The Messianic Disruption of Trinitarian Theology

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The meaning of Christianity is that it turns to the faith of the individual, having realized the utter bankruptcy of achieving authentic faith on the level of the historical. Althaus couches the supersessionist position toward the Jews in salvation historical terminology. In the Church and for the Church, Israel has no more special position and no more special salvation calling.

As a result of this shift, Christianity has no need to engage in dialogue with Judaism, since 10 Chapter One the latter is deemed to be in need of salvation itself. The meaning of salvation is now wholly defined by the Christian Church. The consequences of understanding the rise of Christianity in such drastic terms are disastrous in terms of its evaluation of postbiblical Judaism. The emancipation of the Jews in France was predicated on the dissolution of Jewish communal existence, granting equal rights to the individual without acknowledging the autonomous existence of the Jewish community whose life was regulated by special legislation.

This ultimate prejudice toward the Jews, however, is a position that Christianity was never meant to take. For a meaningful dialogue to exist between Christianity and Judaism, Christianity must return to its Judaic roots and regain its messianic orientation, which finds its basis in the identity of Jesus. The connection between Judaism and Christianity unquestionably lies in the person of Jesus: The task of an authentic Jewish-Christian dialogue is to explore the meaning of such a paradoxical situation, namely to investigate the difference between the Christian Yes!

Hermeneutically locating Jesus on the open horizon of Jewish existence is the only way of acknowledging the Jewish tradition as an authentic partner in dialogue with Christian theology, whose presence is a constant reminder to Christianity of the drastic political consequences particular options within Christian theology ultimately led to. The first schism in the history of the kingdom of God began with the separation between Christianity and Judaism. Even if we are not free to annul that schism all by ourselves, we can still overcome its fateful effects and arrive at a common ground crossed by paths which are indeed still divided but which none the less run parallel to one another.

For Moltmann, the task of Christian theology lies in confronting its history, exposing the false theological alliance between the State and the church, and in retrieving the Jewish messianic idea for Christian theology, an idea that Christian theology perverted through its embrace of the messianism of the State.

Through their anti-Judaism, sometimes beneath the surface, sometimes obvious, the Christian churches have been paganizing themselves for centuries. They turned into institutions belonging to the single religion of their respective countries and persecuted people of different beliefs as the enemies of both religion and the state. The more the church frees itself today from this abuse of itself, the more clearly it will recognize Israel as its enduring origin, its partner in history, and its brother in hope.

Christology was cut off from its The Loss of the Messianic 13 messianic base and became the domain of metaphysical speculations about the ontological identity of the incarnate God. On the foundation of the allegorical reading of the Old Testament, the church developed a christology in which the promises of Israel were conclusively fulfilled by Christ.

Because Christ fulfilled the messianic expectations of Israel in an absolute sense, the Christian Church dispensed with its initial messianic expectations for the return of the Messiah, and instead defined its faith on the level of ontology. The result was a soteriological scheme dominated by the dual ontological status of the Mediator that not only excluded the role of eschatology but it also led to the marginalization of pneumatology the doctrine about the Holy Spirit.

Unfortunately, from early on Christian theology split up the unity of Old Testament messianology into christology on the one hand, and eschatology on the other. Christian theology has overstressed the christology, which is cut away from eschatology; and the eschatology has been neglected. This came about because the incarnational christology of the patristic church presented the descent and ascent of the Redeemer in the vertical perspective of eternity, and moved the divine sonship of Jesus into the center.

The meaning and function of the messianic in Christian theology is to re-situate the human response to comprehend God on the open horizon of historical becoming. It is because Israel continues to hope that the church can hope at all. The retrieval of the messianic is also indispensable for avoiding the marginalization of the Jews and the Jewish faith and for laying the foundations of a meaningful dialogue between Christianity and Judaism, these two now being situated on the common eschatological horizon of messianic hope undoubtedly realizing the fact that there is an important difference in the quality of hope between Judaism and Christianity.

Acknowledging the reality of Jewish hope opens up the whole doctrine of the Trinity, which was for long have been understood as being predicated on the very denial of meaningful Jewish hoping and living. Moltmann retrieves the messianic dimension of Christianity that the latter inherited from the Jewish faith, and he convincingly demonstrates that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which had previously stood as an impervious metaphysical barrier separating Christianity and Judaism, finds its true meaning within a hermeneutical matrix determined by the concept of the messianic.

The dialogue with Judaism on the horizon of history defined by Auschwitz is a practice in political theology. In essence, it is in coming to terms with Auschwitz that political theology begins. This is so, because according to Moltmann all previous attempts to understand the Jew merely functioned to define the Christian and deny the autonomy of Jewish identity: True dialogue between Christian theology and Judaism thus allows the Jew to reveal himself on his own terms to the Christian.

