National Jewish Scholars Project

Ethical Monotheism When the Word is Wounded: Wendell Dietrich Reread

Peter Ochs

Introduction

Wendell Dietrich’s presence in Jewish academia repre-sents one of those rare expressions of balm and care that the Jews receive in years after their terrible destructions. I don’t say this merely as a token of gratitude for his personal presence and contributions, but also as a way of acknowledging the type of presence he embodies in Jewish life. What type of philosophic academic can embody balm for the Jews after this Destruction? There is a transcendental con-dition to be met! It must be a Christian, in order for it to embody the reversal of oppression, undoing the main features of European civilization under which the Jews were oppressed. Among these features were Christian universalism (/imperialism) and its secularized substitute: what many of us lazily perhaps but also somewhat helpfully label "modernism," thinking of such features as "foundationalism," "secular humanism," and the various academic imperialisms that have accompanied these.

Wendell Dietrich -– from here on, I will write WD –- is not a postmodernist. That is to say, his way of respond-ing to the oppressive features of modern Europe has not been to negate modernity in general, but to search out and selectively promote modernity’s deeper capacities for inner reform: imperialist Europe’s working toward that form of Christian philosophy that would overcome Europe’s imperialism. Hence the balm mentioned earlier: a balm for European thought and, therefore, a balm as well for Jews in the West after the horrible culmination, this century, of Europe’s oppressive tendencies. But WD’s response to oppression is more than a balm for the Jews touched by European civilization. It is also a balm of the Jews, because WD’s response is to locate command-ments for Europe within the Jewish heritage of Europe’s own Christian heritage.

This is a Jewish heritage that, without negating its own inner concerns, turns also outside itself to speak to Europe -– or to the Christian-and-secular West -– to remind it of its own roots in Biblical Judaism, to caution it against its imperialist, totalizing proclivities, and to draw it forward to a renewal of its primordially prophetic faith. This renewal is what may be termed "ethical monothe-ism": WD’s reading of Hermann Cohen’s vision of biblical faith as ethical rule for the modern West, a rejudaized Christian West. Ethical monotheism does not negate the modern West but extends its arms instead to envelop it in the stern and directive love that emerges from out of the biblical word to define Europe’s present purpose.

But what do we do when the word itself is wounded? Wounded, because we do not, after the Shoah, know so clearly how the biblical Word commands, what it prom-ises, or what it threatens. And wounded as well because we also do not know so clearly how our own reason is be trusted as a vehicle for deciphering the command, the promise, and the threat. This is the question, in different terms, of how WD’s version of ethical monotheism can respond to the challenges of postmodernity. In response to this question, I offer four stages of re-reading WD’s ethical monotheism. In stage 1, I offer an introductory typology of the central theses of WD’s ethical mono-theism interpreted as an intentionally selective and pragmatic re-reading of John Calvin, of Ernst Troeltsch, and, in particular, of Hermann Cohen. I suggest that WD displays the religious purpose of his ethical monotheism in his reading of Calvin, and its ethical purpose in his readings of Cohen and also Franz Rosenzweig (with passing references to Emmanuel Levinas). In stage 2, I offer my own selective and pragmatic re-reading of WD’s ethical monotheism as it might now respond to the challenges of postmodernity. This complex re-reading is divided in turn into four sub-stages. Stage 2a addresses the early modern sources of WD’s ethical monotheism. I suggest that, to serve the needs of our own age, WD may be interpreted as having reread Calvin as a selective, pragmatic reader of his own community’s scriptural tradition. Stage 2b addresses the modern con-text of WD’s use of Calvin. I reconstruct the ethical monotheism WD attributed to Calvin as WD’s way of re-addressing Calvin’s monotheism to the needs of a modern age. Stage 2c addresses the postmodern con-text of our own uses of WD’s work. I identify two "torments of postmodernity," I suggest how these tor-ments may challenge WD’s ethical monotheism, and then I offer a way to re-read this ethical monotheism so that it responds appropriately to the torments. In conclusion, I suggest how WD’s work may be brought into dialogue with some contemporary movements of postmodern philosophical theology.

1.

Wendell Dietrich’s Ethical Monotheism:
a brief typology

WD is one of those cheerier scholars who write about thinkers they like and write about them felicitously. His felicity is not mere generosity, however; it also reflects a method of selectively re-reading previous thinkers in ways that will enhance their capacity to serve the deep needs of a contemporary society of readers. This method provides the means, moreover, of reading WD as he reads these others: reading him felicitously and then re-reading him in ways that extend his service to our community of readers. WD introduces the method through the way he describes Troeltsch. WD writes,

When Troeltsch moves from ... reflection on the work of the historian to the work of a systematic thinker, he acknowledges that systematic thought requires selection among varieties of Christian belief. Such selection requires responsible risk-taking .... Troeltsch‘s selection of resources from the tradition is ... shaped by his estimate of the modern sensibility. Modern man is not occu-pied with death and other worldly immortality as is the man of the Ancient Church .... A proper modern reinterpretation of Christianity will show that Christianity provides signifi-cance to man as amoral personality by relating him to the one God.

So too, WD begins his analyses as a historian of religious and ethical thought, but then rereads his authors’ words selectively, taking risks to argue how these authors speak from out of their own historical contexts to address matters of urgent concern in the context WD shares with his readers. In the language of his other central author, Hermann Cohen, this is WD’s own pro-cess of "idealization."

Cohen is the central source for the terms of WD’s work As WD notes, Cohen offers a systematic scheme for understanding Judaism, what WD calls his "ethical mono-theism." This is, however, no essentialistic reduction of Judaism, but "a postulatory scheme in which the idea of God functions in certain ways." The scheme "is filled out in a specific way when data is brought into the scheme from religious life and from the sources of Judaism." Is that not, nonetheless, simply to adopt an abstract postulate and then "fill in the details" to suit the given case of Judaism? WD does not think so. First of all, he believes Cohen has drawn the terms of his scheme from readings of the classic biblical and rabbinic sources that are warranted by the historical scholarship of his day: "Modern biblical criticism helps to set the agenda for Cohen’s own systematization and ‘idealization’ of Judaism as a religion of reason." Second, this scholarship por-trays the biblical and rabbinic texts themselves as the products of multiple layers of redaction, each layer of which is guided by its own postulatory scheme for selectively rereading previous layers. The third and key issue is how these schemes arise. Did Cohen believe that the schemes arise out of each generation’s conviction that its teachers have glimpsed "the one truth" more clearly than any other? If so, then we might suspect Cohen of seeking to do the same: to promote what we would now call his own "foundational" vision of the essence of Judaism. What if, however, he believed that each generation of teachers must select from its text traditions those specific lines of reasoning that will re-deem the generation from its present woes? If so, then Cohen would be guilty of ignoring his generation’s specific needs if he read the text traditions of Judaism as mere historian or academic. His obligation would be, in addition to historical scholarship, to take the risk to judge what his community needed and how some as-pects of the text tradition could speak to those needs.

I believe WD reads Cohen in this second sense and that this represents WD’s own purpose as well: to pursue what we might call a "redemptive –- or pragmatic -- scholarship" that places the last stage of scholarly interpretation in the service of an explicit, ethical and religious end. WD reveals significant aspects of his religious purpose in his reading of Calvin and his ethical purpose in his reading of Cohen-Rosenzweig.

