The Outside Daniel Whistler ‘… the fate of thought depends on its relation to exteriority …’ (Zourabichvili [1994] 2012: 44) [A] The Conditions of Theological Insufficiency This chapter concerns one feature of Christian apologetics during the nineteenth century: the acknowledgement that one need not be doing Christian theology. The idea that ‘Christian theology is not everything’ comes to be distinctively embedded within the theological thinking of the period. Accordingly, other scientific pursuits and theoretical frameworks are seen not only as independently valuable, but also as key tools for theology’s self- determination. Theology comes to itself mediated by an outside. An initial example of this logic is provided by a passage from Schleiermacher’s Speeches (to which I return at length later in the chapter): This is the great evil, that good people believe their activity is universal and exhaustive of humanity and that if one would do what they do, one would then need to have no sense except for what one does. ([1799] 1996: 62) Schleiermacher identifies a significant epistemic vice in intellectual narcissism or, more specifically, in a lack of awareness of scientific pursuits that are genuinely different from one’s own. Conversely, to recognise the potential alterity (and so contingency) of ways of thinking is an essential virtue that makes good theology possible: successful theologising acknowledges that there is more to thought than itself. There are, therefore, both