Table of Contents

    Putt - The Benefit of the Doubt - JCRT 3.3

    The Benefit of the Doubt: Merold Westphal’s Prophetic Philosophy of Religion

    B. Keith Putt
    Samford University

    In recent years, several scholars in the United States have exploited the implications of Continental philosophy for developing new and innovative approaches to religious and theological studies. These thinkers’including, but not limited to Carl A. Raschke, Mark Taylor, Charles Winquist, Edith Wyschogrod, and John Caputo’have embraced various expressions of European philosophy, not in order to offer simple commentaries on those expressions but to utilize them as raw material for developing a uniquely American species of philosophical theology. These new American philosophical voices speak critically and constructively to the biblical paradigms lying behind Western theory, to the traditional religious and theological themes developing out of those paradigms, and to the cultural and social transformations that have changed how those paradigms are appropriated.

    Toward an Apologetic for Paralogetics

    > There is, it seems to us,
    > At best, only a limited value
    > In the knowledge derived from experience.
    > The knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies,
    > For the pattern is new in every moment
    > And every moment is a new and shocking
    > Valuation of all we have been (81-87)

    Human beings always experience reality from finite perspectives, always standing between some protological moment of immediate clarity and some eschatological moment of total realization.Consequently, they live out this finitism through ontological patterns, various attempts at ordering reality into cosmetic world structures that give value to existence. These patterns always falsify to greater or lesser degrees in that they are either opaque to reality and, hence, in error, or offer numerous intensities of translucence, and, hence, promise only incomplete views of existence. Eliot seems to give in these lines a poetic translation of the irreducible manifold previously referred to as Westphal’s “dark prism.”

    > Do not let me hear
    > Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
    > Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
    > Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God. (93-97)

    Since individuals are never born in vacuo, they never live outside of various world patterns that have preceded them. These patterns of reality are legacies bequeathed to each generation by their ancestors, those whom Eliot calls the “old men.” Their patterns are the wisdom that offers guidance, stability, truth, and meaning to the community, legitimating the community’s legislating interpretations by embracing systematically and boldly all aspects of culture and nature.In accepting the authority of the “old men” and their wisdom, individuals live out these systems as comprehensive and uncontaminated.

    > The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
    > Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless (97-98).

    Westphal’s prophetic paradigm seeks this very wisdom and teaches that humility’the fear of the Lord as the consciousness of finitude and fallenness’is the preeminent benefit of the doubt.

    Notes

    B. Keith Putt is Professor of Philosophy at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Rice University in Houston, Texas. He has published several articles on the radical hermeneutics of John D. Caputo.

    ’ 2002 B. Keith Putt. All rights reserved.
    Updated 07/28/21.
    http://jcrt.org/archives/03.3/putt/

    1. Merold Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 2. ↩︎

    2. Merold Westphal, “Phenomenologies and Religious Truth,” in Phenomenology of Truth Proper to Religion, ed. Daniel Guerri’re (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), p. 105. ↩︎

    3. Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania’ State University, 1991), p. 7. ↩︎

    4. Merold Westphal, “Taking Suspicion Seriously: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism” Faith and Phiosophy 4 (January 1987): 29. ↩︎

    5. God, Guilt, and Death, p. 12. ↩︎

    6. Merold Westphal, “Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy of Religion Which Will Be Able To Come Forth As Prophecy,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (Fall 1973): 141. ↩︎

    7. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p. 42. ↩︎

    8. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 526-27. ↩︎

    9. History and Truth, p. 176. ↩︎

    10. Freud and Philosophy, p. 26. ↩︎

    11. History and Truth, pp. 55, 181. ↩︎

    12. Paul Ricoeur, “Freedom in the Light of Hope,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 412. ↩︎

    13. Paul Ricoeur, “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace. trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), pp. 205-206. ↩︎

