HERMENEUTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION* MARK I. WALLACE Paul Ricoeurs and Emmanuel Levinass writings are a rich source for biblically-nuanced philosophical reection on the question of the mandated self in relation to others. Former colleagues at the University of Paris- Nanterre, Levinas and Ricoeur have engaged one another in their writings over the years, making a comparison of their related proposals a potentially fruitful enterprise. In this essay, I will suggest that Ricoeur, in his sustained contrapuntal dialogue with Levinas, successfully mediates the dialectic between self-esteem and solicitude for others in his religious thought. The essay is divided into three parts. Part 1 considers the methodological dif- culties that follow from placing Ricoeurs thought under the heading From Phenomenology to Scripture. Part 2 considers the advantage of a Ricoeurian model of biblical reading in contrast to the analytic approach offered by Nicholas Wolterstorffs work on divine discourse. Part 3 turns to Levinas as proposing a similarand also signicantly differentscriptural account of selfhood. Nodding to Ricoeur, the trajectory of the paper will be to consider rst the question, How do the biblical texts function? while the second question will be, What do these texts say? In the end, I hope to show how both Ricoeur and Levinas use the biblical texts to construe the project of selfhood in terms of being summonedbeyond ones choosing and willingto take responsi- bility for the neighboreven at great cost to oneself. For each thinker, the individual becomes a self by allowing the divine Other to awaken it to its responsibilities for the human other. Nevertheless, the nature of the self Modern Theology 16:3 July 2000 ISSN 0266-7177 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Mark I. Wallace Department of Religion, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081, USA being summoned to its responsibilities, on the one hand, and the her- meneutical method for understanding this summons within the biblical texts, on the other, are questions answered differently by each theorist. It is the answer to these questions that nally divides Levinas and Ricoeur from one another while still providing support for the deep affinities that underlie their related projects. I Before I begin this conversation between Ricoeur and Levinas, let me rst make some preliminary comments about Ricoeurs identity as a philosopher who uses the biblical texts to provide imaginary variations on the theme of the good life. These comments will situate Ricoeurs work in relation to the rubric of this session, From Phenomenology to Scripture. As a philosopher, Ricoeur is a hermeneutical phenomenologist, to use Don Ihdes felicitous description of Ricoeur; and as a biblical exegete, he is an interpreter of the meaning of the Word within the words of the scriptural intertexts. Her- meneutical philosophy and biblical interpretationthese two tasks con- stitute the distinctive, but always related, fulcrums about which Ricoeurs thought turns. This dual description of Ricoeurs intellectual identity entails three characteristics. First, as a hermeneut, Ricoeur argues that selfhood begins not with the philosophical hubris that the subject is an autonomous self but with an awareness that the subject enters consciousness already formed by the symbolic systems within ones culture. Consciousness is never independent or emptya tabula rasabut always already interpene- trated by the founding symbols and stories that constitute ones communal heritage. Thus the journey to selfhood commences with the exegesis of the imaginary symbols and stories constitutive of ones cultural inherit- ance in order to equip the subject to become an integrated self by means of appropriating these symbols and stories as her own. Second, as a phenomenologist, Ricoeur puts into abeyance any judgment aboutin Husserlian terms, he performs an epoch regardingthe reality status of the imaginary claims made by ones orienting textual sources. This bracketing exercise is performed in order to accord to these claims the status of lived possibilities, even if they cannot be established as referring to proven realities in the world. 1 Third, and nally, as a theological thinker within the biblical traditionsbut not as a theologian per se, a label Ricoeur consistently refusesRicoeur maintains that it is in allowing oneself to be appropriated by the gurative possibilities imagined by the biblical texts that the task of becoming a full self is most adequately performed. A persons religious wager becomes her destiny as a moral subject: by taking the risk of becoming assimilated into the worlds of the biblical texts, one veries the claim that a scripturally regured self is the crown of a life well lived in relation to self and others. 