Freedom! Long-standing theme of doctrinal reflection, core value of modernity, and pressing concern of oppressed communities everywhere, the theme of freedom is full of urgency, promise, and ambivalence. This joint session highlights notable treatments of freedom emerging in modern and contemporary systematic theology, particularly in the contrasting accounts of freedom in the writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Jame Cone. The session’s four papers inquire into the complex questions surrounding the relationship of divine and human freedom, freedom and authority, liberation and social sin, and theological affirmations of freedom and human dignity amidst the modern history of oppression.
Søren Kierkegaard’s sense of Divine Authority was a counterpart to 19th century liberal treatments of human freedom. German idealist philosophers and theologians—including Hegel and Schleiermacher—were striving to overcome oppositions between divine and human authority, especially to reconcile naturalistic causal accounts of the universe with Divine action. These have been key points of retrieval by contemporary theologians. But Kierkegaard was a fierce critic of the attempt to reconcile contradicting claims of agency. Instead, he offered an account of absolute and rigorous Divine Authority. And yet Kierkegaard’s account is so interesting because it pairs with an equally rigorous account of human agency and free choice before this authority. Both are found in Kierkegaard’s signed religious discourses and later-life polemics. I conclude Kierkegaard’s high sense of Divine authority serves, rather than detracts from, a high sense of human freedom and a general ontology of dynamic engagement between God and world.
In light of the proliferation of legislation against DEI, choruses abound across liberal news outlets about how critical race theory is really about understanding and empathy rather than blame, shame, or guilt. There is a temptation to defend our pedagogies by claiming that we are not teaching about guilt. In response, this paper asks: What might an articulation of sin’s inheritance offer contemporary Christians and the broader American public to challenge the racism, sexism, colonialism, and transphobia perpetuated by such legislation? I use Friedrich Schleiermacher and James Cone to explore this question. I highlight the ambivalence of sin’s inheritance. On the one hand, sin teaches us there is something devastatingly wrong with a world in which we disavow our guilt as we enact quotidian and systemic violence. On the other, the history of sin also exemplifies just how guilty we, as Christian theologians, are.
This paper aims to be a constructive exploration of dependence as fundamental for any Christian account of human freedom. Towards these ends, both Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth offer abundant resources for thinking about the relation between dependency and freedom. Pairing these two might seem, at first glance, an exercise in inevitable frustration, but it will become clear that there are similarities in the form and substance of their Christological instincts for theological anthropology. Both men insist that true humanity is not found by first making observations on human freedom generally and then moving to think about how Jesus fits that pattern, but rather they insist that one only understands human freedom in considering how Jesus is the unique revelation of true humanity. In taking cues from both men, this paper presses further the question of freedom in dependency by attending to biblical, trinitarian, and systematic considerations.
What does it mean for theology to seek liberation in the context of structural sin and oppression? This paper develops an answer through a constructive counter-reading of F.D.E. Schleiermacher's little-known reflections on the morality of same-sex desire. Developing his reflections on marriage, sex, and economy in the aftermath of the 1792 Allgemeine Landrecht, Schleiermacher develops an account of queer desire as natural manifestations of human sexuality under disordered political-economic conditions in which the conditions for sexual reproduction do not coincide with the conditions for social reproduction. Condemning approaches to the morality of queer desire that affirm or deny its morality for the individual outside the context of a broader commitment to social transformation and change, Schleiermacher contributes towards the formation of a new theo-political coalition that centers economic justice without neglecting the culture-wars issues that have contributed to the conditions in which partisan gridlock enables dictatorial action.