Jasper's axial prophesy fulfilled?

the origin and return of biblical religion, Abrahamic hermeneutics, and the second person

pp. 119-208

in: Jonathan Bowman, Cosmoipolitan justice, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

This chapter will focus on Jasper's prediction that post-WWII global secularization trends will soon be matched by a resurgence of Biblical religion. I focus first on the Hebrew tetragramaton YHWH and the associated experiential backdrop of the Sinai covenant and Exodus event. From there, I trace second person narratives back to the universal species-ethic of Hebrew Biblical genealogies. I frame Horkheimer and Adorno's appeal to the non-utterance of God's name as akin to their refusal to claim achievement of ultimate justice. Applied to the Christian case, Jaspers' will follow suit in his resistance to the doctrine of Christ's incarnation. In reply, I follow a non-Hellenistic reading of the logos that uses the accounts of the Sermon on the Mount to couch the logos in terms of second person promissory narratives. I adapt Habermas's method for critically appropriating traditionally Judeo-Christian theological concepts communicatively, highlighting three examples. Finally, in the Muslim case, I confer Islam axial status by virtue of its secondary breakthrough from originally Judaic and Christian origins. I recount Talal Asad's emphasis on the embodied habitus of ritual experience and look to the Muslim jurisprudence of Abdullah An-Naim as an instance of an inherently Islamic call for religious liberty. Lastly, I turn to Rawls for hints at how an overlapping consensus among Axial traditions could be applied to international jurisprudence, specifically focusing on Islam.