Introduction

I am grateful for the opportunity to offer some thoughts on John Perry and Joanna Leidenhag’s exciting book on science-engaged theology. I am doing this as a German Protestant systematic theologian. From this perspective, I find it particularly encouraging that Perry and Leidenhag’s proposal for new and bold modes of science–theology interaction moves away from traditional dichotomies such as religion vs. science or natural vs. revealed theology. I have organized my thoughts and comments along six points.

Secularization as Explanation?

Science-engaged theology stresses historical contextualization of both “science” and “theology,” and of their ways of engagement. In their book, Perry and Leidenhag (2023, 9) refer to Peter Harrison when they write: “science and religion are not transhistorical categories that we can track throughout different epochs, but imagined concepts that, as a result of certain theories of secularism, have come to be defined in opposition.” Here as well as at other places Perry and Leidenhag (2023, 20) refer to a meta-narrative of secularization. According to the presentation by the authors, Harrison also subsumes “the story of science and religion . . . within larger accounts of secularization and the loss of Aristotelian-Thomistic teleology.” According to this meta-narrative the ‘imagined’ concepts of science and religion in their modern meaning “were invented as tools of an ideology called secularism” (2023, 21). All this insinuates that the ideology of secularism has invented the imagined concepts of religion and science, and that if we get rid of that ideology we might leave the conflict behind. However, the sociological concept of secularization or secularism is not so much a descriptive historical category as it is an analytical term which became common with Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Peter L. Berger, and others as a characterization of the development of modernity away from religious dominance in society.

Usually, three aspects of secularism are distinguished: (1) Functional differentiation: “the process of societal modernization as a process of functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres—primarily the state, the economy, and science—from the religious sphere and the concomitant differentiation and specialization of religion within its own newly found religious sphere” (Casanova 2008, 19). (2) The decline of religious convictions and religious behavior. (3) An increasing privatization of religion so that the religious sphere is reduced to the narrow realm of private life. In his famous analysis from 1917, Max Weber (1985, 594), for example, linked these developments to the rise of science leading to the increased intellectualization and rationalization of modernity and thus to the “disenchantment of the world,” in which technical means and calculation provide tools to master nature. For Weber, this development had positive and negative aspects. It gained technical progress, but it also enclosed the modern individual into a “shell as hard as steel” (Weber 1922, 203), or, as in the famous translation by Talcott Parsons, into an “iron cage” (Weber 1930, 181). Others have questioned the thesis of a general secularization of the Western World on principle or on empirical grounds. Today, the debate about secularization and whether or not we already live in a post-secular age is an open one (Costa 2022).

In any case, one should bear in mind the warning of the great church historian Owen Chadwick from his Gifford Lectures:

Umbrella terms, however doubtful, are useful. I do not think it an abuse of such a term to call this radical process, still in part so obscure to the enquirer, still in part undefined and possibly in part undefinable, by the name of secularization; on the one condition (and it is an absolute condition) that the word is used, neither as the lament of nostalgia for past years, nor as propaganda to induce history to move in one direction rather than another, but simply as a description of something that happened to European society in the last two hundred years. And what happened, and why, must still be matter for much enquiry by students of history and religion and society. (Chadwick [1975] 2000, 265–66)

Therefore, it seems to me a normative and in itself anachronistic construct to identify a secularist ideology or agenda as the cause behind the debates and conflicts around science and religion in the nineteenth century, and a problematic move to insinuate that if only we overcome this ideology those tensions between the imagined constructs of religion and science at the expense of religion would go away or be transformed into fruitful engagement. Even if one agrees that the modern concepts of science and religion have been shaped in the nineteenth century and that they were used within developments and discourses which today many describe as secularization, such a view is no explanation and requires careful analysis of the complexity of the conflictual constellations between reason, faith, empirical sciences, scripture, scientific world-views, claims for religious tolerance, democratic change, etc. It is, indeed, complicated (Perry and Leidenhag 2023, 16–21) and not the result of ideology.

