuss. An example of such an antagonism is the school commonly known as the “Return of the Death of God” in the late 1960s, 70 years after Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God, and their successors today like Richard Dawkins, ² Regina Schwartz, ³ and Hans Kippenberg, ⁴ to name a few, who share the opinion that monotheism is the ultimate source of violence in human history. ⁵ Truly, while politically the status (or authority) of the three Abrahamic doctrines has drastically declined since the rise of modernity, their classic universalistic ambition was replaced (or inherited) by the extremist ideologies of fundamentalist groups. Using the non-ideological atmosphere as well as the existential-financial uncertainty that prevails in some developed Western societies, these non-democratic groups are trying to produce a longing for an imagined, lost harmonious past, out of a sharp antagonism to the present time. Disguised as restorers of “true pure being,” they violently strive to dictate the sociopolitical agenda in the global arena. But as explained by S. N. Eisenstadt, one of Buber’s classic interpreters, these groups challenge the monopoly of the liberal Western idea of modernity by appropriating many aspects of it in order to prove a separation between modernity and Western culture. Hence, though they speak in the name of tradition, they are, by and large, a modern phenomenon. That is, they are themselves a modern ideology which strives to reshape modern worldviews—in the case of radical Islam—in its own non-Western image. These groups struggle against modernity using its own weapons by using the latest technology to mobilize the outdated man, the one who is “forgotten” in the corner of modern society, to their side.

Against this background, namely the polarism between extreme atheism and extreme religiosity, I want to reconsider in this short account Buber’s and Rosenzweig’s theological response to modernism, which remained esoteric and marginal; that is, it did not receive the attention it deserves, partly because, in my opinion, their thought was presented with the wrong emphasis. Like Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, in Buber and Rosenzweig’s view religion is always relevant. To use Buber’s phrase, God is the “eternal Thou,” yet religion is ready to be reformulated. They were aware, like Bultmann, ⁶ that the scientific orientation of the modern mind requires that traditional ideas should be retold in a new language, different from that used during premodern times. According to Rosenzweig ⁷ modern science radically changed the study of past events in a way that strongly questioned the status of the miracle as evidence of religious truth. Therefore, in his view, traditional language should be reconsidered. Like Tillich, he claimed that theology should dwell with natural philosophy, though for a different reason, namely that faith is in need today of the stability of the pagan philosophical logic. He calls this mixture “new thinking,” which balances culture and theology. He added elsewhere that we cannot ignore that in turning back there is a danger, hence one must carefully check in what way is it poisonous and it what ways it is an opening towards the future. Similarly, Buber pointed out that the religious demand is not to go back in time to the Bible, as the desire cannot be to return to, or even to continue what has already been, but rather to extract the principle of the ancient gospel, which he calls “Jewish humanism,” and adapt it to the present given situations. Rosenzweig described fundamentalist anachronism as the “ruthless Tyranny of the Heavenly Kingdom,” while Buber pointed out that it destroys the balance between the earthly time dimension and the eschatological one. Walking in the path of God requires self-restraint. That is, sometimes the lack of power to act is the very fulfillment of God’s will. In any case, both of them stressed that a fanatic attitude does not leave God room to act, as it urges by force the end of history to arrive before its time. By glancing at the “big picture” from the farthest distance, they ignore the demands of present social responsibility that are found in Scripture. However, Buber and Rosenzweig did not identify the core of the biblical gospel with current existential thought as Bultmann did with Heidegger, ⁸ but rather offered theological answers to existential questions which were raised in modern life, like relativism and cultural pessimism. For example, they queried whether revelation is an answer for autonomic reason, and in the same way that the building of the kingdom of God answers the question of being at all, and whether history has a point. Buber and Rosenzweig consequently longed for a revival of religiosity. However, in contrast to the extremism of some atheist schools, fundamentalism, as well as the dogmatism of institutional religion—that is, a religion that is held prisoner by its own notions—they rejected the attitude that “Western thought is very good at asking questions but fails to answer any of them, while theology knows the answers.” They rather suggest that genuine theology, that is, one that is in dialogue with culture, must raise new questions in order to be relevant to people outside its communities; that is, to stay open to new interpretations of its relations to culture. This notion is embedded in their dialogical philosophy, in that that the language of Western philosophy already holds information, a content, while dialogue creates new content time and again. For example, when I ask someone a question to which I cannot know in advance how he will answer, if at all, then I can say that the content will be revealed when he will decide to reply, or not, and how. Being aware of the gap drawn between religion and culture in modernity, a reaction out of which the above-mentioned social polarism came about, Buber and Rosenzweig addressed their message to both the religious and the secular public. On the one hand they gave the issue of religious extremism a systematic theological formulation, derived from their perception of revelation, namely, their analysis of the psycho-theological mechanism of messianic process, which exposes the fanatic distortion of tradition as well as its modern character, rather than of tradition’s delivery squad. This innovative systematic formulation can serve today as an effective pedagogic tool. On the other hand, like Bultmann, Buber strived to revise the messianic idea for the modern person in a way that can implement the idea of redemption in everyday social situations, namely, to satisfy deeper spiritual needs, without great aspirations—that in most cases do not leave room for other types of faiths or opinions. From a purely theological point of view, their novelty is located, in my view, in the way that they shifted the issue of religious fanaticism from being a political question to a theological one. That is, they saw it as a distortion of the dynamics of faith that blocks the ability to chart for itself a limit, which is a condition for true monotheism to flourish.

