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Toward a Generous Orthodoxy provides a refined exposition of Hans Frei's christologically motivated engagement with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Clifford Geertz, Erich Auerbach, his use of ordinary language philosophy and nonfoundational philosophical insights, while illuminating and expanding his orientational indebtedness to Karl Barth's theology. By placing Frei's work into critical conversation with developments in pragmatist thought and cultural theory since his death, the rereading of Frei offered here aims to correct and resolve many of the complaints and misunderstandings that vex his theological legacy. The result is a clarification of the unity and coherence of Frei's work over the course of his career; a reframing of the complex relationship of his work to that of his Yale colleague George Lindbeck and successive "postliberal" theological trends; demonstration that Frei's uses of Barth, Wittgenstein, Auerbach, and Geertz do not relegate his theological approach to critical quietism, methodological separatism, epistemic fideism, or a so-called "theological ghetto"; explication and development of Frei's account of the "plain sense" of Scripture that evades charges of narrative foundationalism and essentialism on one hand and, on the other, avoids criticisms that any account so emphasizing culture, language, and practice will reduce scriptural meaning to the ways the text is used in Christian practice and community. What emerges from Toward a Generous Orthodoxy is a sharpened account of the christologically anchored, interdisciplinary, and conversational character of Frei's theology, which he came to describe as a "generous orthodoxy," modeling a way for academic theological voices to take seriously both their vocation to the Christian church and their roles as interlocutors in the academic discourse.

Jewish Liturgical Reasoning is an attempt to articulate the internal patterns of philosophical, ethical, and theological reasoning that are at work in Jewish synagogue liturgies. Jewish Liturgical Reasoning is also about the relationship between internal Jewish liturgical reasoning and the variety of “external” philosophical and theological forms of reasoning that have been developed in modern and postliberal Jewish philosophy. The book focuses, in its first chapters, on the liturgical reasoning of Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. It then attempts to further develop the liturgical reasoning of these figures with methods of study from hermeneutics, semiotic theory, postliberal theology, anthropology, and performance theory. These newer theories are enlisted to help form a contemporary liturgical reasoning that can respond to such events as the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and interfaith dialogue between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The book argues that liturgical reasoning can reorient Jewish philosophy and provide it with new tools, new terms of discourse, and a new sensibility for the twenty‐first century.

The divide between liberal and postliberal theology is one of the most important and far-reaching methodological disputes in twentieth-century theology. Their divergence in method brought related differences in their approaches to hermeneutics and religious language. The split between liberals and postliberals in their understanding of religious language is widely acknowledged, but rigorous philosophical analysis and assessment of these divergent understandings is seldom seen. Liberalism vs. Postliberalism provides just such analyses, using remarkable developments in analytic philosophy of language over the past forty years. The book provides an original analysis of the “theology and falsification” debates of the 1950s and 60s, placing them in the context of developments in analytic philosophy of language out of which they arose. These debates then supply the philosophical lens that brings into focus the centrality of the issue of religious language in the methodological dispute between liberal and postliberal theologians in the latter part of the twentieth century. Knight argues that recent developments in analytic philosophy of language reveal serious problems with both positions. In the course of the argument, the author makes important recent work in analytic philosophy accessible to theologians, religious studies scholars and their students. This philosophical work clears the ground for a more inclusive method that takes seriously the aspirations of both liberal and postliberal theologians. The book thus makes an important contribution to contemporary theological method, to the understanding of liberal and postliberal theologies in their similarities and differences, and to our understanding of the role of analytic philosophy in contemporary theology and religious studies.