Better than Wine: Love, Poetry, and Prayer in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig

This monograph examines Franz Rosenzweig's distinctive approach to religious thought through his integration of love, poetry, and prayer as essential modes of theological understanding. Greenberg analyzes how Rosenzweig's philosophy challenges conventional Western philosophical approaches to God by privileging experiential and relational categories over abstract speculation.

Greenberg demonstrates that Rosenzweig's project fundamentally reconceives the divine-human relationship through lived experience rather than systematic theology. The study explores how Rosenzweig positions love as the primary mode of encountering God, arguing that divine love precedes and enables human love. This reverses traditional philosophical priorities that begin with rational proofs or metaphysical arguments. For Rosenzweig, love functions not as sentiment but as the ontological foundation of religious life, creating genuine relationship between finite and infinite being.

The monograph carefully traces how poetry and prayer serve as linguistic expressions of this love relationship. Greenberg shows that Rosenzweig views liturgical language not as descriptive statements about God but as performative utterances that actualize divine-human encounter. Prayer becomes the paradigmatic speech act that transcends subject-object distinctions characteristic of philosophical discourse. Similarly, poetry provides the linguistic form adequate to express the immediacy of religious experience that conceptual language cannot capture.

Greenberg situates Rosenzweig's thought against both German idealism and emerging existentialism, demonstrating his critique of philosophical systems that reduce God to a concept or principle. The work explores Rosenzweig's engagement with Jewish sources, particularly the Song of Songs, which provides the organizing metaphor of divine love as "better than wine" - more intoxicating and transformative than rational knowledge. This biblical hermeneutic reinforces Rosenzweig's claim that revelation occurs through interpersonal encounter rather than propositional truth.

The study contributes significantly to understanding how Rosenzweig's "new thinking" offers an alternative to both traditional natural theology and modern atheistic critiques. By analyzing the interconnection of love, poetry, and prayer, Greenberg illuminates Rosenzweig's vision of theology grounded in lived relationship rather than abstract argumentation. This approach neither proves nor disproves God's existence but instead transforms the terms of the debate by insisting that the question of God must be addressed through experiential categories. The monograph thus presents Rosenzweig as pioneering a dialogical theology that locates divine reality in the space of authentic human encounter and liturgical practice.