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In “From the Classroom,” faculty members give insight into their particular subject, providing a window on the intellectual rigor that characterizes the environment of academic excellence at Lafayette. In this issue Eric Ziolkowski, Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies, discusses teaching his course Christianity: From Jesus to the Third Millennium.
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FROM THE CLASSROOM
Eric Ziolkowski
Photography By David W. Coulter
MAKING THE
FAMILIAR STRANGE
It is often said that the
aim of teaching any religious
tradition from a critical
academic perspective should
be to make both the strange
familiar, and the familiar
strange. There is wisdom
in this adage. Yet adherence
to the first half of the formulation, making the strange familiar, can easily lead to distortion or, at best, over-simplification of the subject. Adherence to the formulation’s second half, making
the familiar strange—or, more precisely, allowing what might appear familiar to show its actual strangeness—is usually more important, and hits more consistently and closely to the mark in religious studies.
The German theologian Rudolf Otto famously suggested that the experience of the holy (das Heilige), whether in a Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, or any other religious context, always involves a sense of
the “Wholly Other” (ganz Andere)
as mysterium tremendum, an
“awe-ful [or awe-inspiring] mystery.” Critics will complain that Otto’s theory reduces religious experience to a single “essential” trait, and that his central concept, rooted as it is in ecclesiastical Latin, betrays a Christian bias. Although these are legitimate criticisms, Otto’s emphasis upon mysterium is useful, if only as a conceptual foil to the common inclination to domesticate religions in our construal of them, and to ignore or expurgate their more alien aspects.
David Carrasco, an eminent scholar of Mesoamerican religion, articulated this matter succinctly at the close of a guest lecture he gave here some years ago on the religious worldview that led the Aztecs to engage in human sacrifice. “Religion,” he said, “is weird.”
How does this bear upon my approach to the first day of teaching my department’s general course on Christianity, Christianity: From Jesus to the Third Millennium? While Lafayette students, like most other American adults, may be “weirded out” by contemplation of Aztec sacrifice, they are unlikely to regard Christianity as strange. Two years ago, a Gallup poll found 86 percent of American adults identifying with one or another branch of the Christian tradition. And presumably Christians made up the vast preponderance of the 90 percent of Americans whom the same poll found believing in God, the 81 percent believing in heaven, the 78 percent believing in angels, and the 70 percent believing in hell and the devil. Consistent with these national percentages, many Lafayette students, particularly those who have been raised in one church or denomination or another, come to the study of Christianity with an attitude of intimate familiarity: “Been there, done that.” The same attitude, or one like it, is often evinced by non-Christian students who, having grown up in a predominantly Christian society, are acquainted with at least the most salient Christian beliefs
and mores.
For these reasons, in embarking with my students upon a semester-long consideration of Christianity, I propose that we remind ourselves that the rubric “Christianity” subsumes a number of traditions, most notably Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and the various Protestant denominations. Like all other religious traditions, these multiple Christianities are rooted in history, and therefore not only do they differ from one another, but each of them has developed and significantly transformed
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ERIC ZIOLKOWSKI
eric ziolkowski, Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies, joined the faculty in 1988 as a visiting assistant professor. He was named assistant professor a year later and rose to associate professor in 1994 and full professor in 2000. He was named Dana Professor in 2004.
In addition to Christianity, intro to religious studies, and American religious history, he has taught courses on the philosophy of religion; theories of religion; religion and the literary imagination; religion and fantasy; revolution, education, and religion; saints, mystics, and ecstatics; and a First-Year Seminar called Questers of Extremes. He has advised two dozen Lafayette students in senior honors theses and independent research projects.
He is the recipient of Lafayette’s Mary Louise Van Artsdalen Prize for outstanding scholarly achievement; Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Award for superior teaching and scholarly contribution to his discipline; and Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Faculty Lecture Award in recognition of excellence in teaching and scholarship.
Ziolkowski holds a Ph.D. in religion and literature and M.A. in
divinity from University of Chicago Divinity School and a B.A. in religion from Dartmouth College. He is author of Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art (2001) and The Sanctification of Don Quixote: From Hidalgo to Priest (1991); and editor of Literature, Religion, and East/West Comparison: Essays in Honor of Anthony C. Yu (2005) and A Museum of Faiths: Histories and Legacies of the 1893
World’s Parliament of Religions (1993).
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over time—so much so, that the religious lives of Christians of earlier periods and places can seem quite foreign to the varieties of American Christian life today. To explore this idea, I distribute for the class’ consideration photocopies of one of the notorious polemical articles that the Danish religious thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) published during the last two years of his life against what he called “Christendom.”
At this point, because “Christendom” stems from the noun that designates the subject of the course, I typically pause to explain the etymology and meaning of this word, beginning with the root kristós. The latter noun is the Greek translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic term messiah, “anointed one,” which either Peter (according to the Synoptic Gospels) or Andrew (according to John’s Gospel) was the first of the disciples of Jesus the Nazarene to apply to him. From kristós derived the epithet kristianós, a Latinism (from Christianus, “Christian”) denoting “partisan of Christ,” putatively coined by pagans in Rome or Asia Minor during the second half of the first century (Acts 11:26; cf. 26:28), and used by them as a pejorative before being adopted as a title of honor by Christians themselves (1 Peter 4:16). “Christendom” (christenheden or kristenheden in Danish) is a compounding of “Christian” with the suffix “-dom,” which connotes a domain, as in “kingdom,” or a general condition, as in “freedom.” As the term thus refers to a Christian state or, more generally, a realm where the Christian religion predominates, Kierkegaard, in speaking of Christendom, had in mind not only his native Denmark, with its established evangelical Lutheran church, but the whole European world of his time.
