Abstract
This interesting book presents various debates about a contemporary approach to God, conducted over a period of four years, between the Boston College Irish philosopher Richard Kearney and a number of distinguished philosophers and theologians, namely, James Wood, Catherine Keller, Charles Taylor, Julia Kristeva, Gianni Vattimo, Simon Critchley, Jean-Luc Marion, John Caputo, David Tracy, Jens Zimmermann, and Merold Westphal.
The discussions relate mainly to Kearney’s influential book Anatheism: Returning to God after God which represents the culmination of his thought, developed in several previous works, about how an affirmation of God can be most effectively achieved today in the context of a largely post-theistic culture. The distinguished range of participants is a fitting recognition of the international esteem in which Kearney’s philosophical achievement is held.
He proposes Anatheism as a critical hermeneutical retrieval of sacred things that have passed but retain a possibility to be realized, eschatologically, more fully in the future. It is ‘a farewell to the old God of metaphysical power, the God we thought we knew and possessed the omni-God of sovereignty and theodicy. Adieu, therefore, to the God that Nietzsche, Freud and Marx declared dead’ (p. 17). It seeks instead a more phenomenological, hermeneutical, subject-oriented, and practically relevant approach to God.
This is to be achieved through imaginative interpretation of sacred and secular texts and images with a view to discerning how they challenge us to risk realizing, through our ethical response, the possibility of what may seem impossible. This is a challenge to locate and welcome the sacred within the secular, to rediscover transcendence within immanence through our ethical response to the appeal of the vulnerable other.
The paradigm of this rediscovery of the sacred is our hazardous loving welcome of the stranger, the alien, the impoverished, and even the potential enemy. The Bible provides many instances of such hazardous welcome of the stranger, e.g. Abraham’s welcome of the three strangers, Mary’s welcome of Gabriel. So also do other religious texts and indeed the works of secular writers such as Joyce, Woolf, and Proust.
By welcoming the sacred as an ethically enabling possibility, we can accomplish, beyond our limited self-regarding propensities, an ethical order of justice and love. Through this accomplishment the kingdom of God, the God who may be, is accomplished by us. There is a co-relativity between the divine, as enabling possibility of a kingdom of justice and love, and humanity which, as thus enabled, can accomplish this possibility. We make actual the divine possibility which is God.
Depending upon whether the enabling possibility of the sacred or its human accomplishment is emphasized, the responses of the participants in dialogue in the book range across a spectrum from theism to atheism. In some cases the sacred is interpreted as indistinguishable from the secular. In others it is envisaged deconstructively as a disturbing unforeseeable radical otherness which we seek to configure imaginatively in human ethical terms. Kearney skilfully defends his Anatheism from such extreme alternatives. He insists that ‘the sacred is inseparable from the secular, while remaining distinct’ (p. 18).
The God retrieved in this book is one who is accessible principally as corresponding to exigencies of our human condition. God is seen as a call, a cry, or summons that invites us to interpret our human situation and direct our action in the light of various inherited sacred and secular narratives, life experiences, and philosophies.
The thesis which animates the discussion from various angles in the book is that the only God recoverable today is a God for man—a God essentially and co-relatively linked to human aspirations as an enabling possibility of ethical achievement.
This orientation of talk about God to concrete human experience yields many rich and revealing insights about the practical implications of religion as a way of life rather than an abstract metaphysical speculation. Many of the, at first sight, strange claims about us enabling God to be—‘God is up to us in the end’ (p. 250)—can be given a perfectly intelligible meaning. Phenomenological and hermeneutical interpretation of historico-religious texts can provide an illuminating account of how God can become a reality for us as an ethical inspiration in our lives. Genuine faith is portrayed, not as a propositional belief that God exists, but as faith in an infinite demand, desire, hope, trust.
This phenomenological hermeneutical approach is contrasted at least 20 times in the book with a metaphysical approach to the existence and nature of God which, for the most part, is rejected as false and idolatrous.
This is a contention with which I and indeed some of the discussants, both theist and atheist, have some difficulty. Thus for James Wood ‘I do not see evidence for an anatheist understanding of God as the creator of the world’ (p. 25). And for Merold Westphal ‘he clearly wants us to abandon a sovereign God’ (p. 230).
Undoubtedly we humans must exist if God is to be a God for us. And it is as thus co-relative to us that Kearney’s hermeneutical phenomenology can advance such illuminating considerations about rediscovering God in our anatheistic times. However, the questions remain: Is God’s co-relativity to us absolute? Does God not exist if we do not exist? Was Hegel right in claiming that ‘without the world God is not God’? It is here, and in comparable instances, that meta-phenomenological or metaphysical issues arise.
In seeking to remain closely in touch with the spirit of contemporary thought and experience Anatheism provides an innovative practical approach to the affirmation of God or the sacred supported by convincing interpretations of religious and secular texts. However, a question remains whether it is too constrained within the boundary of co-relativity, which has been called the dominant notion of modern philosophy since Kant.
Must not this co-relationist approach of hermeneutic phenomenology be complemented with another more metaphysical level of reflection which considers impersonally and objectively questions concerning the existence, nature, and co-existence of God? This is the issue of how to envisage God as not constrained co-relatively within the hermeneutic circle within which we find ourselves.
Scientists face a similar challenge with equanimity when they discourse about the state of the universe prior to the appearance of human consciousness. And, of course, there can be more than one valid approach to understanding a phenomenon. We still use the complementary terminologies of particles and waves when discussing mundane phenomena such as radiation and light. The physiologist’s account of our experience of a beautiful sunset is different from but complementary to a phenomenological account. When we experience a sharp chest pain it is more prudent to consult a physician than a phenomenologist.
The phenomenological approach to divine transcendence, in terms of God’s immanence to human consciousness as an enabling appeal to our ethical possibility, opens an illuminating subject-oriented access to the revealed truth that we are graced into loving personal friendship with a God who typically intimates himself in the guise of the vulnerable stranger. However, the metaphysician may also, with justification, point out that her more objective ontological approach should also be accommodated to give due significance to the equally veridical revelation that we are radically dependent creatures. The two approaches are different—complementary not incompatible.
Metaphysics, like God, has had a bad press in modern thought. Would it be too much to hope that Professor Kearney, whom I am proud to claim as a student, might follow up his remarkable Anatheism with an equally influential Anametaphysicum?