Calvin and scriptural monotheism: In his essay "Calvin’s Scriptural Ethical Monotheism," WD draws out of Calvin’s entire corpus, the Institutes in particular, a single, co-herent system of religious thought. Following Troeltsch, he argues that Calvin constructs this system by asking, selectively, what social and religious directives scriptural Christianity can offer the Western civilization of his day. In the next stage of reading, I will examine WD’s method of reading Calvin’s method of reading. In this stage, my goal is only to identify the results of WD’s reading: a system of religious rules, including the following rules for fulfilling the religious ends of scholarship:

• God communicates to humanity by way of scripture.
• This communication is made by way of the scriptural readings that are offered by particular communities of readers with respect to the particular social/historical conditions of life that stimulate their reading.
• By itself, the scriptural text therefore commu-nicates God’s word vaguely or multivalently; univalent meanings are disclosed only with respect to the specific social/historical context of the community of readers.
• While we cannot say a priori what the content of any such reading will be, we can say what a priori conditions it should fill: God’s word will, in some context-specific way, command the community of readers to act in a certain way, on behalf of the God of all creatures, on behalf of all humanity, and as a means of redeeming the community itself from its sin and suffering.
• The culminating, gospel narrative of Christ’s life was conditioned, finally, by "the tormented consciences of fallen human beings who are so alienated from God that they persistently turn in upon themselves and must constantly be converted in order that they might refer all life and its benefits to God and not to themselves." As WD reads Calvin, God enters humanity as Christ only in response to humanity’s sin and the torment of its unredeemed fall. Christ is thus the mirror of the special election of the individual believer, who is relieved of his or her torments through Christ and comes, through him, to the moral and social obligations of God’s word.
• For his own Christian society, Calvin read the scriptural record as a summons to form a plurality of communities covenanted with God as was Israel: "construing the universal church as an association of churches in different nations." Each community was obligated to the "two tables of the law": the first table of the Ten Commandments that obliges Israel and the Church to be devoted to God, and the second table that obliges all humanity to moral relations with its neighbors. God commands freely and commands all humanity.
• As a religious response to the needs of the modern era in general, Calvin’s religious doctrine can be reread as a "scriptural ethical monotheism." In the same way that the "tormented conscience" of fallen humanity conditions Christ’s redeeming presence, so do each of the major "torments"
  of the modern era warrant Calvin’s redeeming doctrine.

In sum, scholarship should serve the life of Christ, responding redemptively to the specific symptoms of humanity’s fall that one encounters in contemporary society. These are, in general, symptoms of humanity’s "tormented conscience." Therefore, the goal of scholar-ship is to read scripture as a vehicle of God’s redeeming word; to read it through the history of successive, community-specific readings that link us, today, to the primordial reception of scripture; and to reread scripture now, in light of that history, as a vehicle of God’s redeeming word for us here, specifically, in our par-ticular condition of torment. From this perspective, both Calvin’s and WD’s selective readings are selective as vehicles of this redeeming word. Since that selectivity is specific to present-day needs –- and self-consciously so -– it should not be condemned as a symptom of some foundationalist reduction of the scriptural tradition to the terms of some a priori scheme. It serves, instead, a "postulatory scheme," whose value is ultimately instru-mental: true, in a pragmatic sense, if it redeems; false to the degree that it does not.

Cohen/Rosenzweig/Levinas and ethical monotheism: The redemptive goal of WD’s Christian scholarship is, at the same time, an ethical goal, since humanity’s "torment" is not only sin, but also suffering. This connection between suffering and moral conscience is made clearest in WD’s reading of Cohen, which extends, in its major theses, to his readings of Rosenzweig and Levinas.

A succinct statement of Cohen’s ethical monotheism comes in WD’s "The Character and Status of the Con-cept of History in Three Twentieth Century Systems of Judaic Thought: Cohen, Rosenzweig, Levinas." According to WD, Cohen derives three postulates from his reading of Jewish sources: "(i) the one, unique God, in his transcendent ethical ideality; (ii) unitary human history; and (iii) the ideal goal, never to be fully attained, of a unified Messianic humanity." The "universally valid cri-terion" by which changes in humanity’s unitary history are to be judged is "justice," which primarily concerns the redistribution of "social power in modern industrial society," and which also serves the end "of fostering human emancipation." This is emancipation from "status oriented, hierarchically structured pre-modern societies" to the messianic society Cohen envisions. Or, in what WD considers Troeltsch’s complementary terms, human-ity’s utopian goal and "highest purpose, attainable only through religion, is to achieve that authentic human freedom that entails a transition from finite-egoistic creatureliness to a self surrendered to the divine will." The people Israel’s purpose is to serve as instrument of humanity’s achieving this goal, which means that, for WD, following Cohen, Jewish ethical monotheism should be a regulative principle for all western society.

WD’s commitment to this conclusion is evident in the aspects of Rosenzweig’s monotheism that he does not accept Rosenzweig -- and Levinas after him -– notes that the Jewish people’s attachment to the one, tran-scendent God constitutes its resistance to the violence of history and, thus, its capacity to guide humanity to the end of history. For WD, this is good, ethical mono-theism. But, Rosenzweig –- perhaps unlike Levinas -– also appears to value this people as more than mere instrument, focussing "on the Jewish ethnos as a con-crete realization of transcendent goods without regard for ethical monotheism’s instrumental conception of the Jewish people ... as bearer of the universal criterion of justice as an unaccomplished eternal task." For WD, this is not good; it is a "serious defect" in Rosenzweig’s rea-soning that shows him to be "basically a conservative ... at odds with a social democratic version of Judaic ethical monotheism." Rosenzweig’s position notwith-standing, WD has shown us the force of his own ethics. It is not good for Christians or Jews to live in an end-time. Human fallenness remains a condition for ethical as well as religious life, because it means that all our institutions -– the profession of scholarship included -– remain potentially suspect until the one end of time: potentially unjust, potential sources of oppression. Our capacity for autonomy is thus emancipatory in the present world only when it is a power to free us from our violent history and the institutions that embody it. And we acquire this power only when, with the grace of God, we participate in all of our institutions as instruments of justice and of rectifying injustice. For us as scholars, this means refusing to participate in the profession of academia as if it were an end in itself, rather than an instrument of ethical service.

In sum, WD’s ethical reading of Cohen overlaps with his religious reading of Calvin. In both cases, the end of reading is to contribute to healing humanity’s torments. The reader encounters the torment of human sin by way of its manifestations in specific cases of human injustice and suffering, and, in responding to injustice and suf-fering, the reader responds to the conditions of human sin. From this perspective, WD’s writings on scriptural-ethical monotheism may themselves be re-read as expressing the following Calvinist/Cohenian doctrine of religious-ethical scholarship:

