What does history have to do with prophecy? Or to put it less cryptically, what does our imagination of the future, and of the actions (which is to say, the politics) necessary to take us toward that future, owe to past debates between Muslims, Christians, and Jews over the meaning of divine teachings?
This question may seem two centuries out-of-date. In works such as The Conflict of the Faculties (the title is timeless, but the date is 1798, the faculties being Theology and Philosophy/History), Kant already taught that the separation of history from its heretofore traditional codependence with Christian theology was a precondition for critical thought. “It is in this distinction that true enlightenment consists.” Many secular philosophies and practices of history would spring from this distinction. But note that Kant himself presented this emancipation in religious terms. According to him, the cause of the conflation of history and prophecy — and of all subsequent religious violence — was that the early Church had failed to completely erase the Jews and their histories, instead becoming contaminated by them: