Sunday, May 01, 2016
A Double Standard
Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980), The Faith of a Heretic (1961; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 104:
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[T]heology depends on a double standard. One set of standards is employed for reading and interpreting one's own tradition and its texts; another, for the texts and traditions of all other. Here, one is committed not only to make sense of everything but to make everything come out superior, profound, and beautiful; there, one is not averse to finding fault and even emphasizing all that is inferior to one's own tradition.Id., p. 105:
Theology is antithetic not only to the Sermon on the Mount but to the most elementary standards of fairness. It involves a deliberate blindness to most points of view other than one's own, a refusal to see others as they see themselves and to see oneself as one appears to others—a radical insistence on applying different standards to oneself and others.
