Fallible Commitment

This article draws on Augustine’s De trinitate to articulate a logic of fallibilist commitment. It speaks into the wider context of twenty-first century religious pluralism, focusing as a test case on Christian post-supersessionism, in which the problem of fallible commitment emerges for the Christian who seeks, in response to her Jewish co-traditionalists, to repair her own tradition in respect of its long-entrenched supersessionism (the family of claims and practices rooted in the belief that the church has replaced Israel in the purposes of God). With a focus on the work of R. Kendall Soulen, I argue that postliberal post-supersessionist Christian theology is both exemplary in the way it enacts fallibilist commitment and falls short of a more thoroughgoing fallibilism. After tracing the fallibilist commitment, or logic of searching, articulated and enacted by Augustine in response to the questions he poses in De trinitate 10, I return to postliberal post-supersessionism in order to follow through more fully its partial repair of supersessionist Christianity.