Secularization as Kenosis

210 | postmodern condition and secularity
effort is to continue the Christian tradition in its kenotic and secularizing intent and
to develop religion in a secular and aesthetic mode. Falling back into a positivistic or
transcendental religion would mean a betrayal of this central message of Christianity.
Vattimo’s discourse on secularization is thus not only a polemic on traditional metaphysical
theology, but also on supposed alternatives to metaphysical theology. All too
easily such alternatives slide back into modes of thinking that have considerable similarity
with ontotheology. A truly historicist theology cannot think of God as an ineffable
‘God beyond God.’
But does Vattimo’s model remain loyal to its concerns with historical contingency?
The discussion of Derrida and Levinas brings Vattimo to a remarkable observation, that
has to do with the ‘Judaic’ character of some contemporary philosophy of religion. Vattimo
speaks of a ‘predominance of Judaic religiosity in the return of religion.’ 173 His
complaints about the Judaic predominance is articulated as follows: “It is a fact that
the total otherness of God with respect to the world appears to be affirmed at the expense
of any recognition of novelty in the Christian event.” With regard to Levinas and
Derrida this has to do with the alleged a-historic character of Jewish thought. 174 The
Jewish character of Levinas’ philosophy has been an object of critique on several other
occasions, for example in his contribution to the seminar with Gadamer and Derrida
on Religion. 175 What I find striking in this critique of the Judaic character of Levinas’s
philosophy is that Vattimo interprets this as a lack of awareness of the historical destiny
of Being. It is “historicity reduced to its finitude.” The experience of contingency
for Vattimo has its limits in the recognition of a process in history, which cannot be
interrupted by a free, willing God or experiences of contingency. But this is to say that
secularization means that there is an undeniable concurrence between experience and
God and to neglect this concurrence would mean to be on the wrong side of history. 176
I agree with Vattimo, when he opposes a theology of radical alterity. A theological
insistence on the radical alterity of God is fated to leave the secular bereft of any inherent
meaning. Vattimo puts forward a quite different account of secularization than
certain forms of death-of-God theology. 177 If emphasizing God’s transcendence leads to
a loss of meaning of the secular, I think Vattimo is right to resist such an approach. This
is, however, but one horn of the dilemma. The other is the insistence on a process of
173 Vattimo, Belief, 84.
174 He writes: “There is no real difference between historical times; since every historical moment is
immediately related to eternity, the historicity of existence is entirely reduced to its finitude, that is, to the fact
we are always already thrown into a situation whose particular traits are given little consideration, compared
to the purely ‘vertical’ relation to the eternal”. Vattimo, Belief, 84.
175 Gianni Vattimo, ‘The trace of the trace’, in: Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, editors, Religion
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 79–94.
176 Sciglitano draws on Vattimo’s dealing with the sacred-profane dichotomy in a discussion on Altizer:
“As for Vattimo and for Hegel, love appears to have for Altizer the quality of an identity between the divine
and the secular that has overcome alienation which includes the Old Testament picture of God’s relation to
the world and many aspects of the New Testament. In this sense, difference, whether between the divine
and the world or within the divine, construed as Trinity, gets eliminated or dissolved, and with it goes the
ground for a world that is genuinely other than the divine and rooted in God’s gracious Being.” Anthony C.
Sciglitano, ‘Contesting the world and the Divine. Balthasar’s trinitarian ‘response’ to Gianni Vattimo’s secular
Christianity’, Modern Theology 23(4) (2007), 536.
177 As Sciglitano explains, for Vattimo they fail to articulate ‘. . . an explicit theory of secularization and
of the death of God as the positive affirmation of divinity based on the idea of incarnation contemporary
thought emphasizes the disappearance of the sacred from the world precisely by affirming transcendence as
the total ‘alterity’ of the biblical God.’ Sciglitano, 535.