• Humanity suffers. This is the consequence of the universal condition of human sin, as manifested in community-specific instances of suffering.
• By way of scripture, God communicates a redeeming word to this suffering humanity.
• This word is directed to humanity universally, but vaguely. The word is received, clearly, only as it, in context-specific ways, commands a specific community of readers to act in a certain way, on behalf of all humanity, but in response to community-specific instances of sin and suffering.
• Any specific reading –- or project of reading -– should have a specific context in the life of the community of readers: It should respond to their defining "torment of conscience," as WD puts it in terms gleaned from Calvin. In religious terms, this represents the specific aspect of human sin and fallenness that warrants both God’s redeeming grace and the scholar’s work: for this work succeeds only through divine grace. In moral terms, this represents the specific conditions of injustice and suffering to which the reading must respond.
• Scriptural readings of this kind are guided by community representatives specifically educated for this purpose.
• Scriptural philosophers of the scriptural traditions  -– like the subjects of WD’s inquiry, Cohen, Troeltsch, Rosenzweig, and Levinas -– have the qualifications to be numbered among these representatives, provided they accept the responsibility. And they should accept it.
• As community representatives (and representative readers), these scriptural philosophers carry the heavy responsibility of proposing how God’s scriptural word offers its commanding and redeeming voice to the specific conditions of need or "torment" that mark a given community of readers and that warrant scriptural scholarship. Scriptural scholarship is not for its own sake, but for the sake of delivering a redeeming word to its communal context. The scholarship should include three activities:
1. Reading: careful familiarity with the text-reading traditions that link the present community of readers to the scriptural sources. This means study of scriptural sources, rabbinic (or patristic) commentaries, and medieval and modern text-and-philosophic interpretations.
2. Observation: attentiveness to the empirical conditions of social and communal life that warrant scriptural study today.
3. Responsive (or redemptive) Interpretation: selective re-reading of the text traditions in order to suggest how the scriptural word may command specific responses to contemporary conditions of suffering and injustice.

• Philosophic reflection is integrated with practices of text reading throughout all three of these activities. In Cohen’s terms, the scholar’s obligations to act are rooted, ultimately, in the scriptural revelations and their interpretations; the scholar’s capacity to clarify the meanings of the revelatory tradition draws, ultimately, on the rules of philosophic logic recommended by Greek philosophic traditions and their interpreters. While the scriptural traditions should, indeed, retain their moral privilege, the details of ethical monotheism reflect many levels of interaction between text and philosophic practices. Furthermore, while it requires philosophic discipline to clarify the rules of scriptural scholarship, this discipline itself reflects a history of interaction between philosophers and text scholars.
• The second and third activities of scriptural philosophy require concrete engagement with the specific community of readers out of which the scholar works. For example, there must be some actual case of injustice and suffering in some actual society, as observed by some actual scriptural readers. The selectivity of scriptural reading is based, ultimately, on the specificity of this concrete engagement, which is the basis as well of the scriptural logic of the absolute. For a scriptural philosophy, the kind of universality one associates with pure generality must be nominal, alone. This is the generality of mere convention or artifice, as when one says "let us define the term ‘hard’ to refer to any object (in general) that scratches but cannot be scratched," and so on. Real generality –- or that which may be predicated of whatever actually exists -– is attributable only to attributes of what we may call the "absolute." This is that one reality to which everything in the universe refers, relating to it as creature to creator, but of which nothing is known in general. Attributes of the absolute are displayed only in relation to historically and experientially concrete events or engagements: for example, "divine grace," as displayed in the capacity of a particular group of scriptural philosophers to rediscover the relationship between scriptural reading and the modern scholar’s obligation to respond, as scholar, to conditions of communal suffering.

2.

But what if the word is wounded?
Challenges to WD’s ethical monotheism

Readers of this book will be sufficiently familiar with postmodern criticism to expect that, if stated baldly, ethical monotheism would seem to be a candidate for just that kind of criticism. As a species of "universalism," this monotheism might be expected to attract criticisms of its foundationalism, or its efforts to construct a total, conceptual scheme on the basis of which all claims to human knowledge and all norms for human conduct could be judged. As a form of theism and of scripturalism, ethical monotheism might be expected to attract criti-cisms of its potential contribution to cultural oppression: imposing the master narrative of some confessional group on those who may not share the confession. Students of academic methodology might be expected to criticize what appears to be its unwarranted reduc-tion of Jewish and Christian ethics to a single set of concepts. And so on. My purpose in this section is to ask to what degree ethical monotheism can or cannot speak to a postmodern age. Nonetheless, there are two reasons why I will not attempt to get an answer by applying these more well known kinds of postmodern criticism. One reason is that I am afraid that, within the limited space of this essay, I would have to reduce subtle lines of argument to mere slogans. A second and more important reason is that, unless it is to be em-ployed in an imperialistic way, postmodern criticism must be offered first with respect to a philosophic, religious, or cultural program’s own internal rules of inquiry. To ask about the pertinence of WD’s ethical monotheism is, therefore, first to ask how this monotheism would evalu-ate itself today.

While modern- or liberal-sounding in its ethical univer-salism, and while clarified through the tools of transcendental philosophy, WD’s ethical monotheism remains rooted in a reading of God’s commanding and redeeming word, as read through scripture, both Old and New Testament, and through the history of scripture’s reception right up to the present day and its torments. This ethical monotheism therefore rests on faith in the commanding and redeeming presence and power of God’s word, but not on mere faith. As detailed in the previous section, it offers a rational method for receiving, clari-fying, and falsifying its claims. These claims are "postulatory schemes" rather than foundational dogma. They represent a self-consciously selective reading of the scriptural traditions rather than a mere reduction of these traditions to the terms of an a priori scheme. This selection, furthermore, is made on behalf of pragmatic criteria drawn from out of the traditions themselves. Abstracted from out of the practice of ethical mono-theism, these criteria could be re-framed, for the present occasion, as rules for testing the strength of this practice. Here, then, is an illustrative list of three of these internal rules for testing the claims of ethical monotheism:

1. The legitimacy of these claims is tested against one’s communal tradition of scriptural reading: this is scripture as witness to the presence of God’s word and one’s communal tradition as witness to the witness. It may be simplest to say that a given community urges a set of readings of scripture and that the claims are tested against these readings.
2. The power of these scriptural readings is tested, in turn, in their success in commanding behavior that relieves the kinds of suffering, injustice, or torment that characterize a given community in a given age. To be pragmatically testable, in other words, one’s scriptural reading must be selective and the selection must be directly influenced by the conditions of torment that the reading should help relieve.
3. Reason is the vehicle for articulating any of these claims from out of a tradition of scriptural reading and for applying to them the tests of communal reading and of pragmatic efficacy. This is not simply "reason in general," but the specific form reasoning takes when scriptural reading is adopted as the basis for generating ethical norms and when those norms are to be tested pragmatically, as noted in Rule 2. There is no single, a priori rule for determining the form that reasoning will take in this monotheism. The form it takes -– or the set of rules for determining that form –- is simply urged on what we may call the sub-community of ethical monotheists through their direct encounter with God (or what they consider to be such an encounter). That they encounter God in this way is not itself a testable or falsifiable claim but is one of the a priori conditions for engaging in ethical monotheism, as is the claim that a form of reasoning is urged on them and that this reasoning makes irresistible and indubitable commands. What remain testable and falsifiable are their claims about what specific forms this reasoning takes and what it specifically commands. For example, the "universality" of ethics is not an a priori category for reasoning in this way. "Universality" is, instead, an attribute of the ethical monotheist’s claim about the ethical meaning of scripture and is therefore a testable and falsifiable aspect of ethical monotheism.

