by Jeanyne Slettum
19th century
Kant: religion within the limits of reason alone; religion converted to ethics
Schleiermacher: God as the feeling of absolute dependence; religion as feeling
Hegel: everything converted to philosophy; Absolute Spirit; system
Feuerbach: God is a human projection; religion must be overcome
Kierkegaard: truth is subjectivity; leap of faith; religiousness A & B
Ritschl: neo-Kantian, kingdom of God
Harnack: separate kernel from husk to find essence (truth of gospel embedded in Bible, doctrine)
James: healthy-minded and sick soul typology; the unconscious as the likely portal for the divine
Rauschenbusch: social gospel
Marx, Freud, Nietzsche: “masters of suspicion”; i.e., interpreters who strip religion of its disguises (religion as opiate of the masses, religion as illusion, death of God)
20th century (to about the 70s)
People
Troeltsch: Christianity as history and culture; religious typology
Otto: holy as numinous (nonrational, nonsensory, external to self)
Barth: Christocentrism; knowledge of God limited to the self-revelation of God in Christ
Bultmann: kerygma over historical Jesus; dymythologization (don’t remove the myth, interpret it); God’s transcendence as nonspatial, nontemporal, but existential, confronting us in the moment of decision
Bonhoeffer: cheap grace, Confessing Church, political theology
Tillich: faith as ultimate concern; God as the ground of being, method of correlation
Reinhold Niebuhr: “religious socialism”→Christian realism; hermeneutic: myth
H. Richard Niebuhr: ethicist; Christ and culture typology; radical monotheism
Hartshorne: process theology; omnipotence as a theological mistake
Cobb: process metaphysics, Christ as creative transformation
Moltmann: theology of hope, political theology, panentheist, Trinitarian
Pannenberg: historicity of revelation, systematic theology
Movements
Religion as anthropology: Frazier
Religion as psychology: Freud (religion is an illusion), James, Jung (collective unconscious)
Religion as sociology: Durkheim, Weber (“Protestant ethic”)
Religion as religious studies: Smart, Smith
Pragmatism: James, Peirce
Neo-orthodoxy: Barth, Bonhoeffer, Brunner, Niebuhr (2), Bultmann
Phenomenology: Husserl, Otto
Process: Whitehead, Hartshorne, Cobb, Suchocki
Existentialism: Tillich, Bultmann
Liberation: Boff (2), Sobrino, Guttierez, Söelle
Feminist: Daly, Ruether, Schüssler-Fiorenza
Womanist: Williams
Black Liberation: Cone
Catholic: Balthazar, Teilhard, Rahner (“anonymous Christian”), Tracy
Jewish: Buber (I-Thou), Heschel, Wiesel