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Hi, I'm Luke Breverton, Director of the McDonald's Center for Theology, Ethics and Public Life. Welcome to this podcast, which is part of an occasional series from the McDonald Center that explores one of the oldest and most urgent questions we face today. What does it mean to be human? At a time marked by political polarization, religious conflict, rapid technological change, and renewed debates about identity and belonging. Ideas about humanity itself are being contested. Who counts as fully human? What do we owe one another? And can we still speak meaningfully about a shared humanity in a deeply divided world? These episodes address these questions. They're drawn from a major international conference that brought together scholars, religious leaders, and practitioners to explore the idea of religious humanism, particularly within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Far from being simply a secular idea, humanism has its roots in religious traditions, and these in turn have inspired movements for abolition, humanitarianism, civil rights, democratic renewal, and reconciliation. Across the series, we explore how different traditions have imagined the human person, how those visions have shaped public life, and whether religious forms of humanism might offer resources for addressing some of the most pressing ethical and political challenges of our time. At its heart, this podcast asks a simple but profound question. In an age of fragmentation and fear. What kinds of ideas, practices, and communities can help us build a more humane, just, and generous form of common life together? We're glad you're here. We hope you enjoy this episode.

SPEAKER_05 2:12

It is now my absolute pleasure to introduce Randy Rashkover. Randy is the Nathan and Sophia Gumenek Chair of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Judaic Studies at William and Mary. Her areas of expertise include Jewish philosophy, Jewish Christian comparative theology, Jewish political thought, and philosophy of religion. Time doesn't permit me today to talk about all of the extraordinary energy and insight and brilliance she brings to Jewish thought and to theology more generally, especially in North America. And we really are delighted to have you here. I want to mention a few of Professor Rashkover's books. First, um, Revelation and Theopolitics, Art Rosenzweig, and the Politics of Praise in 2005. In 2011, Freedom and Law, A Jewish Christian Apologetics, and Forthcoming, A Hot Off the Press, Nature and Norm, Judy Judaism, Christianity, and Theopolitical Problem. There are two new books that we look forward to reading and receiving. First, Judaism, Tradition and Continuity, a Philosophical Perspective, and The Akeida Theology and Its Limits. Please join me in welcoming Professor Rashkover.