To test the pertinence of ethical monotheism to a post-modern age, perhaps the most important aspect of the preceding rules is the selectivity of monotheistic claims: the requirement that each claim is made with respect to historically specific conditions of suffering and injustice or "torment." This aspect, alone, protects ethical mono-theism from the baldly stated range of postmodern criticisms mentioned earlier. WD’s claims must be evalu-ated with respect to their contribution to the modern European conditions of torment to which they are addressed. To re-evaluate their contribution to our own context, WD’s claims must first be re-applied to the postmodern conditions of our communities of scriptural reading. Since WD’s modernism is itself articulated against the backdrop of early modern scriptural mono-theism, I find it helpful to add his reading of early modernism as yet another context for this evaluation.

2a.

The early modern context of scriptural ethical monotheism: Calvin as reread by WD

Earlier I listed rules of scholarship that are suggested by WD’s reading of Calvin: his selective way of re-reading Calvin’s scriptural ethical monotheism in light of his own community’s needs. To test or justify WD’s rereading, we should try to reconstruct what WD takes to be the early modern communal context to which Calvin addressed his ethical monotheism. This way, we can imagine a peren-nial albeit vague ethical monotheism that can appear in one way for Calvin’s community and another for WD’s. We would be practicing a version of Cohen’s "ideali-zation," but the vagueness of our ideal should protect the exercise against charges of reductionism or founda-tionalism. The ideal would function like a personal being that appeared in this or that way at different times, reliably there as a representation of our readings, but never reducible to a single set of appearances. So, here is a reconstruction of Calvin’s context as WD reads it:

• Calvin offered his reading of scripture for an early modern community that, among other crises, was disappointed by the failings of natural science; was therefore confused theologically by the lingering religious naturalism it inherited, still, from Thomism; was confused morally and socially by Luther’s two kingdom’s-doctrine and its accom-panying dichotomization of law and grace; and lacked, as yet, a theo-political doctrine that would enable it to participate, as a Christian community, within the emergent plurality of European nation states.
• Calvin recognized the context-specific character of both Old and New Testament receptions of God’s word.
• Calvin re-read scripture in terms of its own three major contexts. The Old Testament narratives of creation were conditioned by the general election of humanity to life with God and by the fall of humanity. The elemental conditions for this fall were humanity’s sins: infidelity to God and rebellion against God’s commandments; sloth; and following the idols of its own false imagining and thus suppressing the truth. The Old Testament narratives of Israel’s history were conditioned by the general election of the people Israel, along with its subsequent exile and restoration, all of which are also types for the later election, exile
  or loss and restoration of subsequent Christian nations. The culminating, gospel narrative of Christ’s life was conditioned, finally, by "the tormented consciences of fallen human beings."

2b.

The modern context of WD's own
scriptural ethical monotheism

We may next reconstruct the way WD re-reads the monotheism that addresses Calvin’s community but now as it addresses WD’s own modern community. For the sake of comparison, I will offer this reconstruction in terms of WD’s reading of Calvin, but it could also be offered in terms of his readings of Cohen, Troeltsch, et al.

In the same way that the "tormented conscience" of fallen humanity conditions Christ’s redeeming presence, so do each of the major "torments" of the modern era warrant a reapplication of Calvin’s redeeming doctrine.

1. Calvin’s universalism responds to the "torments" of modern atomism, in which each nation, people, and denomination are potentially at war with every other. Consistent in this respect with the rationality and universalism of Kant’s categorical imperative, Calvin recognizes a single humanity, universally obliged to overcome self-interest out
   of devotion to God and to God’s moral law.
2. Calvin’s scriptural monotheism responds to the "torments" of modern secularism, in which the enlightened philosopher seeks a universalism, but without God. Without God, "universal humanity" represents a mere concept –- well intentioned perhaps, but nonetheless an idol of human imagination and desire, which cannot represent humanity universally, because it cannot be fully detached from the historical conditions of representation. As portrayed in the scriptural narrative, however, "universal humanity," or adam, is no mere concept, but rather an index of that creative act of God’s through which all human beings find their commonality. Scriptural references to adam function as a set of rules for seeking out the universally human, rather than as any sort of reductive description of some general being or essence. The scriptural portrayal works this way because it defers, implicitly, to the one, infinite God as its author and thus reserves for the Infinite alone the capacity and privilege to complete any reader’s effort to determine the particular one to which the portrait refers. Secular philosophic concepts of humanity cannot work this way because they defer, by definition, to merely human authors, who lack the capacity and privilege to delimit their readers’ efforts to determine meaning. In sum, without a scripture whose author is infinite, humanity can be characterized in only non-universal ways.
3. Calvin’s ethical monotheism responds to the "torments" of modern, religious irrationalism and docetism. Here, religious critics seek a false alternative to modern atomism and secularism by condemning reason altogether, as if it were not an instrument of God’s word, and by condemning the worldly realm altogether, as if it were not also part of God’s creation, and as if the secular philosophers who inhabited it were not also neighbors, made in the image of God’s beloved. Calvin’s ethics –- the "second table of the Law" –- is dictated to all humanity by the one "sovereign and free commander, who shows himself as the one who has the right to command." It is dictated by way of the scriptural word, mediated by Christ as God’s truth, and addressing humanity’s "troubled and guilty moral conscience."

WD notes that there are other elements in Calvin’s writings that do not seem to fit this ethical monotheism: for example, Calvin’s writings on Christ as priest who cleanses humanity of its pollution and on the trans-mission of "hereditary sin." However, he believes that to read Calvin’s words religiously, as witnesses to God’s word and not as a mere collection of completed ideas is to read them the same way Calvin read the scriptures: as texts that communicate God’s redeeming word to some tormented community of believers in its social-historical context and religious need.

In sum, as it addresses modernity, WD’s ethical mono-theism retains Enlightenment-like optimism, but it is not optimism about modern reason per se. It is optimism about the divine Word’s capacity to repair modernity’s wounds. What do we do, however, if the Word itself is wounded?

2c.

A postmodern context for re-reading and evaluating WD's scriptural ethical monotheism

WD addresses his ethical monotheism to a modern, rather than a postmodern context. To reread him in the felicitous way he rereads previous monotheists, it is therefore best to identify specifically postmodern con-ditions of "torment" and then ask if and how ethical monotheism can be reapplied to these conditions. In this concluding section I perform this exercise by, first, isolating two dominant torments of postmodernity; then, summarizing modern ethical monotheism’s incapacities to relieve these torments; and, finally, suggesting some of the features of a more adequate, postmodern ethical monotheism. The reader may now note that, from the beginning of this essay, I have already been reading WD from the perspective of this postmodern version of his monotheism. This is not mis-reading, but the kind of selective rereading that his own scholarly method requires.

1. Two Torments of Postmodernity

According to what we may call the witness of scripture’s postmodern interpreters, the Word is wounded today in two ways. First, by the testimony of postmodern ethi-cists, the Word is wounded because reason is wounded, and human reason serves as the scriptural word’s messenger, delivering it to the places of suffering and torment that receive it as healer and redeemer. Eugene Borowitz summarizes the general Jewish version of this complaint, as directed, in this case, against the modern formulation of Cohen’s ethical universalism: Modernity betrayed our faith.

For most of two centuries almost all Jews who could modernize did so. They knew that modernity was good for them, that the great gains that equality and opportunity brought made the problems connected with modern-ization acceptable. But as the twentieth century waned, doubts about modernity’s beneficence arose throughout Western civili-zation. People were profoundly disturbed by the deterioration of the quality of life. A great deal of their unhappiness was disappointment. The Enlightenment, the intellectual credo of modernity, had promised that replacing tradition with rational skepti-cism, hierarchy with democracy, and custom with freedom would bring messianic benefit  -– and certainly it hasn’t .... On a much deeper level, this loss of confidence in Enlightenment values has come from the collapse of its philosophical foundations. All the certainties about mind and self and human nature that once powered the bold move into greater freedom now seem dubious.

Where they once served, in disproportionate numbers "as the prophets of [modern] humanism and taught the secular salvation of politics, intellect, and high culture," Jewish thinkers now turn, again in disproportionate numbers, to the deconstructive arts of postmodernism, undermining what they take to be the false idols of modern rationalism. From their perspective, Cohen’s rationalist monotheism remains too close to this kind of idolatry.

Cohen's paradigm [of a ‘religion of reason’] has been problematic to many Jews [in post-modernity] because, to begin with, asserting the dominance of human reason makes Judaism a hostage to whatever version of rationalism the thinker finds convincing ....

The other great complaint against this model is the inability of a stringent universalism to legitimate a substantial Jewish particularity. In neo-Kantian and similar systems, only ethics is directly required by the God-idea, which, itself being fully universal, has no special relation to any particular people or land.

And, one of the lessons of modernity for the Jews is that theories of universal ethics offer no protection for the dignity and safety of human communities, in their "mere" particularity.

From a second perspective –- testimony from the people Israel’s survivors in this century -– the Word itself is wounded, and not merely its messenger. In our age, the Word that commands does not command clearly or unambiguously, and the Word that redeems seems to delay its own coming. Most readers will be familiar with the question that haunts Eli Wiesel’s Night: "Where is God? ..." For the Talmudist David Halivni –- a fellow survivor from Wiesel’s town of Sighet –- the challenge is not to locate God, but rather, to face the current reality of God’s speaking a word that is "maculate" –- not immaculate. "As religious Jews," Halivni writes, "we have to know that without God there is no humanity.... ‘Walk humbly with the Lord thy God’ (Micah 6:8) –- like a child holding hands. You must hold hands, and walk. But this does not mean that you always have to say, particularly in remembrance of the Holocaust, ‘What you did was right.’ It was terribly wrong."

A sensitive survivor -– and particularly one who has the opportunity or the leisure to pursue intellectual activity –- must work ... under the influence of mutually contradictory forces.... The Shoah signifies that whatever one considered the pattern of life one should choose –- the ideal standard –- collapsed.... Something must be changed.... On the other hand, the person who has survived, and has been wounded so deeply, needs that sup-port, that holding-on-to, which only tradition can provide. "Though he slay me, yet I will trust in Him" (Job 13:15).... That mankind could sink so low and inflict this kind of violence upon children: one must react to this spiritually. And at the same time, one must seek spiritual solace....

On the one hand, ... not criticizing the past is being like those who justify.... On the other hand, if you acknowledge the wrong [in God and tradition that is!] then you run the risk of cutting off the branch on which you rest.... Therefore the struggle this per-son has is the struggle to do both: to find a way of criticizing tradition, but of holding steadfastly to it. Criticizing affirms that something went wrong –- badly wrong, deeply wrong. Yet there must be something to come home to....

Personally, I found this balance in the critical study of Jewish texts, in a combination of criticism and belief in the divine origin of the text.

Halivni bases his doctrine of text criticism on a Talmudic tradition according to which the words of the Hebrew Bible are holy, yet they by themselves are not fully reliable vehicles to knowing God’s will. Because of the "sins of Israel" during the period of the monarchy, the words transmitted to us are maculate. Through divine inspiration, Ezra worked to restore these words. In many cases, he left the explicit meaning of the written words unclear, but he then transmitted the "oral Torah" through which these meanings can be clarified by the sages of each generation in response to the context-specific needs of each generation. In Halivni’s terms, the unclear texts are "maculate," and this maculation is also an index of the maculation –- or what I am calling the "wounds" -- of our world as well of the words of the One who created this world. Maculate texts are clarified only in the process of responding to the specific maculations of our lives in this world: To clarify a text of Torah is, thus, no act of merely technical scholarship, but an act of tikkum olam, "repair or restoration of the world" -– as well as of the word.

Halivni’s reading illustrates a tendency of Jewish thinkers after the Shoah neither to abandon the scriptural word as sign of divine will nor to trust that that word can be known clearly, nor that that will can be followed without jeopardy. How would such thinkers receive the postu-lates of ethical monotheism? What shall we of this generation do, more generally if, for the ethical human-ist’s community of readers today, reason does not appear to offer its commands unambiguously? If the word it delivers does not appear to heal or redeem? And if the community, in fact, offers ambiguous witness to the presence of God’s word?

2. Challenges to Modern Ethical Monotheism

For the following reasons, these two torments of post-modernity would appear to pose some unanswerable challenges to the modern variety of ethical monotheism:

1. Calvin-Cohen’s universalism is significant as a response to modern atomism, but it overstates the response, as if there were no other means of avoiding atomism outside of a strict universalism. Modern ethical monotheism appears to be posed within the terms of a strictly binary opposition between strict universalism and strict particu-larism. According to the postmodern critique of reason, there is no reason to presume the adequacy of such an opposition as if there were no third term.
2. The notion of a single humanity may function, asymptotically, as a regulative and messianic ideal, but, in practice, fixation on this ideal has tempted ethical monotheists to denigrate the individual’s this-worldly obligations to family, community, and people, as if these particularities were not also instruments of ethical messianism. It is not possible, in clear terms, to define what the notion of a "single humanity" means.
3. To identify universal humanity with adam, the single creature of God, is an appropriate way to avoid reducing ethical universalism to a merely abstract concept. However, there is no reason to presume that we understand clearly the relation of single creature to infinite creator, nor the relation of universal humanity to the individual human being.
4. To avoid spiritualizing ethics, it is appropriate to locate its source in the "Ten Commandments" as commands directed to all humanity. Like all of scripture, however, the Commandments do not speak without context-specific rereading. Without such rereading, there is no way to distinguish this "universal commandment" from what, as we have noted, remains a strictly regulative and messianic ideal. Once the Commandments are subject to rereading, however, their meanings are disclosed only to the context of some particular community of readers, weakening, or at least complicating, claims about the universality of these command-ments. WD’s own discomforts with Rosenzweig’s ethnic particularism may also represent discom-forts with context-specific readings of this kind.
5. While granting the historical specificity of each generation’s reading, the modern variety of ethical monotheism appears to be inattentive to potential differences of readings within any community, let alone within the text itself.
6. Modern ethical monotheism may idealize the capacity of even a pragmatic reasoning to discern unambiguously just what torments a particular community, just what it suffers and thus just how its reading of scripture will prove redemptive.