302 Mark I. Wallace Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000. As a philosopher and interpreter of the Bible, it might appear, then, at least at rst glance, that Ricoeur is a philosophical theologian, or perhaps a philosopher who engages in cryptotheology to promote his philosophical aims. But these readings of Ricoeurs project are a mistake. Ricoeur is not a philosophical theologian, if by that phrase one means a religious thinker who grounds reections on God and the self on a particular philosophical foundation, be it phenomenology or something else. By the same token, he is not a Christian philosopher, if by that phrase one means a philosopher who utilizes philosophical discourse to prove the truth of Christian faith claims in opposition to other rival claims. Faith, for Ricoeur, is always a wager and a risk and can never be established as apodictically certain based on the false security of a philosophical substructure. As a wager, faith eschews any triumphalism that posits one set of life choices as inherently superior to another set of choices. The only verication of the truth of such choices is found, over the course of ones existence, in the rich quality of a life well lived in harmony with self and others. No thought system external to these choices can adjudicate which, if any, alternative forms of life are superior to another. In this respect, Ricoeur is a thoroughgoing Kantian, as Pamela Anderson has shown, because, like Kant he seeks to resolve the conict between the faculties of theology and philosophy by erecting a rigid partition between the two disciplines: even as philosophy should be conceived as an autono- mous, agnostic eld of study that puts in suspension the question of God, so also should theology be regarded as a self-contained enterprise that refuses the temptation to ground its inquiries on a cryptophilosophical foundation. 2 In a Kantian vein, Ricoeur argues that it is productive cautiously to borrow language and concepts from one domain to elucidate the other mode of inquiry as long as such borrowing does not degenerate into grounding or determining the one discipline on the basis of the other. 3 Like Kant, who bifurcates the interests of critical philosophy and religious inquiry, Ricoeur defends this rigid partition by arguing that philosophy operates in the registry of reective analysis while theology functions as living testimony to the possibilities of biblical faith without the pseudo-security of a meta- physical foundation. In another sense, however, the trajectory of Ricoeurs work is not Kantian but Anselmian. Or, to put it another way, Ricoeur, as a scripturally-informed philosopher, takes his cues from the Kant of Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone, where biblical imagery is thoughtfully utilized for the expli- cation of the moral life, and not the Kant of the three Critiques. If, as I have suggested above in labeling Ricoeur a hermeneutical thinker, all thought takes ight within the fullness of ones symbolically-rich and textually- mediated presuppositions, then biblical faith, while neither the queen of philosophy nor its handmaiden, is the generative impulsebut never the determining groundfor Ricoeurs whole enterprise. Religion, then, is the From Phenomenology to Scripture? 303 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000. rich matrix that motivates and informs Ricoeurs autonomous and agnostic philosophy of the moral life. Unlike Kantthat is, if one reads Kant diachronically from the rst Critique onwardsRicoeur does not move from a presuppositionless critical philosophy to a regional application of such a philosophy to religious questions. On the contrary, he begins all of his various projects in the fullness of his beliefs, and then strives critically to understand better the implications of such beliefs through the discipline of philosophical inquiry. Ricoeurs question, therefore, is not Kants question in the rst Critique, namely, How can knowledge be denied in order to make room for faith? Rather, his question is, In the fullness of faith, how can critical inquiry expli- cate the meaning of the presumptions and concerns generated by this faith? Or, as Ricoeur puts it in an earlier context, how can philosophy be pressed into the service of saturating faith with intelligibility? 4 In the Introduction to Oneself as Another, Ricoeur states that his abiding interests in various philo- sophical problemsincluding the overall problem of the selfare moti- vated by the convictions that bind me to biblical faith. 5 Ricoeur rejects the quixotic illusion of philosophyto begin thought without presuppositions by fully owning his positioned belonging to a rich heritage of biblical language and imagery as the wellspring of his philosophical itinerary. Thus, from Ricoeurs perspective, the arrow of prepositional directionality implied in the rubric for this sessionfrom phenomenology to scriptureis a mis- take founded on the historic fantasy of critical philosophy to begin thought in the spirit of presuppositionless, radical doubt. In sum, the trajectory for Ricoeur is not from phenomenology to scripture but from scripture to phenomenology. II Up to this point, my case is that Ricoeurs thought is oriented by the claim that the journey to moral selfhood is made possible by the subjects willing- ness to receive new ways of being through its interactions with the biblical text-worlds. But how do these texts function? How do they make meaning? How do they transport the reader into their worlds and reveal new possi- bilities of existence for self and other? Ricoeur appropriates Anglo-American speech act theory to explain the dynamic of biblical meaning. According to J. L. Austin and others, much of our discourse has performative force in that it not only says something (the locutionary act), it also often does something in the saying (the illocutionary act), or it generates a certain effect by the saying (the perlocutionary act). 6 Applying speech act theory to scriptural interpretation uncovers not how the biblical texts communicate propositional content but rather, through their power to disclose new modes of being, how these texts propel the reader into a living confrontation with the God referred to by these texts. In 304 Mark I. Wallace Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000. the medley of diverse genres the biblical texts actually name God and offer the reader different models of apprenticeship to the God variously identied in the intertext of the Bible. 