SPEAKER_04 3:40

Thank you, Hindi. Thank you so much. So it is really, really lovely to be here. And Sarah just walked in, and that makes it all better. It's lovely to be here in Oxford. For years I went to Cambridge over and over again, and um I got yelled at all the time for walking on the grass. I I didn't realize one day I was sitting there and I was having a cup of coffee, and it was in the days where I was smoke a cigarette, and I was sitting there on, you know, in the grass, you know, having a cup of coffee and whatever, and then I was told, you know, politely that I wasn't supposed to, but nobody's yelled at me here in Oxford yet. So I feel it's it's very nice. Anyway, um it's it's wonderful to be here. Um thank you, uh Hindi. It was good to hear about your work. I'm really thrilled uh to be here, mostly uh because of Luke. Um I'm really excited about what Luke's trying to do here, and I want to learn more about it, and and I'm proud of you. And uh we all sort of knew that Luke had to leave the United States and come back at some point. So couldn't be a better place for him to come back to. So the the title of the talk's changed a little bit, but who cares? Okay, so uh the theme of the conference is fortuitous for me because a lot of my work in the past, oh, this is gonna be a little, this you're gonna suffer through this paper, sorry. So the theme of the conference is rather fortuitous for me because a lot of my work in the past two years has been devoted, oh, sorry, that's Leora Batnitsky, turn that off. Um has been devoted to developing new orientations to standard questions of truth, revelation, and human problem solving in relation to matters of Jewish theology and Jewish Christian theological relations. Indeed, the catalyst and the outcome of this new orientation is what we might refer to as a new humanism. In my talk today, I'm going to introduce us to this new humanism through a reconstruction of the state of Jewish Christian theological work. So, it's widely recognized, of course, that a new chapter in Jewish-Christian theological relations emerged in the wake of the Holocaust and Vatican II. Even so, critical point number one, these developments have been frequently accompanied by an anxiety over what is the perceived to be a tension between Jewish Christian exchange and the stability of each tradition. A classic statement of this anxiety appears in my uh my beloved Dr. Vatter's uh David Novak's article, a very famous article, Supersessionism Hard and Soft, that was published in First Things in 219. By supersessionism, Novak doesn't simply refer to the Christian notion that, quote, the Christian church has superseded the Jewish people, assuming their role is God's covenanted people, Israel, unquote. But David refers to the idea of supersession as the broader philosophical notion that one tradition holds absolute truth claims that invalidate another. Nonetheless, David maintains that there are two forms of supersessionism. The first he calls hard supersessionism, which consists of external attempts to convert Jews by Christians, or on the Jewish side, the Jewish indifference or outright dismissal of Christianity as a form of paganism. So he's not proven, he's not excluding supersessionism as being something that both Jewish and Christian traditions do vis-a-each. The second form of supersession he labels soft supersessionism, which refers to modes of Jewish or Christian engagement with the other that maintain confidence in the unique and unrivaled truth of each tradition's respective revelation and accompanying norms, but identify theological conditions that permit or encourage positive engagement or dialogue with the other. For example, the Christian appeal to the Pauline notion of God's eschatological treatment of the Jews maintains the absolute theological difference between Judaism and Christianity, but opens possibilities for Christians to let Jews take the wheel, if you will, when it comes to Jews, such that contemporary Christians need not actively pursue their conversion. Most significantly, important point, next important point, Novak rejects hard supersessionism, but he accepts forms of soft supersessionism. Here's his fundamental claim. Both Christians and Jews should reject forms of hard supersessionism, he argues. Why? Because we live in times when they have to combine forces in their fight against secularism. Christians should no longer seek to missionize Jews, and Jews should recognize Christians as monotheists and allies in their effort to, quote, confront a common enemy, militant secularism, unquote. Indeed, it's this practical endeavor coupled with an appreciation of a range of common moral norms, natural laws, that constitute the heart of contemporary Jewish-Christian relations in Novak's work. If, however, Novak promotes Jewish-Christian dialogue for the purpose of A, appreciating shared natural law, and b combating secularism, he also insists that such a relation does not, and indeed should not, threaten each tradition's right to maintain the absolute validity of their revelatory tradition over and against the other. Even an active Jewish Christian dialogue needs, in his view, to retain some degree of soft supersessionism, since otherwise, he argues, the absolute validity of each tradition's revelatory tradition is in question, and the ongoing motivation of its adherence is at risk. As he states, I won't read the whole quote, but a complete denial of supersessionism leaves Christians, you have to listen to the arguments, leaves Christians unable to affirm Christianity as having brought something new and fuller to the ancient covenant between God and Israel. Without some kind of supersessionism, Christians have no cogent reason for not going back to their Jewish origins. Without some kind of supersessionism on our part, Jews like me, David says, would have no cogent reason for not going forward into what Christians regard as Judaism's fulfillment, unquote. Without maintenance of some appeal to the absolute validity of one's revelatory tradition, adherents engaged in Jewish-Christian encounters run the risk of undermining the grounds for their commitment to their own tradition. While David concedes that Judaism and Christianity both recognize the revelatory significance of the Hebrew scriptures, for example, they disagree regarding the normative interpretation of this text. And as he explains, these interpretations and the normative worldviews they generate, and here's another telling quote, are not, David says, the kind of differences where it can be said, you have your truth and we have ours. Rather, these are differences that concern the ultimate level of truth corresponding to ultimate reality. They concern our relationship to God. Here, the difference between Judaism and Christianity is the starkest. It's a matter of either or. I'll leave the quote there. A Jewish-Christian dialogue that aspires to complete dissolution of supersessionism inevitably works against the interest of each tradition. This is David's argument, and a soft supersessionist position of some desirable sort constitutes a necessary condition of Jewish Christian engagement. To his credit, David recognizes that as human beings, our assertions concerning absolute truth are always qualified by God's eschatological prerogative. Even so, and ironically, Novak does not appeal to the ultimate eschatologically determined finitude of human assertions as his primary point of orientation for JC relations, but rather to the contemporary battle between Judaism, Christianity, and secularism, and what is his insistence on their soft supersessionist position with regard to each other. Today I want to offer a review of this widely held theophilosophical precision from the perspective of an account of the fallibility of our claims about revealed traditions. From here, I'm going to illuminate a picture of Jewish-Christian relations that entirely offsets the assumptions and the anxiety at work in David's account. For our purposes, I'm going to provide two angles on the fallibility question. One is Peter Oakes' and one is mine, even if the two are very similar. Let's start with Peter's. In an article entitled Domains, Normativity and Normativity Across Domains, a very good friend of all of ours, Susanna Ticciati, offers the following description of Peter's account of scriptural revelation. So this is Susanna describing Peter's account of revelation. Peter, she says, distinguishes in rabbinic terms between the will of the absolute as displayed in the plain sense of scripture, but only indeterminately, and the determinate meanings that are arrived at by historically specific communities of readers. For finite creatures, only the latter have truth values. In another Reformation, that's one of Peter's books that Susanna's referring to, Peter clarifies, we may declare, we have heard directly from the one whose word is true universally, yes indeed. But we are not the ones to articulate the universality of this word, unquote from Susanna. Here Susanna uses the term indeterminate to describe Peter's account of how the will of the absolute is presented in scriptural revelation. Peter, often pulling from purse, uses the term vague. A vague concept is one whose full meaning is reliant upon its determination across a range of possible contexts. Thus, in Oakes' view, scriptural revelation, this is the key point coming out of Peter. Thus, in Oakes' view, scriptural revelation is not a set of truth claims, but formally speaking, a condition of the possibility of the human determinant of truth claims. In this case, truth claims generated through processes of scriptural exegesis and interpretation, not that different from what Hindi was just saying. As such, for Peter, the wisdom of the text is not therefore synonymous with the truth claims that we formulate, but with the text's ability to foster our hermeneutical attempts to formulate them. Moreover, human determination of vague claims into truth-determinate claims is always a context-conditioned activity. As finite creatures, human beings develop assertoric propositions, that is to say, determinations concerning what we take to be the case or not to be the case. We make assertoric propositions about what we know within the limits of our affinitude, our physical, historical, political, economic particularity, and location. Thus, truth claims, or in this case, exegetical determinations of scripture's contents are features of human life and not features of scriptural revelation itself, and as such are inevitably finite or fallible. There is no such thing, this is one of the really nice uh claims that you get out of Peter, there's no such thing in Peter's account of an absolute truth claim, or at least not one that we as human beings can access or lay claim to. Absolute truth, to the extent that there is any, is simply not tantamount to our conception of and ways of handling what we call truth. Certainly one might wonder why for Peter scriptural polyvalence registers as wisdom and not simply as possibility. To speak of a scriptural tradition as sacred for him is to speak of how it operates as a catalyst for the human development of ways of life that promote human flourishing and respond to human suffering. And here's the fundamental claim vis-a-vis the conversation with David. As such, Peter does not worry about threats to Judaism's continuity or Christianity's continuity. And this is not because, like David or others, he finds refuge in absolute assertions of the absolute validity of revelation, but because Peter has confidence in the wisdom afforded by these traditions, as his wisdom is articulated in the form of living habits, theoretical and practical, that promote human flourishing and repair human alienation in the created order. Note, Peter's claim that truth claims concerning revelation are a human enterprise does not mean, and this is an important point for those of you who are interested in Rosenzweig, if there's any Rosenzweigans out there, Peter's claim that truth claims concerning revelation are a human enterprise does not mean that revelation is non-propositional or beyond propositionality. Such a move would render Peter's view vulnerable to charges of what I elsewhere call arbitrary anchoring or an expression of what I call an appeal to a more that's devoid of any humanly derived meaning. Peter's view, if you didn't catch that, you can follow this sentence. Peter's view is not that revelation is non-propositionalizable, but that it's only propositionalizable through finite human determinations. As promised, I'd like to offer a second angle from which we can appreciate the fallibility of claims regarding revelatory traditions and from which we may find relief from the kind of anxiety regarding Jewish-Christian relations that accompanies Novak's account. So