Rudolf J. Siebert and Dialectical Religiology
Few academics have careers that are as long and productive as Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert. The author of dozens of books and hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics, Siebert has over his long career shaped the trajectory of comparative religion, critical theory, and the critical-political approach to understanding the dialectical nature of religion and theology. Rooted both in his theological education, as well as the Frankfurt Schoolâs Critical Theory of Society, he is the initiator of what he called Dialectical Religiology, which seeks to understand religion as a dialectical phenomenon â both embodying emancipatory, liberation, and revolutionary elements, while also holding fast to its dogmatism, obscurantism, and authoritarianism. Like the first generation of critical theorists before him, Siebert is not a proponent of a positivistic âoutsidersâ perspective to the study of religion, as if religion is merely an âinterestingâ sociological phenomenon, the claims of which one can study without ever taking seriously. Rather, he has attempted to emancipate those prophetic, recalcitrant, and non-conforming elements within the world religions from the reactionary, conservative, and stasis-inducing historical forms in which they reside. Although he appropriated their well-founded critiques, and advanced them against positive religion, Siebert did not wholly follow the anti-religion intellectuals of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, Sigmund Freud, and Vladimir Lenin, just to name a few, who saw religion one-sidedly. Being men of their times, religion, as it was defined and embodied by the ruling Bourgeoisie and the dogma of âprogress,â was seen merely as a reactionary impediment to humanityâs earthly emancipation. In other words, they totalized the ideologically distorted Christianity of Emperor Constantine (and his successors) and the many who distorted Christianity by transfiguring it into a means of domination, but forgot the anti-ideological and anti-idolatry Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and his revolutionary weltanschauung. For the 19th century critics, religion had to vacate history. For the dialectician, religion had to be rescued.
Throughout his work, Dr. Siebert has returned to Immanuel Kant and Georg W.F. Hegel, and their dialectical approach to religion. Through aufhaben (determine negation), that which was salvageable within the historical world religions, i.e. their inherent negativity towards the world-as-it-is (contra mundum), can be delivered to an emancipatory critical-political philosophy, wherein the
Dr. Siebertâs dialectical religiology has its roots not only in Kant, Hegel, Marx, and other Enlightenment intellectuals, but also in numerous Left-wing theologians, such as Walter Dirks, Hans Küng, and Johannes Baptist Metz, as well as the first generation of the Frankfurt School, who, like Siebert, saw elements within religion that were still salvageable, precisely because they were still loaded with emancipatory potentials, i.e. they lent themselves towards an exodus from human misery towards a future reconciled society, wherein the entrenched antagonisms that now defines the damaged and degraded conditions of human existence, are alleviated. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Leo Löwenthal, and Erich Fromm, etc., were all keenly aware that religion was dialectical, and not an entirely positive (status-quo affirming) epiphenomenon of human misery, rooted solely in humanityâs longing for a world better than this one, a merely delusion, or a reactionary ideology. Rather, it was also a powerful motivating force and critique against the world-as-it-is, in the name of the world-as-it-should-be, and thus, as Walter Benjamin stated, certain theological elements could be âenlistedâ by historical materialism into the struggle against the structures of human oppression, exploitation, necrophilia, and unnecessary human suffering.1 As such, Critical Theory was the successor of prophetic religion, and allowed revolutionary religious potentials to remain alive after the functional death of their exterior forms. The first generation of critical theorists, writing within the catastrophes of World War I and II, Auschwitz, and the ever-looming threat of a nuclear holocaust, could not, like many of their philosophical predecessors, abstractly negate religion. Such a deflation of human intellectual and moral potentials would have contributed to the further suffering, debasement, and enslavement of mankind â the âslaughterbench of historyâ or âuniversal Golgothaâ â thus preparing the way for further barbarism. At a time of civilizational crisis, wherein (1) the true individual, who is capable of resisting irrational outbursts of fascist collectivism, continues to collapse; (2) serious literature has degenerated into superficial word-bound-entertainment; (3) music is a mere widget of corporate capitalism; (4) critical philosophy is abandoned for âself-helpâ guruism; (5) history is forgotten amidst national amnesia; (6) cheap entertainment and consumerism is the predominant method for anesthetizing the meaninglessness of modern life; (6) wherein war increasingly becomes the norm because it is profitable; (7) âeducationâ is mere training for careerism;
Dialectical Religiology has its roots not only in the modern condition, but also in the on-going perpetual tragedy of history and humanityâs attempt to understand and live with the meaning of such senseless suffering within a seemingly âGodlessâ world, which ironically is said to be saturated with the presence of a merciful and loving God. The theodicy problem is an ever-present spectre in Siebertâs dialectical religiology.2 From his study of the global class conflict, World War I and II, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, the rise of Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany, and their reemergence and reconfiguration in the 21st century West through palingenetic ultra-nationalism, the return of which the Frankfurt School had predicted already at the end of the second world war, the pain of longing for a merciful and compassionate God (the Totally Other) in the face of a merciless and uncompassionate world historical process, lingers behind every word he has written. Such work is also born out of the suffering of his own biography; from the death of his parents, his brother Karl, his beloved wife Margie, his son Steve, and his numerous friends, not to mention the tragedy of witnessing the destruction of Frankfurt, Germany, his hometown, and its innocent inhabitants, by the saturation bombing of the Americans and the British; each tragedy informs his dialectical religiology. His participation in the Battle of Aschaffenburg (1945); his experiences as a prisoner of war, both in Europe and in the United States; his experiences with Jews during the war â amidst the Endlösung der Judenfrage (final solution to the Jewish question); the anti-Hitler Catholic youth movement, his experience with a Protestant minister who shared his water after young Siebert had been struck by a protesterâs stone while being transferred via train to another P.O.W. camp; all of these episodes were formative to the development of his dialectical religiology.
Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert has spent more than fifty years at Western Michigan University, where I first met him my freshman year (1994â1995). While studying music and comparative religion, I was repeatedly drawn to Siebertâs popular classes, Psychological Elements of Religion, Religion and Revolution, and Religion and Social Ethics, not to mention the numerous graduate courses he offered in the Frankfurt School, many of which were taught in his home, the âHouse of Peace,â wherein numerous graduate students stayed for free as they pursued their graduate degrees at WMU. In my experience as a young undergraduate, Dr. Siebertâs analyses of current affairs, his time diagnosis and prognosis, rooted in a dialectical understanding of the historical processes that brought history to that particular point, was matched only by one other person I had studied: Malcolm X. Both had the uncanny ability to penetrate through the ideological camouflage that perpetually blurred the vision between reality and fiction, essence and appearance, truth and ideology. His inter-disciplinary approach to comparative religion, and the broader study of society and history, rooted in dialectics, appealed to me, just as it did for many other former students of his, some of whom have contributed to this festschrift, including Dr. Michael R. Ott, Siebertâs most prominent intellectual heir. Over the course of decades, Siebert has educated thousands of students from all over the world. He has taught in the United States, Canada, Europe, the former Soviet Union, as well as Japan, and is known throughout for his Critical Theory of Religion, or Dialectical Religiology, which has come to cross-fertilize many other disciplines, such as political science, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and history. He has served on numerous masterâs thesis committees and doctoral dissertation committees, and has directed two international courses, one in Dubrovnik, Croatia (formally Yugoslavia): The Future of Religion, and the other in Yalta, Russia (formally Ukraine): Religion in Civil Society. Both of which many of the contributors to this volume have attended and benefited from.
I personally had one of those truth-revealing moments while traveling abroad with Dr. Siebert. In 2004, while at the Future of Religion conference in the Crimea, he and I visited the little castle commonly called the âswallowâs nest,â just outside of Yalta. As a graduate student, coming from the United States, which is devoid of castles, but plagued with corporate architecture, I was amazed by this small Neo-Gothic structure that seemed to defy gravity, as it sat on a cliff overlooking the Black Sea. I said to Siebert, âIsnât that amazing,â to which he replied: âIt is a catastrophe!â Stunned, I asked why he would say that. Analyzing it intently, he said, âthink of all the workers who died fall
The Critical Theory of Religion, as developed by Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert is dynamic; it rejects any attempt at dogmatization and/or reification. True to the nature of Critical Theory, as written in Max Horkheimerâs 1937 essay, Traditional vs. Critical Theory, Dr. Siebert has always encouraged his students to take dialectical religiology into other realms â opening up new avenues of inquiry, mining other subjects and disciplines for valuable insights, concepts, and notions, and challenging the dogmatism and authoritarianism of all other seemingly closed semantic universes.3 The evidence of such an theoretical openness towards other schools of thought, academic disciplines, ways-of-beings, as well as the thought of the ideological âenemies,â is characteristic of Siebertâs own work, as it is expressed in the millions of words heâs penned over the course of his long and prestigious career. For his work and his revolutionary-compassionate praxis, both at home and abroad, he has engendered respect and admiration from many scholars outside of his own discipline and outside of academics altogether.
I would like to thank my dear friend and brother, Dr. Michael R. Ott, for assisting me in the reading of the manuscript. His sharp eye catches what I miss. If there are any mistakes in the manuscript, the fault is wholly mine. If there are none, credit should be given to him. I would also like to thank Jamie Groendyk for assisting me in preparing the manuscript for publication. Without her help, support, and encouragement, rest assured, this book would never have come to fruition. I would also like to thank my parents, Joyce Weber and Roger Byrd, who to this day continue to motivate me to work hard and honor their
It is fitting that we show our well-deserved gratitude to Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert for his friendship, mentorship, guidance, and influence upon us and our work. We are forever in his debt. On behalf of all the contributors and those who could not contribute but would have liked to, we thank Dr. Siebert for his over fifty years of teaching, lecturing, researching, and writing. We would not be who we are if he was not who he is. Remember, as the great humanist Desiderius Erasmus said, âin regione caecorum rex est luscus.â4
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. âTheses on the Philosophy of History.â In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 253â264. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Horkheimer, Max. Selected Essays.New York: Continuum, 2002.
Siebert, Rudolf J. From Critical Theory to Critical Political Theology: Personal Autonomy and University Solidarity.New York: Peter Lang, 1994.