This approach to dialogue with the Other, however, creates a crisis of identity on the part of Christian theology as it has always defined the Jew according to its own terms. Under that cloud it is hard to strike up a conversation. We learn to see ourselves in the mirror of the other and to recognize ourselves in the eyes of the other in a way in which we would otherwise not be able to do. For Christians, and especially German Christians in Germany, this is a humbling process, for to recognize ourselves in the eye of the Jew means to be looked upon with the eyes of the victim and of the survivor of Auschwitz.

These are not two different phases of his theological enterprise but rather ones that are dialectically related to each other. His effort to retrieve and bring to light an authentic form of Christianity is achieved through bringing the history of the Christian tradition under severe scrutiny.

If there were nothing to be retrieved from the history of Christian tradition, no meaningful dialogue would be possible with the Jews in the postHolocaust era. We are likewise responsible to those who shall come after us. We owe it to them to think through carefully the possible consequences of what they say and do, for they will have to bear these as we have had to live with what we have inherited. We must shoulder our own responsibility for our failure to have offered more than a token resistance to this horror, but our forebears are also answerable.

The steps we take and the words we say today could someday mislead or desensitize our followers to become accomplices to evil. First, Moltmann, through a confrontation with his own post-Shoah German context, develops a political theology in conversation with a living Jewish tradition. Through recapturing the full implications of the theology of the cross, the theodicy question is moved from the periphery to the very center of the Christian doctrine of God.

The Gordian knot of the time-eternity paradox of traditional Christian metaphysics is cut through by the eschatological categories of advent and novum, categories whereby the earthly irrelevance of the metaphysical God is overcome. It is only on the horizon of eschatology that a productive dialogue is possible. This is so because on this horizon the question regarding the identity of Jesus is turned into a question of hope, hope being a fundamental category of both Judaism and Christianity. It is through the resuscitation of the category of hope for Christian theology in his breakthrough work, The Theology of Hope, that Moltmann opens up Christianity to a horizon it once had and that it has always been supposed to share with Judaism.

God as the Trinity is not a God that belongs to the insularity of eternity but a God of messianic expectations whose being is becoming one who is present in and through the suffering of his people. For Moltmann, pointing to the Jewishness of Jesus does not exhaust the significance of Judaism. Paying lip service to the Jewishness of Jesus is not a sufficiently critical way to deal with the theological justification of anti-Semitism. The only way to address the inherent anti-Semitism of traditional Christian theology is to reconfigure the horizon, which determines the Christian understanding of God.

This heavy future orientation, explicitly drawing on the philosophy of hope of Ernst Bloch, remains with Moltmann in spite of his attempt to temper it with the retrospective dimension of his seminal work in political theology, The Crucified God. His resurrection from the dead brings the dynamism of the provisional into accord with the finality of the sacrifice, so that it would be possible to talk about a final interim period, but not about a holding back of life in the period of deferment.

In the final analysis, the Christian theology of Moltmann is a forward-looking theology as it anticipates, within the present, the future of human history through the eschatological arrival of God. The event beyond all events, the coming of God, is simultaneously the arrival of Jesus at the completion of his messianic mission by becoming the Son within the inner-trinitarian history. This work abounds in strong statements about the essentially doxological nature of theology: Easter joy is the doxological utterance of Christian belief in God. An examination of the thought of Walter Benjamin serves to demonstrate that there is an alternative philosophical attempt to explore the meaning of the redemptive significance of the messianic.

Knowledge is fragmentary, and it can only be approached through excavating those neglected memory traces that a positivist theory of knowledge, dominated by an uncritical theory of progress, left behind. Johannes Metz clearly sees the value of the negative theology of Benjamin and the necessity to hold onto a weak construal of the messianic in the following section of his seminal work, The Emergent Church. Wherever Christianity vigorously conceals its own messianic weakness its sensorium for dangers and downfalls diminishes to an ever greater degree. Theology loses its own awareness for historical disruptions and catastrophes.

Has not 20 Chapter One our Christian faith in the salvation achieved for us in Christ been covertly reified to a kind of optimism about meaning, an optimism which is no longer really capable of perceiving radical disruptions and catastrophes within meaning? Does there not exist something like a typically Christian incapacity for dismay in the face of disasters?

Moltmann characterizes his theology as messianic in light of his essentially eschatological characterization of theology. Benjamin, on the other hand, does not make such determinations concerning the nature of the messianic. The messianic in Benjamin is understood as an interruption.

The combustion of this interruption is fueled by the past. Moltmann, however, sees the messianic interruption as an interruption that is fueled by the essential futurity of God. Hope for Benjamin is wholly negative in the sense that it is completely beyond present realizability. Finally, the basic divergence between the thought of Benjamin and Moltmann finds vivid illustration in their favorite angels and their allegorical representations. Moltmann, in the preface of his magisterial book on Christian eschatology, The Coming of God, makes an explicit comparison between two angels and their respective orientations: And its meaning is the birth of the future from the Spirit of promise.

