The Protestant project and indifference concerning God

“MacIntyre adamantly insists he is first and foremost a philosopher. He thinks it theologically important that philosophers disavow any ambition to be a theologian or to do theology. So he is extremely careful not to appear as though he is making theological judgments. But he clearly has schooled himself in Christian theology. He knows classical Protestant liberals like Schleiermacher and Troeltsch, but he seems more interested in Bultmann and Tillich. The latter are the subject of his withering critique in his 1967 Riddel Memorial Lectures at the University of Newcastle. In these lectures, which were published as Secularization and Moral Change, MacIntyre developed some of his most astute criticisms of liberal theology.

“In particular he draws on his sociological insights to illumine the dead ends in which Christianity now finds itself. He observes that one of the central claims of Christianity has been its ability to incarnate itself in different forms of social life, which gives life meaning it would otherwise not have. But MacIntyre argues that the secular life of postindustrial societies no longer is able to give life the meaning that Christianity had supplied in the past. Christianity is now shaped by a secular (in the bad sense) world — even making such a world constitutive of its own life. As a result, he suggests that the claims of Christianity are rendered unintelligible by the actual history of modern society. Theologians have tried to respond to the challenge of the loss of Christian substance by making Christianity at home in such a world, but in the process they have robbed Christianity of any distinctive theological and political content.

“MacIntyre focuses on Tillich as the exemplification of this process. Tillich, according to MacIntyre, took as his fundamental project to explain God in terms intelligible to the modern world. To do so, Tillich left behind the metaphysics of Scholastic Catholicism because he judged such a position to be no longer relevant in the modern world. As an alternative, Tillich explains, what Christians mean by God is that God is the ‘name of man’s ultimate concern.’ Such a suggestion, MacIntyre judges, may be an affective appeal against modern cynics and trivializers, and it might make entertaining sermons, but it is still the case that Tillich’s ‘theism is merely a familiar form of atheism baptized with a new name.’

“MacIntyre had made similar observations in 1969 in the book with Paul Ricoeur entitled The Religious Significance of Atheism. As a way to explain why the theism versus atheism debate has become culturally marginal, MacIntyre made the memorable judgment that ‘theists are offering atheists less and less in which to disbelieve. Theism thereby deprives active atheism of much of its significance and power and encourages the more passive atheism of the indifferent.’ Theologians have apologetically resorted to a theological strategy that has tried to save what is thought to be essential to Christianity by distinguishing the kernel of Christian theism from the outmoded husk. As a result, Christianity has been robbed of its theistic content. For example, Bultmann’s project to demythologize the gospel resulted in making Jesus an early anticipation of Heidegger. The desire of Protestant liberals to find a ground for believing in the truth of the gospel independent of the truth of Christian orthodoxy ends up making Christianity unbelievable. In particular, such strategies cannot account for the significance that orthodox Christianity has ascribed to Jesus.

“MacIntyre, like Barth, thinks the most devastating criticisms of positions like Bultmann’s and Tillich’s were not made by Christians but by Feuerbach (and Nietzsche). Feuerbach did not deny that theological language had a referent, but that referent turned out not to be God but rather the projections of a finite humanity against the reality of death. The only difference between Tillich and Feuerbach is that the theism in which Feuerbach disbelieved became the theism in which Tillich believed. Such theologies MacIntyre judges to exemplify the alleged disease they sought to cure.

“The disease that infected liberal theological proposals is the inability to engage the fundamental questions raised by our finitude. In Secularization and Moral Change, MacIntyre observes that when we move away from the sophisticated theologies of Tillich, there is a feature of Christianity that is very important to the naïve believer that theologians like Tillich do not adequately address, that is, how to sustain hope in the face of death. Yet Christianity still has a hold on many because it does sustain a hope in the face of death. Contemporary theologians say little theologically about death because they have accepted naturalistic accounts of our finitude. That hell and purgatory are no longer subjects of theological reflection is an indication that theologians have lost any basis for being taken seriously. Thus MacIntyre’s judgment that we cannot do with Christianity in the modern world, but neither can we do without it because we have no other vocabulary to raise questions about how to live in the face of death.”

— from Stanley Hauerwas, Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth (University of Virginia Press, 2022)