again, Novak's telling us that we've got to have some soft supersessionism in Jewish Christian relations. Jewish Christian relations mean that we have to harbor some kind of fidelity to the absolute validity of our claims, because if we don't have some degree of supersessionism, then we won't have, he says, any reason to sustain our commitment to our claims. That's the anxiety that folks like Novak and a whole, it's a very common position. And so I'm trying to show you that we don't have to have that anxiety, and therefore getting rid of supersessionism is surely something that only we can, not only we can do, but something that we must do or that we're going to benefit from doing when we engage in Jewish Christian relations. So, um, as noted above, Novak presupposes, so here's me just saying what I just said. Um, Novak above presupposes that the recourse to the absolute validity, the supersessionism of one's religious position is a necessary feature of Jewish Christian engagement because without it, the engagement threatens to promote syncretism or relativism. As we've seen, Oakes would suggest that this anxiety is misplaced. Both Peter and I will maintain that neither Jews nor Christians need to fear the dissolution of supersessionism. Oaks maintains that revelatory traditions just aren't the kinds of things that one can be supersessionist about. I'll claim that even if Peter is right, that they're not the kinds of things that one could be supersessionist about, that a lot of human beings are fully capable of presenting them as such. But that the E's efforts are ideological, but here's the fundamental point, ultimately self-destructive for the members of both traditions. So I'm going to argue that recognition of the fallibility of revelatory claims is actually a condition of those traditions' own continuity, such that what adherents should fear most is not the dissolution of supersession, but its retention in any form. That is to say, adherents of these traditions should themselves be concerned with the retention of supersessionism because I'm going to argue it threatens their own continuity. The central contention of the analysis is that claims must be fallible to be true. By this I mean that the determination of a claim as true is the determination of it as true. A true claim undergoes a test or is a claim that's accompanied by an account of what makes it true. But a claim that's true in so far as it's accompanied by such an account is conditionally true or fallible. While this may at first seem counterintuitive, it's not hard to see that the assertion of a claim is true without an account of what makes it true is vulnerable to the skeptic who asks, how do you know that this is always the case, that uh X is true? How is this different from Y? In response to which the respondent would need to provide an account to preserve the integrity of the claim. Mine is such an account, the skeptic can justifiably accuse the claimant of irrationality, dogmatism, or both. Thus, a true claim is only true and neither arbitrary nor dogmatic by virtue of its fallibility. When Novak argues in favor of supersessionism as a philosophical position, he argues in favor of the absolute validity of revelatory claims. Thus, by supersessionism, he doesn't mean to refer to the truth of the tradition or its claims, since such a position would permit the possibility of an argument for or against it. This is something that McIntyre understands. That's not here, but somebody mentioned McIntyre, I'm sorry. Rather, as noted above, he appeals to the absolute validity of his tradition since he claims without it the Jew would have no reason to remain a Jew and the Christian no reason to remain a Christian. Apparently, either David A. does not want Jewish-Christian relations to be exercises in the advancement of strong reasons in favor. Of the truth of one or the other's positions. Maybe he doesn't want that kind of Jewish-Christian dialogue. Or B, and I think this is probably more likely the claim, David doesn't see how Jewish-Christian relations could be an exercise. He can't imagine what kinds of reasons each might bring to the table. I.e., he doesn't think that the truth of a revelatory tradition is the kind of truth for which there could be reasons. In either case, he holds that only an appeal to absolute validity, the untested, unaccounted for validity of the revelatory tradition can secure adherence. Thus, when Novak asserts the absolute validity of one's respective traditions, he takes the question of this validity off the table and instead suggests that revelatory tradition is not only absolute true, but the ground or the standard of what constitutes truth and falsehood at all. While Novak concedes that within this framework, a tradition posits, so this is an important point. While Novak concedes that within this framework, a tradition can posit true or false claims, and a tradition can foster its own internal arguments with regard to the truth and falsehood of particular claims. His position implies that these true and false claims are fallible only in relation to each other and can only be critiqued by adherents who sustain a shared assumption regarding the absolute validity of the revelatory tradition and not by critics outside of this framework. While at first glance, such a view seems to resemble Peter's account of how religious tradition functions, it differs in one crucial respect, which I'm sure now you can see. Novak's support of soft supersessionism indicates that his revelatory tradition is absolutely valid, while Peter maintains that scriptural revelations are not the kinds of things about which one says that they're true or not, since the language of truth is ours and as such always fallible. Okay, so that's them. To appreciate the philosophical problems associated with the appeals to absolute validity of foundational claims, we can refer to Leo Strauss's analysis of the irrationality of the modern scientific position. So here I'm invoking Strauss because he offers a very, very nice critique of the philosophical problem of the appeal to absolute validity. The example he's going to use is going to be the Enlightenment, but we can apply it to any philosophical position that appeals to a claim of absolute validity. In his 1935 text, Philosophy and Law, Strauss argues that the Enlightenment's claim to monopolize truth vis-a-vis the success of natural science can be traced back to Spinoza's account of the human knowledge of nature and his robust critique of revelation and miracles. But Strauss argues, and it's interesting when you get a philosopher like Strauss critiquing the rationality of science, in this case, Spinozistic grounds of science, but it will be science, modern science in a certain capacity. Strauss argues that Spinoza's scientific denial of the possibility of miracles only succeeds if one takes for granted the exclusive logical validity of scientific knowledge. To be convincing, Strauss says, Spinoza's critique of miracles and revelation would have to, quote, depend on metaphysical support or on an account of how scientific knowledge alone adequately and absolutely refers to how things are. Spinoza doesn't provide such a metaphysical account, Strauss says, but merely assumes the self-evidence of naturalistic criteria. He permits his argument to rest on unargued premises and refuses to engage with possible challenges to his position. What had been an account of the truth of natural science, thereby, Strauss says, degenerates into an absolutism that neglects the skeptic's challenge and undermines its own claims to knowledge. In philosophy and law, Strauss attributes the same pattern to the modern enlightenment more generally. There he argues that, like Spinoza, modern Enlightenment thinkers refuse to quarrel with orthodoxy and insist that natural science's practical successes signal its absolute epistemic superiority in relation to revelation. If, however, the Enlightenment's tendency toward epistemic absolutism had its modern roots in Spinoza, Strauss asserts that its foundational inspiration is, and I debated taking this out, but I didn't, asserts that its foundational inspiration is in Catholicism's identification between reason and revelation. Easily misunderstood, Strauss's critique of tomastic scholasticism is not a call for an absolute severance between theology and revelation. You'll hear the point in a second. It's not the relation between reason and revelation that worries Strauss, but the identification of the two as absolute that worries him, and which he thinks filters down to the modern enlightenment. Okay, so a willful, so like its scholastic forebearer, the modern enlightenment refuses to recognize its own limits, this is Strauss's fundamental point, and refuses to concede the prospect of falsification. You're going to apply all of this to Judaism and Christianity in a second. A willful rejection of the prospect of new information of data that might alter its account of truth, Strauss says. The Enlightenment position is anti-scientific and leads to the devolution of scientific claims into subjective position or historicist assertion. The very enlightenment that touts natural science and modern reason undermines science and reason and introduces cracks into the foundation of civilization. That's Strauss. His story, his music is very similar to the claim that I'll make now. From here, it's easy to recognize the negative consequences of the insistence on claims to absolute validity, theological or non-theological. Most significantly, appeals to absolute validity are attempts to shield foundational and internal claims from the potential falsifications that may emerge from encounters with the world and encounters with other accounts of the world that may challenge their epistemic superiority. That's the key philosophical claim of what follows. Thus, appeals to absolute validity are attempts to ignore and thwart ongoing knowledge of the world and ongoing knowledge of other approaches to it. There are two primary negative entailments of this approach. First, rather than secure the continuity of each tradition, the appeal to absolute validity destabilizes it. While I do not maintain that the ability to offer an account of how X claim makes sense in relation to other things we know about the world, what I will refer to as its truth, intelligibility, or in Dewey's language, its warranted assertability of revelatory claims is the sole and exclusive meaning or worth of revelatory claims. But I do hold that intelligibility, this is the key point, constitutes a minimal condition of the possibility of ongoing commitment to a tradition. While ideologues who insist upon the unfalsifiability of claims are skilled at deploying a robust range of tools to maintain adherent commitment to dogmatic or irrational claims, in the long run, I argue, ideologies lose their power when the contradictions and unintelligibility of their positions is exposed. When there's no way to distinguish between the absolute validity of a position and its fantastical character, adherents, I argue, will likely question their commitment to said view and leave it in search of other worldviews. Second, and perhaps for our gathering here, the more important point, an even more damaging entailment of the irrationality of the appeal to absolute validity, is its failure to help human beings develop the knowledge they need to solve human problems. By limiting what counts as legitimate knowledge to the field of revelatory knowledge or this closed system, despite the irrationality of this position, such an approach or insistence on the absolute validity of a single revelatory framework prohibits the ongoing encounter with the world, that is to say, inquiry, that can generate knowledge discourses that exceeds the bounds of a finite and fixed account of truth and falsity. Thus, it inevitably alienates human beings from the world and from the possibility of developing knowledge of the world that they need to promote flourishing. By contrast, an account of human knowledge development in the context of what I refer to as the philosophical pursuit of truth, which is a Straussian view, the philosophical pursuit of truth, by which I mean the ongoing encounter between human inquiry and the world, that invites the work of a great multiplicity of worldviews or discourses and modes of inquiry in the service of human problem solving and not in the service of the endorsement of a hegemonic account of truth and falsity. The appreciation of the fallibility of truth claims is necessary for the project of the pursuit of human flourishing in the world, and the appeal to absolute validity vis-a-vis its foundationalist approach obstructs it. Not only does the commitment to supersessionism secure the unintelligibility and ideological character of each