By means of such a negative theology, which begins not with the notion
of God but with the horror that is experienced in this world that brings about
the necessity of a God, such religious beliefs as these can become a critically
reflective and dynamic concept that could be applied as a standard to judge
and thereby negate the reified class antagonism of capitalist society. According
to Horkheimer, the content of such religious ideas must not be abstractly
negated and thus discarded with their mythological form. Rather, the reli-
gious or mythological form of such theologically expressed ideas of human
suffering and hope needs to be determinately negated so as to allow such
expressions of indictment of unjust social powers the possibility of becom-
ing critically effective and liberating in a inversely modern, secular form.
Religion developed and contains, albeit in an inadequate form, the longing
and the struggle for the totally Other of past generations, which needs to be
negated, remembered and preserved, and furthered into a this-worldly, rev-
olutionary theory and praxis that longs for the creation of a new and better
future society and the totally Other. It is this materialist, negative theology
of the totally Other in which there is a similarity between the critical theory
and theology.
As Horkheimer (1985:431) stated in another interview in the early 1970’s,
the critical theory is founded on the thought that the Absolute, the totally
Other, or God cannot be made into an object. All that can be said is that the
critical theory cannot express, nor does it want to express, the belief that this
present antagonistic world is identical with the totally Other. This Other is
completely unknown, and it is in this negativity of the Absolute that the crit-
ical theory differentiates itself from every positive theology and religious doc-
trine. For the critical theory of religion, the unbelievable Christian theodicy
of the existence of an all-loving, almighty God, who is providentially work-
ing God’s purpose out in the horror of history should be materialistically,
inversely transformed into the longing for the existence of such an Other,
which will not allow the suffering and death of the innocent to be the last
word of history. For the critical theory of religion, true theology expresses
prophetically and Messianically the dialectical materialistic notions of justice,
of the Good and Right, of liberation of the oppressed and exploited, of resis-
tance to “grinding the face of the poor in the dirt” (Isaiah 3:15) by the pow-
erful. These ideas must be critically differentiated from their distortion in the
history of religious institutions, e.g., the church, or their positivistic socio-
logical corruption as in the Rational Choice Theory. This is the fundamental
144 • Michael R. Ott