This brings us back to the challenge of making the familiar strange with regard to Christianity. Much of what Kierkegaard condemned about Christendom concerned the phenomenon for which the German neologism Kulturprotestantismus (Culture-Protestantism), or Cultural Protestantism, would later evolve to connote: the theological tendency to accommodate Christian faith to the currently prevailing culture, and thus to de-emphasize or negate discontinuities between the worldly and the
Syllabus: REL 214
Christianity: From Jesus to the Third Millennium
Course Description:
This course examines the history of the main branches of Christianity
(Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestant denominations), focusing upon the types of religious experience that produced and sustained them and the various forms through which the traditions have expressed themselves: theoretical (beliefs, doctrines, dogmas); practical or cultic
(rituals, usage of symbols, sacraments); and sociological (communion,
institutions, types of leadership). Together with surveying the
representative historical figures and formative periods of the three main branches, we will consider the sacraments and beliefs on such matters as human life, social justice, and the relation of the Christian faith to the
state and to other religious traditions, particularly Judaism and Islam.
   
Required Texts:
Augustine, Confessions; Bible (Revised Standard Version recommended); John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress; Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love; Robert E. Van Voorst, Readings in Christianity, 2nd ed.; Mary Jo Weaver, Introduction to Christianity, 3rd ed.
Cocurricular Activities:
Films (The Last Temptation of Christ and The Kingdom of Heaven), field trip (St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, Bethlehem, Pa.), and guest lectures (Robert Orsi of Harvard Divinity School discussing American Catholic rituals celebrating the Virgin Mary, Diane Apostolos-Cappadona of Georgetown University speaking on images and traditions of Mary
Magdalene, and representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
day Saints [Mormon] discussing their tradition and its theology).
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divine. Kierkegaard lived during the heyday of Cultural Protestantism, which coincided
with the early period of the historical-critical study of the Bible and the
so-called Quest for the Historical Jesus (a scholarly enterprise in which he took interest but with which he did not have great empathy). Accordingly, he often alluded to the eighteen hundred years that separated his own time from that of Jesus, Jesus’ disciples, and the early Christian martyrs. In Kierkegaard’s view, modern “Christians” (his quote-marks), the inhabitants of Christendom, had made “Christianity” into something all too comfortably familiar, and he was determined to expose how utterly alien the precarious existence of the original first-century Christians was to the comfortable, unthreatened “Christian” lifestyle in Christendom.
The distributed article that I ask my class to consider is a single page long, and announces its thesis in its lengthy title: “In ‘Christendom’ All Are Christians; If All Are Christians, eo ipso [through that alone] the Christianity of the New Testament Does Not Exist at All; Indeed, It Is Impossible.” Students’ initial reactions to this title tend to range from bafflement to startlement. What did Kierkegaard mean? If all were Christians in Christendom, why would it follow that the Christianity of the New Testament would be non-existent or even “impossible” there? However, when we proceed into the article’s text, the opposition that Kierkegaard perceived between New Testament Christianity and the “Christianity” of Christendom becomes discernible. New Testament Christianity is premised on the notion that the believing and God-loving Christian exists “in a relation of contrast.” Such a person “has all the strenuousness, struggle, and anguish associated with what is required, to die to the world, to hate oneself,” and also “to be hated by others, to be persecuted, to suffer for the doctrine.” Antithetically, “In ‘Christendom’ we are all Christians—the relation of contrast has consequently disappeared. In a meaningless sense all have been made Christians and everything Christian—and thus we are living a life of paganism (under the name of Christianity). . . . [W]e have hypocritically and knavishly abolished [Christianity] by falsifying the definition of what it is to be a Christian.”
In the classroom: Eric Ziolkowski, Dana Professor of Religious Studies (L-R), Diane Shane ’06, and Karen Fusco ’09.
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For Kierkegaard, the complacent Cultural Christianity that reigned supreme in modern Denmark represented a complete inversion of its original source, the heroic faith of a persecuted minority in the first-century Roman Empire. Whereas
Paul the Apostle, author of the earliest documents in the New Testament, construed the doctrine of the Cross as a “scandal” (skándalon, literally a stumbling-block) to the vast majority who rejected it, Kierkegaard died eighteen centuries later knowing that he had scandalized his fellow Danes by having declared their “Christendom” to be “a Christian criminal case” in which “Christianity is made a game and a fool is made
of God.”
Kierkegaard’s words are harsh. But they are effective for prompting all of us in the class to approach Christianity, in our critical consideration of its origins and subsequent two-thousand year history, as anything but static, monolithic, or familiar.
1All quotations and paraphrases are of Søren Kierkegaard, “The Moment” and Late Writings, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 168.
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