Theology, Taubes posited, arises out of religious crisis, when the “mythical” symbols in canonical texts that express a  human encounter with the divine lose their plausibility in their original form. “The hour of theology is come when a mythical configuration breaks down and its symbols that are congealed into a canon come into conflict with a new stage of man’s consciousness. When the symbols coined to express man’s encounter with the divine at a unique moment of history no longer coincide with his experience, theology tries to interpret the original symbols in order to integrate them within the context of the new situation: what was pre sent in the myth is then only ‘re-presented’ in the theological interpretation.” Yet the result of this reinterpretation is paradoxical. For on the one hand, the original symbols are preserved by being reinterpreted. But on the other hand, the reinterpretation means that the original symbols are understood in a new way, befitting the changed stage of consciousness. Then, as culture and consciousness change again, the existing interpretation is once again experienced as inadequate, creating a demand for a new theological reinterpretation of the original symbols of the faith. When theology is no longer able to provide an interpretation that is experienced as plausible, the symbols lose their hold and die. That, according to Taubes, was what was happening to Christianity.

[…] The role of theology in Christianity, Taubes noted, went back to the New Testament itself. That was  because the gap between the original symbols and the historical reality manifested themselves almost immediately. The eschatological expectations of the first Christians—of the end of history with Christ’s imminent return— were unfulfilled. Thus, “the Christian community was thrown into history against her expectations and against her w ill, and the hiatus between the eschatological symbols of faith and man’s continuing existence in history is as old as the history of the Christian church.” The function of Christian theology from then on remained the reinterpretation of the eschatological symbols (such as Christ’s incarnation and man’s salvation at the end of days) in light of changing historical circumstances. In the process of transforming “an adventistic sect” (that is, a small group of people awaiting the imminent coming of the Messiah and the end of days) into a universal church, Christianity had had to come to terms with the world, to become “secularized.” As Taubes formulated the point elsewhere, “Jacob Burckhardt once remarked that all relation to external reality breaks down if you take certain passages of the New Testament in dead earnest; in these, a spirit is reflected that considers the world to be a strange and alien place. Church and theology have done their best, however, to mitigate and obscure this original Christian experience of total alienation from the world; in nineteen centuries they have transformed anoriginally ‘nihilistic’ impulse into positive ‘social’ or ‘political’ action.” That led to a perennial conflict between the canonical texts of the faith (the New Testament) and subsequent theological commentary on it, a “conflict between the eschatological symbols and the brute fact of a continuing history.” The main way in which that tension was eased was through the use of allegorical interpretation, the insistence that the Biblical text  ought to be understood in a nonliteral way.

But that allegorical tradition of interpretation, Taubes maintained, was no longer  viable, for a variety of reasons.

The first was that modern critical scholarship on the Old and New Testaments, which sought to discover the  actual history of the texts, was at odds with traditional theological interpretation of the Bible (exegesis). “Does not historical interpretation qua method imply a criticism of all theological exegesis? Whereas theological exegesis must ‘transfer’— this is the original meaning of translation— the original symbols by the method of allegorical interpretation into a given situation, the historical analysis interprets the text, the canonic symbols, in their original historical context.” Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), the  great liberal Protestant historian of Christianity, resolved this dilemma by interpreting “the essence of Christianity” as the religion of Jesus, while “discarding all Christological doctrine as dead weight.” Nietzsche resolved it by concluding that the triumph of historical research had as its implicit premise “the death of the Christian God. Historical research, Nietzsche observed, works only as a post mortem, dissecting the body for the sake of anatomical study and writing an obituary.”