respective tradition, it thwarts the human effort to reconcile itself with the world, or what is nothing other than the fulfillment of God's project for human beings within his created order. The above account of the fallibility of rebuttal claims in hand, I'm just going to quickly sketch a different account of Jewish Christian relations than the one presented in Novak's view. First, an account of Jewish-Christian relations in light of the fallibility of claims is an account that has nothing to do with supersessionism and is devoid of the latent antagonism or inclination to battle it out on the field of normative claims. Neither tradition arrives at the table fueled by a latent self-certainty, and neither need be threatened by the latent polemicism of the other tradition. While Novak and others opt for versions of soft supersessionism, this position guarantees that Jewish Christian encounters maintain the conditions for these, even if they discourage adherence. Okay, never mind. By contrast, this position that Jewish-Christian relations operate without appeals to absolute validity are free of the rivalry and explicit or implicit impulse to assert the invalidity of the other positions. Moreover, not only does an appreciation of the fallibility of JC claims eliminate the rivalrous and potentially deadly character of Jewish relations, it also has the potential to orient them in an entirely new direction. The history of Jewish-Christian relations can be identified by three phases: an adversarial, an argumentative, apologetic, and a pragmatic. I'm going to skip the first two and just run to the third one that I call the pragmatic phase. The adversarial is easy to understand, it's early supersessionism, the argumentative is Mendelssohn and Kant, something like that. The third phase is the pragmatic phase. The pragmatic phase is what I'm proposing here, presupposes the fallibility of claims concerning revelation. And indeed, um uh uh it also has the central um contention of this analysis that um blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it vastly outweighs the negatives of the earlier phases. This is because the pragmatic phase is an entailment of the principle of human flourishing that accompanies the account of fallibility. As discussed above, the apply the um applied to religious traditions or any worldview, the principle of human flourishing or the workability of claims is the principle that for claims to retain value or worth over time, they have to be intelligible or workable for those who hold them. When by workable I mean they comport with other things we know about the world and facilitate our ways of being in the world. This means at once that their philosophical truth status is context-dependent upon the ongoing human inquiry into how things are. When how things are is a reflection of the cognitive habits human beings develop in relation to their world for the purpose of sustaining their adaptation and flourishing within it. Seen from such a perspective, truth or absolute truth amounts to, and it does have some significance here, the hypothetical and always deferred future notion of the sum of all collectively retained or pragmatically successful human cognitive habits. Such a conception of truth is not only indetermined, vague, and always incomplete, but its primary function is regulative. By regulative, I mean this conception of truth that I'm advancing here is the ongoing pursuit of truth over the course of inquiry. By regulative, I mean it illuminates and it can remind adherents of particular traditions that of certain cognitive norms implicit in the pragmatic fallibility of claims. For example, it illuminates the cognitive norm or principle that fallibly held claims are claims that human beings maintain when they support the human effort to adapt and sustain well-being in relation to the world as their primary element, and not when they are deployed as anti-pragmatic declarations of cognitive superiority. Thus, the key to the following analysis of the third phase of Jewish-Christian relations is recognition of the regulative impact of this notion of truth and its accompanying account of worldviews and scientific discourses as agents of the ongoing pursuit of truth. What the effect of that is on the behavior Jews and Christians engage in religious encounters. Arguably, the regulative impact of this notion generates several pragmatically motivated stages between Judaism and Christianity. So, one effect, I'll list uh three of them very quickly and then I'll finish up. The first stage is a pragmatically and motivated encounter between one tradition and another, when adherents of one tradition recognize the limits in the tradition's ability to solve worldly problems. The second stage, so let me talk about that one first and then I'll do the other two. The first stage in a pragmatically motivated encounter between Judaism and Christianity derives from the regulative notion that given the character of truth assertion and inquiry, worldviews will seek out encounters with other worldviews when they find themselves in situations that expose their problem-solving limits. A good example from Judaism is the encounter between medieval Jewish legal thinkers known as the Barcelona School and their appeal to features of non-Jewish political theory. As Menachem Lorbebaum discusses in a famous book, Politics and the Limits of Law, schools of Halachic exegesis like the Barcelona School in the 13th and 14th centuries, associated with scholars like Moses Nachmanides, Solomon Adret, and Nissim Ben Rubin Girondi, they demonstrate how, and this is something that I think can happen in Jewish-Christian relations, they demonstrate how halakhic thought itself promotes the development of extra-halakhic political discourse. According to Lorbaum, quote, this broad scope of inquiry made possible by circumscribing the domain of the halacha reflects the fact that while any legal system is at the mercy of political power, the adequacy of the provisions made by a system of law for the existence of a viable political regime remains an ongoing preoccupation of the greatest scholars of that tradition. The primary focus of the Barcelona school's extra-halachic inquiry happened to revolve around the matter of public law. But a tradition can see itself as finite and limited with respect to a whole number of issues that are critical for problem solving and realize that they need to dip into the advances and benefits of another discourse in order to complete their own. For our purposes here, these Barcelonian scholars' recognition of the need for public law and their development of a discourse of inquiry around this topic offers a good example of how Halachic scholars sustain an awareness of the limits of halacha and of the need to not only encounter, but even incorporate extra halachic discourses that can offer the transcendental conditions for the possibility of events and realities that exceed the framework of the Halachic system itself. But this encounter between rabbinic thought and non-Jewish political thought as a paradigm illuminates only stage one of the pragmatic account of Jewish-non-Jewish relations. No doubt. Like earlier, so it operates, it does operate, and this is something we might want to investigate, from a position of self-interest or what is the desire of the Halakhic tradition to preserve itself. We look to other traditions to engage in problem solving for the sake of helping our own tradition be able to survive. Even so, the desire to preserve itself here is qualified or curtailed by the sober recognition of the worldly constraints that impinge upon this desire and have to be frankly and honestly responded to, lest confidence in one's worldviews and intelligibility is upset. As such, the desire for self-preservation is inevitably coterminous, and this is the key point, with the sober awareness of the potential value or worth of claims arising from other discourses or sciences. Clearly, the fundamental notion behind such a pragmatically motivated encounter with non-Jewish discourses is the principle that Jewish communities do not live insular existences but inhabit a shared world with others. And insofar as other communities have developed modes of inquiry that offer knowledge claims concerning that world, it's inevitable that Jewish communal processes of discerning and developing Judaism's own normative claims will on occasion seek to avail themselves of the findings of the verse range of non-Jewish discourses, Christianity is the case in hand. Even so, a Judaism that pursues encounters with non-Jewish traditions of human flourishing doesn't just do so for the sake of human well-being, does so for the sake of human well-being, but not only for the sake of its own communal needs. We have to return to the above principle that Jewish communities inhabit a shared world. This is the maximalist notion, and I end with this one. We may return to the above principle that Jewish communities, Christian communities, any communities, inhabit a shared world with others to recognize another entailment of the regulative principle of deferred truth for Jewish engagement with non-Jewish discourses. Not only does the principle of human flourishing lead to one tradition's occasional deployment of other discourses, it leads to a tradition's awareness of the need for that tradition to be minimally compatible with other sciences and discourses. So I've upped the philosophical ante just one little piece. You have to be minimally compatible with other sciences and discourses that co-participate in the ongoing pursuit of truth, as the always deferred notion of the sum total of habits and conditions that resolve human problems. It doesn't serve our way of life's interests if we permit or foster ignorance of other discourses of tradition. A community can only quarantine itself from the effects of the wider world for so long until it becomes unintelligible to its adherents who encounter this wider world. Regulatively speaking, such a principle will normatively prompt, normatively prompt Jews and Christians to acquire a basic knowledge of one another's way of life. No doubt the minimal demand that Judaism's claims and practices be compatible with other non-Jewish modes of knowledge production does arrive from Judaism's need to sustain itself in history. Because a Judaism completely alienated from the world or dismissed as an attempt to thwart processes of human flourishing is a Judaism that's marginalized, will lose its historical significance over time. The ongoing pursuit of the normative validity of Jewish claims and practices thereby requires a minimal degree of compatibility. Nonetheless, and it's the last uh paragraph, this inward-facing need does in fact translate into the outward-facing demand that Jewish communities, Christian communities, must strive not only for compatibility with other traditions and discourses that contribute to human flourishing, but they should work to actively support them. Like all other communities, Jews need this world to be inhabitable. This demand only increases as the world becomes a smaller place and generates what scholars these days call complex problems. Complex problems that are far-reaching and from which few communities can remain immune, and problems that are not adequately addressed by the application of one or two, at most, spheres of inquiry or science, but require a full plurality of knowledge discourses to tackle. Applied to Jewish-Christian relations, this means that Jews and Christians need to work together to identify, be informed of, and help respond to complex problems. Moreover, it means that Jews and Christians ought to collaborate, and this is an important point from yesterday, in support of societal institutions that endorse the pragmatic pursuit of truth and the health and vitality of the multiplicity of discourses required to engage in the work of complex human problem solving. In some, an appreciation of the fallibility of revelatory claims within the context of the pursuit of human flourishing in a shared world catapults Jews and Christians into an entirely new normative environment, which invites them to understand how Jewish Christian engagement need not be inhibited by an anxiety over the preservation of rivalrous positions of revelatory truth. It's not to say that Jewish-Christian relations understood within this context might not stimulate traditions to offer strong arguments for validity of other claims. But it does mean, it does mean that a protectionist supersession supersessionism need not have any bearing on the character of Jewish Christian relations at all, nor should it be permitted to overshadow the development of Jewish Christian relations that can bring out the best of what each of these traditions has to offer to a suffering world. Thank you.