Cornell University Press, Fortress Press, , 2. The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents, new rev. There are similar documents issued by various Protestant denominations. The Jewishness of Jesus became the focal point of recent studies of the historical Jesus. See, for example, the excellent work of John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus New York: The works of John Dominic Crossan should also be mentioned, as they provide controversial reconstructions of the identity of Jesus the Jew.

Crossan, The Historical Jesus: Constructive theology broadly defined refers to the efforts of Christian theology to articulate the meaning of the Christian tradition in light of the challenge of modernity: Westminster John Knox Press, , HarperCollins, , Fortress Press, , — Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ , 5.

See I Samuel 8. Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 7. It is important to point out that the purpose of this book is not to argue against the validity of the early Christian Creeds but to make a case for rereading them through a messianic hermeneutics. In this effort this work follows groundbreaking work in Christology by the preeminent liberation theologian, Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator: For an intelligent analysis that propagates this possibility, see Jacob Neusner, Judaism as Philosophy: The Method and Message of the Mishnah Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, , in which Neusner makes a convincing case for perceiving a middle-Platonic structural dimension to the Mishnah.

That there is a metaphysical tradition within Judaism is unquestionable. One of the early figures, if not the founder, of this tradition is Philo of Alexandria. Schocken Books, , Schocken Books, , 24— Fortress, , 25— For a succinct and convincing argument against the charge of hellenization, see Jacques Dupuis, S. Introduction to Christology Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, , 80— The Loss of the Messianic 23 In the Age Renaissance and Reformation Minneapolis: McFarland and Company, Inc.

Whether or not post-Enlightenment Europe can be characterized as post-Christian in a positive sense is a hotly contested topic reflected in the current debate on including or excluding references to the Christian heritage in the constitution of the European Union. A convincing argument for the inclusion of the Christian past may be found in the works of the Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, himself an advisor to the committee in charge of drawing up the constitution.

See Gianni Vattimo, Belief Stanford: Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews: A more thorough treatment of the historical roots and development of Christian anti-Judaism may be found in Rosemary R. Ruether, Faith and Fracticide: Eine Studie zur deutschen theologischen Literature der Gegenwart Munchen: Moltmann, On Human Dignity: Political Theology and Ethics London: SCM Press, , Political Theology an Ethics, Fortress Press, , Moltmann, On Human Dignity, See Moltmann, On Human Dignity, — The work of Paul van Buren provides a hermeneutic for trinitarian messianism.

Discerning the Way San Francisco: Harper and Row, , The paradoxical identity of Christians in relation to Jews is best put by Paul van Buren. A Gentile is by definition anyone who is not a Jew. It is, however, notoriously difficult to identify exactly who is a Jew. Why then do we define ourselves by reference to that which is itself indefinable? We do so because the authors of our Apostolic Writings force us to do this. We define ourselves by reference to the Jews because our Way has no starting point and no possible projection except by reference to the Way in which the Jews were walking before we started and are walking still.

Harper, , Fortress Press, , xv. Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Spirit, Fortress, , 4. Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 1. The multivolume work of Paul M. See Moltmann, On Human Dignity, Moltmann, in The Theology of Hope, defines the meaning of the Christian faith as essentially eschatological in nature: The eschatological is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which everything in it is set, the glow that suffuses everything here in the dawn of an expected new day.

Fortress, , See Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Spirit, , n. Seabury, , Indiana University Press, , See Moltmann, The Coming of God, xvii. Messianism misunderstood finds expression in the political idea that a particular ruler or nation is invested with a messianic identity to create order in the world. The assumption of the messianic throne is the tragedy of totalitarian rule. Agnes Heller puts it in the following way: An empty seat awaits the Messiah.

If anyone does occupy it, we can be sure that we would have then a perverse and hypocritical Messiah. The new political theology was born out of the ashes of the concentration camps installed by the false messianic pretender who wielded absolute authority and who turned his might against the people of the messiah. While rejecting the messianism of Schmitt, Moltmann turned to other expressions of messianism in order to reconstruct Christian discourse in and for a post-Shoah context.

The Messianic Disruption of Trinitarian Theology - Kornel Zathureczky - Google Книги

It was during this time that a new generation of young German Jewish intellectuals recognized the bankruptcy of the assimilationist attitude of their fathers. They rediscovered for themselves those sources of the Jewish tradition and folklore that were labeled as irrational by their assimilationist fathers whose Judaism was a religion of enlightened reason. These inalienable and not-yet-discovered potentialities of human existence offer hope for a revolutionary future utopia, beyond the oppressive bureaucratization of life by the State. It is through the darkness of the lived moment, facing the total negation of existence by the technocratic State, that the messianic hope for a utopian future is born.