7 In the circulation of meaning within and through the Bibles contrapuntal modes of discourse, the unnameable God is named and the reader is propelled into an alternative form of relationship to and with self and other through her relationship with this God. Ricoeurs appropriation of speech act theory reworks the theological idea of revelation in order to argue that a variety of nonreligious and religious texts (including the Bible) are revelatorynot in the sense that they are deposits of divinely inspired truths, but because they faithfully enact a productive clash, and sometimes a fusion, between their world and the world of the reader. Ricoeur understands revelation in performative, not propositional, terms: revelation is an event of new meaning between text and interpreter, rather than a body of received doctrines under the control of a particular magisterium. He refers to the disclosive power of gurative texts (including sacred texts) in terms of an areligious sense of revelation just insofar as any poetic textby virtue of its power to fuse the world of the text and the world of the readercan become a world that I inhabit and within which I project my innermost possibilities. 8 Nicholas Wolterstorffs Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reections on the Claim that God Speaks agrees with Ricoeur that the biblical texts are extended speech acts with the potential to actualize the presence of the divine life for the reader. But whereas other philosophical theologians have also used speech act theory to argue for the performative dimension of biblical mean- ingincluding Ricoeur, but Thiemann and Jngel also come to mind in this veinWolterstorffs distinctive contribution to this discussion is his contro- versial contention that the Scriptures function to convey Gods actual speech to human auditors. It is not simply that the general lines of the biblical message are inspired by God in a broad sense, or even, as Ricoeur avers, that the Bible has the power to propel the reader into a new mode of existence, but rather that the whole Bible, word for word, contains infallible records of Gods communication to the biblical writers, on the one hand, or it serves as the reliable, unerring medium God appropriates to facilitate divine dis- course to readers of the Bible, on the other. In sum, God is the ultimate author of the Bible and there are no spacings or ruptures between Gods intent to say this or that and the human authors creation of the texts Wolterstorff believes are exact records of Gods speech (albeit sometimes mediated indirectly). Wolterstorff is aware of the clash between his infallibilist theory of biblical inspiration and Ricoeurs viewpoint. He argues that to read the biblical texts correctly one must discern what Godthe divine authorintended or meant in these writings, while for Ricoeur, according to Wolterstorff, the author is entirely absent from the interpretive process in the exegesis of biblical and other texts. 9 But Ricoeurs hermeneutical model is not against From Phenomenology to Scripture? 305 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000. the author; rather Ricoeur has sought painstakingly to situate his approach between two poles: the intentional fallacy, which holds the authors inten- tion as the criterion for any valid interpretation and the fallacy of the absolute text: the fallacy of hypostatizing the text as an authorless entity. 10 For Ricoeur, the authors intentions are absorbed into the texts plurality of meanings which are themselves produced through the readers responses to the range of possibilities the text projects. Once discourse becomes written it escapes the nite intentions of its authorbe that author divine or human and now enters the public domain of the reader where meaning is generated on the basis of the encounter between the texts potential meanings and the readers interpretive construals of the same. In this schema, textual meaning is no longer necessarily coincident with authorial meaning; the text enjoys a certain semantic autonomy over and against its author. The problem, then, is that Wolterstorffs assignment of central importance to the divine author in determining the meaning of the biblical texts denies to the reader any significant role in interpreting these texts. If the text is not a public work of meaning but an extension of the authors private interiorityeven if the interiority in question belongs to Godthen the role of the reader is to allow the text to interpret itself, so to speak, rather than discern the range of possible meanings the text projects that are alternately true toand distinct fromthe authors intentions. His stated intentions to the contrary notwithstanding, Wolterstorff sometimes proceeds as if his biblical reading is an uncovering of the Bibles hidden sense rather than a construal of its possible trajectories of meaning. Biblical meaning, however, is not given in the words of the texts themselves but instead is produced on the basis of the readers active engagement with the texts projection of new possibilities for existence. Meaning is generated in the to-and-fro, give-and- take interaction between text and interpreter; it is not a timeless property of the text ready to be discovered by the reader who can somehow discern the mind of the author(s) who wrote the text. In my mind, a more balanced account of biblical