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8 - Paul Ricoeur: A Biblical Philosopher on Jesus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Paul K. Moser
Affiliation:
Loyola University, Chicago
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Summary

In 1979 Paul Ricoeur published a short article, “The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God.” Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, repeats four times the phrase “how much more” (5:9, 10, 15, 17), and Ricoeur takes Paul's rhetoric to indicate the “divine logic” of Jesus. This is a logic not of equality and equivalence but of the excess and superabundance “that one hears in the voices of the prophets, in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel, and in the Psalms” and also in the teaching of Jesus – as in Matthew 5:39b–42 on turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, and never refusing to lend, or in the extravagance of a parable about the Kingdom of God or the hyperbole of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. Ricoeur goes on to argue that “Paul says the same thing as Jesus but at another level of language” but adds something new:

that Jesus Christ is himself the “how much more of God.” For the Gospel, Jesus was at first the one who spoke and spread the good news. Now he is announced as the one who, by the folly of the cross, breaks the moral equivalence of sin and death…. [T]he church, through the mouth of Paul, gives a name, the name of Jesus Christ, to the law of superabundance. But even then, this proclamation of the church would remain an exclusive saying if we could not attach this supreme “how much more” to the enlightening paradoxes of the rabbi Jesus.

Type
Chapter
Information
Jesus and Philosophy
New Essays
, pp. 169 - 193
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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References

Ricoeur, Paul, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. Pellauer, David (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 279–83Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Mudge, Lewis S., trans. various (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980)Google Scholar
The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Buchanan, Emerson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969)
LaCocque, Andre and idem, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, trans. Pellauer, David (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul, “Myth as Bearer of Possible Worlds,” in States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, ed. Kearney, Richard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 35Google Scholar
Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, eds. Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–1975)Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, trans. Blamey, Kathleen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 355Google Scholar
Ford, David F., Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar
Vanhoozer, Kevin, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 128CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dawson, John David, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar
Ricoeur, , Time and Narrative, trans. Blarney, Kathleen McLaughlin and Pellauer, David, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988)Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Savage, Denis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970)Google Scholar
Ricoeur, , “Biblical Hermeneutics,” Semeia 4 (1975), 29–148Google Scholar

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