Editorial Introduction to the Topical Issue “Existential and Phenomenological Conceptions of the Relationship Between Philosophy and Theology”

Ever since Dominique Janicaud observed with dismay that French phenomenology had taken a theological turn,1 the issue of how the distinct disciplines of philosophy and theology relate to one another has been the topic of a heated contemporary debate. The discussion has descended into a somewhat ugly polemic, not helped by the tone of Janicaud’s opening salvo—which Jean-Luc Marion has described, not unfairly, as “more virulent than argued.”2 The intellectual “decadence” Merleau-Ponty complained about in his “In Praise of Philosophy” then still seems to be very much in place today when it comes to whether the consideration of the divine or the religious dimension is philosophy’s highest fulfilment by going to the root of what it means to philosophise (a position suspiciously often articulated by confessional thinkers), or rather its unwarranted theologisation by way of a neglect of the methodological atheism that is seen as essential to what it means to truly think (a position suspiciously often articulated by atheist thinkers): “For to philosophize is to seek, and this is to imply that there are things to see and to say. Well, today we no longer seek,” Merleau-Ponty concludes. Instead, “we ‘return’ to one or the other of our traditions and ‘defend’ it. Our convictions are founded less on perceived values and truths than on the vices and errors of those we do not like. We love very few things, though we dislike many. Our thinking is a thought in retreat or in reply.”3 To those of faith, the temptation is sometimes to reduce “philosophy, when it is not theological, (...) to the negation of God,”4 precisely because finally the opportunity to establish the divine within the bounds of the Concept seems to present itself again; whilst those who lack faith get caught in a cruel irony when they elevate their own perspective on things to the transcendental one, precisely because “one bypasses philosophy when one defines it as atheism. This is philosophy as it is seen by the theologian.”5 Nevertheless, and disregarding the spirit in which it was made, we do agree with Janicaud’s essential point that philosophy (phenomenology) and theology make two. The question, however, is what exactly this means.

Ever since Dominique Janicaud observed with dismay that French phenomenology had taken a theological turn,1 the issue of how the distinct disciplines of philosophy and theology relate to one another has been the topic of a heated contemporary debate. The discussion has descended into a somewhat ugly polemic, not helped by the tone of Janicaud's opening salvo-which Jean-Luc Marion has described, not unfairly, as "more virulent than argued."2 The intellectual "decadence" Merleau-Ponty complained about in his "In Praise of Philosophy" then still seems to be very much in place today when it comes to whether the consideration of the divine or the religious dimension is philosophy's highest fulfilment by going to the root of what it means to philosophise (a position suspiciously often articulated by confessional thinkers), or rather its unwarranted theologisation by way of a neglect of the methodological atheism that is seen as essential to what it means to truly think (a position suspiciously often articulated by atheist thinkers): "For to philosophize is to seek, and this is to imply that there are things to see and to say. Well, today we no longer seek," Merleau-Ponty concludes. Instead, "we 'return' to one or the other of our traditions and 'defend' it. Our convictions are founded less on perceived values and truths than on the vices and errors of those we do not like. We love very few things, though we dislike many. Our thinking is a thought in retreat or in reply."3 To those of faith, the temptation is sometimes to reduce "philosophy, when it is not theological, (…) to the negation of God,"4 precisely because finally the opportunity to establish the divine within the bounds of the Concept seems to present itself again; whilst those who lack faith get caught in a cruel irony when they elevate their own perspective on things to the transcendental one, precisely because "one bypasses philosophy when one defines it as atheism. This is philosophy as it is seen by the theologian."5 Nevertheless, and disregarding the spirit in which it was made, we do agree with Janicaud's essential point that philosophy (phenomenology) and theology make two. The question, however, is what exactly this means.
We have set out to collect the following essays on existential and phenomenological conceptions of the relationship between philosophy and theology in an attempt to bring nuance to this debate: recognising both that there must be a real difference between the two, without being naïve about their equally real entanglement, or foreclosing the possibility that philosophers might be able to learn something from theologians and vice versa. By specifying that the conceptions presented here are existential and phenomenological, we hope to indicate that, rather than being questions of disciplinary boundaries within academic institutions or distinct modes of thought (faith or reason), the relationship between philosophy and theology first of all concerns the issues of existence and experience: what is at stake is how we live our lives in the world and how the world is disclosed to us in doing so.
As a result, we are navigating treacherous waters here-that of our experience as human beings to which our intellectual constructions must be able to do justice. What we find, then, is that there is real seeing differently: what forms the saturated phenomenon of Revelation for the person of faith, might strike the atheist as nothing but the most ordinary and everyday of experiences.6 The challenge of phenomenology is not to dismiss any seeing differently as inauthentic, or an exercise in bad faith, but rather to be able to account for it in terms of different lives lived in different ways. In grappling with this challenge, Janicaud's blanket refusal to allow the divine to become the subject of a phenomenology is as unhelpful as Marion or Michel Henry's identification of the phenomenon of Revelation with the general structure of phenomenality as such. Against Janicaud, we must maintain that if someone claims to actually have had a particular religious experience it must at least in principle be available for phenomenological analysis precisely because "it belongs essentially to phenomenology that the a posteriori render it possible and therefore that no a priori prohibition predetermine it."7 However, against the authors of the theological turn, we must equally maintain Janicaud's valid frustration: "But in virtue of what experience?"8 In virtue of what experience is the phenomenon of Revelation declared to be universal and unconditional (for everyone), which is not the same as simply actual (for someone), given that that experience in fact does not seem to be universally shared and can therefore not be unconditional. In placing the theological at the heart of the philosophical or the phenomenological, we risk losing touch with the language that makes our statements understandable on a basis other than faith.
