God and Caesar

Troeltsch's Social Teaching as Legitimation

Constance L. Benson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351290180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

H. Richard Niebuhr's powerful interpretation of Ernst Troeltsch has shaped our view of the man for over seventy years. Troeltsch is one of the most respected and renowned figures in liberal Protestant thought. Yet as Harvard philosopher of religion Cornel West observes in his foreword, Constance Benson "shat-ters certain crucial aspects of Troeltsch's image as a liberal religious thinker" with God and Caesar.

Benson reconstructs the historical context in which Troeltsch wrote his landmark The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, and reinterprets it in relation to that context. She shows that Troeltsch's Christian-ity legitimized class, religious, and gender inequality in response to the challenges of social democracy. Her controversial exploration of why most Troeltsch scholars have remained silent on this deserves seri-ous consideration. Her discovery of Troeltsch's role

in the politics and ideological debates of Imperial Germany require a painful reexamina-tion of an entire chapter of Protestant history. Benson exposes Troeltsch's relationship to Paul de Lagarde, a notorious anti-Semite and architect of what later became Nazi ideology.

God and Caesaris a needed corrective. Troeltsch is an important figure for the Chris-tian right in Germany and for many mainstream Protestants in the United States. Benson's courageous book is the most challenging critique of Troeltsch's politics we have—an unsettling perspective that forces us to revise the beloved Troeltsch so many of us had come to admire and cherish. It will be of interest to intellectual historians, theologians and students of religious history, and specialists in German social and political history.

1

Introduction: The Theologian and the Revolutionary

In 1985, I would have never imagined finding myself at the center of a major academic and religious controversy. To be sure, I had a longstanding habit of asking tough questions, which always put me on a collision course with religious and political orthodoxies of all kinds. But now I was in an environment with an international reputation for rewarding critical thought and innovative inquiry. I was attending Columbia University in the City of New York, enrolled in a Ph.D. program in religion offered jointly with the Christian Ethics Department of Union Theological Seminary, on the other side of Broadway.

Little did I know that even such institutions have their icons. And in choosing my dissertation topic, I had inadvertently stumbled upon one of them—Ernst Troeltsch’s 1912 classic, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches.¹ Seven years later I defended a Ph.D. dissertation that was essentially the same as the book you are now reading. Given the controversy that then erupted,² I feel it is important to reconstruct at the outset my original intentions in undertaking this research, and why I came to revise my views regarding Troeltsch.

In 1985, I was personally dissatisfied with the eclecticism of the liberal Protestant community in which I found myself, and was searching for a more coherent religious identity. I therefore asked my academic advisor, Roger Lincoln Shinn, if there were a foundational liberal Protestant theologian whom I could read to provide a frame of reference for my intellectual and existential search. He answered, without hesitation: Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), especially his thousand page magnum opus, The Social Teaching.

The image of Troeltsch that I inherited from Shinn, and that he inherited from Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, is still the prevailing conventional wisdom, both within and outside the liberal Protestant sub-culture. Troeltsch, according to this view, was an enlightened critic of what is today called Christian fundamentalism. His Social Teaching is generally believed to be a pioneering application of modern sociology to the history of Christianity,³ and is today one of the pillars of the advanced curricula in mainstream Protestant seminaries throughout the world.

With an open mind, and indeed with a favorable predisposition inherited from Shinn and the Niebuhrs, I decided to undertake a serious reading of Troeltsch’s massive Social Teaching. This decision coincided with my need to develop a dissertation topic. However, the Ph.D. program I had chosen in the first place reflected my personal religious and existential concerns, and I now chose this specialized research topic for the same reasons. I emphasize these “purely religious” motives at the basis of my research, because many observers have erroneously concluded—given my iconoclastic findings regarding Troeltsch—that I must have approached The Social Teaching with an iconoclastic intent. Nothing could be further from the truth.

My task now, of course, was to formulate an even more specialized research topic that could make some contribution to existing scholarship on my chosen subject. As I became familiar with the vast secondary literature on Troeltsch, it became apparent to me that interpretation in this field had been almost entirely limited to traditional text-based methods. My contribution would be to reconstruct the original historical context of The Social Teaching and Troeltsch’s intentions in writing it as a basis for a fresh interpretation. While I hoped this methodology would advance Troeltsch studies, I had no intention of challenging the Niebuhrian paradigm of Troeltsch as an enlightened liberal.