Yet—and this is of decisive importance—the future, the topos of the unknown within the future, where alone we occur, where alone, novel and profound, the function of hope also flashes, without the bleak reprise of some anamnesis—is itself nothing but our expanded darkness, than our darkness in the issue of its own womb, in the expansion of its latency.

The messianic suffering of Jesus is suffering over the status quo and its incapacity to offer true freedom to both individual and society.

At the lived moment both self and society are in exile from their true home in the future revolutionary utopia. Therefore, the meaning of the kingdom of God can only be understood eschatologically, as the homecoming of self and society through the messianic struggle to overcome the bondage of the status quo. The kingdom of God is not the incomprehensible abstraction of eternity in time but the presence of a hoped-for future utopia in spite of the injustices and sufferings of the present moment.

He cannot dispense with either. He has set enmity between the two for all time, and withal has most intimately bound each to each. To us [Jews] he gave eternal life by kindling the fire of the Star of his truth in our hearts. The [Christians] he set on the eternal way by causing them to pursue the rays of that Star of his truth for all time unto the eternal end. Out of the fragmented isolation of this originary triad emerges a new mode of time, as God, man, and world enter into mutual relations with one another.

The triad of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption describes the process of relationality. Experience is not integrated in the all-encompassing system of the Absolute. Experience for Rosenzweig regains its singularity; it resists being incorporated into the larger whole of the System. As a result, every moment in time has its singular significance. Time is therefore no longer the transcendental category of the Kantian system.

For Rosenzweig, every moment has its own temporality as time cannot be reduced to a mere succession of moments. The present moment, the time of Today Heute , cannot be located in terms of a linear understanding of time. There is no progress in time from the past through the present to the future. The past has its own quality of pastness understood under the concept of Creation. The present has its own meaning given by the concept of Revelation. And the future also has its own value, never reducible to the past or the present, through the concept of Redemption. Time is a relational category, whose vehicle is language.

In contrast to the concept of time determined by a teleological understanding of history, Rosenzweig identifies Jewish existence as one, which operates with a messianic temporality. This is the Messianic Possibilities 31 veritable shibboleth that distinguishes him from the authentic devotee of progress: For without such anticipation, the moment is not eternal; it is something that drags itself everlastingly along the long, long trail of time.

In contrast to Christian existence, which is the way to Truth through history, Jewish existence is meta-historical.

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Both the Jew and the Christian partake of redemption, but they do so differently. The Jewish people already partake of redemption through their transhistorical existence as the eternal people. The Jew therefore needs no conversion. Conversion is the domain of Christianity whose task is to convert the world within history to the expectation of the Messiah.

Through his very temporality as the one who lives in the redeemed time of eternity, the Jew has already embraced the Messiah. The significance of Jewish election is that the Jew belongs to a history, which is different from the history of the nations. The existence of the Jew constantly subjects Christianity to the idea that it is not attaining the goal, the truth, that it ever remains on the way. This is the profoundest reason for the Christian hatred of the Jew, which is heir to the pagan hatred of the Jew. The becoming unity of God expresses the process of interpenetration between the ordinary triad of God, man, and the world.

Rosenzweig, drawing on the kabbalistic doctrine of the exile of Shekinah, posits a self-distinction within God. In this way, in this suffering, the relationship between God and the remnant points beyond itself. Redemption for Rosenzweig is the constellation within which God, man, and the world arrive at their true meaning through one another.

The Becoming Unity of God expresses not only the infinite responsibility of God toward his people and the world but also the infinite responsibility of man and the world to bring about the redemption of God. The unity of the triune God is the goal of the uniting of man and creation with the Father and the Son in the Spirit. The Wissenschaft des Judentums movement propagated a view of Judaism as a purely rational religion. The positivity of religion represented by the proponents of this movement found its consummate expression in the philosophy of Judaism developed by the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen.

Sabbatai Sevi was not the Messiah anticipated by the Jewish people, yet his messiahship was widely accepted by diverse communities of the Jewish Diaspora. Paradoxically, his claim for messiahship intensified, and he gained even wider following ensuing his apostasy and subsequent conversion to Islam. Positive signs do not precede the emergence of the Messiah. The sign of messiahship is perceived in the total negation of all messianic expectations. The true Messiah is an apostate.

Scholem points out how throngs of Jews all across the Diaspora, and in Palestine, embraced the apostate messiah despite the efforts of Jewish leadership to stamp out the new movement. The paradox of the apostate messiah reflects the contradictory nature of Jewish exilic existence. Creation, in the Kabbalah, is the Galut exile of God from Godself. God cannot contain Godself within Godself and thus explodes 34 Chapter Two into an infinite number of fragments out of which the cosmos is created.

The Diaspora, the dispersion of the people of Israel, is the representation of the Galut of God on the human level. Israel is not alone in her Galut as this Galut is primordially present in God, who exiles Godself from Godself.

