Auguste Sabatier

Sabatier first traced the process of institutionalisation which gave birth to Catholicism, the system of beliefs which considers the Church as “the historic, visible incarnation of saving truth and of the redemptive acts of God”. This system culminated in the proclamation of the dogma of papal infallibility on 18 July 1870 during the First Vatican Council. Wondering – without a hint of animosity – about the future of the Roman system and about a future breakdown of Catholicism, Sabatier writes, “Time is a great critic; it breaks down the hardest rocks; it transforms the most intransigent institutions; it will manage to dissolve the Catholic bloc and give freedom to what is alive in it, letting die what is merely a cobbling together of past ideas.” But far from perishing, and in spite of the attempts at reform begun in the wake, now enfeebled, of the Second Vatican Council, the principle of authority has been reinforced by papal personality cults, a trend begun by Pius XII in the Holy Year of 1950, before blossoming in the highly media-friendly figure of the recently beatified John-Paul II.

Sabatier next discusses how the principle of authority manifests itself in Protestantism. He criticises confusion between the Bible and the Word of God: the Bible conveys revelation; it is not itself revelation. The biblical text, a document with a specific cultural context, can and should be submitted to historical-critical analysis. But a biblical fundamentalism which defends the inerrancy of Scripture is currently in the ascendant: it claims that the Scriptures, directly inspired by God, are incapable of being wrong in any respect; it wants to maintain a literal approach to the Bible by limiting the modes of interpretation between the text and the reader.

If Sabatier called for the emergence of a religion of the Spirit, what he certainly did not have in mind was the development in the 20th and 21st Centuries of a charismatic Christianity which affirms the immediacy of the presence of Almighty God and which seeks the re-enchantment of the world through spiritualities of spiritual combat and prosperity theology. With this wave of Pentecostalism, we have entered what Olivier Roy calls “the epoch of religion without culture”, characterised by an emotional Christianity on the borders of magic, resistant to all dialogue with modern culture.

So keen is Sabatier to define a religion of the Spirit that he has difficulty in finding it except outside the confines of religions of authority. He finds it easier to say what religion of the Spirit is not than what it is.

His reflections reveal a tension between on the one hand what he calls “critical symbolism”, that is, an intellectual demand to submit the doctrinal expression of the faith to a critical analysis the better to identify its symbolic heart, and on the other hand what he calls “fideism”, that is, personal religious experience. This tension can be seen throughout his own life: Sabatier reveals much about himself when, outlining the ideas of Schleiermacher, he finds in him, “the religion of the heart seen as an irreducible fact about experience logically prior to all religious theory, as well as an intellectual force of extraordinary power and rigour.” Once cut off from the discipline of German university theology (he studied at Tubingen and Heidelberg), Sabatier, a child of the Ardeche Revival movement, remained loyal throughout his life to the current of spiritual fervour which had marked the 1830s.

But it is perhaps in recognising and transcending this tension between religion of the heart and intellectual rigour that we can establish a theology of experience which honours the autonomy of the individual valued in his originality and the otherness of God whose Spirit reveals himself to our minds. This theology of experience would also honour human cultural contexts, especially that of the Bible, which enable us to describe this experience in an individualist and secular society, where the justification of belief can no longer be based in submission to the Churches’ rules, but more and more in the construction of narratives by each individual.

Thus the critique of authority by Sabatier keeps its relevance in today’s radically different cultural situation (… the deconstruction of the subject, the end of humanism, the lack of proof for the personal God posited by classical theology, the emergence of interfaith dialogue…). Sabatier’s theological project remains an invitation to think the faith, not as subscription to a closed body of beliefs, rites and norms, but as the experience of a way of freedom and of conversation with people of belief and unbelief.

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