9. COMPARATIVE ESCHATOLOGY

Westphal’s Theology, Kearney’s Philosophy, and Ricoeurian Detours

WITHOUT CAPUTO: WESTPHAL IN DIALOGUE WITH KEARNEY

In the previous chapter, we discussed Merold Westphal’s thought in light of his primary debate partner, John Caputo. As I argued, Westphal is almost always discussed alongside his friend Caputo as both represent different, opposing sides of various debates in Continental philosophy of religion in North America. On the one hand, Westphal argues for a ‘thick theology’—a hearty soup—that provides a theistic, religious appropriation of postmodern thought to nourish the believing soul. On the other hand, Caputo analyses theism through a radical critique of religion’s onto-theo-logico-centrism. Caputo’s postmodernism declares that religion must be rethought—even to the point of abandoning much of what qualifies as religious—to proceed after what we have discovered about the nature of human thought. It often feels as if this debate holds an unqualified either-or: one must take a side and argue it to the hilt. For their parts, B. Keith Putt as well as J. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister have tried to reconcile this debate by showing how Westphal and Caputo’s thought might coalesce either as a “Capuphalian” philosophy (Putt) or a return to religion with religion (Simmons and Minister).

I have only touched on this discussion in my exploration of Westphal because it appears to me that each thinker approaches philosophy and theology from irreconcilable positions. Westphal is an open theist who wants to appropriate postmodernity for aiding and guiding a particular brand of theism, whereas Caputo wants to do away with anything that can be construed as theism and utilizes postmodernity for its eradication. Contrariwise, I find that we have overlooked Westphal’s true dialogue partner: Richard Kearney. Even though Westphal and Kearney have engaged each other, with Kearney contributing to Westphal’s Festschrift and with Westphal intervening at conferences and colloquia dedicated to Kearney’s work, an in-depth discussion of the convergences of their thought has been lacking.1

This is surprising, as I have found that reading Westphal alongside Kearney (and vice versa) reveals a profound discussion about hermeneutics and theism. Importantly, I find this to be a discussion, not a debate. Initially, one can see Westphal and Kearney as dialogue partners through the profound influence Paul Ricoeur has had on their work and their shared use of Scripture. However, as I intend to show, their primary intersection is in their eschatology and in how humanity plays a role in bringing about an eschatology here on earth while awaiting an eschatological moment yet to come. Both focus their thinking on the command and promise of God.

After exploring their intertwining debts to Ricoeur, I unpack this notion by first exploring Kearney’s eschatology in The God Who May Be and how it challenges Westphal’s own eschatology.² What also emerges from this discussion is a shaper distinction between philosophy and theology. To simplify our inquiry, I center on how each conceives of God after onto-theology, paying particular attention to their views on ontology and eschatology. Accordingly, this inquiry reveals how Westphal and Kearney, despite using Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology, methodologically approach the question of God after onto-theology in strikingly different manners. Westphal’s methodological approach reveals an eschatology that is heartily theistic, revealing its theological roots, whereas Kearney’s method strictly follows hermeneutical-phenomenological description of a possible God beyond ontology, which is best read as a philosophy. These contrasting disciplines impose certain limitations on both thinkers, thus deepening the need to read each alongside the other for a more robust understanding of religion in a postmodern context.

IN ACCORD: A SHARED USE OF RICOEUR

Richard Kearney’s reading of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology closely resembles Westphal’s earlier use of him in God, Guilt, and Death and adjacent articles. Therefore, we will capitalize on this mutual understanding by using this text to provide a baseline for when Westphal eventually diverges into an appropriation of Ricoeur. From there, we then follow how Westphal develops his own project through this appropriation, and finally, we will return to Kearney to contrast how his use of Ricoeur remains consistent throughout his career. What emerges from this is a distinction between Westphal’s theological discourse and Kearney’s philosophical one.

Westphal is indebted to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, and consequently, he owes much of his methodology to Ricoeur. This is especially seen in God, Guilt, and Death and Suspicion and Faith, two works that define the contours of Westphal’s overall project. In those works, Westphal first employs Ricoeur’s overall hermeneutical phenomenology to understand the existential meaning of religion and then he appropriates Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion to understand the ways religion can be corrected when it fails to live up to this meaning. Recall that Westphal describes Suspicion and Faith as a sequel to God, Guilt, and Death, and that he situates Transcendence and Self-Transcendence as a work that can be read as a sort of bridge between the two, effectively forming a trilogy.3 In doing so, Westphal reveals that his three most original works are methodologically based on Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Finally, if one were to extrapolate further and say that Overcoming Onto-theology contains a constellation of ideas that led to Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, one can clearly see the great impact of Paul Ricoeur on Westphal’s entire thinking.⁴ Even though Westphal gathers most of the content of his core ideas from other thinkers—namely, Kierkegaard—he does so through a methodology that is based on Ricoeur’s own.

This reliance on Ricoeur for a methodology first arises in God, Guilt, and Death. Here, Westphal inquires into the value of religion by exploring the ‘believing soul’ and her journey through religion. He thereby attempts to describe the existential meaning of religion through how it shapes the believer’s concept of guilt and death.⁵ From the start, two immediate themes emerge: the concept of the believing soul and a phenomenological method distinct from Husserl’s. Furthermore, recall that Westphal even appropriates the term believing soul from Ricoeur.⁶ Additionally, he founds his project on Ricoeur’s hermeneutical framework, especially Ricoeur’s concept of the sympathetic imagination. Through this, Westphal is able to place his readers as close as possible to the religious believer to understand how she experiences her belief. Quoting Ricoeur, Westphal clarifies:

The philosopher adopts provisionally the motivations and intentions of the believing soul. He does not ‘feel’ them in their first naiveté; he ‘re-feels’ them in a neutralized mode, in the mode of ‘as if.’ It is in this sense that phenomenology is a re-enactment in the sympathetic imagination.7

Through the sympathetic imagination, Westphal declares that his phenomenology maintains a purely descriptive line of reasoning that never ‘explains’ religious practice. Philosophically speaking, he claims that an ‘explanation’ attempts to interpret phenomena, yet, rather than describing what occurs, it tries to give causal reasons for why it occurs. Regarding religion, this tactic can either ‘explain away’ or ‘explain into’ what happens to the believing soul. In other words, it is liable to either use phenomena to prove or disprove religious belief. Description, in contrast, avoids this problem by accepting a sympathetic ‘as-if’ position within its observations by only interpreting phenomena or experience through the believing soul’s own perspective (or as close as one can get to it). Hence, the phenomenologist stymies as much bias as possible toward or against religion from entering into her work.⁸ While this may be stating the obvious for any phenomenologist, it matters for our exploration because Westphal eventually abandons this descriptive methodology for one that is more personally involved, one that is prophetic and prescriptive.

However, given that the phenomenologist is human (all too human), at least some degree of bias is inevitable.⁹ Knowing this, Westphal also incorporates Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion as foundational to this method. Using it here as Ricoeur does, Westphal’s goal is to employ such a suspicion only to correct his bias and not the believer’s praxis.¹⁰ So, one could say that in the text, Westphal strictly follows a Ricoeurian methodology, similar to Kearney’s, as we shall see. Moreover, through Ricoeur’s suspicion Westphal discovers that it cuts both ways: against those who wish to breathe too much belief into philosophy of religion and against those who suffocate belief through their ‘objectivity’:

Might not that pursuit of objectivity which limits itself to the phenomenal, observable, perhaps even to the testable domain be a fear of error which turns out to be a fear of truth? Is not a descriptive philosophy of religion methodologically prejudiced against its subject matter, just as much in its methodological theism as in its methodological atheism?¹¹

Here, Westphal uses Ricoeur’s suspicion to cast doubt upon a phenomenological enterprise that claims an atheistic-like detachment from religion in order to better understand its purpose. By acknowledging the flaw of objectivity within this methodology—thus proceeding beyond a Husserlian phenomenology—one can make room for the believing soul to speak. Conversely, to not go too far and fall into the opposing trap of being methodologically prejudiced on behalf of this soul, Westphal argues that one must “establish” a position “of detachment and disengagement,” which maintains that “the descriptive attitude is not motivated by the desire to be rigorously scientific, but rather by a passion for self-understanding that is neither detached nor disengaged.”12 Hence, the phenomenologist stands alongside the believing soul, asking her questions in an attempt at ‘refeeling’ and ‘reenactment,’ but the phenomenologist cannot assume the role of the believing soul.