A second aspect of Buber’s and Rosenzweig’s theological response to modernism that I want to cover here, because it is mirrored in overall modern culture, is their approach to Jewish–Christian relations, and the place or relevance of the discussion on this relationship today. Although their perception of Judeo-Christian interreligious relations is a unique episode in the history of Jewish thought, I assert that it also carries a meaning that reaches beyond this context, not only because they created a theoretical foundation that upgrades the relations from mere demonstration of goodwill towards a theological conclusion, but mainly in light of the fact that, according to their understanding of revelation, namely as a dialogue (between man and God), there is no apparent reason anymore for developing a theology which does not relate to other religions. Also, interreligious dialogue carries an existential interest for overall modern society, which is tied to Christianity and Judaism. This notion was expressed in the way that their conception of Judaism was possible out of their understanding of Christianity, and this has affected their approach to Christianity. In other words, they were not satisfied with mere religious tolerance as Spinoza was, ⁹ nor with A. Y. Heschel’s demand for pluralism due to the genetic character and interaction of both religions ¹⁰ based on the model in which Christianity is to be seen as a daughter religion. Buber and Rosenzweig were on a search for an active relationship that is based on an open exchange of ideas. Their method to reach a harmony between the two communities which is required in the messianic process is a mutual theological reaction, especially in Rosenzweig’s system in The Star of Redemption, and this method is their most important contribution to Jewish thought about Christianity so far, a reciprocity that rests on the partnership of the two religions in the Bible. Indeed, long before Buber and Rosenzweig, Spinoza referred to Christianity as an internal matter to Judaism rather than an external “problem” as medieval Jewish thinkers like Maimonides and Rabbi Yehuda Haevi saw it, in that that he understood the new situation created by modernity—for example that one can step out of his faith community without the need to convert—as a common challenge for Jews and Christians alike. But it is still unclear whether Spinoza’s point of view towards Christianity was taken from inside or outside Judaism, therefore it is difficult to relate him to what we might call the history of dialogical Jewish thought towards Christianity in modern times. And because his position is still disputed, it is also hard to say if the innovative way in which Spinoza viewed the Bible from a Christian point of view cleared the way to Buber and Rosenzweig. Therefore in my opinion they were pioneers in that they entered the territory of Christian thought and set out again the nature of the relationship between the two religions in terms of classical Christology itself, especially Rosenzweig—that is, they explained the task of the Jewish redemption process also according to Christian theology by providing Jewish answers to Christian questions, partly from the reason that Jews could never explain to Christians what Judaism is and who the historical Jesus was from Jewish sources alone. At any rate, unlike Spinoza, Buber and Rosenzweig saw in modernism a problem, a crisis, and a solution in respect that it created an atmosphere in which secular culture ironically moved closer than ever before to the messianic idea. Specifically, Rosenzweig suggests that under the veil of modern nationalism lays a messianic ambition; that is, it proves that certain nations were fed up with defending their particular cause and turned to develop a will to announce something on a bigger scale, universal, which corresponds to the church’s classic ecumenical aspirations, while Buber interpreted the modern crisis of faith as an extreme phenomenon which raised again not only the classic question of the existence of God but also new existential questions that emerge from it and that demand new responses. In accordance with his notion of God as an eternal Thou, his existence is not at stake, but our willingness to present him in his life. Buber uses Franz Kafka’s story “The Castle” as a case study in which the modern person can walk confidently in the darkness to his or her destination, although there is no logical reason for it. Through this, Buber turns the common perception of Kafka as a Jewish existential nihilist—that is, as a person who thinks God has forgotten humanity—into a modern precursor of authentic biblical faith, like Job. Hence, Buber calls modern times “the era of the eclipse of God,” implying that modernity is not a mere “shattering of the vessels” (in Hebrew: shevirat hakelim) ¹¹ in a sense of opening of a new page disconnected from past events, but has a profound theological meaning, as it explores the ties that always existed between theology and culture, and of course: the existence of God through Kafka’s thought. Buber’s theological answer is therefore that God was eclipsed by modern ideologies, ¹² a situation that made it possible for Western modern mind, of both believers and nonbelievers, to get closer to Jesus’ dynamic of faith as described in the synoptic Gospels, and in effect, closer to what he considers as the common ground of both authentic Judaism and Christianity as well as all humans—namely “Jewish humanism,” ¹³ even if they are not aware of it.

Hence, from the viewpoint of what is called today “interfaith theology,” ¹⁴ a relatively new discipline in the field of theology which has made its first steps in the last couple of decades, and that Buber and Rosenzweig can be considered precursors to, I want to conclude the essay by placing their positions in the context of the modern Christian debate on Paul–Jesus. Seen in this way, one can discern the link between interfaith theology and the challenge of modernity which religiosity in general has to face. As we saw, especially Buber showed that the very absence of God caused by modern secularism brought Christians and Jews, at least theoretically, closer. This modern Christian debate started off in liberal German Christian circles in the 19 century by scholars like Baur, ¹⁵ Wendt, Hilgenfeld, Bauer, Wrede, ¹⁶ and up to and including Bultmann, Schweitzer, ¹⁷ and Barth. Though their importance in making a breakthrough in traditional Christology that laid the foundations for modern NT scholarship is undisputable, if through controversial questions on the relation of the historical Paul and Jesus, which led some of them to radical conclusions such as that the existence of the historical Jesus is unprovable, or by pointing to the problematic absence of details from Jesus’ life as they are reported in the synoptic Gospels in Paul’s epistles. But also through the pioneering distinction of Baur between a Jesuit-Petrine layer of Christianity and the Pauline one, which is taken for granted today in discussions on the history of the church, at least in the academy. However, all in all they avoided the consequences of their discourse for Judaism. In other words, even Bultmann and Schweitzer, who were on personal friendly terms as well as in intellectual dialogue with Buber, ¹⁸ left the Christian perception of Judaism as distorted and remote as it had always been in traditional Christian dogmatic teaching. Apart from the NT scholarship level, there is also a gap between Buber and Rosenzweig’s “religious existentialism” (that is, a thought that seeks current existential solutions in the Scripture) and that implemented by Barth and his school in respect to Barth’s absorption in the implications of the existential aspect of original sin for modern humanity, which is one of the reasons that modern Protestantism became a theology that sounds like individual spiritualism that sees faith as a paradox that modern people suppose to be familiar with. As Jacob Taubes puts it, this theology places the existential questions “on a catastrophic plane.” ¹⁹

Only after World War II this discussion, which was held on German soil alone, started to be seriously echoed in Anglophone Christian scholarship, mainly by the so-called “New Perspective of Paul” school by scholars like Stendhal, Dunn, Sanders, and Wright, who developed the pre-World War II discussion significantly further. From the Jewish dialogical point of view of Buber and Rosenzweig, this school concerns us here more, as they did take into consideration the effect of their new ideas upon the future of the relationship between Christians and Jews, and even the Zionistic cause, especially Stendhal. Parallel to these new modern Christian views, a discussion about Paul also emerged in the field of Jewish modern thought, a discussion which was revolutionary on its own in that until then Jewish concern with Christianity focused on Jesus alone, mostly because Paul’s image was perceived as too alienated or pagan, which led all premodern and most modern Jewish scholars to think that it is better not to discuss his teachings, or more accurately, to reflect on the rumors they heard about them. Now, Buber took an important part in that chain of modern Jewish discussion on Paul–Jesus, mainly in the book Two Types of Faith, which I analyzed at length in my dissertation. Though Rosenzweig’s approach to Jewish–Christian relations has not focused on Paul as much as Buber did, his reflections on the role of the church as well as his overall conclusions, which are very close to those of some of the post-World War II NPP Christian thinkers, place him alongside Buber in the context of my discussion.