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The Galut of Israel finds its ultimate meaning in the Galut of God. The God who is exiled shares in the exile of his chosen people. The God of Israel makes himself vulnerable to the vicissitudes of history by going into exile with his people. The Kabbalistic hope for redemption is illustrated by the concept of the unification of God out of the dispersed fragments of creation. One of the most influential inventions of Kabbalistic mysticism was its reformulation of the doctrine of the Shekinah.

In contrast to the Talmudic and Rabbinical understanding, the Kabbalah represents important changes in the conceptualization of the Shekinah. It is this particular identification that introduces the novel idea of the feminine aspect of the divine. While previously the Shekinah was understood as the presence of God with the people of Israel, in the Kabbalistic system the Shekinah among the people refers to the presence of a part of God among His people.

This act of misdirected contemplation brought about a fissure within the Godhead, the fissure symbolized by the exile of the Shekinah.

The goal of redemption is to bring about unity within God, through the reunion of God and His Shekinah. For the Kabbalists the mythological symbolism concerning the Shekinah had practical ramifications in that every act counted as a possibility to end the Galut of the Shekinah and bring about the unity of God. Scholem characterizes the negativity of messianism as catastrophic in nature. Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature—this cannot be sufficiently emphasized—a theory of catastrophe.

This theory stresses the revolutionary, cataclysmic element in the transition from every historical present to the Messianic future. Hope is a wholly negative category for the Jew because of the unsustainability of hope in the present. Scholem does not say that the Jew has no hope. The Jew does hope, but he does not hope in the Present. It is impossible for the Jew to hope in the Present because active hope in the Present carries with it an index of absolute nihil, which no human being can fully contain within himself. Through the realization that active hope in the messiah is existentially impossible, the Jew defers his hope in the Messiah.

For Scholem, this deferral of hope is the best way one can incorporate the nihil associated with the expectation of the messiah. By deferring hope in the Present, the Jew fully recognizes the absolute nihil of what hope in the Present entails and, through the acceptance of his incapacity to hope in the Present, defers his hope. For Scholem, the basic attitude of the messianic community is a wholly negative one, one that he characterizes as an attitude of constant deferment.

Messianic hope is not a positive assurance of future redemption, a worldnegating attitude, but a consciousness of the utter unreality of the historical materialization of redemption. The greatness of the messianic idea corresponds to the tremendous weakness of Jewish history, which in exile was not prepared for intervention on the historical level. It has the weakness of the provisional, which does not expend itself. Thus the messianic idea enforced life in deferment, in which nothing can be done and completed in a final way.

For the Jew there is no universal history, only the particular history of the elected people. To the fragility of Jewish existence in exile corresponds the exile of the Jews from history. Consequently, because of the meta-historicity of exilic existence, the Jew is incapable of projecting his expectations on the historical future. It is the very essence of Christianity to hope and to offer hope to others.

Christianity is compelled to hope because of its belief in the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. It is in this eschatological event where the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus will find its final shape. A vastly different messianism, which was similarly associated with the Weimar era, also had a lasting impact on his thought.

That was the secularized messianism of Carl Schmitt. This option, however, represented to Moltmann the gravest possible misunderstanding of the meaning of the messianic idea. Schmitt offers a secularized version of the messianic restitution of all things through the finality of decision, through classifying people within the categories of friend and enemy, and through the pseudo-soteriological powers of the Sovereign.

He says, German romantics possess an odd trait: Novalis and Adam Muller feel at home with it; to them it constitutes the true realization of 38 Chapter Two their spirits. Catholic political philosophers such as de Maistre, Bonald, and Donoso Cortes—who are called romantics in Germany because they were conservative or reactionary and idealized the conditions of the Middle Ages— would have considered everlasting conversation a product of a gruesomely comic fantasy, for what characterized their counterrevolutionary political philosophy was the recognition that their times needed a decision.

In the indecision of the German bourgeois middle class, Schmitt detected the major weakness of the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic: Is it possible to find a purely rational way to legitimate the constitution, especially if one follows the idea of rationality liberalism operates with? The sovereign, the one who declares the state of emergency and seizes power to lead the state out of its crisis, has absolute and unquestioned power over the state.

The inadequacies and ultimate crisis of the Weimar constitution were a reflection of a secularized version of the fall of man and his perpetual crisis in attempting to govern himself in a world without God. This is the theological scheme corresponding to the crisis of the legitimation of power within the realm of the secular. Why is Schmitt so crucial a figure for the political theology of Moltmann? First, Schmitt uncovers the hidden, theological dimension of the secular state, and provides a theory of the sovereign in which the sources of legitimations are explored.

He does this by appealing to a Christian theological conception of God as a sovereign being. Ultimately, through these doctrines, he finds theoretical legitimation for the sovereign power of the state. Quoted by Metz in A Passion for God: Paulist Press, , The cultural, intellectual, and religious revitalization of Jewish life of this period is referred to as the German-Jewish Renaissance. The literature on the GermanJewish intellectual-cultural renaissance is vast, and only a few items can be listed in the context of this study.

