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The Journal of Philosophy & Scripture: A Prologue
John
D. Caputo
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Who or what comes
after the God of onto-theology? Among the many answers to that question,
which in one way or another has captured the imagination of a whole
host of contemporary philosophers working in the continental tradition,
one answer certainly is the God of the Scriptures. Having come before
metaphysics, or at least in a milieu that was innocent of metaphysics,
the Scriptures are in a way older than metaphysics and so they are
not faced with the challenge of overcoming onto-theology. By the
Scriptures, we mean not simply Christian or Jewish scriptures but
all the great Scriptures, from all of the great religious traditions,
western and non-western. Levinas once said that the Tanach was a
good book - which I think he meant in the sense of a Gadamerian
classic, although he did not have Gadamer explicitly in mind - from
which everyone, especially the philosophers, had much to learn.
The task for thought, he said, was to know how to translate the
Tanach into Greek, by which he meant philosophy. The premise of
the journal which our students have launched is that Levinas is
right about this, that the Scriptures are a deep and enormous provocation
for philosophy, that they call forth philosophical thinking and
send philosophy down avenues that philosophy, left to follow its
own tendencies, would never explore or discover. Like drama and
tragedy, poetry and narratives - which, of course, they also are
- the Scriptures provide philosophy with a bottomless and inexhaustible
resource, a salutary shock of alterity, that philosophy requires.
Philosophy cannot be itself without exposing itself to its other,
to what is not philosophy. Philosophy cannot be itself without delimiting
its autonomy, making its own autos questionable, and allowing
itself to understand–which means to stand under–the coming of something
other than philosophy which by the very paradox of dialogue makes
philosophy true to itself. Too often, contemporary continental philosophers
take the "other" of philosophy to mean literature, but not religion,
which is for them just a little too wholly other, a little beyond
their much heralded tolerance of alterity. They retain an antagonism
to religious texts inherited straight from the Enlightenment, even
though they pride themselves on having made the axioms and dogmas
of the Enlightenment questionable. But the truth is that contemporary
continental philosophy is marked by the language of the call and
the response, of the gift, of hospitality to the other, of the widow,
the orphan and the stranger, and by the very idea of the "wholly
other," a discourse that any with the ears to hear knows has a Scriptural
provenance and a Scriptural resonance. We invite everyone to join
us who shares these views–everyone who wishes to think in dialogue
with Scriptures, who want to expose philosophical thinking to the
advent of Scriptural imagination, who agree that the Scriptures
are abundantly thought-worthy, that they give us more than enough
to think. Our wager is that both philosophical thinking and the
reading of Scripture will each be enriched. |
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