The scope of the present article does not allow me to exhaust all the aspects I have presented, nor is it intended to check who was right or wrong (although Buber and Rosenzweig have distinguished right from wrong reading of the Scripture), but rather make the observation that when closely examined together, from the correlations between those new Jewish and Christian schools, we can outline a road map which can lead us to a new understanding of traditionalism\modernism. That is to say, we can speak here of a new religious language, not one that abrogates the former one, but rather with a new grammar—Christian as well as Jewish, which can serve as a model for future interreligious dialogical attempts with other religions, first of all Islam, as well as a platform for a dialogue with what is commonly seen hitherto as a non-theological realm like secular culture. For example, the manner in which Buber and Rosenzweig used their dialogical approach to the biblical text as an alternative to traditional theological categories, namely through one whose ultimate concern is with humans, is a language that neutralized the fanatic potential of popular messianism that is often used in extreme ideologies, religious and others. More specifically, Buber understood the infringement on dialogic reality as a “sin.” That is, an objective relationship is equated with “impurity,” and the restoration of the dialogical reality as “forgiveness” or “repentance.” In the same way, according to his perception of the traditional category “revelation” as a universal lingual emancipation, “secular” would be one who does not relate to his fellow man by his first name. Similarly, Rosenzweig used in his book, The Star of Redemption (in which his core insights on Christianity, as well as culture, are located), concepts which are taken from classic religious terminology, though he refused to classify his thoughts in that category. Indeed most of it deals with idolatry and revelation regardless of the testimony of a specific historical religion or another. With regard to radical atheism as well as fundamentalism, Buber and Rosenzweig reconciled the tension between ideas and concepts that seem primitive and oppressive—in short: “medieval” to secular ears (for example, those of Richard Dawkins’s fans) like “God,” “sin,” “redemption,” or the “kingdom of heaven,” with modern humanistic altruistic values such as human dignity, orientation (against relativism and pessimism), and, especially for Buber, social justice. In this way a traditional category like “idolatry” can tolerate other meanings, for example, not being in relation. It should be noted that this notion is not merely metaphorical in the way that Jack Miles ²⁰ or Harold Bloom, ²¹ for example, perceive God’s existence as valid only within the closed logic of literature; that is, he is not to be ontologically found in the books. As Diamond clarified, Buber did not intend by his dialogical philosophy to convert or adjust the designation “God” to the avant-garde intellectual trend, but he rather hoped only that the use of the term “eternal You” would spare him the unnecessary efforts in fronting the religious prejudice that exists in contemporary culture, that is, to bring people the simple message that they can treat each other and the Godhead on the level of I–you without letting their supposed prejudices and opinions about religion to interfere with that experience.