What is surprising about this is that this creates a middle way between being confessional and observational: Westphal wants to describe religion’s value but not explain (i.e., defend) it to those who may reject religion. Westphal has, in effect, established an anti-apologetical position in a framework wholly indebted to Ricoeur.¹³ This adds another layer of depth to his Kierkegaardian position against a certain kind of apologetics that attempts to defend faith through reason alone.¹⁴

Westphal elaborates upon this anti-apologetical stance in his 2008 essay “Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Phenomenology of Religion,” where he gives his understanding of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical turn against the Husserlian project of phenomenology as a rigorous science.¹⁵ Westphal notes that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics involves not just an arduous reading of texts, but includes “the whole domain of meaningful action. Thus a hermeneutical phenomenology of religion will concern itself with practices as well as paragraphs and pericopes.”¹⁶ Regarding phenomenology and apologetics, this means that, to understand the significance of religious texts, one must first explore their function in their religious tradition and then reflect on what those texts say about that religion: why they are authoritative, how are they interpreted, et cetera. Thus exploring a tradition requires one to bracket out both skeptical and apologetical perspectives to walk alongside the believing soul. Through this bracketing, Westphal’s reading of Ricoeur opens a space for dialogue where religious texts and practices become open to believers and nonbelievers alike, offering possibilities of intersections between the masters of suspicion and the prophets, a bridge between philosophy and theology.

Phenomenologically speaking, this entails an inquiry beyond the texts themselves to proceed “towards [the text’s] immanent sense and towards the world which it opens up and discloses.”17 As such, it requires a reenactment in which the phenomenologist provisionally adopts the motivations and intentions of the believing soul.¹⁸ Westphal eventually places this provisional adoption as a hermeneutics of recovery, arguing that both an hermeneutics of recovery and suspicion work together to thwart any sort of presumed psychologisms from appearing while also revealing the phenomenologist’s biases or prejudices. Thus, taken as a whole, Westphal’s reading of Ricoeur allows the phenomenologist to enter into the lifeworld of the believer without taking her place:

Even if the phenomenologist is a believing soul, seeking to articulate the meaning of religious experience and belief, to describe the world in which the believing soul lives is not immediate experience, belief, and life. To write an essay on the phenomenology of prayer is not to pray. To describe confession is not to confess. So the phenomenology of religion is not the religious life itself, and the phenomenologist need not be a believing soul engaging in the beliefs and practices being described (though that may be helpful).¹⁹

Questions concerning the veracity of those religious truth claims are bracketed out for the phenomenology to unfold. Written more than twenty years apart, this essay essentially redescribes his project in God, Guilt, and Death while tacitly revealing how his appropriation of Ricoeur allows him to write in both philosophical and theological contexts by removing the issue of apologetics.²⁰ Kierkegaard gives Westphal a Christian motive for being anti-apologetical by pitching sin instead of reason against faith. Ricoeur deepens this position by giving Westphal a philosophical motive to remove apologetics by developing a phenomenological inquiry into faith that does not concern itself with a logical defense of that faith.