meaning would argue that while it is reasonable to pre- sume that God speaks through the biblical textsa presumption well defended by Wolterstorffthere is always some slippage between the inten- tions of the texts divine author and the genre-saturated signiers that mediate this intention. All discourse, including divine discourse, is never fully transparent upon divine intentions but is always already interpene- trated by the traces of other intentions and other discourses as well. III The biblical texts function as word events is a position shared not only by Ricoeur and Wolterstorff but by other contemporary philosophical readers of the Bible as well, including Levinas. But now the focus shifts to the Bibles ethical demands on the reader. In this section, I will take up Ricoeurs ethical 306 Mark I. Wallace Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000. reading of the Bible vis--vis his dialogue with Levinas concerning the dialectic of the self and the other. To begin this dialogue, let me turn to an analysis of a central problematic in Ricoeurs moral philosophy: the question of the broken cogito and the role of conscience in mediating the funda- mental discontinuity of the self with itself. For Ricoeur, the self is perman- ently other to itself because, contrary to Descartes, the self is not a xed subject, in full possession of itself, that perdures over time. But while the self is not an immutable substratum, according to Ricoeur, it does not follow that there is no self, as some of Descartess critics maintain. Some anticogito thinkers (for example, Michel Foucault) contend that insofar as there is no entitative core self, then the subject is nothing other than the sum total of the discourses practiced by its particular culture. Similarly, some analytic phil- osophers (for example, Derik Part), who also criticize Cartesian essential- ism, argue that the subject is reducible (without remainder) to its brain states and bodily functions. Ricoeur rejects both of these optionshistoricist and physicalistthrough a tripartite analysis of the phenomenon of passivity or alterity within selfhood. 11 My selfas neither a xed entity, discursive con- struct, nor biochemical ciphercobbles together its identity by experiencing the otherness of my own body, the dissymmetry between myself and the other person in front of me, and the originary phenomenon of being called by the voice of consciencea voice both proximate and exterior to methat summons me to my obligations and responsibilities. What does Ricoeur mean by the term conscience? Conscience, Ricoeur writes, is the voice addressed to me from the depths of myself the forumof the colloquy of the self with itself We need, I think, to preserve within the metaphor of the voice the idea of a unique passivity, both internal and superior to me In this sense, conscience is nothing other than the attestation by which a self affects itself The point is that human being has no mastery over the inner, intimate certitude of existing as a self; this is something that comes to us, that comes upon us, like a gift, a grace, that is not at our disposal. This non-mastery of a voice that is more heard than spoken leaves intact the question of its origin The strangeness of the voice [of conscience] is no less than that of the esh or that of other human beings. 12 In the depths of ones interiority, the subject is enjoined to live well with oneself and for others. The colloquy of the self with itselfthe phenomenon of being enjoinedoccurs in the place where the self appropriates for itself the demand of the other upon it. Conscience, then, is the forum for the summoning of the self to its obligations. As I noted above, while Ricoeur scrupulously avoids grounding the dis- ciplines of religious studies and philosophy upon one another, he does not object to borrowing concepts from one domain in order to illuminate problems From Phenomenology to Scripture? 307 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000. within the discourse of the other eld of inquiry. The upshot of this careful give-and-take interchange is the recognition, by Ricoeur, of certain deep affinities or homologies that exist between key terms that intersect the two disciplines. His analysis of the phenomenon of conscience is emblematic of this homologous approach to understanding the human condition. In his philosophical writing, Ricoeur is self-consciously agnostic about the origins of conscience, the experience of being enjoined by the other: Perhaps the philosopher as philosopher has to admit that one does not know and cannot say whether the source of the injunction, is another person or my ancestors or godliving God, absent Godor an empty place. With this aporia philosophical discourse comes to an end. 13 But in one of the two theological papers that Ricoeur excised from the original set of Gifford Lectures that constitute Oneself as Another, Ricoeur does identify the origins of conscience in the voice of Goda voice that enjoins the hearer to care for oneself and attend to the needs of others. In his omitted lecture on the summoned self, Ricoeur identies conscience as the inner chamber where the divine mandate is heard and understood. In the interior voice of obli- gation, each person is called by God to exercise responsibility for oneself and the other. Indeed, conscience is now valorized as the inalienable contact point between the Word of God and human beings; it is the forum where divine forgiveness, care for oneself, and solicitude for others intersect. Con- science is thus the anthropological presupposition without which justi- cation by faith would remain an event marked by radical extrinsicness. In this sense, conscience becomes the organ of the reception of the Kerygma, in a perspective that remains profoundly Pauline. 