The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

SCANNED PDF  

I'm now convinced that Wittgenstein's authority can well be added to that of Bergson, Santayana, and Whitehead, as well as Bultmann, with respect to an adequate analysis of religion. His distinction between "religiöser Glaube und Aberglaube," the first being "ein Vertraun," the second, "eine Art falscher Wissenschaft" that "entspringt aus Furcht" points, in its own way, to the same difference that the other four thinkers all formulate by their respective distinctions. My point is not that they all say exactly the same thing. My point is that their different analyses are convergent and readily hamonizable—or, at any rate, readily capable of being sublated in a single coherent, and perhaps more adequate, analysis. 

In all of them, the distinction between anxiety or fear, on the one hand, and trust or true reverence, on the other, is fundamental. In Bultmann's case, the stress falls on the idolatrous, inauthentic character of religion. What is at work in religion, he says, is "not true reverence in the presence of God but anxiety about life in face of the uncanniness of the world, and this religion is simultaneously the attempt of human beings to become lord of this anxiety by bringing the uncanny under their control, integrating it into their life, thereby reassuring themselves in face of the riddle of their existence and creating their own security" (Marburger Predigten: 3 f.). By implication, however, even Bultmann allows that religion is, in principle, or authentically, " true reverence in the presence of God," "the one true God," "the God who is Lord of heaven and earth" (5).

The other thinker who comes to mind in this connection is, of course, Peter Berger, whose analysis of religion converges particularly closely with Bultmann's and Wittgenstein's.

20 July 2006

  • No labels