Yale University Press, should be mentioned here as it has important sections on the intellectual-cultural renewal of Judaism of this period. Stanford University Press, provides 40 Chapter Two a profile of Jewish intellectuals of the postwar period who, in various ways and levels, attempted to confront and incorporate sometimes through negation Jewish messianism into their thinking. It was also impossible to make a child, over-acutely observant from sheer nervousness, understand that the few flimsy gestures you performed in the name of Judaism, and with the indifference in keeping with their flimsiness, could have any higher meaning.

Penguin Books, , 56— Messianic Theology in the Making Basing Stroke: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion New York: Contributions to Trinitarian Theology New York: Crossroad, , — Aubier, from the same author. The Thought of Franz Rosenzweig Detroit: Wayne State University Press, Franks and Michael L. Philosophical and Theological Writings Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Schocken Books, represents an indispensable resource because of its rich biographical content. Lecture and Essays, edited and translated by Barbara E.

Syracuse University Press, Messianic Possibilities 41 9. That was an extraordinary stance: Metaphysical truth was essentially possible in two forms of expression. That was stated for the first time. Christology in Messianic Dimensions Minneapolis: Fortress Press, , 1—5, and his The Coming of God: Fortress Press, , xiii. Translated by William W.

Notre Dame University Press, , Seuil, , Syracuse University Press, , See Susan Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Indiana University Press, , 94— Moltmann, The Coming of God Minneapolis: Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, Harvard University Press, New York University Press, See Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism Oxford: Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, Scholem also attributes an important role in the suppression of the irrational, apocalyptic element within Judaism to Moses Maimonides and his Mishneh Torah: And do not think that in the days of the messiah there will be any departure from the normal course of things or any change in the cosmic order.

Princeton University Press , 12— Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 16— See Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, Schocker Books, , 7. Messianic Possibilities 43 Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie: The MIT Press, The radical journal Telos has been most instrumental in introducing Schmitt to English-speaking academic circles.

See Paul Piccone and G. The standard English biography of Schmitt is by Joseph W. Theorist for the Third Reich Princeton: Politics and Theory New York: Gottfried, Carl Schmitt Politics and Theory, See Schmitt, Political Theology, The two sentences Schmitt brought under his scrutiny in a brilliant way are the following: For this purpose he may suspend, temporarily, in part or entirely, the basic rights as provided in articles , , , , , , and The adequacy of purely rational legitimation of power was problematized by the infamous article 48 of the Weimar constitution, which prescribed the emergency measures the state can take in case of a political crisis.

The ambiguous way the constitution legislates over who can declare a state of emergency and what measures can be taken exposes, at least for Schmitt, the very anomaly of liberal democracy and the inadequacy of its epistemology to draw up an unambiguous constitution and thereby create the basis for the existence of a strong state. The ambiguity of the constitution reveals that the state is in crisis now by the very existence of this constitutional anomaly. The state of emergency cannot be declared by the kind of political power legitimated by the anomalous constitution of the Republic.

The article of the constitution, however, signals the solution to the way out of the quagmire of constitutional crisis. Chapter Three Messianic Epistemology That political messianism does not have to terminate in a theory of totalitarian decisionism Carl Schmitt can be seen in the messianic philosophy of Walter Benjamin. The thought of Carl Schmitt held a particular fascination for Walter Benjamin.

Although he naturally had stronger affinities with the Marxist Left, he also elicited frequent disapproval from these circles. Ultimately Benjamin remained on the margins of European Marxism, eager to hope in the coming revolution, yet remaining realistic enough to perceive the very real pitfalls of realizing a communist state.

Benjamin remained the philosopher of the margins, refusing to be sucked up in versions of political messianism through a totalitarian state. He rejected the political messianism of the revolutionary working class, and also the political 45 46 Chapter Three messianism of the authoritarian Sovereign. The importance of his messianic thinking lies in his insistence on approaching the question of truth through the particular truth lying hidden in the marginal, that which is excluded from the master narrative of European civilization. The tragic character of his life as a marginalized, homeless peripatetic authentically mirrors the quality of his thought as a philosophy of the underside of existence.

It would be facile to anoint Benjamin the patron saint of liberationist philosophies, yet his thought eludes all such forced attempts for classification.

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The significance of Walter Benjamin for European intellectual-cultural thought lies in offering the concept of the messianic as a central category for philosophical thinking. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption; all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. Vision of reality can no longer provide a comprehensive picture of the world.

Vision is shattered, and the task of the critical theorist is to allow these shattered fragments to speak for themselves. The messianic in the thought of Benjamin is not an easily circumscribable category. The messianic refers more to a quality of thinking that focuses on marginal features of existence. Benjamin thinks from the margins and of the margins.

