These views have tremendous implications for inherited and traditional views of God, Christ, and humanity within the world. The “de-centering” of these concepts calls into question the viability of all issues of “authority connected” religion as well as religion in general. The postmodern context is one that features open-endedness, pluralism, pragmatism, and tentativeness. Contemporary theologians are challenged to represent God, Christ, and the church as realities and sources of authority in ways that are intelligible to the current age and also faithful to the inherited theological vision of Christianity. While the issue of authority has been central in every age, it takes on even more dramatic seriousness today since common foundations—assumed in times past—can no longer be called upon in the service of Christian apologetics or theological construction.
DONALD K. McKIM
Bibliography
Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation.
Stanley Grenz, Primer on Postmodernism.
David H. Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology.
Paul Lakeland, Postmodernism.
Donald K. McKim, The Bible for Theology and Preaching.
Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, trans. John Bowden.
Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach.
Cross-Reference: Ecclesiology, Epistemology, Experience—Religious, Feminist Theology, Inerrancy, Inspiration, Liberation Theology–Latin American, Narrative Theology, Praxis, Process Theology, Womanist Theology, Vatican II.
AUTONOMY
In Greek antiquity, the concept of autonomy (autonomia, self-determination or self-regulation, from autos [self] and nomos [law]) was used, with rare exceptions, in a political frame of reference. It referred to the political independence that was the aim of the Greek city-states. In the ancient Latin world, the concept was absent, but its sense was approximated in such phrasings as “the power to live according to one’s own laws”; except for one appearance of the Greek word itself in Cicero, the word autonomia was not used. In the Latin Middle Ages, too, the concept was absent, but it was revived and played an important role in connection with the political and religious controversies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Only with Kant and post-Kantian idealism does the concept acquire philosophical and theological meanings. This development provides the immediate background of its use, in conjunction with the concepts of heteronomy and theonomy, in the twentieth century. Its most prominent role emerges in the philosophical theology of Paul Tillich.
Early Usage. As a political concept, autonomy signified the right to arrange a political entity’s own affairs independently of outside powers. Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.E. contrasts autonomy both with external dependence on foreign domination and also with internal tyranny. The word’s rare nonpolitical sense is illustrated by Sophocles’ Antigone when she is described as heading toward death not as a victim of disease or the sword but “autonomous, living, alone” (Antigone, line 821). At the beginning of the modern period, the concept becomes important in jurisprudence. Thus, it was invoked to interpret the Peace of Augsburg (1555), which recognized the legitimacy of Lutheran and Catholic confessions by providing an arrangement, lasting until the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), for subjects in each land to follow the religion of their ruler (cuius regio eius religio). In an effort to find a designation for the Protestant demand for religious freedom, Franciscus Burgcardus, author of the important treatise De Autonomia, das ist von Freystellung mehrerlay Religion und Glauben (1586), had recourse to the Greek word autonomia; for, unlike the Latin terms for liberty (libertas) and freedom of religion (licentia credendi), it had political as well as religious connotations. Burgcardus, however, still associated the concept with the medieval theory of social orders rather than with personal subjectivity. In the period following, the term had both a religio-political sense, when referring to the Catholic princes’ loss of their privileges upon converting to Protestantism or to the “establishment of freedom of religion, freedom of conscience” (Peace of Westphalia), and also a more general sense, when referring to having one’s own right and being one’s own master instead of being subject to imperial power.
The Concept in Kant. More important for present-day use of the term in religion and philosophy than the developments in the juridical concept (including the distinction between private autonomy and civic autonomy) is Kant’s embracing philosophical concept of autonomy as expressed in the remark, “All philosophy . . . is autonomy.” Here it means no longer a right to institutional self-determination, but the possibility of human beings to be self-determining according to the form of reason. The concept of autonomy is thus set over against the concepts of nature and of social form; to act freely is synonymous with acting autonomously and in an ethically good way. Autonomy is the capacity of the rational will to determine itself rather than be determined from the outside, that is, by empirical intuitions and natural drives or inclinations (even those leading to self-love and arrogance), hypothetical imperatives (instead of categorical imperatives), and natural causes. If, for example, one furthers the happiness of others because one is moved by sympathy with fellow human beings, the will is determined by an object rather than by a rational form produced by reason; that is a state of heteronomy. If, however, one furthers the happiness of others because reason gives to the self-loving inclinations the form of universality, extending to all rational beings and independent of feelings, then the action is determined by the rational form; and that is autonomy (Critique of Practical Reason, A 59). Along with autonomy and heteronomy, Kant mentions, although only in passing, “heautonomy” as the reflexive power of judgment to prescribe a law not to nature (as it does in autonomy) but to itself (Critique of Judgment, Introduction A xxxv/B xxxvii). Kant regarded the Christian principle of morality itself as autonomous, in contrast to certain theological elements with which it was connected and which made it heteronomous.
Against this Kantian notion of autonomy, made more radical through J. Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling, early opponents raised the objection that it denied the essential human obligation to God. In an essay from 1801, K. L. Reinhold called autonomy the “basic error” that was taken for the “basic truth.” F. H. Jacobi called Kant’s and Fichte’s autonomous form of morality a “self-deification.” F. von Baader called Kantian critique blind to God for not recognizing that conscience is a co-knowledge, a knowing of oneself as being known by God, and that the spontaneity of the will rests on the indwelling of God in the will and not on an impersonal moral law of reason; and to the autonomous self of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) he contraposed the formula cogitor ergo cogitans sum (I am thought, therefore I am a thinking someone). Indeed, Baader regarded as antimoral, antireligious, and revolutionistic all moral doctrines based upon an absolute autonomy.
Neo-Kantianism and After. Kant had developed the concept chiefly by reference to the rational will (practical reason), while also indicating its more comprehensive sense. With Neo-Kantianism this universal sense, which had been obscured by the ethical framework of the discussion, returns. Thus, H. Cohen, in his Ethik des reinen Willens (1907), declares that the concept of autonomy must be drawn from logic as well as from ethics and that what constitutes heteronomy is fundamentally the mistrust of theoretical reason. On this basis, several concrete, autonomous spheres can be defined: the autonomy of science, religion, the social, and the aesthetic. An important variation of ethical autonomy is found in the ethics of material values associated with N. Hartmann and M. Scheler, the latter of whom emphasized that the act of obedience to what is given to reason as a norm is itself an autonomous act of the will. Here the theory of the autonomy of values means that norms of action are pregiven to the