In principle, Buber held that no one is entitled to give up the term “God” after so many people in history lived and died with this name on their lips. ²¹ Nor did Buber and Rosenzweig hold God for an idea on top of a philosophical system like Moses Mendelssohn and Herman Cohen did, that is, as a conclusion that can be derived from natural wisdom, a spirit that people can relate to only through reason. But Buber and Rosenzweig’s perception of the Godhead is ontological, as someone who reveals himself or his will in history, sometimes through miracles—a God that humanity encounters in real life, that people live and die before. This is expressed according to Buber in that the authentic biblical meaning of faith (in Hebrew: emunah) is confidence (in God’s will to help). Hence, from a pedagogical point of view, seen in this perspective, Christianity cannot be reduced to a mere statue of Jesus. This of course refers not only to certain Jews, but to anyone who judges others, of religious or other belonging, only according to the dogma of their group. This anti-fundamentalist approach was expressed in the last decades very directly in the new liberal thought of Bishop John Shelby Spong. ²³ On the basis of non-literal reading of the Bible, Spong calls for a rethinking of Christianity’s core areas of teaching (Christology, eschatology, theodicy) which hitherto were considered essential for being a Christian at all. His ideas, such as what he consider as the mistake of the view of the cross as the sacrifice for the world, and that a new way of defining and speaking about the Godhead must be found to adjust Christianity to the post-Newtonian world created by modernity where most traditional theological God-talk no longer has any meaning, as well as the way he reconciled between modern evolution theories and religious tradition, can be seen in the context of the present account as an outcome of the NPP approach not only in the respect that he takes account of the Jewish context of any New Testament study, but also in that he stretched this trend to the point where he needs to retell the whole Jesus story as Christians know it. In this way he also neutralizes the anti-Jewish sting which was embedded in their traditional reading. Spong’s attempt to reformulate the church’s doctrine matches the condition of modern Christianity as Buber described it in his book Two Types of Faith, as a faith which is no longer in need of mediation, a faith that he calls “non-Pauline Paulinism,” which signals a progress of Christian faith towards the authentic faith of the Jewish Jesus.

Obviously, Spong was widely criticized. Some hold him for a dangerous heretic. Hence, the place of his attitude in current Christian discourse can be compared to that of Buber’s in that, as explained by Eliezer Schweid, along its history traditional Jewish thought was full of internal debates, in which some unusual figures took part like Paul and Elisha Ben Avuya. But out of the intention to preserve integrity and authority, tradition “overcame” their arguments and left only a memory of their existence; that is, it reduced their alternative understanding of Judaism to a mere curiosity. However, in modern times, or more specifically in postmodern discourse where the exceptional has become the center of history, one cannot present Jewish thought anymore without displaying it against the attempts to break away from it, as in our age the number of thinkers who left tradition is immeasurable, and their personal experience with the boundaries of Judaism is where their understanding of the relationship between religion and modernity stems from. In other words, Buber’s perception of Jesus and Paul is not according to Jewish and Christian dogma, and Spong’s alternative reinterpretation of Christianity is only obvious today. Although Rosenzweig’s understanding of the relationship between the two religions is complementary, which was revolutionary in his time, it is still not fully absorbed in Jewish circles, as David Goldman suggests that sadly, many Jews welcomed the liberal secularism of the past two centuries, as they felt they were witnesses for Christianity, but witnesses held in an unpleasant custody at best. It was the French Revolution that tore down the ghetto walls and opened the doors of Western society to them. Hence, to the question, Is the decline of Christianity good for them?, some are encouraged to promote today’s “multiculturalism” as it represents a new religion hostile to the previous Christian monoculture. Goldmann claims that the relevance of Franz Rosenzweig today is therefore in the merit that he argued that Christianity is needed for the Jews, as the Jews are needed for the Christians not only in the form of a book written in Hebrew but physically as a living people, and that the “new” religion of multiculturalism is nothing more than the old “polytheistic barbarism.” ²⁴

Finally, I find it therefore very challenging to encounter the innovative rereading of Paul’s teachings, ²⁵ which very much strives to bridge between Christians and Jews as communities, that is, to re-explain their relationship in light of the appearance of the New Testament, with Buber and Rosenzweig’s interfaith as well as cultural-critical positions. Namely these are: the unique way with which they made room for the otherness of the Christian; ²⁶ Rosenzweig with his love-based “New Law” as an act which promotes a dialogical lifestyle alongside other forms of Belief; and Buber by basing revelation upon the presence rather than on contents in a way that expands common ground with other types of faiths as well as cultures. These thinkers, from both religions, foresaw that it will be all the more difficult to think today in our global era of religious life without being interreligious, and to live a life at all without being multicultural. Therefore, I view these thoughts as a model to the purpose and direction on which an effective future dialogue between Jews and Christians, as well as other religions or any modern or postmodern worldview, should strive for, as they both relate directly to the question of whether believers, in this case Jews and Christians, today, in a time when religion is in danger of being excluded again from intellectual debate, realize that they are in need of each other to be able to confront a world which does not want to know about their God. Furthermore, their relation to God, that stems from their common theological background, demands that religious scholars are no longer entitled to withdraw from the debate on religious fanaticism and leave it to politicians, but rather join together in an educational enterprise, crossing religious boundaries to confront it.