Modern Theology 16:3 July 2000

ISSN 0266-7177

FROM PHENOMENOLOGY TO
SCRIPTURE? PAUL RICOEURS
HERMENEUTICAL PHILOSOPHY
OF RELIGION*
MARK I. WALLACE
Paul Ricoeurs and Emmanuel Levinass writings are a rich source for
biblically-nuanced philosophical reflection on the question of the mandated
self in relation to others. Former colleagues at the University of ParisNanterre, 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 difficulties 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 significantly differentscriptural
account of selfhood.
Nodding to Ricoeur, the trajectory of the paper will be to consider first 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 responsibility 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
Mark I. Wallace
Department of Religion, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081, USA
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Mark I. Wallace

being summoned to its responsibilities, on the one hand, and the hermeneutical 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 finally 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 first
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. Hermeneutical philosophy and biblical interpretationthese two tasks constitute 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 interpenetrated 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 inheritance 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 finally, 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 figurative 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 verifies the claim that a
scripturally refigured self is the crown of a life well lived in relation to self
and others.
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From Phenomenology to Scripture? 303

As a philosopher and interpreter of the Bible, it might appear, then, at
least at first 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 reflections 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 verification 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 conflict between the
faculties of theology and philosophy by erecting a rigid partition between
the two disciplines: even as philosophy should be conceived as an autonomous, agnostic field 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 reflective analysis while theology functions as living testimony to
the possibilities of biblical faith without the pseudo-security of a metaphysical 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 explication 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 flight within the fullness of ones symbolically-rich and textuallymediated 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
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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 first
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 first 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 explicate 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 philosophical problemsincluding the overall problem of the selfare motivated 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 mistake 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 willingness 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 possibilities 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
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the medley of diverse genres the biblical texts actually name God and offer
the reader different models of apprenticeship to the God variously identified
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 figurative
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 Reflections 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 meaningincluding Ricoeur, but Thiemann and Jngel also come to mind in this
veinWolterstorffs distinctive contribution to this discussion is his controversial 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 discourse 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
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the author; rather Ricoeur has sought painstakingly to situate his approach
between two poles: the intentional fallacy, which holds the authors intention 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 finite 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-andtake 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 presume that God speaks through the biblical textsa presumption well
defended by Wolterstorffthere is always some slippage between the intentions of the texts divine author and the genre-saturated signifiers that
mediate this intention. All discourse, including divine discourse, is never
fully transparent upon divine intentions but is always already interpenetrated 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
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From Phenomenology to Scripture? 307

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 fundamental discontinuity of the self with itself. For Ricoeur, the self is permanently other to itself because, contrary to Descartes, the self is not a fixed
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 philosophers (for example, Derik Parfit), who also criticize Cartesian essentialism, 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 fixed entity, discursive construct, 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 forum of 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 flesh 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 disciplines of religious studies and philosophy upon one another, he does not
object to borrowing concepts from one domain in order to illuminate problems
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within the discourse of the other field 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 identifies conscience as the inner chamber where
the divine mandate is heard and understood. In the interior voice of obligation, 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. Conscience is thus the anthropological presupposition without which justification 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 reflects 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 definitively 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 throughout these texts. In exegeting the Abrahamic/Mosaic response here I am,
Ricoeur writes, I see, for my part, in this figure of a summoned subject a
paradigm that the Christian community, following the Jewish community,
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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 separates 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 unfulfillable 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 first place. Pace
Levinas, Ricoeur asks, Would the self be a result [of its assignment to take
responsibility for the other] if it were not first 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 selfesteemhas its origin in my self-reflexive 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 correlative 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
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IV
This disagreement over the question of the mandated self reflects the different 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 centripetal focus of the scriptures. In his comments, after registering his appreciation 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 firmly as in the pellucid classification we
have been offered. Prescriptive lessonsfound especially in the Pentateuch, the part of the Torah known as the Torah of Mosesoccupy a
privileged position within Jewish consciousness, as far as the relationship 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 biblical genres. To be sure, Ricoeurs biblical discourse analysis is acutely aware
of the function of prescriptive discourse in summoning the self to its responsibilities. But Ricoeur makes this point against the backdrop of a wider
semiotic concern for reading the whole Bible as a point-counterpoint intertext.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 flatten
out the Bibles overall diversity and its regional zones of indeterminacy and
discontinuity. Singular attention to any one discourseincluding legal discourseruns 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
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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 significationnarratives, 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
classificatory 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
figuration 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 unified
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 reflects their profound 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 subordinating 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
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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 concern for the panoply of other, nonlegal discourses that generate the surplus
of meanings within the biblical texts. The hermeneutical difference between
both thinkers is significant and to some degree irreconcilable but, nevertheless, 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 first 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
Refiguring of Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 183257.
9 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections 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.
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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.

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