At this point in my inquiry, I knew that Troeltsch had been influenced by the contemporary Marxist intellectual, Karl Kautsky. Filtering this information through my Niebuhrian lens, I imagined that Troeltsch had appropriated what was positive in socialism, perhaps anticipating modern liberation theology. What I discovered from the historical record, however, made it clear that he was actually arguing against such a view, advocating equality “in Christ” as a purely spiritual and individual alternative to a Christianity based on an apostolic “communism of goods.” In fact, as I eventually learned, Troeltsch went so far as to align himself with Paul de Lagarde, a right-wing Protestant mystic and a notorious architect of what later became Nazi ideology.

These findings were startling enough in their immediate implications: that Troeltsch was arguing primarily against the left, not against the religious right. Their broader implications were even more startling, given Troeltsch’s preeminent position in modern Protestantism. It would appear that the Protestant establishment—who promoted Troeltsch’s fortunes and for whom he spoke—has been more conservative than is generally realized. Conversely, it would appear that many Protestants in Imperial Germany were more receptive to revolutionary interpretations of Christianity than is commonly thought, otherwise Troeltsch would not have devoted his magnum opus to refuting such interpretations.

In summary, modern Protestantism—which is widely perceived to be above the fray of politics—has been in fact highly politicized. Although I came to this realization in part through original historical research, I am not, of course, the first to discover this. Fritz Fischer, a pioneer in the historiography of modern Germany, documented this view in rich detail in the 1960s and more recent scholarship on the period remains indebted to his work.⁴

Troeltsch may have “won” his debate with Kautsky and the Christian socialists in the sense that Troeltsch’s interpretation of Christianity, not theirs, came to dominate the curricula of mainstream Protestant seminaries. However, this state of affairs conceals the political and ideological struggle for the soul of Christianity that raged in Imperial Germany and that rages throughout the world today.

The same polarization between rich and poor that created German socialism, and more recently, Black and Latin American liberation theologies, continues to afflict today’s world. Now, as then, believers as diverse as Ralph Reed and Peter Berger interpret Christianity as a path of salvation for individual souls only. Others, such as Cornel West, Jean Bertrand Aristide, and certain Latin American bishops, view Jesus as a liberator of women and the poor, an outspoken critic of oppression and exploitation, and a martyr in the struggle for a new community based on love and the sharing of wealth.

To be sure, many believers try to harmonize these alternative theologies. It would appear, however, that the individualistic and social interpretations of Christianity are what Weber called “ideal types.” Since they arise as characteristic responses to an objective social predicament, the conflict between these theologies is likely to continue as long as society remains polarized between rich and poor. This theological debate took one form in Troeltsch’s Germany, a somewhat different form in recent U.S. and Latin American history, and will undoubtedly produce further variations as capitalism, Christianity, and the relationship between the two continue to evolve.

This conceptual approach reflects my attempt to understand religion and its relationship to political and economic power in a genuinely dialectical manner. Only from this vantage point will it be possible to do justice to both Troeltsch and Kautsky and to grasp what is really going on in their debate. Kautsky correctly saw that the communism of goods was a distinguishing feature of early Christianity, but then explained that feature reductively in terms of political economy. Troeltsch was no less reductive, but in the opposite way, viewing Christianity as a purely spiritual teaching having nothing to do with the communism of goods.

From a dialectical perspective, the real question is precisely how the specifically religious concerns of Jesus and his movement related to their communism of goods. Although this question cannot be answered in detail here, I will summarize my own view inasmuch as it inevitably informs my reconstruction of the Troeltsch-Kautsky debate.

