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Rational Theology within Postmetaphysical Thinking? A Catholic Assessment of Habermas’ View of Religious Belief

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2022

Martin Breul
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Abstract

Jürgen Habermas’ assessment of the rationality of religious convictions is ambivalent, as it oscillates between a postsecular appropriation of their semantic potentials and a fideistic insistence on their “discursive extraterritoriality.” In this article, I argue that Habermas’ fideistic portrayal of religious convictions is neither compatible with the overall argumentative architecture of his postsecular paradigm nor a logical consequence of Habermas’ philosophical framework in general. Instead, once his fideism is overcome, Habermas’ postmetaphysical discourse theory provides valuable resources for contemporary Catholic theology. This article thus offers both a theological assessment of Habermas’ view of religious belief and an argument for a Catholic appropriation of Habermas’ postmetaphysical thinking.

Keywords

religious epistemologypostsecularismJürgen Habermaspostmetaphysical thinking
Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , December 2021 , pp. 456 - 474
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Copyright
Copyright © College Theology Society 2022

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References

1 Habermas, Jürgen, Philosophical Introductions: Five Approaches to Communicative Reason (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2018), 168Google Scholar.

2 See Habermas’ reading of Kierkegaard in Habermas, Jürgen, Between Naturalism and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 235–38Google Scholar.

3 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 143.

4 Habermas has received quite a lot of attention for his writings on religion since 2001. However, most scholarship came from political science and philosophy; see, for example, the lack of any genuinely theological contributions in Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan van Antwerpen, eds., Habermas and Religion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

5 Habermas, Jürgen, Postmetaphysical Thinking II (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2017), xGoogle Scholar.

6 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 140.

7 Habermas, Jürgen, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2003), 11Google Scholar.

8 Habermas’ reading of Kierkegaard's as a fideistic position is quite contentious, cf. Viertbauer, Klaus, “Jürgen Habermas on the Way to a Postmetaphysical Reading of Kierkegaard,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (2019): 137–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Maureen Junker-Kenny, Religion and Public Reason: A Comparison of the positions of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 177: “No sustained theory is offered to unite these elements which remain external.”

10 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 143.

11 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 130.

12 See Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking II, 258.

13 Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking II, 101.

14 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 247.

15 Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking II, 141.

16 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 245.

17 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 129.

18 Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking II, 106.

19 Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking II, 107.

20 Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking II, 65.

21 Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1992), 78.

22 See Habermas, Jürgen, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019)Google Scholar.

23 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 242–43.

24 See exemplarily Richard Amesbury, “Fideism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2017), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/fideism: Fideism claims: “that faith is in some sense independent of, if not outright adversarial toward, reason.… Fideism holds … that reason is unnecessary and inappropriate for the exercise and justification of religious belief.”

25 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 211.

26 See Habermas, The Future of Human Nature.

27 See Jürgen Habermas, The Lure of Technocracy (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2015).

28 See Jürgen Habermas, “Equal Treatment of Cultures and the Limits of Postmodern Liberalism,” in Between Naturalism and Religion, ed. Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 271–311.

29 Norbert Brieskorn, “On the Attempt to Recall a Relationship,” in Jürgen Habermas et al., An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2010), 24–35, esp. 24.

30 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 110.

31 Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking II, 153.

32 Habermas et al., An Awareness of What Is Missing, 18. I will not address the problem of Habermas’ instrumentalization of religion in the remainder of this article, but it is worth noting that every major world religion would oppose a reduction to its functions as sources of morality. See Michael Reder, “How Far Can Faith and Reason Be Distinguished? Remarks on Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion,” in Habermas et al., An Awareness of What Is Missing, 36–50, esp. 39: “Habermas tends to instrumentalize religions for this kind of reflexive treatment of the moral problems of modernity.… Religions for him have in the first place the social function of a moral resource, when modern societies are no longer able to tap into a motivational source for their normative principles.… Many religions would resist such a reduction.”

33 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 211.

34 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 131.

35 For Habermas’ sophisticated defense of a deliberative model of democracy, see Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1996). For a compelling contemporary defense of deliberative democracy in line with Habermas’ central insights, see Cristina Lafont, “Is the Ideal of a Deliberative Democracy Coherent?,” in Deliberative Democracy and its Discontents, ed. Samantha Besson and Jose Luis Martí (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 3–26.

36 This is not the first time that this objection to the coherence of the postsecular paradigm has been raised; cf. Breul, Martin, “Religious Epistemology and the Problem of Public Justification: Towards a New Typology of Religious Convictions,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 58, no. 2 (2016): 176–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas M. Schmidt, “The Semantic Content of Religious Beliefs and Their Secular Translation: Jürgen Habermas’ Concept of Religious Experience,” in Religion: Immediate Experience and the Mediacy of Research, ed. Hans-Günther Heimbrock and Christopher Scholtz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 175–88.

37 Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 114–15.

38 Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History, 119.

39 See Maureen Junker-Kenny, Habermas and Theology (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2011), 157.

40 See Junker-Kenny, Religion and Public Reason, 131.

41 Habermas’ view of revelation says that religious believers are obliged to obey “the dogmatic authority of an inviolable core of infallible revealed truths” (Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 129; my emphasis).

42 See Junker-Kenny, Habermas and Theology, 158.

43 See Junker-Kenny, Habermas and Theology, 162.

44 See John Bishop, “Faith,” The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2016), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/faith.

45 Klaus von Stosch, “Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy as Foundation of Comparative Theology,” in Interpreting Interreligious Situations with Wittgenstein, ed. Andrejc Gorazd and Daniel H. Weiss (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2019), 73–96.

46 The neopragmatist idea of a close connection between truth and rational acceptability can paradigmatically be found in Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History. Habermas clarifies his indebtedness to pragmatism in Jürgen Habermas, Truth and Justification, ed. and trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press: 2003).

47 Clooney, Francis, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 For an overview of different methodological approaches to comparative theology, cf. the contributions in Francis Clooney and Klaus von Stosch, eds., How to Do Comparative Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

49 See Jürgen Habermas, “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, ed. Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1990), 1–20.

50 The metaphor is drawn from Schnädelbach, Herbert, Vernunft und Geschichte. Vorträge und Abhandlungen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 166fGoogle Scholar.

51 See Kant, Immanuel, Religion within the Boundary of Pure Reason, trans. Semple, J. W. (Edinburgh: Thomas Clark 1838)Google Scholar.

52 Dalferth, Ingolf U., “A Relaxed View of Metaphysics. Neo-Aristotelian Thomism and the Theological Legacy of Thomas Aquinas,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 114 (2017): 49–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 79.