He elevates the marginal to previously unprecedented epistemological heights. He perceived the messianic force of the marginal and the fragmentary vehemently opposing the totalitarian authoritarianism of the omnipotent State. His messianism is characterized by the fragility of hope in redemption. Two categories above all, and especially in their Jewish versions assure a central place in his writings: Their significance as regulative ideas governing his thought cannot be overrated. The meaning of the text lies in its very depths. It eludes automatic comprehension and presents itself at the end of a tedious process during which the exegete progresses layer by layer.

What appealed to Benjamin about the study of kabbalistic texts was the exegetical skill needed to probe their levels of meaning. The text, which for Benjamin is reality itself, is not violated by forcing on it a meaning from the outside. Instead, the text almost miraculously comes to life and presents itself to the exegete as an image.

I need say nothing. The text itself could not contain the truth God wanted to communicate to Israel. Human language does not have the capacity to fully contain the divine word, yet it is, paradoxically—and in the case of the Torah, miraculously—the only means to serve as the medium for the human to get in contact with the word of God. The written Torah participates in the shattered reality of postlapsarian humanity in that the truth of the divine word is shattered into the text of the written Torah.

The latter characteristic of the written Torah explains the reverence Jews pay to the parchment of the Torah, revering it as it is this shattered text through which they know about the expected coming of the Messiah, the one who restores wholeness not only to Israel but also the entire universe. Salvation thus comes through the shattered fragmentary reality of the Torah. The method of philosophical investigation is determined by the way ideas find their representation.

The value of fragments of thought is all the greater the less direct their relationship to the underlying idea, and the brilliance of the representation depends as much on this value as the brilliance of the mosaic does on the quality of the glass paste. The task of the reader of reality is to accept the fact of disorentiation, to immerse himself within particular fragments, approaching them as individual monads while refusing to seek narrative coherence that would create a final synthesis of the infinite fragmentation of life.

The true meaning of the text, the truth of the literary product is hidden behind the semblance Schein of its material content: The critic stands before the work of art with a readiness to devour Messianic Epistemology 49 it. Reading reality as a shattered text made up of disconnected fragments is a redemptive practice, a hermeneutics deeply informed by the negative hope of messianic interruption.

Reality is not experienced through the totality of a system but, rather, through fragments. The marginal, the excluded, becomes the locus of truth. Truth eludes the control of the human mind and cannot be displayed as the product of universal rationality. Truth appears through a constellation of fragments of reality, and it can never be apprehended as the end result of the synthesis of thought. Truth appears as a constellation of the fragments of reality.

In this admittedly recondite procedure, the function of conceptual i. The concept of truth is intricately connected to the seemingly insignificant details of everyday life. The metaphysics envisioned by Benjamin lay beyond both objective and subjective approaches to truth. For Benjamin, truth appears Schein through the negative, through the dissolution of the totality of the system represented by the dichotomy between the object and the subject.

The constellation as a theoretical tool points to the epistemological dissimulation of the subjectobject paradigm of neo-Kantian positivism. The constellation safeguards particularity but fissures identity, exploding the object into an array of conflictive elements and so unleashing its materiality at the cost of its self-sameness.

In this programmatic writing Benjamin expresses his disenchantment with the philosophical orientation of neo-Kantianism, the reigning philosophical movement of his day. It is against this reduction that Benjamin voiced his opposition. Benjamin was dissatisfied with what he considered to be an inferior role the concept of experience played within the edifice of Kantian epistemology. Benjamin wanted to extend the scope of possible experiences and wanted to include experiences that were previously excluded by Kant.

The most notable of the experiences excluded from the epistemology of Kant was religious experience. While western philosophy in the twentieth century has increasingly tended to limit its field of inquiry—in analytical philosophy to the propositional aspects of language, in logical positivism and neo-Kantianism to mathematics—Benjamin is noteworthy for his efforts to expand the scope of epistemological inquiry, exploring as he does the relationship between human cognitive capacity and mystical and religious experience. The concept of the naked, primitive, self evident experience, which for Kant, as a man who somehow shared the horizon of his times, seemed to be the only experience given—indeed the only experience possible.

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This experience, however, as already indicated, was unique and temporally limited. Above and beyond this form, which it shares with every type of experience, this experience, which in a significant sense could be called a worldview, was that of the Enlightenment. But in its most essential characteristics, it is not all that different from the experience of other centuries in the modern era.

As an experience or a view of the world, it was of the lowest order. The very fact that Kant was able to commence his immense work under the constellation of the Enlightenment indicates that he undertook his work on the basis of an experience virtually reduced to a bare minimum of significance. Indeed, one can say that the very greatness of his work, his unique radicalism, presupposed an experience which had almost no intrinsic value and which could have attained its we may say sad significance only through its certainty.

