Secularization as Kenosis

secularization as kenosis | 193
process according to which the world will become organized more and more rationally
and religion will eventually wither away. For Vattimo, it belongs to modernity to ‘outgrow
itself’ and to see the ideal of secularization secularized. That is: to see the idea of
progress in an historical perspective and to realize that there might be no such thing as
progress and teleology in history and that even the idea of history may be mistaken or
at least outdated. In the consciousness of postmodernity, history comes to a point where
the need for something new ‘beyond’ is no longer felt, but the new becomes valued for
its own sake. At this point a new idea of infinity emerges. No longer as an indefinite
point in the future, but as the unlimited possibilities of the present. The embodiment of
this postmodern consciousness is a technological society as ‘the phantasmagoric play of
a society built around the marketplace and technological mass media.’ 88 The awareness
of an end of history is most visible in art. Modern art and literature, as Vattimo sees it,
are experiments of ‘. . . temporality outside its supposedly natural linearity.’ 89
5.2.2 Postmodern Secularization as kenosis
One of the most original aspects of weak thought is its hermeneutics of Christianity.
Theories of secularization often discuss secularization as a decline of religion. Vattimo,
on the other hand, sees Western, secular culture as deeply influenced by Christianity.
Secularization in a postmodern context bids farewell to both the transcendent God of
the metaphysical tradition and to the objective world of science. The return of religion
in our late modern culture is thus in a very complex way related to secularization. In
weak thought, secularization is analyzed in relation to the formative role of Christianity
in Western cultures, in relation to the emergence of a secular (scientific) culture and in
relation to the return of religion. This understaning of secularization translates methodologically
into the emergence of hermeneutics. In hermeneutics, philosophy overcomes
metaphysics and rediscovers its roots in the Western religious tradition. 90 In religion,
hermeneutics liberates exegesis from the dogmatics of the (Roman Catholic) Church.
Especially in the Protestant tradition, hermeneutics emerges in the new space of the
free interpretation of scripture. 91 The development of hermeneutics in the nineteenth
century shows us that, alongside a harder rationalistic philosophy, there is a softer
current of interpretative, pluralistic truth, in general ‘well disposed to religion’. 92 To
88 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 106.
89 Vattimo, End of Modernity, 107.
90 Vattimo writes: “As the nihilistic implications of its own premises are developed, hermeneutics
encounters charity and so rediscovers its own links with the Western tradition. This is no accident. It is
simply another, probably more radical, way of experiencing its own concrete historicity, its belonging to
modernity. . . . Hermeneutics belongs to modernity inasmuch as the grounds of its ‘truth’ (there are no facts
only interpretations) may only be set forth on the basis of the fulfillment within nihilism of the principle of
reality which it regards as characteristic of modernity. But modernity is the child of the Western religious
tradition, above all as the secularization of this tradition. It seems that hermeneutics has not only been a
consequence of modern secularization (as a philosophy.”
91 Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1994), 43. For the origin of hermeneutics in the uncertainty following the Reformation
see: H.W. de Knijff, Sleutel en slot. Beknopte geschiedenis van de bijbelse hermeneutiek (Kampen: Kok, 1980),
39–69. See also Kevin Vanhoozer, ‘Scripture and Tradition’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern
Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 149–169.
92 “. . . in that its critique of the idea of truth as verifiable conformity between proposition and thing
undermine the rationalist, empiricist, positivist and even idealist and Marxist negations of the possibility of