- Title
- Keeping the faith: the ambivalent commitments of Friedrich Engels
- Creator
- Boer, Roland
- Relation
- Studies in Religion Vol. 40, Issue 1, p. 63-79
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0008429810389019
- Publisher
- Sage Publications
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- The importance of the early religious commitment of Friedrich Engels, who had such an ambiguous effect on world history, is often recognised but rarely analysed. This article offers a critical treatment of the formative religious experience of the young Engels. His was a (Calvinist) Reformed upbringing and the faith he inherited was taken up with a zeal and exuberance he would later transfer to communism. In the early part of the article, this exuberance is balanced with Engels’s increasing frustrations with the narrow piety of his home town in Wuppertal, a frustration enhanced by his increasing engagement with critical biblical analysis in Germany at the time. The second half of the study deals with two features that would stay with Engels: his sense of the political ambivalence of Christianity, torn between reaction and revolution (as he saw it embodied in his formidable minister, F. W. Krummacher); and his intimate knowledge of the Bible, which would lead to a life-long practice of citing biblical passages at will. In the end, Engels may have lost his Christian faith, but he could not evict Christianity from his life and thought, returning to it again and again to explore its revolutionary potential.
- Subject
- Friedrich Engels; christianity; calvinism; pietism; F. W. Krummacher; bible; revolution
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1054955
- Identifier
- uon:15814
- Identifier
- ISSN:0008-4298
- Language
- eng
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