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Introduction
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Introduction I What is it that we are witnessing in the recent appearance, and indeed the proliferation, of rational principles, social structures, and a moral order no longer determined by a positive relation to religion, if not simply the continued unfolding of our secularity? This much can be conceded without implying any judgment on the rise and alleged fall of the secularization theory of modern society: we today have frequent occasion and perhaps greater cause than ever before to reflect carefully on a dimension of our humanity that seems not to derive its meaning from either a revelation or an inspiration that must be called “religious.”And so one wants to know: Is that secular dimension of our humanity still contained within a religious constellation that it is now our task to redefine or perhaps simply reassert? Or must we recognize in it the arrival of a genuinely godless thinking for which religion is no longer the truth? Is it still possible to propose that every power of our reasoning and the full scope of the freedom our reasoning claims for itself on the basis of that power testify in the final account to a profound 1 solidarity with God? Or is it time to recognize that our freedom and our capacities are more fully realized when that thesis of profound solidarity is set aside? Like all important questions, these have attracted considerable reflection from a variety of disciplines and approaches. The authors contributing to this volume work at the undefined, or perhaps contested, boundary between philosophy of religion, Christian philosophy, and philosophical theology.Where this volume uses the word theology, what is meant is essentially the intelligence of a faith defined by openness to revelation. But in each instance here, that revelation is distinctly Christian , which means the theological work one encounters must not only draw on the considerable resources of that particular tradition but also meditate on any number of problems that may not trouble other traditions in quite the same way. Where there is philosophy, the approach is generally what some have called“continental,”but what here might better be addressed as broadly hermeneutical. This is certainly not to discredit the considerable advances made by “analytic” philosophers, including advances on some of the themes taken up in this volume, but instead to explore the deep disturbances that both join and disjoin Christian theology and hermeneutical philosophy—whereupon the latter may become sufficiently self-reflective for the sustained engagement with analytic philosophy that must surely lie ahead. Remaining within the field that the foregoing distinctions open up, we have at least two fruitful ways of pursuing the question of Christianity and secular reason. One prominent line—put back into the spotlight a few years ago by the public discussion between Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas1 —focuses on the relationship between culture, politics, and religion. Without separating itself from this concern, another line focuses more sharply on the relationship of selfhood, humanity , and world. Let us follow this latter line briefly, touching on what appears to be its ancient root and searching for a possible inclination toward its cultural and political counterpart.As Rémi Brague has shown in a suggestive investigation of the pertinent matters, Aristotle defines the relation of self to world by a fundamental openness and total concern such that, in an important sense, literally everything is the self’s affair.2 Without venturing far into everything that this involves, we may 2 Jeffrey Bloechl note two interesting implications: the very possibility of a relation to the world requires a distinction between me, as openness to that world, and myself as person available to be seen and described within that world; and this distinction is also the difference between me as myself and me as one instance of humanity. My stance in the world is thus oddly doubled: I look out on the world while also inhabiting it, and it is only accordingly that I am able to recognize an order and know a meaning that includes me no less than anything else belonging there. With this in view, there is no mistaking the robust primacy that Aristotle recognizes for what we, according to an undeniable anachronism, might wish to call natural reason in the disclosure of our world and everything in it: natural reason alone, and ceaselessly, makes present whatever it encounters. And this is to say that it is in a certain sense unlimited . Reason never ceases knowing the...