All of which leaves us with one final question, or one final challenge if you will: Is the search for a non-dogmatic theology any different from Sullivan's and Eisner's championing of a "nonsectarian belief," or from the cultured
despisers affirmation of a natural religion.
I do not invoke this throng of "post-metaphysical"
despisers of "metaphysics" to enlist in their company.
As Schleiermacher put it, "In itself it [religion] is an affection, a revelation of the Infinite in the finite, God being seen in it and it in God." And again, "true religion is sense and taste for the Infinite" (Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured
Despisers, trans.
But just as a vast skepticism about the value of democracy has darkened the American mind over the past generation, so has a skepticism about the value of Abraham Lincoln, and it has become fashionable for democracy's
despisers to cast Lincoln as a racist, a wrecker of the Constitution, a military despot, a capitalist tool, and a great fixer rather than a Great Emancipator.
Whether despite or because of its demonstrated ability to establish beachheads of peace and prosperity in a word where poverty and hostility are the norm, in each generation liberal democracy is assailed by clutches of indignant
despisers. During the 1930s fascists and communists agreed on little other than disdain for the democracies that both declared insipid, decadent, and doomed.
Canisius continues: "Augustine, they say, conceals the corrupt morals of his time since, undoubtedly, he gladly forces the received discipline of the church upon these
despisers." (31)
Twice burned (first by Communism, then by '60s liberalism)and thrice shy of abstract doctrines of right, they found much to admire in American bourgeois, middle-class life, and set out to defend it against its cultured
despisers on the radical Left and in the academy.
Despisers of the market system once held the moral high ground.
Second, his accounts of individual popes are good, especially his treatments of Gregory I, Benedict XIII, Benedict XIV, Pius IX, and Pius XI, although his presentation of Pius XII is sufficiently noncommittal to please neither Pius's
despisers nor his defenders.
There are undoubtedly those among the contemporary cultured
despisers of belief for whom T.'s open avowal of a theological agenda will provide reason for walking away from the conversation.
We can see the developing academic study of religion(s)'s impact on various authors in each field: in philosophical investigations such as Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793); in Christian theology, for example, Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured
Despisers (1799); and the theological and philosophical endeavors together, for example, in Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1821-1831).
He compares Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured
Despisers (1799) with Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem (1783); both, he points out, are apologies, paradigms of modern religious thought, and "texts of personal engagement" (41).
(70) Justin Martyr, who exerted much effort in trying to approximate Christian doctrine to Hellenistic culture, nevertheless was constrained to say: "Reason itself (logos) took form and became a human being and was called Jesus Christ." (71) In determined refutation of the objections of their cultured
despisers, Christian theologians insisted that it was a vital part of the salvific work of Christ to mediate knowledge of God in a human idiom through the Incarnation.
must now take on the postmodern "cultured
despisers" of reality who follow in the wake of Hegel and Dilthey.
