Heidegger was moving along the same path; reacting against his starting
point in Catholic scholasticism, he overturned the secure ontologies of a God
as highest and original Being, transforming his theological capital instead into
a series of questions. Using phenomenological language, Heidegger produced
a universal ontology of human existence underlying both Greek and Christian
thought: the central realities are not immortality but being-toward-death; not
salvation but angst, care, and decision; not sin but the sheer arbitrary fact of
being thrown into existing in the world in a particular time and place. The
themes emerged in common with Bultmann, Jaspers, Tillich, and others; after
Heidegger gave them articulation in most general form in Sein und Zeit, they
became all the more explicitly defended in a self-consciously existentialist
theology which reached its height in the 1950s.
Why did this movement emerge, across a broad front, at the time when it
did? To speak of the disillusionment of bourgeois culture after the First World
War is not quite accurate, for there was neither disillusionment in every aspect
of cultural life (certainly not in the popular culture of the cinema and of jazz,
which appeared at this time), nor in many branches of philosophy, such as
logical positivism. It is specifically a disillusionment with liberal theology that
is at issue here. Nor was it a product of the war, since its manifestations go
back to the first decade of the century, among other things, the height of vitalist
philosophies in Germany and France. During 1910–1914 were published in
Germany the first translations of Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky—bringing
about their first widespread fame—and the complete edition of Nietzsche’s
posthumous Will to Power. The theological responses of a Danish anti-Idealist
of the 1840s and of a Russian anti-modernist Slavophile of the 1860s and
1870s were quickly incorporated into the conceptual armory of the new
generation of philosophers and theologians of 1920. This could only have
happened if motives existed for their reception. It was a movement against
accommodation to secularism in religion, against turning religion into merely
universal ethics or a social gospel, against rationalizing the mysteriously per-
sonal God into an abstract Spirit. In general it was a movement reasserting the
emotionally committed faith of particularistic religious traditions in the face
of the tolerant universalizing which reaches across confessional borders by
reducing religious content to the blandest common denominator.
Seen in this perspective, the conservative or neo-traditionalist movements
in theology beginning around 1910 are one turn of a very widespread cycle of
religious accommodation and revival. It is not to be explained, with teleological
pathos, as the forebear of Nazism, nor as a once-and-for-all downfall of liberal
secularism. Sociologists of religion discern this cycle quite generally, in the
United States as much as in European churches, and have uncovered a number
of its mechanisms (Stark and Bainbridge, 1987). Movements for secularization,
tolerance, and liberty of belief generate enthusiasm as rebellions against domi-
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^747