SPEAKER_05 43:40

Thank you for that um bre breathtaking and very fast-paced um overview of um how to think about Judaism and um uh humanism, reimagining humanism. Um I wanted to begin the um the QA with two kind of thoughts slash questions. Um Uh but you could take them as either, or we could just uh leave it for further thought. Um, one is many times you talked about um in order to survive, one needs to accommodate uh scientific innovation or political innovation. Um and I also wanted to ask the other side, I'll give an example of something I've been thinking about a little bit, which is nature, something that Luke mentioned yesterday, nature and natural law. So Judaism reimagined itself in the face of mere Aristotelian thinking about nature and metaphysics and physics in the medieval period, right? So um would you be willing to reflect a little bit not just on um not just on the need to survive as a way of sustaining oneself, but also a requirement, an urgent um impulse to um integrate science in a new way in the context of progress or imagination. And the second thought, um, and I guess it's a larger question for the conference also, right? Uh you know, uh humanism broadly conceived as a Wissenschaftler, right? It's you know, as a way of a big, a big, big tent, right? Um and um the other the other is really something that we're doing now. I'm very proud to say that we're doing in our faculty of theology together with the faculty of history, which is rethinking the curriculum. And one of the things that I think Randy has uh called upon, we teach uh uh mainly Christianity and other religious traditions in our faculty and um uh um in in an environment where we're teaching the history of a tradition uh that is uh that that operates in an economy of supersessionism. How do we begin to teach? How do we teach faithfully? How do we teach honestly? Um and and at the same time take your um your call for um um uh a radical rethinking of theology.

SPEAKER_04 45:51

Um well thank you, Hindi. Uh do I need I don't know if I need that. I'm all hooked up. I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm at this point I'm bionic. I mean Well some of you remember the bionic, the the bionic man, the bionic woman, do you remember? Yeah Um Huh?

unknown 46:07

Six million, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 46:08

There's a six million, but he married the bionic woman though, I think. Sorry, no, they didn't, I think they did. Um uh so to respond to Hindi's um uh terrific first question. So again, I you know I really do so as I took in Hindi's first question was Um uh can I speak a little bit more about the urgency of, let's say, a Jewish ongoing encounter with science or um uh religious traditions ongoing encounter with science. And and so I think Hindi is right to hear that in the paper. I do want to just make sure that I qualify though, what are the philosophical rules of the game from my perspective for such a kind of um ongoing engagement? So um what I'm not looking for, um, and again, I in in this respect, I I I often sound like I do often sound a little bit like a broken record. I really do think that Strauss has a lot to say on this point. Um I'm not actually advocating um uh a religion engagement with science just because science seems to be the self-evident philosophical, philosophically um uh presupposed position of the day. Um The argument that I'm I'm making is, I mean, and to a certain extent, when I say science, I sort of mean it in Hegelian terms. Science, uh philosophical science, that is to say, the science of the pursuit of truth. Um and that means that, and and this is one of the this is one of the wonderful points that um you find in um in the the beginning parts of uh Hegel's science of logic, where he really, and this is something um uh Cohen is concerned about too, um thinking for a rook back there. Um the concern that science itself in the the late 19th century, there was a concern, again you see it in Cohen, um, that science had um had had had it's uh Strauss's critique of Spinoza had made itself immune from any kind of philosophical investigation, that it could rest on its own laurels, that it functioned from self-evident um assumptions that we all, that as Strauss says in philosophy of law, it was so darn successful. And oftentimes this happens, right? When a worldview becomes so darn successful, and pragmatically that's not the worst thing in the world, but when a worldview becomes so darn successful, it oftentimes, people oftentimes think, well, it doesn't need to have justification. And to a certain extent, on pragmatic grounds, for a certain period of time that's the case. But it doesn't mean that it should always be immune from questioning, and that's also the case with science. So to say that Judaism should engage with science, certainly, when I say that Judaism, in order for its continuity, do you need to engage with science, I'm saying that in order for Judaism and for any tradition, I argue this for any tradition, in order for any tradition, the philosophical conditions of any tradition being able to survive, is that they operate in a mode of inquiry, is that they operate in a scientific mode by when I mean by science, I mean that they subject their claims to the tests of intelligibility, to the tests of their workability, because over the long haul, I've argued, I'll argue in this new book and I argued in the last book, over the long haul, when people are asked to retain claims that are no longer intelligible, yes, they will have a certain shelf life. And there are certain kinds of ideological tools that can be used to encourage people to remain beholden to claims that aren't intelligible. But over the long haul, I do think that crises of confidence emerge when, if you will, let's say it in Berger's terms, plausibility conditions of the intelligibility of claims begin to wane. And when those intelligibility conditions wane, and the ideological toolboxes that attempt to secure them over time begin to also lose, begin to uh be subject to crises of confidence, skepticism, and so forth, then I think that the traditions begin to lose their own credibility. That's the kind of continuity I'm talking about. That's the kind of encounter with science that I'm talking about. So again, we don't want to have a Jewish acceptance of science just because science seems to be the reigning discourse of the day. Um, that same science itself needs to undergo. And again, fortunately, that's why we have in the early 20th century, in the wake of a lot of scientific materialism, you have the rise of the philosophy of science. And that field of discourse is a brilliant field of discourse which contributes to the work that, insofar as I'm concerned, that those of us who engage in Jewish-Christian relations should be pretty privy to. When I was in graduate school, we all read Thomas Kuhn. We all studied little bits and pieces of the philosophy of science because we emerged from an environment of Wittgensteinian discourse around family resemblance and language games, and all of those questions about how discourses operate. How do they endure? When do they undergo crises? Um, this are questions that um came up yesterday with respect to solidarity. Um, what are the conditions of the possibility of a movement like solidarity being able to continue? Um, what were the conditions under which it was able to arise? What are the conditions under which it was it was uh being asked to produe? Um these are questions that, again, philosophers of science ask about science, and we should be asking about our own traditions. If we want to engage in the kind of work we engage in, we have to ask epistemic questions. So that's the long answer to that question. Yeah, thank you.

