In what has been presented previously, Levinas' mistrust of theology as a discipline which tends towards the theoretical, compromises the transcendence of the divine by seeking to make it accessible to thought, and bypasses the demands of responsible and ethical involvement with the other person, has been a constant caution. To conceptualise the divine often involves a forgetfulness of the human economy, which is the economy of salvation. For Levinas, there can be no access to the divine other than by way of the human. This is why ethics is fundamental. It is not only ‘first philosophy’ but also ‘first theology’.

This is the reason why Levinas stresses the positive value of a-theism, which is a prelude to an adult religion which has no place for ‘some kind of kindergarten deity who distributed prizes, applied penalties, or forgave faults and in his goodness treated men as eternal children’ (DF, 81). The way to a relationship with the true God of monotheism has ‘a way station where there is no God’ (DF, 82). But such a halt on the way always, for Levinas, involves an essential and necessary detour along the way of the human. There is no recourse to the divine other than by way of the human. Levinas' ethical metaphysics is terribly incarnational. It may be argued that ‘the true life is elsewhere’ but, for Levinas, ‘we are in the world’, and it is within the world of responsibility and justice that one finds salvation.