Nicholas Adams, Habermas and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2006), ix + 267 Pps., $33.99.
Nicholas Adams is Lecturer in Theology and Ethics at the University of Edinburgh. He contributed to Fields of Faith (2005) and The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner (2005). In this book Nicholas Adams shows the importance of Habermas’ approaches to the question of how the world’s religious traditions can debate within the public sphere. The full range of Habermas’ work is considered by Adams, and he includes detailed commentary on difficult texts. Adams unabashedly rebuts some of Habermas’ arguments, particularly those which postulate the irrationality of religious thought. This study is neither a defense of Habermas nor another critique of his work. Rather, this study takes seriously Habermas’ claims about the public sphere and the need for genuine argumentation across traditions, and tries to repair his theory where he thinks it fails. His argument is that Habermas is too positive about religion because he is too ignorant of theology, and that being more circumspect about the difference between ‘mythic’ and ‘modern’ thought removes the need for moral theory to be post-religious.
Adams argues that rather than suspending their deep reasoning to facilitate debate, as Habermas suggests, adherents to particular religious traditions must make their reasoning public. According to Adams, Habermas overestimates the stability of religious traditions. Within this title, Adams summarizes Habermas’ arguments, making his complex reasonings accessible to the masses. Thereby, Adams allows readers with no background in the German philosophical tradition to understand the main issues of it. In what follows, salient points of the book shall be highlighted.
According to Adams, religion plays a curious role in Habermas’ theory. Indeed, Habermas both values it and distances himself from it. He values it as the bearer of cultural life; he distances himself from it because it ‘grip’ on its adherents undermines human autonomy. Adams asserts that Habermas’ critics are wrong to think that he is too troubled by tradition, for he instead views religious traditions with a sort of alienated detachment (12). Adams argues that Habermas has many theological blind-spots, and that therefore using him as a constructive dialogue partner in Christian theology is problematic. Adams contends that ‘religion’ and ‘theology’ are causal victims of Habermas’ remarks regarding tradition. To understand what Habermas states regarding religion, Adams asserts, one needs to interpret his remarks in the context of his arguments about rationality and secularization.
Adams’ text has two main tasks, as he outlines in chapter one: to describe Habermas’ approach to religion and theology, and to make a proposal of an alternative to his theory of communicative action. Adams titles his alternative ‘scriptural reasoning’, for it connects the two tasks of religion and theology. Very little attention, it should be noted, is given to the usage of Habermas by contemporary theologians within this title. However, Adams is adamant in positing that post-liberal and post-metaphysical theology should be encouraged with what philosophy might offer to theology via Habermas.
In chapter two, Adams examines the issues of the ideal speech situation in detail, showing Habermas’ proximity to and distance from Christian eschatology. Within chapter three, Adams considers the question of authority and tradition, and compares Habermas with Gadamer regarding his stance on ‘distance’ and ‘reflection’. A reconstruction of Habermas’ understanding of the relationship between archaic religious practice and modern motivational deficits is undertaken in chapter four. Adams therein contends that Habermas’ account is idiosyncratic and simplistic. Chapter five rehearses some of Habermas’ defense of universalism, and poses a challenge to Habermas’ Hegelianism regarding the subject. Chapter six reviews Habermas’ engagement with the Marxist ontology of peace and draws attention to his substantial agreement with theology. The seventh chapter critiques Habermas’ equation of ‘religious’ with ‘mythic’, and chapter eight examines the relationship between ‘religions’ and ‘metaphysical’ accounts of the same.
Chapter nine deals with Habermas’ principal arguments against theologians. Overall, the central chapters deal with Habermas’ view of religion and theology, and expose problems with it. Although Adams critiques Habermas extensively, he nonetheless contends that it is possible to learn from him the importance of keeping questions regarding the public sphere of religion in mind when dealing with metaphysical questions, while at the same time being careful not to confuse these two issues. Notably, chapter eleven offers an alternative to Habermas’ theory of communicative action: scriptural reasoning, which is the practice of members of different religious traditions reading scripture together. In this chapter, the highlight of the text, Adams asserts that different religious traditions can read others’ texts as genuinely sacred versus merely juxtaposing them as rival narratives. He avers, with presumed support from Habermas, that such a practice could be vital to healing religious divisions in the public sphere. All in all, this is a profitable read, and is to be recommended for those who have interest in hermeneutics.
Bradford McCall
Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA