Secularization as Kenosis

secularization as kenosis | 221
religions and conceptions of God. There is a tendency toward spiritualization and an
idea of universal salvation, which overrides the testimonies of particular traditions. A
striking example of this is the way Vattimo deals with Judaism and the Hebrew Bible.
Vattimo emphasizes those texts in the New Testament that suggest the more spiritual
and ‘friendly’ character of Christianity over Judaism and of the New Testament over
the Old Testament. To my mind this is a Marcionic way of dealing with scripture. It
creates, rather than finds, an opposition between the – allegedly – violent God of the
Old Testament and the revelation of the God of love in the New Testament. This opposition
cannot be upheld, if only for the reason that in the New Testament too, violence
and judgment are inherent to the proclamation of the one God of Israel and the New
Testament book of Revelations may be by far the most violent book in the Bible.
This is not to say that I defend a violent image of God, rather I think that both ethically
and theologically it is undesirable to create an opposition between love and justice,
and between a loving God and a just God. In a similar vein, Vattimo finds the Jewish tradition
highly suspect in its effort to hold onto the idea of a personal, particular God. 226
Vattimo’s spiritualizing and universalizing philosophy of religion is rather modern as it
encourages us to give up both a too particular God and a too worldly revelation of God.
Instead I entirely agree with De Lange that a de-hellenization of philosophy need not
imply a de-judaization. 227 De Lange is very sympathetic toward Vattimo. He sees the
notion of secularization as applied by Vattimo as a promising perspective for theological
hermeneutics. To his mind, however, and I entirely agree with him on this point, his
use of Biblical notions to support his convergence of Christianity and secularization is
quite arbitrary. Vattimo tends to reduce the biblical message to the concept of love, at
the expense of other concepts, such as truth and justice. 228
Vattimo’s concrete prospects for Christianity in the West entail an end to traditional
Christianity. Not only Judaism is suspect. In particular the ethical claims of the
Catholic Church are indications, for Vattimo, of a surviving power structure in Christianity.
In this view, the consequence of secularization would entail the end of the
Church as an institution, as an “historical positive religion”. 229 It would become a religion
without religion; without reference to any concrete tradition. The idea of weak
thought in Christianity might turn out to be a Trojan horse of a philosophical mastery
over religion. 230 In the end there is hardly any difference between modern secularism
and Vattimo’s post-modern secularization, in the sense that both explicitly hold that the
existence of religion alongside secular society is undesirable.
The universalizing tendency in Vattimo’s thinking can be elucidated from the way
he interprets Löwith. On several occasions Vattimo refers approvingly to the work of
Löwith, as someone who would have demonstrated the essential continuity between
Christianity and modern historicism. This is only partially true and it obscures a crucial
disagreement between Löwith and Vattimo. Vattimo does not mention that for Löwith
it was exactly this historical interpretation of Christianity that was a fruit of modernity.
Original Christianity, as in Augustine and Christ’s teaching, were crucially different in
226 See also De Wit, ‘Return to Religion’, 404–5.
227 Frits de Lange, ‘Kenotic Ethics. Gianni Vattimo, Reading the ‘Signs of the Time’, in: Onno Zijlstra,
editor, Letting Go. Rethinking Kenosis (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), 68.
228 De Lange, ‘Kenotic Ethics’, 65.
229 Girard and Vattimo, ‘Christianity’, 29.
230 Cf. Jonker’s critique of Hent de Vries in Jonkers, ‘God in France’, 10–12.