This article provides an overview of Richard Kearney’s attempt at re-imagining God post-metaphysically. In the context of a continental dialogue on the topic, Kearney has responded to onto-theology with a hermeneutic and phenomenologically informed attempt to rethink God post-metaphysically. This eschatological understanding of God is expounded in the article and is placed in relation to Kearney’s more recent concept of Anatheism. The article closes with a few remarks on what may be gained by Kearney’s work, as well as outlining a few critical questions.
This article provides an overview of Richard Kearney’s attempt at re-imagining God post-metaphysically. As part of a continental dialogue on the topic, this Irish student of Paul Ricoeur has responded to onto-theology with a hermeneutic and phenomenologically informed attempt to re-imagine God post-metaphysically.
God neither is nor is not but may be. That is my thesis in this volume. What I mean by this is that God, who is traditionally thought of as act or actuality, might better be rethought as possibility. To this end I am proposing here a new hermeneutics of religion which explores and evaluates two rival ways of interpreting the divine – the
Kearney explores how we may move from old metaphysical notions of God – ‘as disembodied cause, devoid of dynamism and desire’ – to a more eschatological idea of God as possibility to come: ‘the
the God of desire and promise who, in diverse scriptural narratives, calls out from burning bushes, makes pledges and covenants, burns with longing in the song of songs (
Kearney considers the story of Moses’ encounter with the Divine in the burning bush as an example of religious transfiguration. He sees the enigmatic formula whereby God answers Moses’ request to disclose his name, אהיה אשר אהיה,
With the Greeks rendering the phrase – Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὥν (
Ricoeur claims that the encounter of biblical religious thought with Greek metaphysics led philosophers to the idea of Being as the proper name of God and of it designating God’s very essence. This laid, as Etienne Gilson showed, the foundation on which all Christian philosophy would build: the claim that there is one God and that this God is Being (Kearney
Kearney argues that the eschatological counter-tradition to ontological approaches, where the emphasis falls on the ethical and dynamic character of God, is more attuned to the original biblical context of meaning than the essentialist conceptions of divine Being in medieval and post-medieval metaphysics (
But the eschatological promise is made in the context of an I-Thou relationship (Moses and God), which implies that there are two sides to the promise: both human and divine. God’s commitment to a kingdom of justice needs the commitment of his faithful too, as heralded by the response of the people when they enter into covenant with Yahweh at Sinai. And yet, this does not entail conditionality, for the promise is granted unconditionally. The gift is not imposed, and the people are free to accept it, or not to: ‘the … promise can be
What was crucial for Greek thought was
Also:
In the circular words, I-am-who-may-be, God transfigures and exceeds being. His
From this, Kearney draws an indissoluble communion between God and humans that finds expression in ‘commitment to a shared history of “becoming”’ (
God’s promise is to be God at the
Kearney (
God putting being into question just as being gives flesh to God. At this border-crossing, the transfiguring Word struggles for carnal embodiment even as it dissolves into the flaming bush of its own desire. (p. 34)
For him, the counter-tradition of readings calls for a new hermeneutic of God as May-Be, or, as he calls it, an ‘onto-eschatological hermeneutics’ or a ‘
Kearney’s God-who-may-be offers to humans ‘the possibility of realizing a promised kingdom by opening ourselves to the transfiguring power of transcendence’ (Kearney
But with a God that is
God speaks not through monuments of power and pomp but in stories and acts of love and justice, the giving to the least of creatures, the caring for orphans, widows, and strangers; stories and acts which bear testimony – as transfiguring gestures do – to that God of little things that comes and goes, like the thin small voice, like the burning bush, like the voice crying out in the wilderness, like the word made flesh, like the wind that blows where it wills. (Kearney
Kearney’s reader is at times left wondering what exact content he gives to eschatology, or the
In a poetic manner, Kearney attempts to articulate the gift in terms of ‘a cocreation of history by humanity and God, leading to the Kingdom’ (
The divine possible takes its leave of being having passed through it, not into the pure ether of non-being, but into the future which awaits us as the surplus of
Thus, the possibility of good and the possibility of non-good exists in every moment, with the implication that we are actualising or not-actualising the Kingdom in every moment (
The coming of Christ