My understanding of Christian teaching is that the essence of God is love (John 15:9; I John 4:8,16; cf. Deut. 4:37,7:7), that the ultimate fulfillment of all human beings is to participate in this divine love (Matt. 5:43–48; John 15:12; I Cor. 13; I John 4:11–12), and that Jesus’s own mission was to establish a path through which all persons could so participate, thereby establishing the Kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). For Christianity, therefore, the first principle is spiritual, but the authenticity of any human being’s spirituality is measured by his or her embodiment of God’s love in relationships with other human beings (I John 4:20–21). This teaching leads naturally and inevitably to a communism of goods, since a wealthy Christian could not possibly love a less fortunate member of the community in the radical way Jesus intended without also sharing his or her economic surplus (Matt. 19:21, 25:31–46; Acts 2:44–46; James 2:15–17). A community characterized by such sharing would have no need for private property and would naturally turn to a social administration of economic matters.⁵

What lends weight to this interpretation in the present context is that Troeltsch, to be internally consistent, could not dispute the importance of the communism of goods in Christian tradition without also subordinating “love” to “religious individualism” within the specifically religious teaching of Christianity. The question then becomes why Troeltsch held this theological view, which I can only begin to answer here and which requires further biographical and historical research.

Let us begin with the central thesis of this book: that Troeltsch, in disputing Kautsky’s theory that the essence of early Christianity was its communism of goods, was delegitimizing the socialist movement of his own day. Assuming Troeltsch held this ideological and political agenda, the question would still remain whether it was his primary concern, or whether it was itself a mere by-product of his religious and scholarly concerns, which were the real driving forces behind his life and work. My conclusion is that Troeltsch’s primary concern was political, and my reasoning is as follows.

Had Troeltsch’s primary agenda been political and anti-socialist, he would have had to refute any theory that the communism of goods is central or necessary to Christianity. This in turn would have required him to reject Kautsky’s theory of Christianity and any theory centered on a theology of love, which leads inevitably to the communism of goods, as I have argued above. Troeltsch’s embracal of religious individualism is therefore consistent with the theory that his primary motivation was political.

Had Troeltsch been concerned in the first instance with religious individualism and/or its centrality for Christianity, however, he would have had no reason to reject socialism, since there is no conflict between religious individualism as such and either the communism of goods or the contemporary program of German socialism. Religious individualism—the belief that the essence of authentic religion is the private mystical experience of the individual—is compatible both with socialist and conservative political agendas.

In fact, Kautsky himself defended religious individualism, which he found exemplified in Schiller, as an authentic religious alternative to the corrupt, organized Christianity of his day. As for the early Church, Kautsky’s focus on its organized social expression—the communism of goods—was fully compatible with Troeltsch’s theory that its inner experiential essence was religious individualism. Indeed, Troeltsch’s own typology required him to classify every form of Christianity both in a sociological dimension (church vs. sect) and in an inner experiential dimension (mystical vs. non-mystical), as explained in chapter twelve.

In summary, Troeltsch’s claims to be defending the true spiritual character of Christianity from Kautsky’s Marxist reductionism obfuscates the real nature of their dispute, which was overwhelmingly political. The two men could have agreed on religious individualism and its applicability to Christianity. Their bone of contention was the communism of goods as such and its modern counterpart, the program of the German Social Democratic Party.

The relevance of the Troeltsch-Kautsky debate, seen as a clash of conservative and revolutionary ideal types in the ongoing history of Christianity, is not the only justification for the present study. Troeltsch in his own right is at the center of an important intellectual revival in Germany today. This revival began in the 1960s with the founding of the Ernst Troeltsch Society and has continued along with the revival of other conservative German thinkers during that country’s ongoing economic and political ascendancy. In 1988, I received a travel grant from the Society and presented a preliminary version of this research to its triennial Cong...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction: The Theologian and the Revolutionary
• 2. Troeltsch’s “Social Problem”: Revolutionary Movements in Imperial Germany
• 3. “Blood and Iron”: The Military-Industrial Complex
• 4. The Professors: Guardians of the Citadel
• 5. “Catechism, Bayonet, and Scepter”: The Protestant Churches and the State
• 6. The Challenge of Social Democracy
• 7. “Thy Kingdom Come! Thy Will be Done on Earth!” The Challenge of Christian Socialism
• 8. A Quest for the Historical Troeltsch
• 9. On Earth as It is in Hell
• 10. Troeltsch’s “Political Ethics and Christianity”: The Case for Hierarchy
• 11. Karl Kautsky’s Social History of Christianity: The Communitarian Church
• 12. Troeltsch’s Social Teaching: The Legitimation of Social Inequality
• 13. God and Caesar
• 14. Conclusion: Religious and Social Transformation
• Bibliography
• Index