Chepurin, Kirill
Junior Fellow: October 2022–September 2023
Research Project: Between Apocalypticism and Scepticism: Rethinking Theodicy with Jacob Taubes
Can theodicy, after the Holocaust, be understood as containing a sceptical dimension within itself that points at once to its own limits and to the limits of scepticism? This project, which is located at the intersection of religious studies, political theology, and the history of modern European philosophy, aims to explore the above question and has the following research premises and goals. Firstly, it proceeds from the hypothesis that the Jewish apocalyptic thinker Jacob Taubes offers what may be called a “negative” approach to the concept and meaning of theodicy out of the post-Holocaust context—an approach that prioritises questions over answers and hesitation and darkness over certainty and light. Secondly, it seeks to constructively develop this “negative” notion of theodicy and to critically assess its relationship to scepticism and to Taubes’s own apocalypticism. Finally, based on Taubes’s references to “the dark ground” of creation and the book of Job, and also on his polemic against Hans Blumenberg, it seeks to retrace an intellectual trajectory of the sceptical and apocalyptic dimensions of theodicy, especially in the period from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century.
Kirill Chepurin is a postdoctoral researcher. He wrote his PhD thesis in theology at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.