Modern science "has given us Promethean power, but no wisdom to guide its use," asserted Leon Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, at the June 17 Center forum "Why Genesis? Why Now?" Kass said his new book, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, offers "a philosophic reading" of Genesis and seriously reconsiders cast-off alternatives to Enlightenment doctrine. Genesis is "governed by a guiding pedagogical intention," he argued. By portraying the moral and political havoc of human life absent divine instruction, the early chapters prepare the reader to pay attention when God calls Abraham in Genesis 12 and begins his spiritual education. The reader is then "educated along with the patriarchs." He or she is led, moreover, to accept a central and "anti-philosophic" premise of the Bible: that wisdom begins not in wonder but in "fear, awe, and reverence" of God.

Praising the book, Center senior fellow George Weigel contrasted it with the work of many scholars who lose the Bible’s "forest of truth in the trees of historical-critical methodology" and reduce it "to a dead body rather than a living witness to wisdom." Kass presents "a way of reading the Bible that, in an intellectually serious and learned way, restores reverence for the text as disclosing the truth of things." Weigel concluded that "we are all in his debt."

Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College, however, expressed less enthusiasm for Kass’s "unlikely and odd" approach. In seeking moral guidance from the text, Kass relies inappropriately on "the language of human problems and human self-understanding" and underplays "the centrality of God’s actions to most of what happens in Genesis." While Kass may claim otherwise, his book exemplifies the humane and thoughtful discourse of "that classic Enlightenment institution, the secular university seminar room," but has little to say to those who believe that "Genesis is not analogous to our experience; it is our experience, in its historical aspect."

Offering a less ambivalent assessment, Leon Weiseltier of The New Republic said he welcomed the opportunity to discuss "a book about the Bible that is not in the virtue business and not in the certainty business"—though "not pro-doubt either." He called Kass’s work "a book about thought" that, in our "scandalously unphilosophical" culture, rightly directs us to contemplate the character of the universe and human life. He placed Kass in the tradition of Jewish philosophical scriptural commentators.

Center president Hillel Fradkin moderated the question-and-answer period that followed.