Zusammenfassung / Summary
A strong affinity to philosophy is specific to the Catholic profile of systematic theology. This refers to the plight to justify Christian faith within the languages of the autonomous reason. How fertile could a dialogue with a philosophy of that kind then be, which shows no sign of openness towards theology? The connections would then merely be indirect: Axel Honneth's theory of acknowledgement in understanding offers a rationale that, when appropriated to theological purposes, allows the essential claims made by the theology of salvific history to be restated in the language of a theory of acknowledgement. This paper will do so exemplarily by focusing on the theology of creation. Having then freed this tract from its cosmological ballast by reformulating it in terms of a theory of acknowledgement, it may be in turn become possible to explicate that very tension which Honneth encounters as soon as he extends the set of acts of acknowledgment to the world itself without leaving the paradigm of intersubjectivity. Does perhaps the option of a discrete giving and taking, an exchange, between theology and (secular) philosophy become feasible at this point?