Taubes recognized Karl Barth’s strategy in the famous second edition of Barth’s commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans […] as an attempt to circumvent the historical understanding of the Biblical text in  favor a direct recovery of its eschatological ele ments, which seemed resonant in light of the sense of crisis during and after the First World War. Barth’s “dialectical theology,” Taubes wrote, describes a world so totally bereft of God that it “strangely coincided in its diagnosis with the atheistic interpretation of man’s  actual situation.” But Taubes judged Barth’s attempt “a dubious enterprise, combining revolutionary insight into the meaning of the original symbols with an anachronistic exegesis” that smuggled in some typical stereotypes of Protestant orthodoxy. (Taubes probably had in mind Barth’s critique of “Pharisees”—a  Protestant trope used to stigmatize Catholicism.) Barth’s attempt to circumvent historical consciousness was doomed to failure. Taubes criticized Barth’s dialectical theology for trying to avoid historical understanding by a naive return to Biblical sources: “Such innocence is illusory and cannot be regained by  will or wish.”

Taubes agreed with Paul Tillich, the German Protestant radical theologian then teaching at Union Theological Seminary, that all fundamentalist and orthodox theology was no longer plausible. “For the first generation of Christian believers the coming of the Messiah was a reality and not an ontological problem. Many generations did not stumble over the concreteness of central symbols like  Father, Lord, or King of Heaven. . . . T hey could use these symbols naïvely and did not need to develop an allegorical or dialectical interpretation. Anyone who,  after two thousand years of Christian history, thinks he can ignore the hiatus of time is the victim of an illusion.”

In the essay “Dialectic and Analogy,” Taubes explored another barrier to the creation of an adequate con temporary Christian theology. He argued that for most of its history, Christian theology was based on a hierarchical vision of the cosmos, with the earth at its center. In this conception, heaven was really “above,” and earthly institutions reflected their heavenly counterparts. Thus in the  Middle Ages, “the principle of analogy expresses the basic correspondence between below and above, heaven and earth, the natural and the supernatural.” All of  that broke down with the Copernican revolution, which revealed that the earth was not in fact at the center of the cosmos, and that it circled the sun. Man was therefore no longer at the center of the cosmos. While the Catholic Church tried to minimize the importance of this discovery, “the Copernican revolution shattered all hierarchical structure, the heavenly as well as the earthly . . .  above and below became mere ‘metaphors’ and not rooted in the external order of the cosmos.” Taubes argued that the attempt of modern Catholic thinkers to revive the analogical theology of Thomas Aquinas while abandoning his cosmology was misconceived. That, he thought, was futile—there was no  going back.16 In addition, the decline of monarchy as the dominant form of politics and the rise of democracy left much of the imagery of the traditional liturgy disconnected from con temporary consciousness.

As a result, theistic religion was “forced to retreat to the domain of man’s ‘inwardness.’ ” One theological response was to emphasize “dialectic”— the relationship between a distant God and the individual believer, and to stress the individual’s inward spirituality. Theology turns from cosmology to “anthropology,” focusing on the nature of man and his needs. With ever more to say about man and ever less to say about God, the varieties of “dialectical theology”—whether  those of Barth or Tillich—  testified to “the eclipse of the divine in our present situation.” Among Western intellectuals, in the de cade since the Second World War, Marxism had been overshadowed by existentialism. The significance of Tillich’s recent writings, Taubes recognized, was in reminding secularists of the religious roots of the characteristic concerns of existentialism—“ dread, anxiety, courage, being and non- being.”

Taubes suggested that between them, historical consciousness, post- Copernican science, and political democracy had destroyed the traditional techniques of theology. As Christian theologians like Barth gave up on the idea of history as progress and abandoned providentialist accounts that see evidence of God in history in favor of dialectical accounts that stress the gap between God and man, they approached a Gnostic conception of the world as bereft of God, and set the stage for an atheistic theology. “Perhaps the time has come,” he speculated in “On the Nature of the Theological Method,” “when theology must learn to live without the support of canon and classical authorities and stand in a world without authority.” Instead, he suggested, “Theology must remain incognito in the realm of the secular and work incognito for the sanctification of the world.” Taubes seems to have borrowed this notion of theology needing to disguise itself in order to attain contemporary influence from Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” a source he would return to time and again in  later years.

Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse