Philosopher · Contemporary
Franz Rosenzweig
1886–1929 · The New Thinking; philosophy of dialogue
A German Jewish philosopher who resolved in 1913 to be baptized and, after a Yom Kippur in a Berlin synagogue, remained a Jew; he held Christianity to be the true way of the nations to the Father, and Catholic philosophers of dialogue such as Bernhard Casper read him beside Ebner and Buber.
A Hegel scholar (Hegel and the State) who wrote The Star of Redemption (1921) on postcards from the Macedonian front, Rosenzweig broke with the philosophy of the All: God, world and man are three irreducible elements, joined not by thought but by the events of creation, revelation and redemption, and the philosophy that can say this is a speech-thinking that takes time and the other person seriously. Revelation is God's “love me,” answered by the love of the neighbor; Judaism is the fire at the center of the star, already with the Father and living outside history in its liturgical year, and Christianity the rays that go out to conquer the world, each needing the other until the end. Struck with ALS in 1922, he led the Frankfurt Lehrhaus, translated the Bible with Buber, and in his last years wrote Understanding the Sick and the Healthy and the letter “The Builders,” on how the law becomes commandment.
Why he matters: He is the Jewish thinker who grants the most to Christianity without ceasing to be a Jew, and his two-way picture of Israel and the Church is the one that every Catholic theology of Israel since Nostra Aetate has had to weigh; his New Thinking is a source for Catholic dialogical philosophy from Ebner and Casper onward.
Where to be careful
His picture of two valid ways, with the Jew already at the goal and in no need of Christ, cannot be squared with the Church's teaching that Christ is the one mediator (Dominus Iesus 13–15; The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable, 2015, 35–37), and his placing of the Jewish people outside history and the state is a theologoumenon of his own; his God is known in love and speech rather than by any demonstration. His doctrines of creation from nothing, of revelation as love and of redemption as the sanctification of the world are shared ground.
Reading
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The Star of RedemptionFranz Rosenzweig · Part II on creation, revelation and redemption; Part III on the Jewish and Christian ways.
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Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and GodFranz Rosenzweig · The New Thinking in a short and clear form.
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Das dialogische Denken: Franz Rosenzweig, Ferdinand Ebner und Martin BuberBernhard Casper · A Catholic philosopher of religion on Rosenzweig beside the Catholic Ebner.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.