SPEAKER_06 51:46

We we can continue maybe the QA and come back to the question.

SPEAKER_04 51:49

So that yeah, the second question was a good question, but we can talk about it more.

SPEAKER_06 51:53

It's up to you. Do you want to take it or should we take some questions?

SPEAKER_04 51:56

Uh we can take some questions because people have been sitting for such a long time.

SPEAKER_07 52:06

Um maybe right here in the front, and then um I'm I'm sorry, I don't have anyone's name, so I think the second left and then the back.

SPEAKER_09 52:17

All right. I'm uh Aaron Stellmaker from Indiana University. Uh thanks, Randy. That was great, really stimulating. Uh I I wanted to hear a little more about uh the exact logic of your claim about the shared world and the pragmatic encounter catapulting people into engagement with other traditions. Uh because it seems like that's a rather open-ended catapulting. Uh I mean in my own case, right? I've I've uh propelled all the way towards uh Chinese traditions. Um but how how far so so if you can say a little more about the the logic of this like is it is it the what kind of sharing is it that propels this and and which ones do we need do we have a duty to go learn about and how much? Uh-huh. Um it's that combination of things. I I mean I'm extremely sympathetic to this argument, um, but I'm curious about how the logic works and how far we should go.

SPEAKER_04 53:17

So I think so I I think that there's um there's uh a gradation in um in in the pragmatist understanding or in my pragmatist understanding of of world. So um if the premise of the work that we do, and and maybe it's not a premise, but I think it if it is a premise that um there is a desire for these traditions to continue, that those of us who participate in them want these traditions to continue. Um, the argument in its most minimalist um formulation is that those traditions need to have some kind of intelligibility within the most proximate worldly conditions, right? The most proximate worldly conditions. So there is an example of um of a Hasidic community in New York in the United States, um, and it was a Hasidic community that basically said that uh the members of the Hasidic community, uh the men should study all of the time, and only the women should engage in some kind of remunerative employment, and the men should be studying all the time, and that is their primary obligation. Um this community also said that the tradition needs that the communities need to have lots and lots of children. And a lot of the men began to see a little bit of a cognitive dissonance because on the one, on the one hand, this principle that they need to be in yeshiva all of the time, and this other principle that they should be having very, very large families. And what developed, of course, were these vocational schools. Um, but the vocational schools were um shrouded in this very, very negative and hush-hush rhetoric. So the community never wanted to talk about these vocational schools. The vocational schools were thought of as not yeshiva schools, and yet so many of the men knew that they needed to go to these vocational schools in order to be able to do the very things that they were themselves committed to, but which the tradition was, in its particular formulation, suggesting they shouldn't do. There you have an example of a very proximate being in the world, where that's a very immediate kind of being in the world. So depending on um depending on the kinds of encounters, this is why, by the way, arguably traditions, and there are a lot of reasons for this, again, it's a big philosophical question. If you're thinking about the continuity of traditions, one might argue that traditions will last longest that inhabit the smallest worlds, right? Um, and that inhabit the smallest worlds, but also have the biggest institutions, right? Because forms of life express themselves in institutions, and institutions secure forms of life. So when you have a very, very thickly developed form of life that is really bounded by institutions in a small world where you allow the, where the people are basically living in that world and that world works for them, that's all the world you need, right? Now, when you get to in uh circumstances like modern Orthodox Jews, so on and so forth, then the world begins to grow. So depending where you are, in the in it, depending what kind of religious person you are and the kind of habitus you assumed, your engagement with the world will grow larger and larger. Um, just because your engagement with the world, by the way, grows larger and larger does not necessarily mean that the truth value of the claims of your tradition dissipates as that world goes larger and larger. And I think that this may have been a sort of, I don't know if it was a kind of presupposition in your question. Your assumption was that by engagement with the world, shared world, I meant that we need to all out engage in a large syncretist activity where we in effect become each other's religious traditions. Basically, the the logic of the pragmatist argument is we engage with as much of the world as we need to in order to render our claims intelligible. That's the fundamental argument. At the end of the paper, I did offer a more maximalist conception where I did say that, well, the conditions of the possibility of Judaism or any tradition's continuity is not only minimal compatibility with other discourses, but support for other discourses, not necessarily because I'm going to avail myself of those other discourses or I'm going to convert to those other discourses, but because we all live in a world where our traditions benefit from mutual human flourishing. If the world goes south, then so do our traditions. So I'm thinking about engagement with the world in those kinds of my fundamental conception, and then I'll stop about it, is one of constraints. It's of engagement with the world because the world issues a set of constraints on what can count as the intelligibility of our claims. Um and I'm not actually advocating for any kind of syncretism. Though again, depending where you are in the spectrum, inquiry can become a lot more engaged. It depends where you are on the spectrum.

SPEAKER_03 58:16

Thank you, uh Randy. I loved every minute of um what you were sharing. And I think you know, so much of it uh is framed by or or articulated also within the DNA of scriptural reasoning um as of a mode of encounter. Um my question uh is uh around um you know what in Islam I think they call the closing of Ijihad, you know, this idea of um uh is it true that we continually ask questions in order to flourish? Is there ever a possibility of a world without questions or or a moment or a pause without questions in which we we sit in the mess rather than try to problem solve the mess? Um and what does that look like for us in this in this endeavor?

