In his talk, Taubes developed a radical critique of Scholem’s rigid distinction between Christian and Jewish concepts of salvation. In his essay "Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism", Scholem had opposed the Jewish, messianic concept of public and historical redemption to the Christian concept of inner and spiritual redemption. Taubes argued that this distinction is artificial and negates the historical dynamism of messianism: rather than a mere abstract theological concept, messianism is a real historical force that can take very different forms when confronted with concrete historical contexts, hopes, and disappointments. One such essential transformation according to Taubes is the Christian interiorization of salvation. Contrary to Scholem, he considered interiorization as a perfectly legitimate form of messianism, even as the inevitable outcome of its historical logic. By showing how the Christian concept of inner salvation belongs to the messianic tradition, Taubes actually deconstructed Scholem’s rigid distinction between Christianity and Judaism.

[…] Taubes and Scholem clearly disagreed about the scope of messianism; for Scholem, messianism was an inner-Jewish phenomenon, whereas for Taubes it was a dynamic phenomenon that structures Judaism, Christianity, and secularism alike. They had, however, a surprisingly similar concept of the nature of messianism. Taubes, arguably, adopted Scholem’s interpretation of messianism as a subversive, paradoxical, anarchic, apocalyptic, and revolutionary phenomenon that is best understood from the perspective of heresy.

[…] A crucial theological presupposition of Taubes’s and Scholem’s thought was exactly this subversive fascination with the phenomenon of heresy and their discontent with both rabbinic and liberal Judaism. The rabbinic tradition is characterized by a strong emphasis on law and Torah, and could be called “orthodox” or traditional Judaism; liberal Judaism is characterized by an enlightened, rationalist approach to religion that aims at the assimilation of Judaism into modern Western culture. Both strands typically suppress Judaism’s messianic or revolutionary impulses. Scholem’s and Taubes’s research, by contrast, focused precisely on these messianic, mystic, and heretical phenomena that were negated by orthodox and modern Judaism. Instead of understanding these phenomena from the perspective of rabbinic orthodoxy as inauthentic and corrupted modes of Jewish religiosity, Scholem and Taubes wanted to study them for their own sake—Scholem from a historical perspective, Taubes from a more interdisciplinary and philosophical perspective. In this respect, they both considered heresy as an equally legitmate or even more legitimate expression of Judaism than traditional orthodoxy. Their common theologico-philosophical project can thus be called a deconstruction of orthodoxy—or, more precisely, a deconstruction of the classic dividing line between heresy and orthodoxy on which the legitimacy of established, orthodox religion is negatively grounded.

This shared background, however, does not negate the differences between Scholem and Taubes. On the contrary, their fundamental disagreements now become all the more obvious. Again, these differences do not so much concern the nature but the scope of their intellectual project. For Scholem, the deconstruction of orthodoxy remained within the boundaries of Judaism and concerned the distinction between Jewish heresy and orthodoxy, whereas Taubes applied his former teacher’s deconstructive project to the distinction between Judaism and Christianity, as well as to the distinction between religion and secularism. In Taubes’s perspective, the deconstruction of orthodoxy entailed a reflection on the secularization of heresy.

Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World