Monotheism and Tolerance: Recovering a Religion of Reason »

Robert Erlewine is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Why are religious tolerance and pluralism so difficult to achieve? Why is the often violent fundamentalist backlash against them so potent? Robert Erlewine looks to a new religion of reason for answers to these questions. Drawing on Enlightenment writers Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, and Hermann Cohen, who placed Christianity and Judaism in tension with tolerance and pluralism, Erlewine finds a way to break the impasse, soften hostilities, and establish equal relationships with the Other. Erlewine's recovery of a religion of reason stands in contrast both to secularist critics of religion who reject religion for the sake of reason and to contemporary religious conservatives who eschew reason for the sake of religion. Monotheism and Tolerance suggests a way to deal with the intractable problem of religiously motivated and justified violence.

Pt. 1 Overcoming the Current Crisis

1 Monotheism, Tolerance, and Pluralism: The Current Impasse 3

2 Learning from the Past: Introducing the Thinkers of the Religion of Reason 29

Pt. 2 Mendelssohn: Idolatry and Indiscernibility

3 Mendelssohn and the Repudiation of Divine Tyranny 43

4 Monotheism and the Indiscernible Other 69

Pt. 3 Kant: Religious Tolerance

5 Radical Evil and the Mire of Unsocial Sociability 85

6 Kant and the Religion of Tolerance 106

Pt. 4 Cohen: Ethical Intolerance

7 Cohen and the Monotheism of Correlation 131

8 Rational Supererogation and the Suffering Servant 150

Conclusion: Revelation, Reason, and the Legacy of the Enlightenment 177

Notes 183

Works Cited 229

Index 239