What about Esotericism?

Holding that caveat in mind, one can subscribe to the claim that science and religion, at least in the way we understand them today, are concepts of relatively recent coinage. Any thesis about a conflict between these two concepts, let us say, in the seventeenth century, when Galilei stood against the Vatican astronomers and argued against their Aristotelian concepts, or even at the time of early Christianity confronted with Hellenistic philosophy, is, as Peter Harrison (Harrison 2015, 3) writes, an “anachronistic application of modern concepts to past eras.” However, in addition to Harrison and others, and following Heidelberg professor of religious studies, Michael Bergunder (see Bergunder 2020 and his earlier study, Bergunder 2016), I would add esotericism or occultism to the concepts of science and religion as a third concept that was shaped and constructed in the nineteenth century in public discourses around religious and scientific worldviews and their meaning for the future of a changing society. Concepts of religion, science, and esotericism have a common history emerging in the course of the nineteenth century and particularly in its latter half. Modern esotericism as the idea of a re-enchanted worldview is an antagonist movement of amalgamation of religion and science against the religion–science divide established in those days. Recent research in the history of esotericism emphasizes that in its modern form it is no uninterrupted continuation of early modern concepts of secret knowledge and the like but has its roots in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Spiritism, Occultism and Theosophy as decidedly esoteric movements were formed and developed an intensive exchange of ideas with each other (Bergunder 2020, 54).¹ Kocku von Stuckrad (2014) argues that European secularism in fact has been religiously productive itself. The nineteenth century saw the emergence of professional knowledge about religion in a global perspective, while science was used to develop comprehensive worldviews, was propagated as a resource of meaning, and religious notions were merged with scientific concepts and practices. Von Stuckrad speaks of the Scientification of Religion between 1800 and 2000, which is still effective in present perspectives of a consonance between science and religion.

According to Bergunder, the concept of religion in the nineteenth century was constructed as a contrast to that of science, while in response different forms of esotericism propagated the intrinsic affinity and unity of science and religious attitudes and beliefs. This took place in the framework of a global discourse that not only constructed science and religion as antagonists but at the same time gave rise to a countercurrent that wanted to merge science and religion. Analogous discourses can be identified in the major global religions like Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, which in the nineteenth century in the wake of colonialism saw movements of renaissance and reform claiming a new amalgamation of what in the West seemed to become more and more antagonist forces, namely religion and science in their modern sense. In all religions, including Christianity and in the new freethought and free-religious movements, efforts emerged to justify religion on scientific grounds and to substantiate extrasensory phenomena and religious states of mind like meditation empirically and scientifically.

This constellation means that what today we call science and religion is not only shaped by claims of an intrinsic conflict between science and religion constructed in the nineteenth century, but also by alternative claims of an intrinsic consonance between science and religion, which at the same time argues for a transformation of both, science and religion, in order to merge them at a higher level. For later representatives one might think of physicist David Bohm, who had been a follower of Jiddu Krishnamurti, an Indian philosopher promoted by Theosophists, or Stuart Kauffman’s well-known book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (Kauffman 2008). Bergunder as a historian of religion even files physicist and icon of the science and religion field John Polkinghorne under the label esotericism as well as Teilhard de Chardin and other forms of Anglo-Catholicism—a provocative, but maybe stimulating perspective on the discourse around science, religion, and theology and its roots in the nineteenth century. Recently John Milbank followed the tracks of esotericism when he referred to magic as what had been squeezed out in order to reach a truce between “religion” and “science” (Milbank 2022, 141). However, drawing on Antoine Faivre’s understanding of Western esotericism he traces it back to early modernity and identifies in it a constant subtext to the development of modernity. He concedes that it “is not possible to respond to the arrival of ‘science’ in the 19^th century merely by going back to Aristotle, the Fathers or Aquinas” (Milbank 2022, 119), but claims orthodoxy for esotericism and sees in it the means to overcome disenchanted immanence: “Magic alone unites science with religion” (Milbank 2022, 143). Perry and Leidenhag criticize Milbank on theological and hermeneutical grounds when he tries to establish theology as “master discourse” (Milbank 2008, 5–6) and degrades (secular) science as “a bad imitation of theology” (Milbank 2008, 22). However, in my view he also stays within the limits of nineteenth century discourse when he tries to overcome the ideology of secularization by means of “esotericism” not seeing that also esoteric notions are shaped and transformed in relation to secularization. Science-engaged theology would then not only have to contextualize concepts of science and religion, but also those of esotericism which are trying to re-enchant reality by inventing scientific concepts of religion and insinuating a religious understanding of science.

