Reclaiming Speculative Theology: Why Theorizing about God Matters

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting CSWR scholars and their research.

Influenced by philosophy and religious studies, contemporary theologians no longer rely on abstract metaphysical concepts to speculate about God as ultimate being and to construct theories based on that speculation. Instead, contemporary theology tends to reduce ideas about God and religion to immanent, social, psychological, and political categories. But is this shift really justified? And should religious studies scholars and philosophers oblige theologians to renounce their traditional speculative audacity? I don’t think so.

Two prominent intellectual trends cause contemporary theology to shift away from speculating about God as ultimate being and toward the historical and cultural dimension of religious practice: firstly, the “overcoming of metaphysics” proclaimed in twentieth-century philosophy and secondly, the sociological, empirical, and corporeal turn in religious studies. 

In philosophy, influences such as positivism, Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology, deconstructionism, and pragmatism have tended to blame metaphysical speculation for its disconnection from reality and to reduce it to mere illusions created by language and dynamics of power. Ancient and medieval efforts to theorize about ultimate reality—from Proclus, Albert the Great, or Nicholas of Cusa, for example—are often dismissed as premodern naivete. Philosophy, contemporary thinkers argue, should be about describing the structures of language, experience, and society, not about constructing theories about transcendent reality.

On the other hand, religious studies’ opposition to speculation about ultimate reality comes from its strong commitment to the elements of human existence that our time emphasizes as fundamental: experience, aspects of identity such as embodiment and sexuality, social, political, and cultural forces, and so forth. What matters is less the theoretical value or integrity of certain ideas than the plurality of experiences and the cultural richness that these ideas convey. Investigating religion today does not aim to produce theories but to uncover, under the surface of such theories, alternative narratives of human subjectivity.

Despite these critical efforts, it seems to me that no cogent case against theological speculation has ever been made. The tendency of philosophers, religious studies scholars, and theologians to reject speculation is more closely shaped by culturally contingent influences than by rigorous arguments. Scholars in these fields should not assume that other forms of reality cannot exist just because their era is inclined to think of social coexistence, embodiment, and experience to be ultimate points of reference for the study of religions and philosophies.

Why should we not consider the possibility that concrete cultural and embodied expressions exist precisely because they express the connection between human nature and higher, universal, and eternal planes of reality? 

This is precisely the idea promoted in the early nineteenth century by a German Protestant theological movement known as “speculative theology” (spekulative Theologie). Theologians belonging to this movement were students of the idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel was the first philosopher in the wake of Kant’s critique of metaphysics to think that philosophers shouldn’t give up speculation. He argues that philosophical speculation leads us to acknowledge a fundamental metaphysical principle that explains the apparent contingencies of human culture and beliefs, and that fundamental metaphysical principle cannot be dismissed, lest the unity of reality dissolve in contradictions.

Philipp Marheineke (1760-1846) stands out among speculative theologians for his audacity and rigor. His main work, the Fundamentals of Christian Dogmatics as Science, is an attempt to overcome the idea that God is a being situated in a realm beyond grasp and irreconcilable with our knowledge. God is that very thing that unfolds and realizes itself in our knowledge. Marheineke thinks that God is not separate from our idea of him, but he also thinks that God is an idea. 

This does not mean that God is a figment of our imagination. God’s constitution metaphysically corresponds to the constitution of the human intellect. Another important proponent of speculative theology, Carl Daub (1765-1836), explains this correspondence: “His thinking himself, God’s thinking himself, is his thinking himself in the human being.” And “When the human being thinks him—God—that thinking is God’s thinking in himself as Mind (Geist).”

Marheineke and Daub help us see why theologians shouldn’t be tricked by current intellectual trends into renouncing metaphysical speculation and theorizing about God through abstract concepts. Theological speculation is not about rejecting culture and history; it is about finding ways to reconcile culture and history with the presence of ideas about ultimate reality and the absolute that range across civilizations and cultures. 

In Truth and Progress, Richard Rorty describes speculative theories about absolute truth to be “instruments” that were “used to change social conditions.” He thinks “these instruments outlived their usefulness.” Is that really the case?

Following Marheineke and Daub, I argue the contrary. Culture, history, and embodied reality are only meaningful insofar as they intimate the presence of a higher, divine, and ultimate dimension. Theologians should remain open to that presence.