SPEAKER_04 59:07

That's funny. I thought you were asking the opposite question. I I I thought first you were asking the eschatological question. Um, will there be a time to which I have to say I'll have to you know ask a friend? Um or then I thought you were actually asking another question, which would have been a very interesting scriptural risking question. Are do we ever get eschatological pauses? Not pauses. Do we ever get eschatological pauses here and now? Which is also a really terrific question. And to a certain extent, that's what SR is, actually. To a certain extent, SR is not, it's unclear whether or not SR is is preparation for asking questions, but SR is sort of like an eschatological pause. But no, your question was the question, um, do we ever sit in the mess? Sure, we sit in the mess all the time. We're probably sitting in the mess as we speak right now. Um by by sitting in the mess we mean um sitting in the mess in a positive sense means that we have, if we have working forms of life, and and and all of us do, right? Forms of life are very small things. If any of you read um uh Rachel Yegi's uh form of life book, you can see how small forms of life can be. The more successful a form of life can be, the more people that will be involved in it, so on and so forth. But forms of life are very small. Even those of us who feel very lost in our world probably have forms of life. And when we have those forms of life and those habits and those practices, yeah, we we we don't always involve the mess, God willing. You know, we can't wake up, and again, this issue of crisis uh continually arose last night in your in your wonderful talk. Um, we don't always wake up to the crisis. We can't actually, there's always that interesting dialectic between stability and crisis, right? We always need, we never have, well, it's there are times, conceivably, there are times when we have outright crisis. Um there are times when we have outright revolution, when we have outright crisis, but arguably those times don't last that long because they can't. We almost always have some minimal, very basic habits that we hold on to. And depending on the circumstances, we hold on to them more and avoid crisis less. We only encounter crisis when we have to. That is to say, we only engage in problem solving when we have to. Um we are fundamentally rather lazy creatures. We don't like to problem solve. We're really very conservative agents. We like to just engage and you know, we we we like to put it off if we can. Um so yeah, I think that there's actually more sitting around with messiness than there is actually engaging in complex problem solving, um, which is why I think it needs to be a regulative norm in Jewish-Christian relations. I think that complex problem solving needs to be, and by the way, I'm I'm I'm not the first Jewish thinker to say things like that, um, uh, though he flips the terms in a lot of ways, and I won't go into it, but um uh Joseph Salavajik, of course, has always long argued that a key element of Jewish Christian relations is for us to work together on problem solving. That that's where the arena of Jewish Christian relations actually happens. Um his take on it and my take on it are different, but still that's not new. But again, you know, we kind of have to rev ourselves up. We need prophets to tell us how bad things are. If we don't have prophets telling us, um I always think of Lori Zoloth, right? Lori Zoloth is the prophet of our time, right? She you go to a Lori Zoloth lecture and she's gonna tell you all the things that we together collectively need to really be very, very worried about. And then we go and we roll up our sleeves and we realize that Jewish-Christian relations probably ought to be about problem solving because if these problems aren't affecting us today, they're probably gonna affect us tomorrow or our children tomorrow.

unknown 1:03:02

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:05

Um hi, I'm Chris Oldfield, philosopher at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion in Cambridge. Um I have a question. Are you distinguishing between truth and validity? And if so, how? And if not, why not? Um I could say that more complicatedly, but at some points you talk about the absolute validity of a tradition, at some points you talk about the absolute truth and falsity of the claims. And at one point you talked about truth as the endlessly deferred goal of the sum total of human cognitive practice and warranted assertability which lead us to be convusive in our cognition to human flourishing. That's a mouthful. But validity is usually about the health of some kind of inferences or reasoning, practices, and truth. Are you distinguishing between truth and validity? If so, how? If not, why not? Thank you.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:56

Uh thank thanks. Um I'm not distinguishing the truth and validity. In effect, the the argument of the paper is that absolute validity is a contradiction in terms. When I suggested that that truth is um is uh um an ever-deferred notion, uh, I don't think that there ever is a notion of absolute truth. I'm just uh hypothetically telling you that um we could we can conceive of a notion of truth as we could we can conceptualize the notion of truth as the end of all inquiry. What would that look like? Well, it would look like um all the answers to all the problems that we've ever had as finite creatures. Um we can conceptualize that, but we don't, that we don't know what that is. Um and that notion as a deferred notion, is it that's really just a regulative notion that ultimately pushes people to engage in ongoing inquiry about truth. Um, truth itself is something about which we should engage in ongoing inquiry. It's a task. Um uh so that's that's the answer to that question. I don't know if that does it for you.

SPEAKER_08 1:05:08

Yeah, thanks thanks so much, Eric Gregory from Princeton. Um this may or may not follow on that question, but I'm trying to in part because I'm someone who was reared on Novakkian anxieties, that this has been a good therapy session that I think we're trying to dissolve, as you, yeah. I I take it what you're trying to suggest is the problem of supersessionism is not a theological problem, primarily, it's a philosophical problem. So we make this pragmatic referral regulative turn in order to dissolve the problem. Um I guess one I'm trying to figure out a quick way to say this. Does the pragmatic turn entail is it merely epistemological, or does it invite or attract or entail? Any theological claims. Because previous efforts at interreligious dialogue might assert a kind of more apophatic, radical transcendence of God. Trevor Burrus. Yeah. In the eschaton. All of us are going to be a bit surprised, yes, for Christians Christ, but Jesus is going to be really weird and wild, and like, you know, we'll allow it.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:20

It's going to look like a Jew.

SPEAKER_08 1:06:21

We will all learn from the R.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:22

It's going to look like Woody Allen in that all.

SPEAKER_08 1:06:28

At least to a certain extent, surprised. But so is it is it just because in that case it does seem like a very modernist post-Kantian project that privileges philosophy against theology. And it's pragmatic, but it's still valorizing epistemic issues of almost the absolute validity of fallibilism. Are you claiming there's no there there theologically? It's merely architectonic philosophically.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:02

That's interesting. And Kendall and Susanna Ticciani and I have been working on these things for quite some time. So I say Kendall because Kendall wants to argue, of course, he's your classic example of somebody who wants to argue that supersessionism is a doctrinal Christian theological problem. It's within, it is a literally a Christian doctrinal problem. He does not want to argue that it is a philosophical problem. And he is sort of in that Novakkian camp, right? He wants to maintain the absolute validity of the revelatory tradition and deal with supersessionism within it. And from the Jewish point of view, that runs the conversation aground, because ultimately it means that he gets to keep his supersessionism and he gets to keep his understanding of what Judaism is in a way that precludes a Jewish understanding of what Judaism is. So the fact that he does not appreciate that supersessionism is a philosophical problem is an issue. I don't think that, I don't want to say that the claim of fallibility ultimately renders theology a totally epistemic enterprise. I think that it is possible to reconsider what revelation might mean in language that's close to what Hindi used this morning. That is to say, Hindi said something like the Torah or the scriptures are God's word that we receive, something like that, or God's word that we speak to or that we understand. I think it's actually the beginning of a new understanding of theology, to begin to ask ourselves, what might it look like? And this is one of the other projects that I'm working on, what might it look like to actually think about scripture as not a perfect text, but a perfectible text, a text that is perfectible by us. That is a text that is wholly given over to us. So within the Jewish tradition, there are a number of major halakhic thinkers who have posed this possibility. There's David Weisselivny, there's Eliezer Berkowitz, Menachem Fish has versions of this. I'm working on versions of this. That is to say, um we can talk about theology, but we can't talk about theology necessarily as the avenue of divine truth claims. We can talk about theology as a discernment of human truth claims about a revelatory text that could arguably always be more than what we could ever understand it to be. The more of the text doesn't go away just because I argue, in fact, I think the argument is that the more of the text is preserved precisely when you recognize that it is never synonymous with the finite truth claims that we make about it. That's probably the, that's probably the strongest theological intervention I can give there, Eric. That this actually gives us the possibility for a deeper appreciation for what a sacred might mean. Why would we ever think, and Bart knew this, why would we ever think that our finite renderings of that text, our claims about its truth and falsehood, are um gateways to what that text actually is? Um the only difference between my position, in effect, and Bart's position is that, and at the end of the day, there are a lot of similarities actually between my position and Bart's position, as much as I always I've wanted to get away from Bart's position for a very long time. Um the fundamental difference between my position and Bart's position is as follows. Bart is not interested in identifying philosophical conditions for the kinds of things that we say about the text. He's not interested in that. The kinds of things that we say about the text are the best we can do and they will always fail. And we don't really have to put that much stock in them. And for me, we put all of the stock of the world in them because the things that we say about the text are part of the things that we say to each other about being in the world. And so we need to be precisely philosophically accountable for them. Are these texts wonderful, remarkable sources of wisdom? Well, if they are inclining folks to engage in flourishing, then yeah. Um, and that's theological.