Context, Not Provinciality: The German Development

Another implication of historical contextualization is that constellations are different in different contexts. Contexts in the nineteenth century were different, for example, in Great Britain and in Germany. In Germany, public discourses on materialism, on Darwinism and on Monism shaped the scene for science and religion since the 1840s. There developed what was among the contemporaries identified as Weltanschauungskampf, an ideological struggle about worldviews (Evers 2024). A number of ideologies were fighting for political and public influence, among them socialist and democratic political movements. Science had built up considerable social prestige and many scientists (Naturforscher)² became public figures and defended the claim that science was the modern means to explain the totality of reality. Among them were public figures like Karl Vogt, Jakob Moleschott, Ludwig Büchner, and Ernst Haeckel (see Chadwick [1975] 2000, 163–82) who often proclaimed socialist or liberal ideas and were decidedly anti-clerical. Numerous volumes on scientific worldviews appeared and different public pressure groups, from socialist to religiously conservative, were founded. Among them was the German Monist League (Deutscher Monistenbund) founded in 1906 as an association for the dissemination of a scientific Weltanschauung (worldview). In the founding manifesto written by Heinrich Schmidt it reads:

The tremendous advances of the natural sciences have displaced and eliminated all outdated dogmatic and mystical ideas about the world and human beings, about body and spirit, creation and development, becoming and passing away of material things. Outdated dualistic ideas are increasingly being replaced by monistic ones, and those unsatisfied in the worldview (Weltanschauung) sanctified by tradition are looking for a unified worldview (Weltanschauung) based on natural science. This [worldview] rejects the belief in outdated, traditional dogmas and revelations and puts pure reason in their place. (Drehsen and Zander 1996, 218, my translation)

After the breakdown of German idealism, discourses were also shaped by the diversity of German philosophical schools: first Neo-Kantianism, then Neo-Positivism with Gottlob Frege, Rudolf Carnap, and the Vienna circle; later new existentialism in the Heideggerian version with sympathies for the upcoming national-socialist move towards a Germanic Weltanschauung; and a variety of attempts to establish philosophy as a moderator of Weltanschauung, like Wilhelm Dilthey’s Weltanschauungslehre: the historico-philosophical discipline of worldview studies. However, after hefty controversies in the wake of World War I about Germany’s cultural, religious and political fate in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Nazis finally claimed the monopoly of Weltanschauung and established Alfred Rosenberg in 1934 as “the Führer’s representative for the supervision of the entire spiritual and ideological (weltanschauliche) training and education of the NSDAP,” often referred to as Amt Rosenberg (Rosenberg Office). The whole development of German Protestant theology in the first half of the twentieth century, the insistence of dialectical theology not to turn religion into a comprehensive worldview, its rejection of natural theology, etc. must be seen against the futility and final outcome of such public and political discourses.