3. Rereading WD’s ethical monotheism
for a Postmodern Setting

Almut Bruckstein has recently argued that postmodern critics fail to appreciate the hermeneutical moves implicit in Cohen’s scriptural monotheism. Her reading of Cohen suggests, in fact, ways of rereading WD’s ethical monotheism for a postmodern community of readers. To take one example, consider her reading of Cohen on "the creativity of the concept":

Cohen maintains that the very acts of inter-pretation and of criticism -- both of which are acts of "calling into question" -– create the infinity of content that characterizes Jewish oral tradition, whereas any religious truth claim produced by history, dogma, or emotional conviction turns out to be a mere derivative, a limited reading of the biblical tradition, presented in the garb of absolute religious truth. Such a dogmatic reading ... harbors the dangers of violence and totali-tarianism.... Cohen condemns such dogmatic limitation of the biblical text, calling it "idol worship." ... "Idol worship" in this context is characterized by a loss of "originality," re-sulting in a closure of the text, betraying the Jewish tradition of innovative interpretation and of creative textual reasoning. The term originality, or origin, is defined in Cohen’s logic as the infinite creativity of human resourcefulness and critical reasoning.... The concept of origin refers to the "limit of knowledge" by what has not yet been explored.... The primacy of this principle ... implies a way of interpreting religious tra-ditions in which the past is predicated upon the future. To this way of thinking, nothing is "given" but the originality of the inter-pretation that links the facts into a coherent objective structure.... The logical primacy of innovative interpretation is predicated on ... "monotheism" and "messianism."

On Bruckstein’s reading, Cohen shares with postmodern-ist philosophers a vision of the infinite process of interpretation through which texts and facts are ren-dered meaningful and through which the reading of both texts and facts is freed from premature closure. Textual words and facts are given as subjects of interpretation, but what they are is never given, only disclosed through interpretation. On this reading, Cohen’s ethical mono-theism might be protected from challenges #3-6. To meet these challenges, we would have to assume that "universal humanity" (in #3) and "universal command-ment" (in #4) represent only regulative ideals in the ongoing interpretation of what "adam" means. And we would have to assume that the ethical monotheist offers only provisional and context-specific readings of the "torments" of any age and of the meaning of any text. Unless claims about "transcendental conditions" are somehow protected from such disclaimers, then we would have to assume that the ethical monotheist also offers only provisional and context-specific formulations of classical Jewish and Christian doctrines.

Robert Gibbs’ complementary reading of Cohen’s principle of correlation may help protect Cohen’s ethical monothe-ism from challenges #1-2.

[For Cohen,] logic requires the possibility of recognizing the correlation of two indepen-dent realities.... Cohen claims that any concept is not merely an answer, but is it-self a question.

In the terms of Bruckstein’s argument, the creativity of the concept involves what Cohen calls the "reciprocal determination" of question and answer. In the pragmatic terms I have used in this essay, every reading of the text idealizes the text -– generating some concept from it -– but only as answer to some question put, for example, by the problematic facts of our social con-dition. Our reading now contributes to the "givens" of our social condition and thus to the questions posed to us for subsequent reading, and so on.

In the Ethics, moreover, Cohen presents the "I" and "you" as correlation ... [T]he "I" is correlate with the other.... To become aware of myself as I, I must first become aware of the other.

Once again, every formulation of the "I" is thus correl-ative to some set of relations: not only of I to you or to this community to which I belong, but also of the I of "us" as a human community to another community, and of our concept of the "I" of humanity to our concept of the "you" of God.

Correlation, in Cohen’s Religion, is a method-ological reciprocity between our concepts of the human and the divine. We can neither understand what a human being is without understanding the same of God, nor vice versa. The basis of this correlation is the creation of the human being in reason.... God creates the human being in order to be known and loved.

In terms of Gibbs’ reading, Challenge #1 may be met by introducing some "correlation" as a third term between the poles of strict universalism and strict particularism. The ethical monotheist may explain that the concept of any universal is correlative to the concept of some particular. In these terms, the modern monotheist’s con-cept of strict universalism would appear, correlatively, only as an effort to ameliorate the modern concept of atomism, and the concept of atomism would itself appear only as an effort to ameliorate some other, antecedent concept, and so on. To respond to Chal-lenge #2, in turn, the ethical monotheist may explain that the messianic ideal of a single humanity is cor-relative to the life of some particular community of human beings in this world -– and vice versa.

In sum, it is possible to reread WD’s ethical monotheism, out of a postmodern context, in ways that parallel Bruckstein’s and Gibbs’ rereadings of Cohen. The "postmodern" ethical monotheist may argue that postmodernity retains many of the torments of modernity, for which the concepts of ethical monotheism still provide a healing response. Among these are:

1. The torments of the contemporary West’s persistent atomism, in which each nation, ethnic group, and religion remains, still, potentially at war with every other. The "postmodern condition" has not reduced the dangers of this atomism, nor, therefore, the appeal of this Kantian aspect of Calvin’s and Cohen’s universalism: the messianic goal of seeking a single humanity, universally obliged to overcome self-interest out of devotion to God’s moral law.
2. The torments of the Enlightenment West’s tendency to define ethical universalism as if it were incompatible with the individual’s devotion, as well, to particular relations and to local or finite communal life. This suspicion of community and relationship accompanies the Enlightenment West’s tendency to promote atomistic individualism and, with it, the unintended consequences of self-isolation and self-absorption. Calvin’s Christian communalism remains appealing, in this regard,
   as a foil to the extremes of modern individualism, although his communalism is always tempered by his doctrine of the special election of the Christian individual.
3. The torments of the contemporary West’s secu-larism, since, as noted above, mere humanism cannot underwrite ethical universalism. Calvin’s and Cohen’s scriptural monotheism remains appealing in the way it guarantees a universal telos (all humans are creatures of the one God) and a universal source of ethical obligation (this God obliges all humans to one another).
4. The torments of anti-modern irrationalism in the contemporary world. Calvin’s and Cohen’s scrip-turalism remains appealing in the way that, unlike recent religious anti-modernisms, it combats secular individualism by appealing to a scripturally warranted rationality. Here, reason is an instru-ment for interpreting God’s ethical commands as they appear when applied to the unpredictable contexts of actual social and political life. Calvin-Cohen therefore illustrate how, within a given historical context, it is possible to avoid both conceptual dogmatism (theology considered apart from its bearing on actual social and political life) and irrationalism.
5. Finally, the persistent perils of totalitarianism in the contemporary world. Calvin’s and Cohen’s critiques of idolatry have lasting pertinence, as a warning against the human tendency to suppress truth, in favor of self-justifying and non-falsifiable projects of world-repair and redemption. Whether religious or secular in self-description, these projects share, in the end, the logic and perils of totalitarianism. A contemporary, scriptural ethical monotheism must be pluralistic.

There, then, is a condensed rendition of WD’s ethical monotheism, as its draws on Calvin’s and Cohen’s scrip-tural, ethical monotheism and as reinterpreted for a postmodern community of readers. As a response to various "torments" of contemporary life, it offers a non-atomistic, non-egocentric, non-secular, non-dogmatic, non-totalitarian, this-worldly but God centered, univer-salist but pluralist, rational but scripturally-based doctrine of ethical life. But is it also polyanna-ish, or can this collection of seemingly incompatible principles re-spond successfully to the torments of postmodernity?

Conclusion:
Scriptural Ethical Monotheism in Dialogue with Scriptural and Textual Reasoning

This essay has been guided by two maxims: i) read the work of a scriptural philosopher selectively, with respect to the conditions of social and religious concern that stimulate your scholarship; ii) evaluate the work of a scriptural philosopher with respect to these conditions and, correlatively, with respect to what you believe are the philosopher’s rules of inquiry, as displayed in his or her writings.