SPEAKER_07 1:12:02

I might yeah, uh right there. Thank you.

SPEAKER_10 1:12:05

Thank you so much for the talk. I'm John Walker, I'm from Princeton University. Um so one of the claims that you made, as I understood it, was that by reconceiving things around this sort of pragmatic conception, uh, we get a picture of traditions, I think you use the language of free of rivalry. And I guess I I wonder why we should assume that if we allow for I guess greater room for the give and take of reasons, we don't stipulate in advance like Novak does, basically what's off the table for debate. Why will that lead to less rivalry rather than more? Because I I understand one of the concerns that it seems like Novak has is he wants to secure the ongoing existence of these two communities. But you're allowing for much more, in some sense, much more contestation actually over ideas. And so maybe this is a a sort of restatement of the anxiety or an expression of the anxiety. Um but I I guess I I worry sometimes that the kind of pragmatic emphasis upon give and take of reasons assumes this will necessarily result in a certain kind of democratic process. Um if that is true, I guess I want to hear a little more about like why we should think this is going to lead inevitably. I mean, I I see this sometimes with a certain kind of Hegelian scheme around once we get talking about reasons, inevitably we're gonna end up with something like democracy. And I guess I I'd like to hear more about that. So thank you.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:36

I'm not um I'm not so so I think it's interesting because again, McIntyre shows up again. Um McIntyre seems to suggest that um we give um we give reasons uh when there is rivalry at stake. Um rivalry and are and and and when when the polemicism actually gives rise when when one tradition seems like it's beating out another tradition, then that seems to be the occasion uh for giving reasons. Um uh I actually don't necessarily disagree with that. The the the kind of rivalry that I'm talking about, about which I think um uh the reason why Novak is willing to um, if you will, bury the rivalry between or pretend, he's pretending that the rivalry between Jews and Christians is not there, is because, and and I, and I I I I mean, Novak was my teacher, and I I I learned everything from him, so I don't mean to, but critique I guess is the better form of flattery. But um uh Novak wanted Jews and Christians to engage in a rivalrous relationship to secularism. He wanted them to be militant in relation to secularism, so he thought that it was pragmatic for Jews and Christians to bury their necessary supersessionism in order to be able to engage in this other fight, in order to be able to engage in this other battle. Um, to me, it's that kind of burying that kind of rivalry under the rug that is the bigger problem. So there are two different kinds of rivalry that you and I need to sort out. There's the rivalry that's just straight polemicism that refuses to entertain reasons, and then there is good argumentative discussion, where there is a play of reasons at stake. My position isn't that we should always be engaging in a play of reasons. On the contrary, when I gave you guys the example of the Barcelona school, Nachmanides, Girondi, Andred, these are medieval Halakhic thinkers, who began to realize or who thought that there were certain limitations to the Halakhic system. And they thought to themselves, well, gee, you know, and this became increasingly the case as Jews engaged in the modern world more and more and more. They had to entertain questions of things like public law. Can we actually learn from political theory that's coming out of Greek philosophy? Can we learn from political theory that's coming out of social contract theory, so on and so forth? Can we contribute? That kind of engagement isn't necessarily an engagement of reasons, that's an engagement of need. Again, the pragmatism drives the character of the discussion. And more often than not, the discussion can be gee, you know, we didn't know that you could actually organize a society vis-a-vis this way. We didn't know that you could produce this kind of vaccine for that. We didn't know. That's the real tenor of the conversation. What have we done vis-a-vis human flourishing? The point of the conversations is not, again, the point of the conversation, that's why I said the point of these conversations between Jews and Christians isn't really to talk about what's true or what's not true. It's to talk about what do we need in order to be able to carry on. And as I said at the end, that doesn't mean that questions about what's true or false won't come up. But that's not the primary engine of the engagement. So again, I this is that was my attempt to um to to to um try to soften your anxiety again.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:12

This is just a quick follow-up actually to that. Are you saying I'm I'm sorry if I misunderstood this. Um are you saying that Jewish Christian dialogue part is happening should be non-supersessionist vis-a-vis the wider world.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:28

Is that vis-a-vis what I didn't hear the last part? So visit vis-a-vis I heard that it shouldn't be non- shouldn't be supersessionist vis-a-vis.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:35

Vis-a-vis the the wider world. So um as you said, I like that when you have a pragmatic issue, it depends on what the issue is, and I should acknowledge that somebody mentioned this to me last night, so I that seemed like the threat is the thing, isn't it? So that's what you were talking about just there. If the threat is describing a metaphysical position for some uh purpose which is uh common to humanity, then it might be the case that participants in Jewish Christian dialogue should not be supersessionist in order to get the metaphysic right for whatever the particular threat is.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:10

I don't think that Jews and Christians should be supersessionist ever. I think that supersessionism is a philosophical error that needs to be philosophically addressed. I don't worldviews, supersessionism is not unique to Judaism and Christianity. It's part and parcel of how worldviews often function vis-a-vis one another. If any of you have ever read um David Nuremberg's Anti-Judaism and the History of Western Civilization, it's an interesting discussion of how basically a supersessionist cognitive model drives the process by which worldviews sustain themselves throughout history. Supersessionism, again, isn't unique to Judaism and Christianity. Again, it's a it's a philosophical problem that ultimately creates enormous, enormous numbers of polemical problems, institutional problems. Again, it's it's it is arguably the philosophical problem that we deal with with respect to the fact that human beings um have a great, great, deep desire to be to be right and to feel that they have a monopoly on truth. Um that that's what that philosophical problem is. And it uh again, it's at the source of um problems with forms of life, and it's at the source of problems with institutions, because institutions are the means by which forms of life oftentimes try to shore up their own truth. When in fact, institutions really ought to be the means by which this kind of engagement with truth would be secured. Again, that's the Hegelian vision, by the way. That is what Hegel wanted. He thought that institutions' jobs were to secure a healthy philosophical environment. I mean, it's I I I the last thing I'll say, because it's time, is just simply that the point of uh the kind of exercise that I do is really not so much to tell us all what it is that we have to do, but to lay out what are the stakes if we don't. What are the stakes if we don't engage it in a certain way, and what are the conditions of the possibility of our traditions being able to make it over the long haul? What would have to be the case if we were going to have them survive in a world of human flourishing? That's very, very different from saying this is what will be possible because there are enormous forces, most forces, work against the kind of philosophical picture that I gave you. Um and we all work in institutions that press against this kind of philosophical set of conditions. Um we all live in religious institutions that work against this philosophical set of conditions. Um I don't mean this to be utopian, not by any stretch. It's more of a diagnosis and a metric that should help us know um what we kind of uh need.

SPEAKER_05 1:21:03

With with that, um I I think it's uh an extraordinary way to end the first session. Please join me in thanking Professor Rashkover for an extraordinary beginning of today's conference.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:21

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