I AM THE TRUTH: TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF CHRISTIANITY.

By Michel

Henry. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press,

2003. Pp. xii + 282. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-8047-3780-0.

Michel Henry (d. 2002) is a central figure in the renewal of French theology in

dialogue with contemporary phenomenology. Along with the more recent

Incarnation, this book constitutes an extended philosophical meditation on

Christianity. More specifically, Henry is interested in the question of truth in

Christianity. However, his is not an apologetic project, attempting to establish

the “truth” of Christianity by appeal to philosophy as arbiter (pace Bultmann).

Instead, Henry is interested in just what constitutes “truth” according to the

believing community whose intentions are embodied in the corpus of the New

Testament. (Those familiar with Kierkegaard’s project in Concluding

Unscientific Postscript will find themselves in familiar territory.) But Henry’s

interest is not merely antiquarian; ultimately he will suggest that Christianity

offers a conception of truth that resists modernity’s positivism. Modernity,

according to Henry, is launched with Galileo and culminates in the “death of

God;” as such, there is a deep continuity between this scientism and nihilism:

“‘The death of God,’ a dramatic leitmotif of modern thought attributed to some

audacious philosophical breakthrough and parroted by our contemporaries, is

just the declaration of intent of the modern mind and its flat positivism” (p. 265).

In contrast to such a reductionism, Henry points to the understanding of truth in

Christianity as ek-static—demanding a transcendence which in turn revalues

immanence (in contrast to charges of a supposed “other-worldliness”). This is a

rooted in Christianity’s radical redefinition of just what constitutes reality—life:

“Radically foreign to the world, life nevertheless constitutes its real content” (p.

258).