14 Without conscience, the divine voice that summons the self to its responsibilities falls on deaf ears. In Ricoeurs earlier writings, the productive imaginations capacity to interpret symbolic language played the role of a sort of praeparatio evangelica for the reception of the divine word. 15 While not denying this previous emphasis, the focus is now on the subjects moral capacity for an internal dialogue with itself that makes possible the hearing and understanding of Gods voice in the life of the listening subject. Ricoeurs analysis of conscience reects the life-long impact of Levinas on his thought, both religious and philosophical. As does Levinas, Ricoeur, in his theological writings on conscience, argues that the biblical scriptures consistently press onto the reader the obligation to appropriate Gods demanda demand denitively represented by the biblical prophetsto take responsibility for the welfare of the other. Along with Levinas, Ricoeur maintains that the ideal of the morally commissioned self is central to the biblical texts. In particular, the establishment of the prophetic I, through heeding the call of obligation for the other, is an underlying theme through- out these texts. In exegeting the Abrahamic/Mosaic response here I am, Ricoeur writes, I see, for my part, in this gure of a summoned subject a paradigm that the Christian community, following the Jewish community, 308 Mark I. Wallace Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000. could make use of to interpret itself. 16 Ricoeurs position regarding the prophetic subject is analogous to Levinass, who writes that [t]he religious discourse that precedes all religious discourse is not dialogue. It is the here I am said to a neighbor to whom I am given over, by which I announce peace, that is, my responsibility for the other. 17 In spite of this rough agreement, an important point of contention separ- ates Ricoeur and Levinas in reference to the questions of conscience and the summoned self: whether the self is constituted solely by its obedience to the cry of the other for justice, or whether the move to selfhood and the capacity to respond to the entreaty of the other are co-orginary. In other words, Is selfhood a product of the others summoning the subject to its obligations, or is the presumption of selfhood, through the medium of ones conscience, the necessary condition for hearing and responding to the others attempt to awaken it to its responsibilities? For Levinas, I become a subject through radical self-divestment, by becoming hostage to the other. The more I return to myself, the more I divest myself I am in myself through the other. 18 I have no selfI am not an Iwithout the other awakening me to my responsibility for the welfare of the other: The word I means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone I exist through the other and for the other. 19 Ricoeur contends, however, that Levinass idea of the passive self, singularly formed in response to unfulllable obligation, undermines the dialectic between self and other, realized through the agency of ones conscience, that is essential to moral action. Conscience, as we have seen, is the site of intersection between selfhood and otherness, the place where my ethical ownness within and the commanding voice of the other without indwell one another, according to Ricoeur. 20 Only a selfas the subject and object, in its conscience, of its own internal dialoguecan have an other-than-self rouse it to its responsibility. Only a selfinsofar as it esteems itself as a self capable of reason, agency, and good willcan exercise solicitude for others. Ricoeur argues that self-identity is not merely a result of ones response to the call of the other; it is also what must be presupposed for the call to be heard and understood in the rst place. Pace Levinas, Ricoeur asks, Would the self be a result [of its assignment to take responsibility for the other] if it were not rst a presupposition, that is, potentially capable of hearing this assignment? [i]s it forbidden to a reader, who is a friend of Levinas, to puzzle over a philosophy where the attestation of the self and the glory of the absolute [that is, the care of the other] would be co-originary? 21 Self-attestationthe capacity for self- esteemhas its origin in my self-reexive openness to being enjoined to give myself to meet the others needs even as my hearing and understanding the voice of the other has its origin in my regard for myself as a moral subject. Ricoeur stubbornly insists on preserving self-love and other-regard in a cor- relative tension that he argues is snapped by Levinass one-sided emphasis on self-emptying obedience in the face of the summons of the other. 22 From Phenomenology to Scripture? 