A God’s-Eye Perspective after Onto-Theology: Notes toward a Post-Modern Christian Culture

Abstract

When the elite of German culture discovered that they no longer understood what the belief in God had been about, they earnestly set to work seeking an answer to this puzzle: what had once animated religious belief? What had been the point of it all? What had been its true meaning? The first answer came from Kant, who sought to show that religion, or at least what he considered the legitimate exercise of religion, had all along been about morality. A second answer came from Schleiermacher, who addressed the "cultured despisers" of religion to demonstrate that the true content of the Christian religion had been not propositions of morality, but certain kinds of intuition or feeling. And, yet a third answer came from Hegel, who concluded that revealed religion had been one of three cultural manifestations of absolute knowledge. In one form or another, these three reductions (morality, feeling, and culture) continue in various permutations to be the principal ways that religion is understood today, even by self-identified believers. With ongoing reference to bioethics as a sort of Rosetta Stone for deciphering secular culture, Engelhardt shows at length how the Enlightenment project—the attempt to lay a new foundation for morality and politics drawing upon a universal, secular, discursive rationality rather than the Experience of God—has failed so miserably that there can be no hope for its fulfillment. The secular project—the attempt to live "after God," to find secular substitutes to which Christianity can be reduced—has failed miserably, even if the darkness from this failed star has yet to reach the enthusiasts of secular society: "Morality has been utterly deflated. Culture is cheap. Feelings are quarantined as matters of personal taste to be overridden by secular obligations. The only solution is to return to the ascetical disciplines of the Church of the Apostles and the Fathers, which aid in turning one from self-love to the transcendent God and to a noetic experience of his will" (Engelhardt, After God, 443 n. 14).

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