Abstract
For biblical or more precisely Christian theology the way up and the way down are not one and the same. Christian theology could attempt to avoid this potentially embarrassing impasse and, refusing to speak to the philosophers, retreat to a comfortable interiority were it not for the fact that the founder of Christianity and indeed the theologians' own humanity demand otherwise. Philosophy in turn might have chosen to disregard the claims of a theology emboldened by reason and Revelation were it not for its own desire to be comprehensive. Accordingly, no major philosopher of the last millennium has passed over the Bible in silence. Admittedly, the theologians have been reticent of late, yet it is by no means clear that the philosophers have succeeded in restoring thought to its former state of Greek "innocence." It is no surprise, then, that the crisis it is the fashion to call "postmodernism" should have reawakened the old question, Quid sit deus? Marion's short, demanding, and at times repetitive book, written "at the border between philosophy and theology," meets this question in a provocative way. This careful translation will surely win him both theologically and philosophically minded readers, as did the French original. His formation points to his currency: among his "teachers" we may mention Derrida; Levinas and Balthasar number among his "masters"; and as he himself admits, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger form his "horizon".