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Welcome to our panel discussion, which will be a rather short one,

because Mr. Asmann has to leave us to catch the train at a quarter to four at the latest we have arranged.

Of course, I also want to open this discussion to you, to the audience,

so we'll try to be a little bit short up here.

But I wanted to take the occasion to involve our keynote speakers into this discussion.

So my first question to both of you will be how plausible or how attractive you find the theory of monotheism put forward by Jan Asmann today.

And maybe we could make a start with the lady.

Thank you very much, Manfred.

Maybe I'll take a cue from Professor Asmann and talk about the ambivalence, so both the positive and the negative dimensions of monotheism.

It seems to me there is a powerful way within political theology and public theology that monotheism potentially functions as a kind of iconoclastic imagination.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me effectively dethrones any other kind of human-made power.

And here we are just not very far from the Nuremberg rally grounds and clearly for certain theologians in the middle of the 20th century and others,

invoking a sense of the otherness of the Holy One, the authority of God, in the face of total annihilating power

that claimed for a human political system, national socialism, an absolute and totalitarian authority, was really very important, a very, very important theological move.

So monotheism in terms of the oneness, the otherness of the Holy One actually overriding any human hubris and claim to political power is very important.

And I think that functions also in terms of representations of power, that it renders all representations, all ways of speaking of the ineffable God as ultimately falling short of the true reality.

So that perhaps is the positive side, but clearly in a sense following the ambivalence there's a mirror image, there's a shadow side of that,

which is that again authorities and governments can speak in the name of religion, can claim for themselves that divine power.

So I think there's a danger there as well.

I think the other interesting thing just to say from Professor Asman's paper that I take is this interesting link between,

and it's almost like a theology of the Word I think, that in creation Yahweh brings the world into being through the Word.

In covenant Yahweh establishes the relationship with humanity and brings humanity into that, into history as it were, and the history of God.

And then through forms of social contract the ethical requirements that follow from being part of the covenant is also a form of words, of making promises.

So actually a theology of the Word that generates creation, covenant, and if you like social contract,

I think is a very interesting other theme to do with a sort of implicit public and political theology within the exposition of Deuteronomy and Exodus that we had.

So when I was in graduate school I participated at Stanford in a wonderful program, the Graduate Program in Humanities,

which brought together all the students from the humanities across the university in a series on Western civilization.

And I remember especially the discussion we had on Dante's Inferno because I was the graduate student that was to give the presentation,

and it was chaired by the great Dante scholar John Ficero.

And of course I gave the religious studies interpretation of Dante, which is that Beatrice is God because God is ineffable,

and we have no way of talking about him or her other than through poetry.

And Ficero's response was, the problem with you religious studies people is that you claim that God is ineffable, and then you go about effing about him all the time.

So I'm going to eff about God a little bit.

I'm especially impressed in the presentation that we heard with the end of both presentations,

and I'm reminded of a wonderful little book by Michael Walser called Thick and Thin, Moral Argument at Home and Abroad.

And in this argument, Walser makes an argument very similar to the argument that I tried to make today, which I think is at the heart of biblical theology.

I don't think it's the Israelite religion. I don't think it's the religion of Judah.

I think it's in the first two chapters of Genesis.

The first chapter of Genesis talks about a universal God.

The second chapter of Genesis talks about a very personal, particular God.

Joseph Soloveitchik, the great Orthodox Jewish scholar, called this Adam 1 and Adam 2.

And the idea is that in every particular faith there is some broader, thinner universal dimension.

But in order to reach that universalism, we have to begin by being different.

And so my argument about the dignity of difference today wasn't the argument that this is what Judaism says,

although that's actually the argument that Jonathan Sacks makes in his book.

I tried to universalize Sacks' argument, claiming that the kinds of universalism that have come to dominate various forms of Christianity and Islam,

and unfortunately may also sometimes be coming to dominate my own tradition,

are fundamentally problematic and dangerous unless they are coupled by some deep, particular, personal dimension which requires us to receive one another.

And that I take to be the fundamental task of religious education, both in the private domain,