The study outlines thefirst intellectual history of religious recogni-
tion, stretching from the New Testament to the present day. It
connects the history of religion and theology with philosophical
approaches, arguing that philosophers owe a considerable historical
and conceptual debt to the religious processes of recognition.
At the same time, religious recognition has a distinctive profile that
differs from philosophy in some important respects. This means that
recognition is a genuinely theological topic that is rooted in the New
Testament and other normative sources of Christianity. When Jüngel
connects it with justification, he is not merely applying a psycho-
logical analogy. Rather, he continues the long theological elaboration
of interpersonal recognition. In itsfinal chapters, the study under-
takes a systematic elaboration of the insights provided by the theo-
logical tradition of recognition. The study thus proposes that both
philosophy and theology can make creative intellectual use of the long
history of religious recognition.
Moreover, the long history of recognition in religious and theo-
logical sources means that it is in many ways a less secular idea than
toleration. While the emergence of toleration is strongly associated
with the early modern and Enlightenment views of personal auton-
omy, recognition has biblical, patristic, and medieval roots which
highlight the heteronomous constitution of person in the encounter
between other divine and human persons. The present study claims,
finally, that recognition is a theological topic that is relatively inde-
pendent of post-Hegelian philosophical developments. In the light of
our long history, the relationship between recognition and toleration
is complex, as religious recognition differs from modern views of
autonomy, identity, and status change. At the same time, the discov-
ery of this history allows for new ways of speaking of otherness or
alterity in Christian theology.
Why have these insights and claims been neglected in previous
scholarship? One explanation is that scholars of Hegelian philosophy
have dominated the academic discussion on recognition. In addition,
there is a curious inconsistency in the work of the two most prom-
inent scholars of this kind, Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth. Taylor
considers on the one hand that the need for recognition is universal.
On the other hand, however, he also teaches that recognition only
becomes prominent in the work of Rousseau and Hegel. How can it
be, then, that the generations before Rousseau never became aware
of this allegedly universal need? Taylor explains this seeming
4 Recognition and Religion