309 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000. IV This disagreement over the question of the mandated self reects the dif- ferent hermeneutical orientations of both thinkers. In the mid-1970s at a conference on the topic of revelation, Levinas and Ricoeur engaged in a spirited debate about the nature of revelation in Judaism and Christianity vis--vis the question of biblical exegesis. In the proceedings from that meeting, Levinas maintains that the gravitational center of the biblical texts is halakhic discourse; the commandments and their explication is the centri- petal focus of the scriptures. In his comments, after registering his apprecia- tion for Ricoeurs use of discourse analysis to explicate taxonomically the various revelatory modalities within the Bible, Levinas raises an important caveat: But perhaps, for a Jewish reading of the Bible, [Ricoeurs] distinctions cannot be established quite as rmly as in the pellucid classication we have been offered. Prescriptive lessonsfound especially in the Penta- teuch, the part of the Torah known as the Torah of Mosesoccupy a privileged position within Jewish consciousness, as far as the relation- ship with God is concerned. Every text is asked to produce such lessons; the psalms may allude to characters and events, but they also refer to prescriptions [and] the texts of the Wisdom literature are prophetic and prescriptive. 23 Biblical revelation centers on prescriptive teachingsregarding matters of behavior, morality, ritual, and lawto the degree that even in seemingly unlegal genres, such as the Psalms and sapiential literature, Levinas argues that there are prescriptive upheavals where Gods commanding voice to the reader breaks through the literary surface of these texts. Ricoeur sees matters very differently. His focus falls on how revelation is generatedhow God is namedthrough the polyphony of diverse bib- lical genres. To be sure, Ricoeurs biblical discourse analysis is acutely aware of the function of prescriptive discourse in summoning the self to its respon- sibilities. But Ricoeur makes this point against the backdrop of a wider semiotic concern for reading the whole Bible as a point-counterpoint inter- text. 24 Because attention to biblical genre diversity, according to Ricoeur, is necessary for a multifaceted understanding of the divine life, it follows that assigning privileged status to this or that particular genre threatens to atten out the Bibles overall diversity and its regional zones of indeterminacy and discontinuity. Singular attention to any one discourseincluding legal dis- courseruns the risk of homogenizing the Bibles semantic polyphony. The naming of God, in the originary expressions of faith, is not simple but multiple. It is not a single tone, but polyphonic. The originary expressions of faith are complex forms of discourse [that] name God. But they do so in various ways. 25 It is only as any one biblical genre is interanimated by its 310 Mark I. Wallace Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000. crossfertilizations with the medley of other modes of discourse that the biblical texts effectively make meaning. For Ricoeur, textual revelation is moderated by the play of literary genres. In the case of the Bible, the Bibles different modes of signicationnarra- tives, hymns, wisdom sayings, laws, poems, gospels, apocalyptic writings, and so forthgenerate a surplus of meaning outside the control of any one genre or particular theme. These various forms of articulation are not simply taxonomic devices for categorizing discourse but rather the means by which theological meaning is produced. The literary genres of the Bible do not constitute a rhetorical faade which it would be possible to pull down in order to reveal some thought content that is indifferent to its literary vehicle. 26 The Bibles different registers of discourse are more than just classicatory codes or decorative literary trappings because the content of religious discourse is generated and determined by the literary forms employed to mediate particular theological understandings. Ricoeurs discourse analysis of the Bible seeks to show how the stories and sayings of the Bible are not one-dimensional exercises in coherence but rather multivalent points of intersection for a variety of discourses and their contrasting theological itineraries. From this perspective, the scriptural guration of the divine lifethe phenomenon of revelationis radically problematized by attention to the mixed genres employed by the biblical writers. Throughout these discourses, God appears differently each time: sometimes as the hero of the saving act, sometimes as wrathful and compassionate, sometimes as he to whom one can speak in a relation of an I-Thou type, or sometimes as he whom I meet only in a cosmic order that ignores me. 27 In this approach, the Bible emerges as a polyphonic and heterogeneous intertext of oppositional genresgenres that alternately complement and clash with one anotherrather than a stable book unied by a particular discourse, including prescriptive discourse (pace Levinas). V In closing, I want to reiterate that in spite of the important differences that separate Ricoeur and Levinas from one another on the questions of selfhood, ethics, and hermeneutics, both thinkers, on a level that reects their pro- found admiration for each other, share a deep affinity for preserving the integrity and probity of biblical thought within the context of their respective intellectual projects. Together, both theorists would be equally troubled by a reading of their respective projects as exercises in subordin- ating biblical exegesis to philosophical inquiryfrom phenomenology to scripture, as the rubric for this session announces itself. Instead, both thinkers would insist on holding together philosophy and exegesis in a tensive parity in order to preserve the autonomy of the two disciplinesas well as the possibility for a genuine and mutually corrective dialogue From Phenomenology to Scripture? 