Following Maxim #1, I have read WD’s writings on ethical monotheism, specifically, to see if and how they might help a community of postmodern theologians respond to a contemporary "torment." The community, loosely defined, includes members of the Societies for Textual Reasoning (STR) and for Scriptural Reasoning (SSR). Formed in 1991, STR gathers philosophers and text scholars of Judaism who share what, as we heard earlier, Borowitz calls the postmodern "disappointment" in the promises of modern inquiry. While not abandoning the university, these thinkers believe that indigenous forms of Jewish inquiry, such as Talmudic methods of text interpretation, provide resources, as well, for university studies of both Judaism and of other subject matters in the arts and sciences. Formed in 1996, SSR extends the interests and concerns of STR to scholars of the three biblical or Abrahamite faiths. The Society studies the patterns of reasoning that emerge out of philosophically disciplined readings of sacred scriptures by Jews, Muslims, and Christians who seek alternatives both to the foundational or reductive discourses of secular academia and to the anti-modern or anti-rational reli-gious fundamentalisms that sometimes replace them.

Both Societies are beginning now to share the first fruits of their inner dialogues with the rest of the academic world. And, in doing this, both encounter one shared problem above all: to articulate how it may be possible for members of three different communities of scriptural readers to argue together about issues of truth. The goal, of course, is to argue together without reverting either to what modernists call the self-enclosed discourses of the pre-modern religions or to what post-modernists call the imperialistic and rationalistic formulations of modern inquiry. Without conceptual constructions, however, how do they now "stretch" their reading of God’s word -- to paraphrase Hans Frei, of blessed memory –- so that it provides shelter for dialogues outside the precincts of their finite commu-nities of reading? In a discussion among members of the STR, Elliot Wolfson put the problem this way:

The postmodern turning back to Jewish tex-tuality is a corrective to the modernist turning away from Judaism, the abandon-ment of "Jewish particularity for the sake of the abstract universal." ... [But,] if the fallacy of modernism lay in its universalizing approach to revelation and in its consequent tendency to ignore the contextual nature of specific traditions, the risk of postmodernism is a potential emphasis on the particularity of a tradition to the exclusion of others....

To emphasize a Jewish particularity isolated from the larger cultural matrix in which it takes shape may result in the reification of the ethnocentric elements of traditional texts.... The postmodern study of Jewish texts must be predicated on a critical assessment of the tradition in all its multi-vocality.

The challenge for postmodern Jewish philos-ophy is to facilitate the growth of a culture based on the textual specificity of the past without losing sight of the place that Juda-ism must occupy in the human community at large.

Following Maxim #2, I have examined WD’s ethical monotheism only from the perspective of its potential contribution to this postmodern inquiry. If my reading was selective, it was selective, however, from out of some version of what I could defend as -– to borrow the rabbinic term -– a "plain-sense reading." This was an effort to identify certain rules of reading -– and rules of scholarship -– that are implicit in WD’s writings and, then, to apply a selection of those rules to reading his own studies of ethical monotheism. The result was a reading of WD’s ethical monotheism reread selectively according to his own rules of reading and selectively, again, as it might contribute to the postmodern dialogue. One result of this end-driven way of reading is that, right from the start of this essay, each of my readings of WD already anticipates the postmodern questions I will be asking of him in the end. Rather than a misreading, I believe this is a route to a more felicitous reading of WD, or any scriptural philosopher, because it acknowledges the redemptive telos of such a thinker’s work and thereby grants that work the power to apply itself to ever renewed contexts of healing.

Following this process, this is what I have learned in response to my initial question: What do we do –- with scriptural, ethical monotheism -– when the word itself is wounded?

1. Scholars must continue to follow the deeper scholarly rules practiced by the scriptural ethical monotheist. These rules remain the same in any situation we can imagine. In the modern period, ethical monotheists in the Kantian mode would say that these rules represent "transcendental conditions" for the conduct of this inquiry. In a premodern period, these rules might be called, for example, attributes of the divine mind or basic commandments. In this postmodern period, we might, following WD’s Calvinist side, call them "redemptive rules of inquiry"; or we might call them "pragmatic rules of inquiry." As drawn, for example, out of WD’s studies of Calvin, Cohen, Troeltsch, and Rosenzweig, these include the scholar’s obligation to study the scriptural tradition, for the sake of confronting injustice and healing suf-fering (including the tormented moral consciousness) in the community of readers and its wider society. This community belongs, at once, to a tradition of scriptural reading, to the university tradition and society, to some socio-political realm, and to the human community most broadly; the scholar serves all these.

2. In the postmodern period, all of these societies are tormented by disappointments with the modern univer-sity’s dominant rules of inquiry, with the dominant religion’s capacities to train the human heart and to account for evil and for what evils God may allow, and with the dominant socio-political systems of promoting human safety and well-being. At this time, scholars need to acknowledge the powers of modern inquiry to con-tribute to healing specifically modern torments, such as fears of communal and political atomism or of the lack of any shared human values across a world of competing ethnic, religious, political and economic groups and interests. But, recognizing the context-specificity and finitude of each redemptive inquiry, scholars need to acknowledge as well that modern inquiry will necessarily fail to heal other sorts of torment, including those to which it may contribute. Facing some of the continuing burdens of modern society, postmodern inquiry will continue some of the rules of modern inquiry. But facing new burdens as well, this inquiry must also reform and replace some of the modern rules.

3. Among the most needed reforms are these:

• To correct modern inquiry’s tendency simply to overstate and overstretch its conclusions: to assume, for example, that an entire system or religion or philosophy is "wrong," when only some of its claims are falsified; or to assume that reforms for such a system require "true univer-sality," where "something simply more-than-particular" would do.
• To correct modern inquiry’s complementary tendency to frame criticisms and corrections in terms of a strict law of excluded middle, as if for every claim X that is falsified, there is a claim -X that is true (where the set of contraries [X + -X] constitute the universe of possible claims, rather than the set of contradictories [X,Y,Z, Q ...].
• Therefore, and by way of illustration, to replace the binary pair "universal or particular" with some correlation uCp, so that any universal claim (u) is made correlative (C) to some particular context of inquiry (p) for which the universal claim serves some corrective or regulative function. According to this rule, "universality" and "particularity" con-flict only in the absence of the mediating third that correlates one with the other.
• To legitimize philosophic claims about "absolutes," where an "absolute" is predicated of claims that are neither universal nor particular but vague. These claims illustrate some correlation that is predicated of all humans universally but that is definable and observable only in specific contexts. Examples of names of absolutes are "God’s love," "Israel as God’s beloved," "justice," and so on. A specific narrative about justice will illustrate only a kind of justice as achieved or sought in some situation. This rule suggests that a modern thinker’s typical binary pairs (individual vs. community, freedom vs. law, universality vs. particularity) can be mediated only by absolutes.
• To note that scriptural scholars are those who identify sacred Scripture as source of the abso-lutes with respect to which they make claims that correlate universals and particulars.

These scholars therefore conduct three kinds of inquiry: i) reading: studies of the plain sense of scripture, which disclose to them, within their communities of reading, the names of absolutes and their relations one to the other within the corpus of scripture. This includes studies of the rereadings of scripture throughout the history of their traditions of reading; ii) observation: studies of the conditions of suffering, injustice, or torment in their societies that warrant scripturally grounded, redemptive responses. This includes critical studies of scriptural or other academic inquiry that fails to fulfill (or incompletely fulfills) its obligations to respond to such conditions; iii) interpretation: judgments about how, as both guided by and illustrating certain abso-lutes, specific conditions of suffering may be remedied by certain lines of action or rules of conduct. It is in formulating these rules that the scholar correlates particular descriptions of suffering with specific sets of concepts. This list itself may be taken as an example, since it belongs to an effort to remedy certain problems in postmodernity. Some absolutes that inform this list are "God’s love and compassion," "the imitation of God," "the obligation to reason as a means of responding to suffering." These absolutes guide my correlating a set of concepts like "over-stretching" and "excluded middle" with a particular description of what I take to be a torment in modern inquiry. The result is a claim about the scriptural philosopher’s obligation to correct modern inquiry’s tendency to over-stretch its use of the law of excluded middle.

