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The author whom I discovered in The God of Faith and Reason displayed another face from the phenomenologist whose work I had come to rely upon to orient me in the often obscure world of Husserl. A bit of personal history will also help to show why I found the central argument of that work so utterly crucial, not only to what I was doing but to the entire endeavor of philosophical theology in the current intellectual culture. The manuscript came to me in Jerusalem during the two years (1980–82) I was spending there, initially serving as rector of the Ecumenical Institute for Theological Research (Tantur), working to expanding its horizons from those of Christian ecumenism to a foyer for interfaith scholarship and understanding. The following year I spent in a personal project to gain sufficient Arabic to explore Islamic and Jewish philosophical theology, with the goal of putting the work of Thomas Aquinas into an interfaith perspective. For I had been persuaded by Karl Rahner's recent (1979) call to re-periodize the history of Christian theology, and had come to suspect myself that Aquinas' classic synthesis of Christian understanding by way of Hellenic philosophy was in fact already an interfaith, intercultural achievement.¹

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-1724-8_13

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