The Nicene Option

An Incarnational Phenomenology

James K. A. Smith

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781481313742
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Christian philosophy and philosophy of religion tend to be dominated by analytic approaches, which have brought a valuable logical rigor to the discussion of matters of belief. However, the perspectives of continental philosophy—in particular, the continental emphasis on embodied forms of knowing—still have much to offer to the conversation and our understanding of what it means to be both rational and faithful in a postmodern world.

The Nicene Option represents the full sweep of James K. A. Smith's work in continental philosophy of religion over the past twenty years. Animated by the conviction that a philosophy of religion needs to be philosophical reflection on the practice of religion, as a "form of life" (as Wittgenstein would say), this book makes the case for the distinct contribution that phenomenology—as a philosophy of experience—can make to philosophy of religion and Christian philosophy. Engaging a range of philosophers in this tradition, including Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Marion, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Smith's constructive proposal coheres around what he describes as "the logic of incarnation, " a "Nicene option" in contemporary philosophy of religion. By grounding philosophy of religion in the doctrinal heart of Christian confession, Smith gestures toward a uniquely robust Christian philosophy.

Besides issuing a clarion call for the renaissance of continental philosophy of religion, The Nicene Option also offers a glimpse behind the scholarly curtain for a wider audience of readers familiar with Smith's popular works such as Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?, Desiring the Kingdom, Imagining the Kingdom, and You Are What You Love —all of which are tacitly informed by the phenomenological approach articulated in this book. As an extended footnote to those works—which for many readers have been gateways to philosophy— The Nicene Option presents an invitation to a new depth of reflection.

Notes

Introduction: God on the Left Bank?

1 This story is recounted, for example, by Nicholas Wolterstorff in “Analytic Philosophy of Religion: Retrospect and Prospect,” in Inquiring about God: Selected Essays, vol. 1, ed. Terence Cuneo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 17–34.

2 I do not have any great stake in the distinction between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy except as a helpful description for different styles or streams of philosophical reflection. I appreciate Wolterstorff’s suggestion that “the identity of the analytic tradition is a narrative, rather than a purely systematic, identity. What makes a philosopher an analytic philosopher is that he places himself within a certain story line of philosophy in the twentieth century” (Inquiring about God, 17). I would happily describe “continental” philosophy in the same way: there is no “essential” identity; only a historical, contingent, narrative identity insofar as the continental philosopher locates herself in a story of philosophical questions and debates that tracks onward from Edmund Husserl rather than, say, Frege. And none of this precludes philosophers becoming conversant in both conversations. See, for example, Samuel C. Wheeler, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), or the way Paul Ricoeur engages analytic discussions of identity in Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

3 There is something of an apples-to-oranges problem in these two adjectives, the first being conceptual and the second being geographical (“continental” Europe vs. England and the English-speaking United States). The problem with any geographical description, of course, is that no region is monolithic. On the other hand, to describe continental philosophy as, say, “phenomenological” philosophy is also too narrow since there are important figures in French and German philosophy who eschew the phenomenological heritage of Husserl and Heidegger. We are left to live with all of these adjectives as fuzzy as best—which, per Wittgenstein, does not mean they do not serve a function.

4 Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39–54; idem, “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference, ed. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 42–74.

5 See Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2012), liv–lv. For further explication that bears directly on phenomenology of religion, see Jason W. Alvis, The Inconspicuous God: Heidegger, French Phenomenology, and the Theological Turn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).

6 Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1969), is an extended mediation on ethics on a religious register, but see more directly, Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 129–47. A representative collection of Paul Ricouer’s contributions can be found in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, trans. Don Ihde (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974). Marion’s breakout book in this respect was God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), but much of his corpus, including early historical work on Descartes, attends to theological and religious questions. For one of Derrida’s earliest direct and sustained confrontations with theology (though it is also broached in early work from 1967–1972), see Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” trans. Ken Frieden in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 73–142. (This Derrida essay was, in many ways, my entrée into the project that comprises the present book.)

7 This debate in France in the late 1980s and early 1990s is now helpfully catalogued in a volume that includes both Janicaud’s critique and responses from Jean-François Courtine, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-Luc Marion, and Michel Henry. See Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).

8 These developments of the field are discussed in more detail in chs. 1 and 3 below.

9 Elsewhere I have argued that, even though Jacques Derrida first gained attention in North America as an import through English departments and literary theory, it is important to situate him as a phenomenologist. See James K. A. Smith, Jacques Derrida: Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2005), ch. 1.

10 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 288–94. I have discussed this in more detail in James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 57–59.

11 I take this to be in the spirit of Alvin Plantinga’s veritable manifesto, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Faith and Philosophy 1 (1984): 253–71, in which he recommends research programs that begin unapologetically from “what we know as Christians,” not as a sectarian or parochial endeavor but in the mainstream of the academy.

12 James K. A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church, The Church and Postmodern Culture Series (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006).

13 See James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Cultural Liturgies 1 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), and Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, Cultural Liturgies 2 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013).

14 James K. A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Relativism? Community, Contingency, and Creaturehood (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), and On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-world Spirituality for Restless Hearts (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2019).

Chapter 1. The Philosophy of Religion Takes Practice

1 For a report from a firsthand contributor to this development, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Analytic Philosophy of Religion: Retrospect and Prospect,” in Inquiring about God: Selected Essays, vol. 1, ed. Terence Cuneo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 17–34.

2 As an example of this development, consider, for instance, the work of Antony Flew: Hume’s Philosophy of Belief (London: Routledge, 1961); God and Philosophy (New York: Dell, 1966); and Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, eds., New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press, 1955).

3 For just a sample of representative work in this vein, see Kelly James Clark, ed., Our Knowledge of God: Essays on Natural and Philosophical Theology (The Hague: Kluwer, 1992); Eleonore Stump, ed., Reasoned Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology in Honor of Norman Kret...