Religionless Christianity

Catalog description

Taught by SFTS. We will study the growth of intellectual and popular movements in the recent past that reconceived Christianity as "religionless," as a counter-religion, or as a form of subjectivity that stands beyond religion. We will examine the place of "religionless Christianity in Transcendentalism and liberal Protestantism in the nineteenth century; dialectical theology, existentialism, and the "death of God" movements in the twentieth century; and "Christian emergence" in recent times. We will trace the sources of "religionless Christianity" to late Enlightenment and Romantic philosophy, hermeneutics, phenomenology. We will take special interest in the growth of non-dogmatic and anti-dogmatic approaches to theology, and the relationship of "religionless Christianity" to secularization, the rise of modern science, colonialization, hermeneutics, phenomenology, liberal Protestantism, neo-Orthodoxy, ecumenism, and "death of God" theologies. Figures studied will include the 19th-century Lutheran theologians Richard Rothe and Albrecht Ritschl; the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche; the historian of religion Ernst Troeltsch; the Sikh-Anglican mendicant Sadhu Sundar Singh; the Catholic adapter of Hindu monasticism Bede Griffith; the dialectical theologians Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer; the American theologian Gabriel Vahanian, the Anglican theologian J.A.T. Robinson; and the philosophical theologians Mary-Jane Rubinstein and Philip Clayton. Seminar format: reading, writing, vigorous discussion, final research paper on an original topic related to the course. [12 max enrollment]