Yet, despite this emphasis on the moment-to-moment tiny acts of love and justice bringing in the Kingdom, Kearney (
If and when the Kingdom comes, I believe it will be a great kind of ‘recollection’, ‘retrieval’, or ‘recapitulation’ (
He sums up:
But for me, God is the possibilizing of the impossible. ‘What is impossible to us is possible to God’. We actualize what God possibilizes and God possibilizes what remains impossible for us. To sum up: God as gift means God is
Another way to understand this is by referring to messianic time, which in Kearney’s understanding ‘subverts and supersedes the linear, causal time of history moving ineluctably from past to present to future’ (Kearney
Kearney believes that thinking of God in terms of possibility makes a difference in three ways. Firstly, ‘it means that the presuppositions and prejudices that condition our everyday lives are put into question in the name of an unprogrammable future’ (Kearney
Secondly, ‘the God-who-may-be reveals that since no die is cast, no course of action preordained, we are free to make the world a more just and loving place, or not to’ (Kearney
Finally, ‘the God-who-may-be reminds us that what seems impossible to us is only seemingly so’ (Kearney
An interesting development in continental philosophy has been to – while accepting Pascal’s distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of the patriarchs – give precedence to the latter. This indicates a movement toward a God who transcends old onto-theological and metaphysical categories (Manoussakis
In
Anatheism is a movement back and beyond God, a concept that revisits the idea of God as a gift and suggests faith as a matter of reception and interpretation, rather than a teleological choice. What can be regained by the anatheistic movement, according to Kearney, is a new understanding of God in both secular and spiritual terms. (p. 446)
In a 2009 essay on the topic of anatheism, Kearney (
how the atheistic critique is a necessary moment in the development of genuine faith that involves a renunciation of fear and dependency as well as a reaffirmation of life and a return to existence. (p. 167)
He then discusses how such a return to God is possible, the ethical position that enables it, the reinterpretations of biblical traditions that it entails and the revival of God as an enabling God, and considers what the relationship between an anatheist philosopher and theologian would entail (
This view holds that one cannot begin to return to a new – ‘messianic’ or ‘eschatological’ – sense of the holy until one has left the old God of metaphysical causality and theodicy behind. God cannot advene until we have resigned our attachment to divine omnipotence. God cannot come until we have said our final adieu.
Ricoeur urges us to acknowledge the critique of ethics and religion undertaken by the school of suspicion. This is because, post-critique, it will be impossible to return, in Ricoeur’s words, to a ‘moral life that would take the form of naïve submission to commandments or to an alien or supreme will, even if this will were represented as divine’ (Kearney
As the section headings in
One significant theological concern, for example, has been Kearney’s lack of locating the cross and suffering within his Christology and eschatology (Gregor
created not only a significant summation of his recent thinking on narrative and hermeneutics but also a space for renewed conversations with Ricoeur’s many accounts of the ‘suffering servant’, as well as with the difficult religious possibilities inherent in Derrida’s thinking; renewed conversations that show not only the possibilities for understanding among friends engaged in the struggle with human suffering but also the rich possibilities for new conflicts of interpretations. (p. 98)
But from a theological perspective, this admittedly does not go far enough, and therefore, the invitation is open for theology to develop the possibilities for re-imagining the suffering God in post-metaphysical terms. Kevin Hart’s point that theology is grounded in the ‘in between’, and that its starting point must therefore always be the life, death and resurrection of Jesus (i.e. the centre of salvation history) and not creation or
Kearney, of course, does not set out to write a theology, and so, it is rightly the task of those theologians who would respond to Kearney’s invitation to dialogue, to interpret the Jesus narrative in conversation with the God Who May Be. Marion has likewise pointed, following Barth and Bultmann, to the continuity between hermeneutics’ general structure and the case of faith, which emphasises the importance of the dialogue between philosophy and theology. Emphasising the ‘deep rationality in the operations of faith, understanding, interpretation’, which, although irreducible to the usual rules of hermeneutics and phenomenology, is still connected to it, Marion states:
I think we are no longer in a situation where you have ‘reason or faith’. Reason is a construct. It is not optional, it is done.
