God and the Sublime

Abstract

What kind of theology articulates God and the sublime?Were this question posed by someone other than Laurence Hemming the chances are that it would quickly lead to a history of liberal Protestantism and its colonization of Catholicism. Everyone knows the story. It begins with a revolution. The Old Theology is overthrown in Königsberg: revelation and liturgy, and a lot of other dusty stuff, are pushed off to the side, though not thrown away altogether. So we are free at last! It turns out, though, that it was not a revolution but a coup.We are getting another King, and he is just about to be crowned. Word on the street says he comes from the royal house of the Sublime and that his name is ‘Experience.’ He is German, needless to say, and is known to some high up in the land as Erlebnis and to others as Erfahrung. The common people are often confused. Yet the King is religious – or at least very moral – and he rules benignly for a long time, granting state favors to Hegel and Schleiermacher. Even when he is dead, people look back to his reign with nostalgia: they become known in the land as ‘Rahnerians.’...