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Jewish Political Studies Review Abstracts
Volume 9, Numbers 3 & 4 (Fall 5758/1997)
John Locke and the Bible, Leo Strauss as Jew and Philosopher
The preference for republican government over monarchy in
the Hebrew Bible appears to be revisited in the writings of the
modern political philosophers, especially John Locke. The
revival of this preference in the teaching of the moderns occurs
in the mode of ideology, and rests upon a new epistemology that
skirts the classic contention about the relationship of knowledge
and virtue. Even so, the modern teaching is at once an
interpretation and a qualified revival of the Scriptural teaching
that man is to "be fruitful and multiply, abound in the earth,
conquer it and rule" (Genesis 1:28).
This study offers a new, more political, view of the
intentions, structure, and meaning of Locke's masterpiece The
Reasonableness of Christianity. It argues that Locke's work is
not to be viewed as another in a long line of seventeenth century
works purporting to offer a "rational" basis for the Christian
religion. Rather Locke's purpose is to reinterpret Christian
doctrine in order to make it "safe" for liberal regimes. Locke's
Jesus is not the Divine mediator nor focus of God's revelation to
humankind. Rather he is a moral teacher who provides the
religious imprimatur for the virtuous behavior of the masses that
liberalism requires.
This essay is a critical evaluation of John Locke's account
of natural right as it is manifest in the biblical scholarship of
J. Wellhausen and C.E.B. Cranfield. It provides a summary of the
accounts of law given by Wellhausen and Cranfield respectively in
order to show that certain views of law, that is, certain
theological-political teachings, have been central to the
emergence of modern biblical scholarship. In both Wellhausen and
Cranfield it can be observed that stylistic and literary
arguments are mustered in support of theological-political
teachings. Finally, we argue that these accounts of "law" and
"right" find their formative articulation in the writings of J.
Locke, and in particular, in his early work entitled, Questions
Concerning the Law of Nature.
Kenneth Hart Green's Jew and Philosopher: The Return to
Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss offers an able
defense against current presumptions that the Jewish element of
Strauss's thought is either unfriendly to Orthodoxy, untimely, or
marginal for an understanding of Strauss's thought as a whole.
Are philosophy and biblical faith compatible? Early, Strauss
wrote that in every attempt to harmonize them, one of the two is
sacrificed to the other. Later, he seemed to think that the two
can co-exist peacefully, each learning from the other. I argue
that there is no place for revelation in the life of reason.
Because Maimonides was primarily a philosopher, he argued that
there were rational grounds for all the commandments. Philosphy
thus enslaves revelation instead of co-existing peacefully with
it.
In his book on Leo Strauss, Jew and Philosopher..., Kenneth
Hart Green has provided the first serious study of the
development of Strauss's thought. Strauss's fundamental thought
that revealed theology and philosophy are mutually irrefutable
takes the form in Maimonides of a cosmological opposition between
creation and eternity. Philosophy's incapacity to refute its
revealed counterpart requires recognition of that counterpart as
a possibility. Green's Strauss's Maimonides's prophetology
articulates human perfection as a reconciliation of reason and
revelation, a reconciliation of prophet and philosopher-king.
The mature Strauss does not deny, but questions, those
conclusions. To qualify Green's account: Strauss's opening a way
of return to classical philosophy relies less on radical
historicism and more on "the evidence of those simple experiences
of right and wrong which are at the bottom of the philosophic
contention that there is a natural right." Strauss never ceased
to be concerned with the question of the relation between the
Platonic-Aristotelian forms and the formulas of modern
mathematical physics. A brief account of the basic difference
between these kinds of "forms" is presented.
Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish
Thought of Leo Strauss is the first book to deal with Leo Strauss
both as a Jewish thinker, and as rediscoverer of Maimonides. The
author responds to comments on his book by three scholars: Martin
D. Yaffe, Michael Wyschogrod, and Laurence Berns. This response
focuses on what he regards as the formidable challenge which Leo
Strauss as a Jewish philosopher represents for the future of
Jewish thought, and on whether these scholars face that challenge
adequately. In response to Yaffe, Green deals with the
contemporary relevance of Strauss's thought; it is argued that
this relevance is only enhanced by the moribund state of current
philosophy, and by the divergent forms of present-day thought
which give a vehement defense of Judaism but do not take
seriously the Maimonidean legacy. In response to Wyschogrod,
Green defends the tradition of Jewish philosophy descended from
Maimonides as an authentic Jewish tradition, rooted in adherence
to the deeper meaning of Judaism, and to an awareness of the
original meaning of philosophy. In response to Berns, Green
deals with the problem of radical historicism and the notion of
nature as a standard in Strauss's thought, and considers how much
the stages of development in Strauss's thought affected his
critique of radical historicism.
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