This brings us to the question of metaphysics. Indeed, one of the most urgent questions springing from Kearney’s hermeneutics of religion that will have to be analysed and evaluated by theological reflection is of whether this God-who-may-be is a God at all or merely a ‘regulatory concept’ (William Desmond), a unifying idea (Craig Nichols) that serves as centre for Kearney’s newly constructed ‘ethical monotheism’ (Jeffrey Bloechl) (Manoussakis
Furthermore, although Kearney’s hermeneutical and phenomenological approach certainly opens many possibilities for novel thinking in terms of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the question of whether this tradition informs Kearney to the extent that his findings are no longer purely phenomenological observations, is a valid one. Patrick Masterson has insisted that Kearney’s phenomenological perspective ‘be qualified and complemented by certain metaphysical considerations which Kearney disputes’ (
Masterson would thus impose on Kearney’s
Clearly, Kearney’s work opens as many doors of possibility as it raises concerns. Future critiques of Kearney’s projects will certainly have to take issue with these questions, and in this respect, we are fortunate that Kearney’s work is still in process and that he has so willingly engaged in interdisciplinary conversation. The voluminous reactions to his work, especially his trilogy, illustrate not only the relevance of his philosophical writings for the study of religion in our day but also the relevance of theology and religion for philosophy as it is being produced by major contemporary thinkers (Manoussakis
It seems, then, that the playfield is open for philosophy and theology to engage anew around the themes of eschatology, metaphysics and its deconstruction, ethics, imagination and religion. But we would hope for more, still. We would dream of a two-way discourse between theology and philosophy. Or to use Kearney’s image (cf. footnote 8) in a different context, we would be as Jacob on the ground, dreaming of angels moving in both directions up and down the ladder, so that the twin disciplines may be mutually enriched by their explorative play.
The author declares that she has no financial or personal relationships which may have inappropriately influenced her in writing this article.
Kearney, who wrote his doctoral thesis under Ricoeur’s supervision [
The first book of the trilogy,
This essentially demonstrates what Kearney specifically means by ‘post’-metaphysical, when applied to re-imagining the sacred. Kearney does not imply a move away from metaphysics altogether, which would be intellectually impossible to do consistently. Instead, he wishes to engage the specific way in which Greek metaphysics has influenced the Judeo-Christian theological tradition, at the same time hermeneutically and phenomenologically exploring counter-narratives in the tradition that may facilitate an eschatological approach to re-imagining God.
The original Hebrew is translated into Greek as Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὥν (
The fact that this rare passage adds the verbal promise ‘to be’ to the ‘I Yahweh’ of other passages suggest that the Tetragrammaton partakes ‘in the semantic field of the verb traditionally rendered as ‘to be’ – in the constative or conditional mood’ (Kearney
In a dialogue with John Panteleimon Manoussakis in Rome, 2002, that continues a conversation between Marion and Kearney on 02 October 2001 in Boston, Marion explains his attempt to speak of God in terms ‘otherwise’ than Being: ‘For a long time, one could actually say since the times of Plato, philosophy has been thinking of God in terms of ‘beingness’ of the
Here, Kearney considers the question: what would happen to the God of the Possible if we were to destroy the earth? How can God’s promise of a kingdom on earth be fulfilled if there is no earth to come back to? What might be said of the existence of God in such a scenario? (Kearney
Kearney offers an answer in three parts.
’The kind of hermeneutics of religion that I’m talking about in my recent trilogy, by contrast, would be much more guided by the paradigm of Jacob’s ladder, where there’s to-ing and fro-ing, lots of people going up and down, in both directions. No absolute descent or absolute ascent. It’s little people going up and down ladders. And that, to me, is how you work toward the Kingdom. ‘Every step you take…’ (as the song goes). Each step counts. Messianic incursion, incarnation, epiphany is a possibility for every moment of our lives. Because we are finite and temporal, the infinite can pass through time, but it can never remain or take up residence in some triumphant or permanent present. That’s the difference between the eternal and time. They can crisscross back and forth, up and down, like the angels on Jacob’s ladder. But they are never identical, never the same. That’s what a hermeneutic affirmation of
With this formulation, Kearney plays on Levinas’ A-Dieu: Without this movement of atheistic separateness, the other as irreducibly alien and strange cannot be recognized as
In dialogue with Kearney, Derrida also comments on the powerlessness of the God-who-may-be in light of his notion of
Masterson’s understanding of philosophy is that our lived experiences provide us with a pre-philosophical foundation for our philosophical deliberations after the fact (Masterson