Debates on science and religion in the UK with its strong history of natural theology prominent even among natural scientists, including the young Charles Darwin, were less ideological. Even the debates about Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution were less heated in the UK than in Germany, where Haeckel made use of Darwin for promoting his naturalist and monist worldview, which had already been formed years before Darwin published his theory of evolution. Darwin himself remarked in a letter that

a week hardly passes without my hearing of some naturalist in Germany who supports my views, & often puts an exaggerated value on my works; whilst in France I have not heard of a single zoologist except M. Gaudry . . . who supports my views. (Darwin [1870] 2023)

In the UK, with its broad empiricist tradition and its elastic Anglican main church, public debates gained momentum in the late nineteenth century when John Tyndall and other scientific naturalists made the argument that the uniformity of nature, natural law, and causality, which natural theology had understood in theistic terms, rather point to a nonreligious understanding of the natural world (Stanley 2019). The so-called prayer gauge debate about petitionary prayer in 1870 made this a public controversy and linked it to the question if the efficacy of petitionary prayer can be measured scientifically (Tyndall and Galton 1876). Tyndall himself, who had studied in Germany, was aware of the German movement of Neo-Kantianism that argued for an agnostic stance towards religion from a scientific perspective and thus was far away from developing what in Germany would have been called a Weltanschauung.

For science-engaged theology, Perry and Leidenhag stress the importance of different historical or geographical contexts for science as well as theology. There will always be contingent social factors and one has to be “aware of the local, political and sociological issues surrounding particular studies and interpretations of data” (Perry and Leidenhag 2023, 65). But such awareness calls for expansion and dialogue beyond the particular context in order to understand it in its specific particularity. Science-engaged theology must not indulge in provinciality but should also develop a critical sense of its own context. It must seek interaction with other contexts and also with the broader questions of epistemology and ontology and thus with philosophical discourses which provide tools of analysis beyond contextual particularity. Theology should not fall prey to communal and cultural self-evidence nor to cultural relativism. In a global and inter-religious perspective and with reference to philosophical reflection, even science-engaged theology can, in the long run, not refrain from introducing hermeneutical and philosophical perspectives which point beyond historical context. Historical contextualization allows for deconstructing dominant and persistent narratives, but it is not a relief from the burden of constructive engagement with substantial philosophical questions including those of epistemology, philosophy of science, and ontology, as well as with doctrinal claims of theology.

Borders and Fences: On the Dialectics of Engagement

Perry and Leidenhag’s understanding of science-engaged theology questions the truce between science and religion as many understand it. Especially in my context of German academic theology, such a truce as built on a categorical separation between science and religion is seen as self-evident. This view is understood as a major progress started by Schleiermacher and ratified at the beginning of the twentieth century that science and religion no longer interfere and refrain from participating in an endless attrition warfare. In his open Letters to Dr. Lücke, Schleiermacher (Schleiermacher 1981, 64) proposed an “eternal covenant between the living Christian faith, and completely free, independent, scientific inquiry, so that faith does not hinder science and science does not exclude faith.” This covenant is usually understood as a categorical separation between religion and science, so that theology as a reflection on and articulation of religious consciousness as feeling of ultimate dependence can in principle not be in conflict with science, because both have nothing to do with each other.³ Or as systematic theologian Ulrich Barth claimed a few years ago in an essay with the speaking title “Farewell to Cosmology: Liberation of Religion to Itself”: “Since Schleiermacher—this can be stated without exaggeration—the dispute between theology and the natural sciences over questions of cosmology has basically ceased to be an issue” (Barth 1995, 35, my translation). In his view the religious concept of creation is concerned with reflections on finitude (Endlichkeitsreflexion) and has nothing to do with theories of matter in space and time or the origin of the universe. A similar case but on the other side of the theological spectrum are Karl Barth’s remarks at the beginning of his doctrine of creation “that there can be no scientific problems, objections or aids in relation to what Holy Scripture and the Christian Church understand by the divine work of creation. . . . There is free scope for natural science beyond what theology describes as the work of the Creator. And theology can and must move freely where science which really is science, and not secretly a pagan Gnosis or religion, has its appointed limit” (Barth 1958, 1–2). However, his preface to Church Dogmatics vol. III/1 was written in October 1945, only months after Germany’s unconditional surrender when the “pagan Gnosis,” the Weltanschauung of the Nazis, had left Europe in ruins. It must be read against the background of a century of Weltanschaungskampf culminating in nationalist, ethno-racist and militarist ideologies built on pseudo-science.

