Dynamic Religion, Formative Culture, and the Demonic in History

Modern German thought owed much to classical Greece. Yet in philosophy and theology, beginning with Hegel and his contemporaries, the debt to Platonic idealism was radically modified by insistence on the reality of history. Construed dialectically, history became a key to overcoming difficulties with both Platonic and Cartesian dualism left unresolved by Kant. In theology, after World War I dialectical theologians, including Barth and Tillich, embraced in varying degrees the existentialists' critique of Hegelian essentialism and belief in progress. This affected how they understood incarnation in christology, sacramental presence in ecclesiology, and Christian responses to what they saw as the demonic threat of German National Socialism. Anglo-American critics, especially of Tillich, often miss the dialectical nuances of his admittedly abstract theology and his religious socialist response to Marxism.