In the Kantian epistemological system experience is made possible by the a priori intuitions of space and time. These forms of intuition are themselves objectively present in the subject before the experience of any particular object by the subject. For Kant, knowledge of the object ultimately depends on the noetic conditions of possible experience. In other words in the Kantian system experience of the object cannot be otherwise.

Actual experience is already determined by the structures of possible experience. The task of a new philosophy, according to Benjamin, is to describe the phenomenon of such diffusion and its consequences to epistemology, projecting the outlines of a new epistemology. Benjamin argued for the epistemological autonomy of experience in order to show the revelatory potential of the object. Benjamin traced back the epistemological dominance of the subject within Kantian philosophy to the influence of Plato. In classical Platonic epistemology it was through the comprehension of ideas that the philosopher acquired true knowledge.

For Benjamin, however, truth remains forever elusive to the grasp of the knower. During the acquisition of knowledge the object becomes subjugated under the possessive consciousness of the transcendental subject. Its very object is determined by the fact that it must be taken possession of—even in a transcendental sense—in the consciousness. He wants to map modernity not as a field of triumph but one of decay.

In actuality it is the tiniest fragment that contains the key to the meaning of the whole. Modernity is exposed in all its insidious structures within which, under the disguise of disinterested reason, only the voices of victors are meaningful. The exclusion of voices on the margins leads to the atrophy of experience, to the end of genuine narrative, and to the inability to remember. Benjamin provides a fascinating phenomenology of the modern from the perspective of marginal phenomena, including peripheral players of the landscape of the modern, such as the flaneur, the prostitute, the gambler, and the collector.

It is through marginal figures and experiences that Benjamin both exposes the illusory world of the modern and fulfills his messianic calling as the redeemer of the forgotten. Benjamin draws on the concept of the fragment, borrowed from such writers as Simmel and Kracauer, to tackle the epistemological illusions of modernity. The task of the critic is to shatter the dream-image and wake up modernity from its illusory dream. Benjamin locates the meaning of the modern in the change of the experienceability of the world. In his phenomenology of modernity Benjamin points to the radical change in the mode of perception effected by the emergence of the modern.

Everything is experienced as potential merchandise with commodity value. The phenomenon of commodification extends its influence over the human. The decay of experience culminates in the phantasmagoria of commodity fetishism. Benjamin, on the other hand, remained skeptical about the concrete utopia forecasted by Lukacs. This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with.

What matters for modernity is what is absolutely new. The time of modernity is a time of the present, which reifies all objects. The time of modernity has an equalizing effect on experience in that all things are experienced as commodities, as mere stepping-stones in the emergence of the next, ephemerally new thing. The time of modernity is the time that corresponds to its experience Erlebnis.

The experience Erlebnis that characterizes modernity is a disconnected experience without tradition. Messianic Epistemology 55 Experience Erlebnis is the experience of the individual who had taken the place of the universal.

Erlebnis transpires within one-dimensional time, and therefore experiences ultimately become indistinguishable from one another. It is within this reality where the shift from Erfahrung to Erlebnis became recognizable to Benjamin. Coherent, integrated experience is destroyed within urban multitudes. Benjamin articulates this process in terms of the transformation of Erfahrung into Erlebnis. It means experience in the sense of being widely traveled, of having witnessed many things, of having gained wisdom.

The experience related by the storyteller, is what one may designate as Erfahrung: Erlebnis is concerned with the domain of inner life, with the chaotic contents of psychic life. The one-dimensionality of Erlebnis lies in its always-the-sameness. Erlebnis is an experience without tradition.

Erlebnis is the experience of the individual who takes the place of the universal. In contrast to Erlebnis the experience of the lived moment without tradition Benjamin, through the method of destruction, attempts to recover experience Erfahrung that is embedded in tradition. In this work Buber challenges objectivistic approaches to understanding experience. Scientistic positivism turns the fallible individual subject into an infallible data processor. Buber 56 Chapter Three describes the event of experience Erlebnis als Ereignis in dialogical terms.

Buber envisages experience as an event that takes place between two equal sides. There is here no subject appropriating the object for its own means. Modernity brings with it a qualitatively new kind of perception. The modern epoch experienced the disappearance of the genuine story. Benjamin describes the impoverishment of experience as the end of storytelling and as the dissemination of mere information. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. The Trinity in Philosophy of Religion. Find it on Scholar.

Request removal from index. From the Publisher via CrossRef no proxy doi. Political Theology at a Standstill: Adorno and Agamben on the Messianic. Christopher Craig Brittain - - Thesis Eleven 1: Messianic History in Benjamin and Metz. Ostovich - - Philosophy and Theology 8 4: McCall - - W. Trinitarian Theology and Philosophical Issues: Difference and Hierarchy in Pannenberg's Trinity. Newman's Via Media Theology of Justification. Holtzen - - Newman Studies Journal 4 2: A World for All?

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