311 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000. between them. And yet the important hermeneutical differences between our two thinkers remains. Levinas is clear that as a positioned Jewish reader of the Bible, his goal is faithfully to recover the dynamically open invitation to obedience at the heart of the Biblean invitation that is central to Jewish unity, and has been essential to its preservation, throughout the generations. From the outset Jewish revelation is one of commandment, and piety lies in obedience to it. 28 For Ricoeur, insofar as biblical meaning is never frozen in the text but made in the encounter between text and reader, then a Christian hermeneutic has the understandable right, within its own terms and canons of appropriateness, to subsume legal discourse to a wider con- cern for the panoply of other, nonlegal discourses that generate the surplus of meanings within the biblical texts. The hermeneutical difference between both thinkers is signicant and to some degree irreconcilable but, never- theless, productively illustrative of the equally principled religious locations Jewish and Christian, respectivelyfrom which both philosophers assay the meaning of being summoned by the other to meet our obligations for his or her welfare. NOTES *This essay had its origins in a meeting of the Philosophy of Religion section of the American Academy of Religion in 1997. On account of that meeting, I am grateful to Bob Gibbs, Glenn Whitehouse, Willie Young, and especially Peter Ochs for providing the opportunity to reflect further on the importance of Ricoeurs and Levinass projects for contemporary religious thought. I also want to thank my Swarthmore College colleagues Ellen Ross and Nathaniel Deutsch for their perspicacious insights regarding an earlier draft of this essay. I have kept in this text my references to the topic of that Philosophy of Religion sessionFrom Phenomenology To Scripturein order to preserve the occasional and rhetorical context that gave rise to this essay in the rst place. 1 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, Emerson Buchanan, trans. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 347357. 2 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, Kathleen Blamey, trans. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 2325; cf. Pamela Sue Anderson, Ricoeur and Kant: Philosophy of the Will (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1993), pp. 139. 3 Paul Ricoeur, Philosophy and Religious Language, in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, David Pellauer, trans., and Mark I. Wallace, ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), pp. 3547; cf. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, trans. (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 310. 4 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, p. 355. 5 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 24. 6 Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), pp. 2544. 7 Paul Ricoeur, Naming God in Figuring the Sacred, pp. 217235. 8 Paul Ricoeur, Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation, Harvard Theological Review 70 (1977), pp. 137; cf. James Fodor, Christian Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur and the Reguring of Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 183257. 9 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 148. 10 Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, p. 30. 11 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, pp. 139, 125139, 297356; cf. Paul Ricoeur, Narrative Identity, Philosophy Today 35 (1991), pp. 7381. 312 Mark I. Wallace Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000. 12 Paul Ricoeur, From Metaphysics to Moral Philosophy, Philosophy Today 40 (1996), pp. 453455. 13 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 355. 14 Paul Ricoeur, The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation, in Figuring the Sacred, p. 272. 15 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil; cf. idem, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, Robert Czerny, trans., with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 315322. 16 Paul Ricoeur, The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation, in Figuring the Sacred, p. 267. 17 Emmanuel Levinas, God and Philosophy Richard A. Cohen and Alphonso Lingis, trans., in The Levinas Reader, Sen Hand, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 184. 18 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Alphonso Lingis, trans. (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1991), p. 112. 19 Ibid., p. 114. 20 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 341. 21 Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas: Thinker of Testimony, in Figuring the Sacred, p. 126; bracketed additions are mine. 22 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, pp. 329356. 23 Emmanuel Levinas, Revelation in the Jewish Tradition, in The Levinas Reader, p. 193. 24 Paul Ricoeur, Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Loving Obedience in Andr LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, David Pellauer, trans. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 111119; cf. Mark I. Wallace, The Second Naievet: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1990), pp. 2745. 25 Paul Ricoeur, Naming God in Figuring the Sacred, p. 224. 26 Paul Ricoeur, Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation, p. 25. 27 Paul Ricoeur, Philosophy and Religious Language in Figuring the Sacred, p. 41. 28 Emmanuel Levinas, Revelation in the Jewish Tradition in The Levinas Reader, p. 200. From Phenomenology to Scripture? 313 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000.