1305.Radical Monotheism

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IS-Here is only one of many passages where HRN's insistence that "theology ... must always participate in the activity of faith" is insufficiently nuanced to be acceptable. For all he says to the contrary, the faith in which theology, or the theologian, has to participate is the particular faith, or form of faith, of whose reasoning theology is said to be at once the disciplined development and the critique. But his own analogy of the literary critic, according to which the critic must live, not in the same vision as the poet's, but only "in the same world of values in which the poet lives," suggests that there is and must be a difference between the faith

in which theology must participate and the (particular) faith on _which theology is the critical reflection, or of which it isthe disciplined development and critique. In my terms, the faith in which the theologian must participate is the "basic faith" in the meaning of life presupposed by the question of religion, and thus by every particular faith, or form of faith, while the faith on which theology is the critical reflection is the faith expressed by this particular religion or that, as well as by all of the other forms of praxis and culture explicitly mediated by this or that particular religion. Cf. HRN's own use of the phrases, "all _accepted faiths in life's meaning" (18) and "specific loyalties and systems of valuation" (23) with his reference to "the apparently universal human necessity of faith and of the inescapability of its gods, not as supernatural beings but as value-centers and objects of devotion" (23). The faith that is universally necessary is evidently distinct from all particular faiths, or forms of faith, in life's meaning and all specific loyalties and systems of valuation. Not surprisingly, then, HRN can speak of "the forms of human faith" as themselves "faiths," and also speak indifferently of his concern as an analysis of the conflict of faiths or as an inquiry into the forms of faith (II, 24). 

16-If, in places such as this, HRN claims only that faith is "apparently"universal or necessarythat to be human is to live by faith (e.g., 22, 242S-HRN'S distinction here between a person's "existence" and her or his "significance" indicates that he is not totally unaware of the relative complexity of faith as trust, as compared with the relative simplicity of faith as loyality. The object of faith in the sense of "trust" is not only, or, perhaps, even primarily, a "center [or source] of value [=significance]," but is also, and, perhaps, first of all, a source of being [=existence]. There are clear indications that HRN hasn't thought all of this through-perhaps because he works too simplistically in terms of theory of value. Granted that we value most what values us, or gives us value, the necessary presupposition of being given any value at all is first being given being together with others in an ordered world. Consequently, we value not only what values us, but also what makes it possible for us to be valued. In short, the God in whom we trust is Creator (and Emancipator) as well as Consummator (and Redeemer). HRN himself makes just this distinction, or one closely related to it, when he distinguishes between "the principle of being" = "the Creator" and "the principle of value" = "the God of grace" (32;(d. 23), in others, he asserts much more unqualifiedly f., 28, 38, 117, 118). d. 48, where he speaks of "the One who is their creator and savior"). Cf. 32, where HRN distinguishes between being "existent" and being "worthy of existence and worthy in existence."

27-HRN's use of the phrase, "one among many" here calls to mindWhitehead's use of the same phrase, or, more accurately, the similar phrase,"one among the many." Considering that HRN also speaks of "One beyond all the many," or, even more tellingly, "the One beyond the many, in whom the_[sic]_ many are one" (24, 16), one may feel confident that he, in his way, shared Whitehead's recognition that "there are two sense of the onenamely, the sense of the one which is all, and the sense of the one among the many."

33-N.B.:To be a "faithful self" is to be "concerned about value." Elsewhere, to be a "man of faith" is said to be a "promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking being" (41), and to be "a faith-ful being" is said "to be trusted or distrusted as truthful or untruthful toward other selves" (46). 33-Although HRN is quite clearthat "the realm of being" is the "cause" of "the principle of being," he nowhere clarifies how this can be the case. How can the realm be "its cause," i.e., the principle of being's cause? This question becomes the more troubling when HRN subsequently speaks of "the cause," and thus the "faith loyalty" that are characteristic of radical monotheism as simply "the realm of being," and thus loyalty to this realm (37,38,40,41,42). Indeed, he more and more comes to speak of faith as "confidence in the One" and as "loyalty [not to the One, but only] to the ull.iverse of being" (41; d. 40). Significantly, he says that "[t]he counterpart ... of universal faith asurance" is "universal loyalty," not "universal faith loyalty." And on p. 35, he says that "for faith the kingdom of God is both the rule that is trusted and the realm to which loyalty is given," the second being identified with "the universe of being." That the many participate in the One and derive their being as well as their value or worth therefrom is clear enough. Less clear is that, or, at any rate, how, the One participates in the many and derives its being as well as its value or worth-its de facto actuality, although not its existence as such-from them. 40 ff.-There is clearly an ambiguity in HRN's concept of "incarnation," which he defines as "the concrete expression in a total human life of radical trust in the One and universal loyalty to the realm of being." If this were taken to mean simply the existential actualization of the possibility of faith in a single human life (which, of course, is just how he takes it in talking about Jesus Christ!), Israel could hardly be said to incarnate radical faith. The only reason this can be said is that, in the case of Israel, unlike that of Greece, monotheism does not remain merely an idea or an ideal, at most "a movement of thought," and thus a part of the history of thought, but is "an element in total personal and communal life," finding expression in and through all "domains" of our cultural activities, such as "the religious, the political, the scientific, the economic, and the aesthetic" (39). This, however, is entirely different from the sense in which HRN claims that radical faith became incarnate in Jesus Christ, since although "[f]aith as confidence in the One and as loyalty to the wl.iverse of being was ingredient in every action and relation" in Israel, it was nonetheless encountered "very often" only "in its negative forms of distrust and disloyalty," which are the very things that "seem" to be absent in the case of Jesus (42).-The truth in what HRN says is completely accounted for by saying simply that the possibility for understanding human existence represented by the Hebrew prophets and the life and institutions of Israel so far as explicitly mediated thereby is the same possibility even more "radically" represented by the words and deeds of Jesus as well as by the witness of the earliest church. But HRN is seriously misled and misleading when he asserts that it is by contemplating "the faith of their Lord" that Christians apply to him the term "son of God." Indeed, by his own account, what makes an event or events "revelation" is that in it or in them "radical faith was elicited." Thus "the Christ event" is revelation "insofar as [it] elicits radical faith," and thus is seen as "demonstration of Being's loyalty to all beings and as call to decisive choice of God's universal cause" (42,44; cf. 47, where "revelation" is said to be "an event which elicits the confidence of selves in their ultimate environment and calls upon them as free selves to decide for the universal cuse"). 110-HRN's use of "religion" here is interesting. Wouldn't he have better said that "every theory of value, so far as it is relational, presupposes faith in some center of value"? Cf. his somewhat similar use of "religion" on 118.The different use on p. 48, as well as throughout the discussion on pp. 11-89, is surely to be preferred.-Similarly, HRN would have better concluded his essay by speaking of "the faith foundations of these relativisms," or of "the faiths that provide the foundations of these relativisms" (113).

114-126-It is interesting that in this essay faith is, for all practical purposes, identified simply with "trust," or "reliance, " or "confidence" (cf. esp. 123: