Theology and Philosophy: A Phenomenological Approach

• In Event: The Relation of Philosophy to Theology Reconsidered

Abstract

Abstract




For certain historical reasons, many Jews have an aversion to the term “theology.” There is less of an aversion to the term “philosophy” inasmuch as a number of traditionally revered Jewish thinkers were clearly doing what “the philosophers” have been doing. So, one may question: (1) Can one speak of a “Jewish theology”? (2) If so, what is the difference between Jewish theology and Jewish philosophy? (3) How are the two related to each other?
For certain Jewish thinkers, following Aristotle, theology as “God-talk” (theologikē) is the most exalted philosophical activity, because ontology is the “queen of knowledge” in its concern with God as Being per se, the summit of the hierarchal natural order. This is what came to be known as “natural theology.” But didn’t Kant dethrone this kind of ontology or “metaphysics” and thus take natural theology down with it? Doesn’t theology thereby lose its real referent through this kind of philosophical deconstruction? On the other hand, though, “theology” can refer to “God’s word” (dvar adonai), i.e. the content that is represented as revelation in Scripture. It is what God addresses to humans rather than what humans think about God. In this understanding of theology, a choice is made for the priority of language in the perennial philosophical debate over whether thought is prior to language or language is prior to thought. As such, theology now refers to a revealed datum, which for some Jewish thinkers is the most rigorous, intellectually satisfying method to understanding biblical revelation’s theoretical meaning (in aggadah) and its practical application (in halakhah). In my view, phenomenology offers the best philosophical methodology for enquiring into what is given in Jewish theology, i.e. when that theology is taken to be scriptural revelation as transmitted and interpreted by rabbinic exegesis. For phenomenology avoids the kind of metaphysical causal inference that Kant seemed to have refuted, and the kind of historical causal inference that historical-critical analysis of the literary record of revealed data seems to have refuted.

Author

• David Novak, University of Toronto