    14. Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981) p. 63. ↩︎

    15. Merold Westphal, “Socrates Between Jeremiah and Descartes: The Dialectic of Self-Consciousness and Self-Knowledge” Philosophy and Theology II, 3 (Spring 1988): 204. ↩︎

    16. Merold Westphal, “The Ostrich and the Bogeyman: Placing Postmodernism” Christian Scholars Review 20 (1990): 115. Cf. also Merold Westphal, “Deconstruction and Christian Cultural Theory: An Essay on Appropriation,” in Pledges of Jubilee: Essays on the Arts and Culture in Honor of Calvin G. Seerveld, eds. Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttkhuizen (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995): 108-109. ↩︎

    17. Merold Westphal, “Postmodernism and Religious Reflection” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 38 (1995): 131. ↩︎

    18. Merold Westphal, “Christian Philosophers and the Copernican Revolution,” in Christian Perspectives on Religious Knowledge, eds. C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 167, 176. ↩︎

    19. “The Ostrich and the Boogeyman,” p. 115. ↩︎

    20. Merold Westphal, “Positive Postmodernism as Radical Hermeneutics,” in The Very Idea of Radical Hermeneutics, ed. Roy Martinez (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1997), p. 52. ↩︎

    21. “Postmodernism and Religious Reflection,” p. 134. ↩︎

    22. “Positive Postmodernism as Radical Hermeneutics,” p. 61. ↩︎

    23. “Postmodernism and Religious Reflection,” p. 127. ↩︎

    24. “Phenomenologies and Religious Truth,” p. 117. ↩︎

    25. Merold Westphal, “Taking St. Paul Seriously: Sin as an Epistemological Category,” in Christian Philosophy, ed. Thomas P. Flint (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), p. 200. ↩︎

    26. Merold Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Faith as Suffering,” in Writing the Politics of Difference, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 60. ↩︎

    27. S’ren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 21. ↩︎

    28. “Phenomenologies and Religious Truth,” p. 118. ↩︎

    29. “Taking Suspicion Seriously,” p. 27. ↩︎

    30. Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 77, 110. ↩︎

    31. “Taking Suspicion Seriously,” p. 37. ↩︎

    32. “Appropriating the Atheists,” p. 25; “Taking St. Paul Seriously,” p. 218. ↩︎

    33. Merold Westphal, “Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task” Modern Theology 8 (July 1992): 251. ↩︎

    34. “Taking St. Paul Seriously,” p. 208. ↩︎

    35. Suspicion and Faith, pp. 13, 15. ↩︎

    36. “Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task,” p. 244. ↩︎

    37. God, Guilt, and Death, pp. 138-39. ↩︎

    38. S’ren Kierkegaard, The Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1948), pp. 53, 79, 99, 104. ↩︎

    39. Suspicion and Faith, p. 16. ↩︎

    40. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 26. ↩︎

    41. Four Quartets, pp. 26-27. ↩︎

    42. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 229. Cf. also John D. Caputo, “Beyond Aestheticism: Derrida’s Responsible Anarchy” Research in Phenomenology 18 (1988): 63. ↩︎

    43. Joseph T. Shipley, The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 73. ↩︎

    44. Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1979), p. 28. ↩︎

    45. “Phenomenologies and Religious Truths,” p. 109. ↩︎

    46. Jacques Derrida, Points…Interviews, 1974-94 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 130. ↩︎

    47. Merold Westphal, “A Philosophical Dialogue,” in Modernity and its Discontents, eds. James L. Marsh, John D. Caputo, and Merold Westphal (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), p. 137. ↩︎

    48. Rufus B. Spain, At Ease in Zion: Social History of Southern Baptists 1865-1900 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967), p. 52. ↩︎

    49. At Ease in Zion, p. 120. ↩︎

    50. Merold Westphal, “The Canon as Flexible, Normative Fact” The Monist 76 (October 1993): 437-38. ↩︎

    51. Four Quartets, p. 27. ↩︎