Reply to Schrijvers

Abstract

I owe a debt of gratitude to Joeri Schrijvers, who has read and summarised Postmodernity’s Transcending: Devaluing God with such care and sympathy. Albeit that he warns readers of the inevitable truncations and losses of nuance in a summary (and one feels he struggles a bit with Aristotle, but then so too did I), nevertheless, there is no doubt that he has attended to his task in ways that many readers will thank him for. I hope he will therefore set within the context of that gratitude the replies and questions I pose in response to him—that he will see them as provocations, not to his person or his concerns, but to his thinking. Given the care he exercised, and with good knowledge of how well he knows the philosophical currents from out of which the book was drawn, I could not help but ask how he himself understands the questions he poses to me right at the end of his summary as arising from within the text, rather than added on, from outside. In response, one could say, why could a thinker not just ask what he wants to ask? Why should I expect that the questions he poses might arise from out of the central problematic of the book itself? Except that, if the book fulfils what it sets out to do, that is to throw contemporary theological questions into a certain relief, then to fail to ask from out of that relief could be argued as a failure to see the depth of the book’s own critique. Or could it not be that the book itself fails in its own task? Indeed it could, but even here surely, the questions should point to that failure and illustrate it, rather than be added in from a general perspective...