Theology as Theodicy
The critical theory is no less a theodicy than Hegel’s historical idealism, or
Marx’s historical materialism, or Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical philos-
ophy (Hegel 1986k:28,540; 1986m:88; 1986p:497; 1986q:248,455; Marx 1964:43–44;
1972:18–20,142; 1961; 1953; Freud 1964; Jones 1961; Horkheimer 1985a). The
critical theory embraces in itself not only a theodicy in the sense of Max
Weber (Weber 1963; Horkheimer 1970:37). According to Weber, a theodicy
was every theoretical effort to explain the suffering on this earth. In the
Weberian sense, the teaching of Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Freud can
be called a theodicy (Horkheimer 1985a; 1985b; 1970:37). Beyond that, the
critical theory of society is a theodicy also in the original sense of the word,
which Hegel still used: a justification of God in opposition to the injustice,
the evil dominating in his world (Hegel 1986k; 1986m:88; 1986p:497; 1986q).
As little as the critical theorists could talk about false consciousness or ide-
ology critique without careful recourse to Hegel, so little could they speak
about theology as theodicy without reference to him (Benjamin 1978:682).
After Auschwitz and all the horror and terror this name stands for, the Jewish
critical theorists had – inspired by Hegel – to remind the Christian theolo-
gians of the 20th century again, that their theology had been originally a
theodicy, and that they had forgotten their own origin, and that it was time
for them to remember it again (Oelmüller 1990; Neuhaus 1993; Schuster &
Boschert-Kimmig 1993; Metz 1995; Greinacher 1986; Sölle 1989). Of course,
in the critical-theoretical perspective, after Auschwitz and Birkenau, Dresden,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hegel’s instrumental theodicy seems not to be plau-
sible or acceptable any longer: God instrumentalizing the slaughterbench of
nature and history as sacrificial altar for the purpose of the achievement of
the realm of Divine and human freedom – the freedom of all. Hegel’s grave-
stone in the socialist Dorotheen Cemetery in Berlin still represents the holo-
caust altar of the first and second Temple in Jerusalem. Up to the present,
174 years after his death, Jewish friends put little pebbles on Hegel’s grave-
stone. Certainly, in this sense, for the critical theorists, Hegel’s philosophical
system has indeed broken down once and for all in so far as it had been a
last gigantic theodicy attempt. Only, to be sure, most precious fragments
remain. The critical theory of society is an eschatological theodicy in so far
as it insists that what Hegel had called most realistically the slaughterbench,
or holocaust altar, or Golgatha, or Skull hill of nature and history will at least
ultimately not prevail. The critical theory is not protology, but eschatology.
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