Against any notions of decoupling religion from science or, as they call it, Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) on steroids, Perry and Leidenhag argue for theology’s qualified engagement with science. For this they propose to move beyond the territories of science and religion by deconstructing the antagonist categories as “deeply misleading,” (Perry and Leidenhag 2023, 21). On the other hand, they concede that “a lack of clear borders does not make the label of science meaningless” and that “this blurred border” does not “license an anything goes relativism” (2023, 47). For me, the term engaged in science-engaged theology indeed presupposes science as something distinct from theology so that engagement becomes possible at all. Theology’s potential commitment to science refers to the hermeneutical dialectics that, to use a famous line from poet Robert Frost, “good fences make good neighbours” (Evers 2019) and thus separation and relative independence are necessary for mutual engagement. Christian theology begins with faith seeking understanding (Evers 2019, 63) and is not and cannot be an explanatory reconstruction of certain phenomena of reality in a third-person perspective. It is also taking first-person perspectives (such as faith as basic trust and personal involvement) and second-person conditions (such as expressivist, non-designative aspects of language and semantics, cultural formations and hermeneutical approaches to verbal and non-verbal communication) into account. Theology engages in open discourses which aim at integrating third- and first-person perspectives with critically reflected and elucidated second-person conditions. Science, on the other hand, must develop and fulfill empirico-mathematical methodological requirements. These are not so clear-cut as many think, and they often depend on the subject-matter one is dealing with, but in any case they are meant to relate formal models to reality in an objectified third-person perspective. Such methodological distinctions between theological discourse and scientific investigation improve and strengthen possible forms of engagement and even make them possible, while blurring distinctions can render fruitful exchange impossible, because it becomes unclear what exactly we are talking about.

My move would be not to blur borders, but to de-politicize and de-militarize them. A fence is not a wall, a fortiori no Berlin wall with border police and spring guns. Fences are permeable, albeit selective in their allowance of thorough passing. There is always peaceful large and small border traffic—between science and religion for example in terms of models and images borrowed from the other side. And fences require constant mending, re-negotiating and at times even moving. The territories of science and religion must not be understood in ways of political entities governed by legislation, police, and politicians, but as free and intrinsically diversified spaces which together with others like music, politics, arts, language, food, etc. form the landscape of human culture. In this landscape science and theology are indeed neighbors. They share a common history and common interests of rationality and truthfulness. And it is important that they are not seen as archenemies, but as engaged in constructive dispute—at times even within a person—about the limits and potentials of human knowledge. Then both are able to contribute their respective and particular gifts, especially when they engage in third places: in the mayor hall, in the marketplace, in the theatre, in parliament, in the media, etc.

Hermeneutics as Foundation: Science and “Wissenschaft”

For any science-engaged theology reflections on hermeneutics, that is reflections on the theory and methodology of interpretation and understanding, are key. Its approach makes it necessary to distinguish between different levels of semantics and conversation. That starts with reflections on the understanding of science as a source for theological reflection: “What, then, is it that science-engaged theologians are meant to engage with?” (Perry and Leidenhag 2023, 36) What we are talking about when we talk about science: Consolidated scientific knowledge? Scientific hypotheses? Scientific data? Scientific research programs? Science as authority? Science as a cultural force? Science based or science-engaged worldviews? Science-flavored narratives? And science in which arena: at the university, in research labs, in public political discourse, as a culture (Snow [1959] 2000)? . . .

