Habermas and Theology (review)

At the beginning of Habermas and Theology, Nicholas Adams asks, “How can there be argument between members of different traditions?” and notes that “this is arguably the most important question in contemporary moral philosophy and theology” (1). With that question in mind, Adams pursues an engagement with Jürgen Habermas, possibly the most significant contributor to a theory of public argument in modern times. The book offers a critical treatment of Habermas that aims, finally, to present an alternative picture of argument across traditions using the model of “scriptural reasoning,” a fairly recent development among representatives of the three Abrahamic religions. This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book, one that takes seriously the challenges of religious pluralism in modern life, particularly the need for an account of how different and often rival traditions can encounter one another peacefully and productively in the public sphere. Adams proves a subtle interpreter and critic of Habermas. For those sympathetic to Habermas’s project, the book raises important and formidable challenges. For anyone interested in the contemporary philosophical and theological debates regarding the challenges of religion in public life in modern society, the book has a great deal to offer.

One helpful way of understanding Adams’s project in this book, I think, is that he is trying to provide non-Habermasian answers to Habermasian concerns about religious traditions and modern life. Adams is more comfortable with Habermas’s ability to identify important questions than he is with Habermas’s ability to answer them. “This study,” he notes early on, “is motivated by a belief that Christian theologians do need to address Habermas’s concerns about how different traditions meet each other in the public sphere” (16). This is especially true because Adams believes that Habermas’s own efforts to address these concerns are ultimately hostile to religious traditions and so ought to be treated skeptically by their members. Adams shares with Habermas a sense of the importance of argumentation as a means of “coordinating discussion in the public sphere” (5) as opposed to understanding encounters in the public sphere as “competing exercises of violence” (25).

Where Habermas wants to draw individuals out of their traditions so that they can engage in argumentation guided by common principles in pursuit of common understandings, Adams responds that such encounters can and must proceed among the representatives of rival traditions without requiring them to strip away their distinctive self-understandings. According to Adams, Habermas fears that the irreducible particularity of traditional narratives will doom such representatives “merely to repeat their own traditions’ positions, perhaps in each other’s hearing, but without agreed criteria for judging each other’s reasonings” (4). Adams responds by offering the example of “scriptural reasoning,” the name recently “given to the practice, by members of different traditions, of reading and interpreting scripture together” (239). Adams acknowledges that “theologians have rightly grasped that something like Habermas’s theory of communicative action is vitally needed” (200) to help guide and form practices of public argumentation, especially among rival traditions. Adams, however, is satisfied neither with Habermas’s approach to argumentation nor with his treatment of religion and theology.

Adams finds serious fault in Habermas’s efforts to provide a theoretical ground for argumentation. He allows that while “Habermas has the best available theory of argumentation in the public sphere, … this theory is unusable” (201). The solution, he insists, is not a better theory: “Argumentation in the public sphere is as resistant to theory as the ground of thought. Thinking has a ground, but there is no way to adequately grasp it in thinking. The same is true of argumentation in the public sphere” (201). According to Adams, this should not be cause for concern: “One does not need to ask if thinking is possible, or grasp its ground, in order to think. In the same way, one does not need to ask if argumentation is possible, or grasp its ground, in order to argue” (201–202). Argumentation, like thinking, happens, and although we may provide more or...