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FROM HEBRAISM TO SCIENCE: IDEOLOGICAL REFINEMENT IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY FROM PAUL TO THE PUBLIC SPHERE By Tymen Devries A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Theology in the University of Trinity College and the Department of Theology of the Toronto School of Theology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Theology Awarded by the University of St. Michael's College Toronto 2010 © Tymen G. 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The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. ••I Canada ABSTRACT In nineteenth-century Germany, the rise of Wissenschaft and the ethos of the research university led the discipline of academic theology into uncharted waters. I posit that the true inheritors of the revolutionary thought of the sixteenth century Protestant Reformers are not, as often claimed, nineteenth-century German Protestant academic theologians but, rather, the nineteenth-century Jewish theological reformers associated with Wissenschaft des Judentums. As 1 demonstrate in terms of successive periods of Christian ethnographies of Jews, Protestant academic theology responds to these shifting political and intellectual contexts with an entrenching ideological refinement. In addition to drawing some parallels between the critical social theory of the early Frankfurt School and the secularized cosmopolitanism associated with German Romanticism, I conclude with some comparisons between the Jewish Reformer Abraham Geiger and the unhappy professor of church history, Franz Overbeck. u CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 1. JUDAISM AND THE PROBLEM OF CHRISTIAN UNIVERSAL1SM 6 Geopiety and the Transformative Power of Ideology 7 Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Jewish and Christian Imaginations 8 Dogmatic and Discursive Approaches to Scripture ! 1 Interiorization and the Hermeneutical Jew 14 Christian Hebraism 17 2. MODERNITY, RELIGION AND ETHNOGRAPHY 21 Between Judaism and Heresy 24 Censorship and Reformational Hegemony 27 3. RELIGIOUS CONTINUITY AND THE COSMOPOLITAN CHALLENGE 33 Revolution, Tubingen and Nineteenth-Century German Protestant Theology 33 German Romanticism and Mass Culture 36 The Public Sphere 42 Science of Religion and the Modern Research University 46 Interiorization Reversed: Franz Overbeck and Abraham Geiger 49 CONCLUSION 63 REFERENCES 68 iii INTRODUCTION The central concern of this paper is with late nineteenth century Jewish/Christian1 relations in the German context. In an effort to better understand the qualities of Jewish/Christian relations in this period, I will make some observations about the impact international modernism had on 'traditional' forms of Judaism and Christianity— in both discrete and comparative terms. As such, I will provide some discussion of the wider period of European intellectual history— from the French Revolution in 1789 and Hitler's rise to power in 1933. As general historical benchmarks, these dates represent the best and the worst of times, respectively, and provide the essential context for a discussion of the interplay of Jewish and Christian theological reactions to the 'secular' developments of the modern age. As we shall see, the widely differentiated reactions exhibit many themes, ranging from a liberal embracement of change to a conservative impulse toward preservation and continuity. However, a critical discussion of the possibilities as well as the difficulties of this modern interplay can only follow an accounting of the complex history of introjection that is a salient feature of Jewish/Christian relations. A main premise in this essay is that Judaism exhibits an inbuilt provision for interpretive latitude that is not available to Christianity. I will examine the idea that, given the conditions (following the French Revolution) of less political domination and 1 Although I do not endorse a theory of "syncretism" (cf. n.2), I choose the backslash (rather than a hyphen, space, or specific word order) between 'Jewish' and 'Christian' to foreground the 150 years of ambiguity in the recent history of scholarship relating to Jewish and Christian relations, beginning with the problem of properly designating "Jewish Christianity". For a recent lucid introduction, consult Jackson- McCabe (2007). 2 The psychoanalytic term 'introjection' is used here in a non-technical sense to register the complex, often oblique, associations and borrowings that mark the history of Jewish/Christian relations. In important respects, the term may be understood in obverse relation to the word "syncretism." See below, n.66. 1 theological stricture, Judaism's intrinsic theological challenge to Christianity surfaces and is successfully maintained under the new conditions of science (Wissenschaft). The secular and materialist challenges to traditional Christian justifications associated with the emergent changes of the modern age become dramatically apparent in the academic reengagement of vital issues pertaining to Christian origins and anti-Judaism. My theme in the essay is that (German Protestant) Christian academic theologians respond negatively toward Rabbinic Judaism despite the emancipatory alternatives inherent to new social and intellectual freedoms that arise in association with the Enlightenment and Romantic remapping of society. In formulating it in this way I draw on the pioneering work in the field of Jewish/Christian relations of R. Po-chia Hsia as presented in his article "Christian Ethnographies of Jews in Early Modern Germany." He states his argument succinctly: Christian interest in Jewish culture, exemplified by the study of Hebrew scriptures and the Kabbala, arose from a dialectic of religion and ethnography. The religious interest among Christians— whether to deny the tenets of Judaism, or to expose the evil of Jewish rites, or to convert the Jews— existed in a dialectical relationship with the new ethnographic impulse to define identities and affirm boundaries. (226) This project will be carried out in three parts. Part one is an exploration of the pre history of the "dialectic of religion and ethnography" in order to take account of the origins of the "religious interest" Christians have in certain aspects of Jewish literature and culture. This will entail an analysis of the origins of differences in belief concerning the status of Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Jewish and Christian imaginations. In an effort to ascertain patterns in Christian ideology through successive periods, conclusions drawn from this analysis will be interwoven with a discussion of continuity and change regarding examples of Christian Hebraism from the medieval period to the present day. 2 In part two, I will employ Hsia's notion of "inner and outer ethnographies" to explore the pre-nineteenth century ramifications of his suggestion that "in turning outward to face Mesoamericans, Africans, and Asians, Christian Europe also viewed its internal aliens, the Jews, with a new perspective and inscribed them in a new, orderly ethnography" (226). I shall then argue, in part three, that events related to the Emancipation of European Jews in the post-Enlightenment period and the rise of the "quest for the historical Jesus" in the German theological milieu in the latter half of the nineteenth century, allow us to discern important patterns of refinement in Christian ideological conceptions of Jews and Judaism. To facilitate my analysis of the patterns of interaction between Jews and Christians I will follow the basic thrust of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. In brief, Huntington asserts that as fundamentalist attitudes become more entrenched, fewer intellectual, cultural and material resources are devoted to abstract and more intensive political