Strengths of this response to postmodern torments:

This way of rereading WD’s ethical monotheism appears to respond successfully to several postmodern concerns. It offers a non-exaggerated way of appreciating the continuing contributions of the modern model while making needed reforms as well. It strengthens the pragmatic dimension of WD’s reading of Cohen-Calvin. By rereading each monotheistic inquiry as a response to context-specific conditions of suffering, this model corrects foundationalist tendencies in the modern model. It assures the postmodern scriptural scholar that, even when an inherited tradition seems to fail (including a modern tradition), it still offers access to deeper, pragmatic rules for correcting the tradition. By identi-fying these rules with scriptural absolutes, this model provides the community of readers a continued source of faith, hope, and knowledge amidst the disappointments and confusions of postmodernity. By characterizing the absolutes as "vague," and thus irreducible to concep-tualized dogmas, the model seems to protect the interests of both localized community and the "other" to any such community. Local community is protected because it alone provides a context for clarifying the actual meaning of these absolutes for concrete action. Those outside the community (or "others" to the com-munity) are protected, for one, because the absolutes belong to them as well as to the community: The community "owns" only its context-specific clarifications of the absolute, nothing more general than that. Others -– and otherness -- are protected, for two, because the absolute is clarified by correlating certain particular descriptions (of need or suffering) with certain sets of concepts. Each of these concepts is a universal, in the sense that it (unlike the absolutes) may have a general definition and is potentially usable by any community on any occasion: the way a brick may become part of my house, alone, but could also become part of yours. Outsiders to the community may therefore not appre-ciate precisely why a community has defined its absolutes on some occasion in some specific way, but they can still understand each conceptual element of the definition. With that understanding, they can enter into dialogue with community members -– keeping "tabs" on the community as it as well keeps tabs on them.

Weaknesses of this response to postmodern torments:

To identify various weaknesses of the postmodern model, it is necessary to examine it from various perspectives. This means that there is not simply one "counter-model," but rather a potential dialogue -– or debate among several. Here is an illustrative sampling:

• Bruckstein, as we saw, argues that Cohen rejects both dogmatic rationalism and dogmatic textual-ism, holding that "the very acts of interpretation and of criticism -– both of which are acts of "calling into question" -- create the infinity of content that characterizes Jewish oral tradition." This reading of Cohen would appear to lend support to our notion of the vagueness of scriptural absolutes, but to undermine our implicit assumption that these absolutes bring the infinite with them, so to speak, rather than having infinity lent to them by the interpreter. In other words, Bruckstein might argue that our postmodern model attributes relatively too much givenness or authority to the text and too little freedom to the reader. In this sense, our model would appear to move too far away from modern models of personal autonomy.
• According to Gibbs’s reading of Cohen, our model may treat the two poles of each correlation as too dependent on one another, rather than as "two independent realities" that stand in correlation. Wolfson and WD himself might be expected to share in this concern: that our absolutes are too strong and that the relation of the absolutes to local conditions of knowledge may therefore overdetermine our pragmatic responses to conditions of suffering. This would be to argue, again, that our model has moved too far from modern universalism and expresses too much confidence in the redemptive power of scripture’s absolutes. WD would undoubtedly extend to our model the criticism he offers of Rosenzweig’s particularism. The vagueness of our absolutes implies that it may, in practice, be too difficult to transcend the communal borders of our relations to the absolute.
• From Borowitz’s perspective, on the other hand (however much he might share Bruckstein’s concerns about autonomy), our model may appear to have retained too much of Cohen’s rationalism. Pragmatism can also be a kind of rationalism if we are too confident in the capacity of scriptural readers to perceive just what is wrong in society and just how a scripturally based reasoning may correct what is wrong.
• Finally, more radical Holocaust theologians might, along with more radical postmodernists, argue that our model does not take seriously enough our own theme of "the brokeness of the word." Edith Wychogrod has argued, for example, that the kind of scriptural reasoning displayed in this postmodern model of ethical monotheism may still have too much to say about the word, even if it is to talk about its brokenness. Such talking is an explicit effort to repair, it seems, and thus to move beyond the fact of brokenness and its source: "It is the historical traumas of the twentieth century that call the values of modernity into question.... Although attributable largely to deep-seated anti-Semitism, the building of the camps can be seen, at least in part, as an outcome of modern social organization and new technologies rooted in modernist conceptual foundations. The Shoah is generally acknowledged to open a new era, one in which the modes of rationality invoked to explain the event fail to account for it while at the same time they are seen as implicated in causing it.... [It brings forward] the problem of unsayability [itself]. When the unsayable is spoken in the straightforward language of journalism, its horror
  is flattened out; when it is mythologized, arche-typical meanings are foisted upon it." And, she suggests, is a return to theological discourse after the Shoah –- a return that is exemplified in our postmodern model -– not an effort to say now, and so soon, what cannot be said? Should we not, instead, share "in the words of the Master of the Universe in the text of Menachot 29b ... : ‘Silence. Thus it came to mind?’"

All of these potential criticisms of our model are strong ones, and I do not believe that there is any systematic way to repair the model so that it responds to all of them. According to its own rules, a postmodern model of ethical monotheism should not be universally useful, but should represent a context-specific way of resolving a given problem. The limits of the model should correspond to the finite character of the problem, and contradictory models should represent opportunities for bringing the perspectives of a variety of problem-specific inquiries into conversation. This does not mean that every model represents a point of fruitful dialogue with every other. Some models belong to a community of models; some do not. The postmodern monotheist might argue that a set of contradictory models belongs to a community when all the models are actively informed by a family resemblance class (or overlapping sets) of absolutes (or rules of correlation). On one level, all scriptural philosophies should belong to a community, since they all draw on scripture’s absolutes. This is one reason why postmodern scriptural reasoners ought to enter into a community of dialogue with modern ethical monotheists: They have bases for dialogue. On a second level, scriptural philo-sophies that are stimulated by similar problems or torments should belong to a more intimate community. Textual Reasoners and Scriptural Reasoners form close communities because they are drawn to similar concerns about modernity and postmodernity. When they are identified and self-identified as strict modernists, ethical monotheists keep or are kept outside such communities. As reread in this essay, however, WD’s ethical mono-theism may also be identified differently. Modernist or not, ethical monotheism can be read as a mode of reasoning, within a community of readers, from condi-tions of social torment to the need for scripture’s word and of reasoning from that word to some program for redemptive or responsive action. This sounds very much like the work of Scriptural and Textual Reasoning. Such reasoners are bound to differ among themselves; informed by different specific torments and differently selective inquiries, so they should. These differences are conditions of fruitful dialogue and of the kind of relationality that must substitute, in postmodernity, for what the moderns called "universality."

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The Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies
956 Dulaney Valley Road, Baltimore, MD 21204
410.494.7161 / fax: 410.494.7169
email: Info@icjs.org