the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament, is the true birthplace of the
hermeneutics of suspicion. The prophets know that “the heart is devious above all else”
(Jeremiah 17:9) and that this is no less true of the covenant people of God than of their
neighbors; and the gospels present the disciples of Jesus as driven by devious desires
(Westphal 1998).
But it would be shameless ingratitude to complain about this lacuna without recognizing
our enormous debt to Ricoeur for showing us the importance of the hermeneutics of
suspicion for the phenomenology of religion or to complain about the unresolved
question about transcending the hermeneutical circle in pure reflection without
acknowledging the methodological and substantive gift he has given us in a descriptive
phenomenology of the images and narratives that shape the self-understanding of the
believing soul. If Husserl's ideal of phenomenology as rigorous science looks like a
methodological bias against the whole region of religious experience and belief,
Ricoeur's hermeneutical phenomenology represents a double openness. The
hermeneutical turn itself, which we can call the hermeneutics of finitude, with its
emphasis on the embeddedness of human understanding in contingent cultural
constructions, is open to a theology of human createdness, and the expansion of this to
incorporate a hermeneutics of suspicion is open to a theology of human fallenness. But
Ricoeur develops the double detour through the texts and subtexts of the religious life
without appeal to religious belief or theological principle as norms.
end p.479
Phenomenology and Religion: Janicaud and Marion
For Heidegger the question concerned the relation of (philosophy as) phenomenology to
(religion as) theology. For Ricoeur it was a question of a phenomenology of religion that
was no longer religious belief and not yet philosophical reflection. Like Ricoeur, Jean-
Luc Marion turns phenomenology in the direction of religion prior to theological
reflection, but the relation of this phenomenology to theology is made an issue by those
who accuse it of being theology in disguise. The loudest such complaint comes from
Dominique Janicaud in a 1991 book entitled The Theological Turn in French
Phenomenology (2000). He argues that Emmanuel Levinas is the new Socrates, who
corrupts the youth—in particular, Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Michel Henry—by
allowing what is presented as phenomenology to be contaminated by theological
commitment. In the work of Levinas, “phenomenology has been taken hostage by a
theology that does not want to say its nameThe dice are loaded and choices made; faith
rises majestically in the background. The reader, confronted by the blade of the absolute,
finds him- or herself in the position of a catechumen who has no other choice than to
penetrate the holy words and lofty dogmasthe only response [to the reader's questions]
could be a reference to the initial presuppositions: `Take it or leave it' ” (43, 27–28).
Levinas' work is of special importance to ethics but not clearly to philosophy of religion.
He talks, to be sure, about God, but when all the constraints he places on God-talk are
taken seriously it is no longer clear that God is anything more than the depth dimension
of the human Other in terms of which I am responsible to and for my neighbor as the