If the theologisation of philosophy is to be avoided for fear of no longer addressing ourselves to all, on the basis of a human life lived in the world; the exclusion of theology from thought is equally to be avoided for fear of forgetting, as Pascal constantly reminds us, that "man infinitely transcends man, and that without the aid of faith he would remain inconceivable to himself."9 Human life in the world is precisely that gesture in which the human being gains an awareness of the fact that it does not coincide with itself but is always exposed to an excess, a dimension which theology perhaps opens up to us most clearly: "the human being," as Heidegger writes, "is a creature of distance,"10 one that never coincides with itself but is in its very being exposed and open. Philosophical analysis, be it existential or phenomenological, is never complete-precisely that which renders it possible, the finitude of which all experience is a function, is also that which ensures that what reveals itself in experience at the same time conceals itself in it.
None of this is to say that theology completes philosophy; rather, what we seek to make felt in this special issue is how philosophy can be, as Emmanuel Falque has framed it,11 transformed by its encounter with theology (as with its encounter with any other discipline). By opening it up to its own blind spots, theology allows philosophy to come to itself anew, in a different way, from a different perspective. After all, as Merleau-Ponty reminds us, "the philosopher must bear his shadow," by which he means that "what resists phenomenology within us-natural being, the 'barbarous' source Schelling spoke of-cannot remain outside phenomenology and should have its place within it."12 We do not have to be Spinoza to see that the same here goes for the question of God. As a result, we hope that these essays might illustrate what Falque calls the principle of proportionality, which states that "the more we theologize, the better we philosophize."13 Namely, showing how philosophy might be transformed by its encounter with theology, insofar as that encounter exposes it to what it leaves unthought and perhaps even that which it indeed cannot think; whilst at the same time acknowledging that bad philosophy results in bad theology, which becomes meaningless if it does not articulate itself in a conceptuality that does justice to how we experience the world in our human lives within it. In this debate, as in all thought and experience, we ought to admit, as Kierkegaard reminds us time and time again, that all thinking, but perhaps also all experiencing, "must correspond to the form of existence."14 Given that we live our lives in different ways, and that we therefore experience the world in different ways, the question of the relationship between philosophy and theology becomes one of negotiating that difference in form.
Demonstrating this negotiation of differences, the papers compiled in this special issue each call attention to the existential and experiential stakes of this debate by engaging with a wide range of thinkers and themes within the existential and phenomenological traditions: In his paper "Epistemically Living in the Existential Margins: Reflections on the Relationship Between Philosophy and Theology", Aaron Simmons defends the need to view the relationship between philosophy and theology as existential, by arguing for the upholding of an epistemic distinction between philosophy and theology in order to reflect the existential reality of a plurality of loyalties in our lived existence. Renxiang Liu's paper "Sartre's Godless Theology: Dualist Monism and Its Temporal Dimensions" underlines the long-lasting and unavoidable entanglement between philosophy and theology through its exploration of Sartre's ontology as a godless theology.
Our own papers highlight two different approaches to the distinction between philosophy and theology outlined in the thought of respectively Søren Kierkegaard and Rudolf Bultmann. Elizabeth Li's paper, "Kierkegaard's Existential Conception of the Relationship between Philosophy and Christianity," offers an exegesis of Kierkegaard's existentially informed commitment to maintaining the incommensurability of philosophy and Christianity. Nikolaas Deketelaere's paper, "The Event of Faith: The Transformation of Philosophy by Theology in Rudolf Bultmann," suggests that Bultmann reconfigures Martin Heidegger's conception of the relationship between philosophy and theology by thinking of this relationship in terms of the transformation of philosophy by theology, and thereby seeks to show how Bultmann's theology can be used to address contemporary French phenomenologist critiques of the early Heidegger's method.
Taking freedom as his starting point, Raul-Ovidiu Bodea brings to the fore how Nikolai Berdyaev perceives both a strong distinction and dynamic interplay between philosophy and theology: only a theologically informed account of freedom could do justice to this concept, whilst philosophy's task is to provide an existential account of it and to reject erroneous views of freedom.
Barnabas Asprey considers Paul Ricoeur's attempt to balance and remain faithful to both philosophical and theological discourse. His paper, "'No One Can Serve Two Masters': The Unity of Philosophy and Theology in Ricoeur's Early Thought," brings out how this pursuit was both deeply personal and intellectually central in early writings by Ricoeur, not yet translated into English.
Andrew Sackin-Poll, meanwhile, reflects on the relationship between phenomenology and theology by seeking to resolve what he identifies as an ambivalence and indecision at the heart of Michel Henry's phenomenological ontology of life. In his article, "Michel Henry and Metaphysics: An Expressive Ontology," he does so by bringing out more clearly how the living self's relation to God exists in a dynamic life in flux.
Through a comparison of Barth and Marion's appeal to revelation to curb what they interpret as philosophy's coercion of thought, Kristóf Oltvai, in his paper "Another Name for Liberty: Revelation, 'Objectivity,' and Intellectual Freedom in Barth and Marion," seeks to demonstrate how a concept of revelation drawn from Christian theology can in fact secure philosophy's right to challenge and critique what is pre-given.
Finally, we would like to thank Open Theology's Managing Editor Dr. Katarzyna Tempczyk for her tireless efforts and invaluable expertise in putting this special issue together.