Let me again share a notion of my German context. While in the English-speaking world “science” has adopted a somewhat narrow sense, Wissenschaft in German means something different: a system of doctrines and knowledge regarding certain subject matters and methods related to them. Wissenschaft can be any ordered, systematic body of knowledge. Right from its beginning in the eighteenth century this notion had two aspects, the “material” aspect of knowledge, and the formal aspect of certain methodological disciplines to gain reliable knowledge with respect to certain objects of knowledge. The German constitution in article 5(3) grants freedom of Wissenschaft (academic freedom), and in 1973 the German Federal Constitutional Court defined Wissenschaft as “any activity which, according to its content and form, is to be regarded as a serious planned attempt to discover/determine the truth”;⁴ the court even links this broad and open definition to the “fundamental incompleteness of any scientific knowledge”⁵ (Bundesverfassungsgericht 2023, my translations). As I see it, this resonates with Perry and Leidenhag’s vision of unity and pluralism in science and beyond. In the German context, Wissenschaft divides into different sub-forms such as Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences), Geisteswissenschaften (humanities), Kulturwissenschaften (cultural sciences), Sozialwissenschaften (social sciences), Sprachwissenschaften (linguistics), etc. Often, the medieval higher faculties such as medicine, law, and theology are seen as practical disciplines dedicated to certain practical and institutional tasks and for this purpose employing methods and knowledge from different other disciplines across the spectrum. Mathematics, philosophy, and academic theology are often regarded as special disciplines of Wissenschaft which fall outside such sub-categories related to specific subject matters, while other Wissenschaften, like psychology, come in different varieties, either as a natural or a social science. Other disciplines are hybrids from the start like computer-linguistics combining empirical scientific methods with linguistics.

Theology in my understanding must be developed as “a serious planned attempt to discover the truth,” and thus must be Wissenschaft. However, there are different levels and categories of truth. While empirical sciences deal with those forms of knowledge which are in such a controlled and subtle relation to empirical reality that they can take on the form of mathematical regularity and allow for empirical falsification and corroboration, theology refers to God as ultimate truth and therefore to truth as a transformative power from beyond human knowledge, experience, and calculation. If we want to establish “a serious planned attempt” to discover this kind of truth, we are dependent on revelation, on God making Godself accessible. While all human scientific knowledge is intrinsically incomplete, theological truth claims fall even more under a fundamental reservation for a number of reasons. They cannot refer to God as an object which can be pinned down by empirical or methodological means. They can only try to articulate how our views of reality and our individual and communal ways of living change if what is understood as a revelation of God unfolds its orienting power. Thus, the theological quest for truth takes on different forms of opening and orienting human existence on personal, communal, and public levels, and it draws from the sources of religious traditions and practices seeking disclosures of truth (Ramsey 1973). If I understand science-engaged theology correctly, theological truth claims must not take the form of a super-science to explain reality, but they must point towards the mystery of God by developing empirically meaningful and historically particular presentations and analyses of reality.

Science-Engaged Theology as Cool Theology

Dewi Z. Phillips has distinguished between warm and cold philosophy. In a nutshell, warm philosophy is passionate in pursuing goals for shaping human existence, while cold philosophy simply describes different philosophical options in a historical or analytical perspective. Phillips identifies his own philosophy in contrast to these two extremes as cool philosophy. With this he refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote in 1929: “My ideal is a certain coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them” (Phillips 1999, vi). The sciences help to cool the temple of theological discourse too often heated by religious and other ideologies. They help keeping religious phantasies at bay and prevent them from running wild. They help to refute political usurpations of religion and theology, and they bind theology’s moral and ethical discourses to concrete reality so that they can gain traction. They help to calibrate personal, spiritual, subjective perspectives on reality with references to empirical reality and intersubjective conditions of communication and argument. They help to prevent religious notions from developing into wishful thinking and inspire non-foundationalist and pluralist forms of “relaxed metaphysics” (Dalferth 2017). They prevent theological reflection from turning into a kind of pseudoscientific argument for trans-scientific objectives. In these respects, science-engaged theology is cool.