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Hermeneutics, Scripture, and Faithful Philosophizing Merold Westphal The more usual conversation about faith and reason has to do with that sort of hermeneutical circle when it’s specifically religious, when it belongs to some particular religious tradition or is grounded in some particular religious scripture. One of the reasons why that is an appropriate way to speak is that when one appeals to scripture in any normative sense, one is automatically talking about what is understood as not available to the unaided powers of human thought, human reason. The term ‘reason’ has been sort of co-opted by this notion of unaided human power. So yes, I think that the question of scripture and philosophy is an aspect of a larger question of faith and reason. BG: Would you say it presents any particular problems or difficulties within that broader dynamic? MW: In a sense it certainly does. It isn’t exactly the problem of particularity, because various forms of contemporary naturalism, for example, are quite particular. They belong not to universal human experience or universal human thought, but to thought as it has emerged from particular sources and traditions at particular times. So it isn’t that one is caught up in dependence on something that is particular rather than universal. The distinct problem is in appealing to something particular for which one claims divine origin and divine authority, and that isn’t always the case. The people who are working on eliminative materialism don’t appeal to divine authority—although they often treat their own rationality as if it were a divine authority. BG: Elaborating on that, to what degree or in what way might scripture be normative in philosophical discourse? MW: I don’t think it can be. There was a time when it could. Back in the patristic period philosophy signified a thought-out worldview, and so some of the early Christian writers talked about their ‘Christian philosophy,’ meaning their Christian world view. For them, scripture was normative. The term ‘philosophy’ has come, in the modern context—and there are the beginnings of this in the medieval context, too—to signify precisely that which unaided human reason can accomplish and validate. That notion of philosophy is so strong and entrenched that I don’t think it’s likely to be in too much danger of being replaced. Understood that way, it’s a no-brainer that scripture cannot be normative for philosophy. BG: To take two examples, Ricoeur and Lévinas want to keep their philosophical discourse in some way separate from their work in scriptural commentary, so that no one can charge them with using scriptural evidence to support the conclusions they are drawing on a JPS Volume 4, Issue 1 27
Hermeneutics, Scripture, and Faithful Philosophizing Merold Westphal strictly philosophical basis. Would you say that practice is similar to the way scripture operates in your own work? MW: I think so. The way I like to think of it is something like this: “Here I stand. My view of the world has been shaped by scripture, which for me as a person is normative. As I look at this or that aspect of human experience, it looks to me as if it’s this way.” I don’t try to deny that that understanding of things has been inspired by scripture. On the other hand, I offer it to you, who may not share that orientation toward scripture as an authority, and ask, “From where you stand, doesn’t that look like that is the case?” I think that is what Lévinas does with the widow and the orphan and the stranger. An orthodox Jew, and for that matter an orthodox Christian, could appeal to scripture as an authority saying “God is concerned about the widow, and the orphan, and the stranger.” Lévinas doesn’t do that. He says “Look, when you look into the face of your fellow human beings—even if they be unattractive in the variety of ways in which widows and orphans and strangers are, those you would rather not notice, those you would rather ignore, and in some cases those you would rather take advantage of—do you not see in their face something that issues a categorical imperative, that you must not deface them?” That’s an appeal that isn’t based on the authority of the scriptural source from which it is inspired. I think Ricoeur’s work often has that same character as well. The working presupposition, in my case at least, is not that such appeals are made to a universal reason which inhabits all of us undifferentiated. So it’s not a rhetorical question; I see it as asking “From where you stand, can you see this?” Sometimes, where you may stand you won’t be able to see this, and we’ve got a problem. BG: You have written extensively on phenomenology of religion, and advocate a distinctly hermeneutical variety, akin to the Anselmian model of faith seeking understanding. There are intimations of this hermeneutical turn even in your earliest work, such as your essay “Prolegomena to any Future Philosophy of Religion which Will Be Able to Come Forth as Prophecy,” 1 where you criticize the transcendental ego that tries to bracket all particularities. But how would you respond to the objection that phenomenology of religion, even in a hermeneutical employment, still harbors certain transcendental ambitions, insofar as it seeks to establish general structures of human experience? Phenomenology might in that case be able to locate some sort of correlation or continuity between these general structures and revelation. But at the same time as you are working in phenomenology of religion, you are also immersed in and influenced by thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Barth, and Lévinas, who JPS Volume 4, Issue 1 28
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interview with Merold Westphal - Journal of Philosophy and Scripture

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