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The Attack On Christendom in Marx and Kierkegaard

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Extract

Our discussion must start from Hegel, because Hegel set the terms of the debate and his shade has haunted the whole controversy we are to consider. His definitions of Christianity and of philosophy were at the heart of the ensuing encounter. Not that Hegel's analysis was accepted: some, like Feuerbach and Marx, modified Hegel more or less drastically while all the time assuming that in essentials, and sometimes in spite of himself, Hegel was right; others, like Kierkegaard, rejected Hegel's whole conception of what Christianity was about and yet still saw the question of what was to be done with the legacy of Hegel as a central issue of the age. And so it is impossible for us to grasp the structure of a still continuing discussion without seeing the pervasive influence of its starting-point.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1972

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References

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page 183 note 3 The young Marx was in his most Hegelian mood when he wrote: ‘The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself’ (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 [Moscow, 1961], p. 70).Google Scholar

page 184 note 1 Wetter, G., Dialectical Materialism (London, 1958), pp. 78Google Scholar. An illuminating recent study of the young Hegelian movement is McLellan, David, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London, 1969), see esp. pp. 14, 18–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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page 185 note 2 Avineri, S., The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1968), p. 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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page 195 note 1 See Avineri, op. cit., pp. 65ff, for a penetrating examination of Marx's materialism.

page 195 note 2 cf. Engels: ‘Fortunately it is easy enough to be an atheist today. Atheism is so near to being self-obvious with European working-class parties nowadays. … It can even be said of the German Social-Democratic workers that atheism has already outlived itself with them: this purely negative word no longer has any application as far as they are concerned inasmuch as their opposition to faith in God is no longer one of theory, but one of practice; they have purely and simply finished with God, they live and think in the world of reality and are therefore materialists’ (cited in On Religion, p. 141).

page 195 note 3 Pace Mészarós, op. cit., pp. I66–8.

page 195 note 4 The problem posed by Pannenburg, W. in ‘Can Christianity do without an Eschatology?‘, The Christian Hope (S.P.C.K. Theological Collections, London, 1970), p. 29Google Scholar. Cf. James Klugmann's reply in the same volume, pp. 59–63.

page 196 note 1 e.g. Mézarós, op. cit., pp. 28–33 and 165–73.