This is why Westphal finds that Ricoeur evades Dominique Janicaud’s critique, which “accuses a number of thinkers … of smuggling theology into philosophy in the guise of phenomenology.²¹ For Westphal, Ricoeur outlines the possibilities of a religious life and one’s possibility of accepting or rejecting such a life. Ricoeur, at least in his philosophical work, makes this a possibility since he tries to avoid crossing over to confessional writing, crossing over to speaking on behalf of the believing soul.²² He rigorously maintains a sympathetic imagination and nothing more. Westphal summarizes Ricoeur’s supposed response to Janicaud thus: “Precisely in understanding a religious world as a possibility of my being I can choose not to dwell in it.”23 This harks back to Westphal’s concern against a methodological theism versus a countering methodological atheism, where an atheistic detachment can evade truth just as easily as its counterpart. However, Westphal often chooses to dwell in the religious world, thus revealing that this argument somewhat sidesteps the concerns held by nonreligious phenomenologists (à la Janicaud) who attempt to understand phenomena from a detached, observational perspective. In Suspicion and Faith, for example, he undermines any concern against maintaining a possible choice not to dwell in the religious realm. One might ask, “How can I follow a phenomenological method that solely ascribes to a sympathetic imagination regarding the believing soul and then continue on to prescribe and alter the religious praxis of the believing soul? Am I not crossing a boundary, at least phenomenologically?”

The answer is yes. One is crossing a phenomenological boundary, and Westphal crosses this boundary often by directly inhabiting a confessional position when crafting his prophetic concept of philosophy as faith seeking understanding. As I have argued previously, this disposition is what lends Westphal to be read as a fundamental theologian rather than a philosopher of religion.²⁴ This is also what separates Westphal and Kearney: Westphal’s work is heavily confessional, whereas Kearney maintains a deeper philosophical line of reasoning.

DIVERGENCE: WESTPHAL’S THEOLOGICAL READING OF RICOEUR

Suspicion and Faith has a different audience than the other two books in his trilogy. Rather than aiming for the academy, it aims for the pews and is meant to be read as a guide for faith seeking understanding through Lenten reflection. This follows the now-familiar path that Westphal takes where philosophical description must also open itself to change; it must allow a space for, following Westphal’s prior terminology, the prophetic voice. Its description of the world, in other words, gives way to becoming a guide for changing it. Despite the change in audience, Suspicion and Faith maintains a Ricoeurian framework through employing a hermeneutics of suspicion against the hermeneutics of recovery performed in God, Guilt, and Death.²⁵ The transition from walking alongside the believer, however, has been augmented toward a confessional stance: the phenomenologist is now a believing soul, talking to his fellow congregates, showing how the prophets of their tradition are still at work and in conversation with atheists who echo (plagiarize even!) their own critiques against religion.26 Westphal has shifted to a confessional point of view and has crossed the phenomenological line to a prescriptive theology.

Even though this crossing from philosophy (sympathetic and descriptive) to theology (confessional and prescriptive) can also be seen in Overcoming Onto-theology and Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, it becomes less obvious. However, this is not because Westphal has distanced himself from Ricoeur, but because he has built his own project on Ricoeur’s thinking. One can see this in how Westphal situates Overcoming Onto-theology as a text that reads as apologetics in reverse: faced with the seeming irreconcilability of theism and postmodern Continental philosophy, Westphal presents ways a traditional theist can exist within this philosophical terrain. Instead of defending traditional theism against encroaching postmodernity, he actually defends postmodern thought against contemporary theism by showing how many of its characteristics run parallel to those found in Christianity, thereby creating a positive postmodernity.

If Overcoming Onto-theology does indeed propose a reverse apologetics to theism, then one of its essential arguments pertains to how a hermeneutics of suspicion is healthy for faith. Suspicion is not skepticism; it does not have to eradicate faith, nor does it demand a logical defense of faith. Given the similar use of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion in both works, one could say that Suspicion and Faith is intended for a lay audience, whereas Overcoming Onto-theology adapts and expands the sentiments of the former work for an academic audience. Throughout both, Westphal is rather consistent on the matter, albeit with more nuance and depth in the latter text.

Both texts, however, warn readers about making suspicion the final resting place for a faith seeking understanding. If taken as the ultimate move, such suspicion can become dangerous and leads to despair or nihilism.²⁷ This is where Westphal posits his own take on Ricoeur’s work through an appropriation of suspicion into the life of faith, where such a hermeneutics is aufgehoben into a larger philosophy or theology.²⁸ This is what he calls positive postmodernism: the hermeneutics of suspicion is placed into a hermeneutical epistemology that is articulated through a Kierkegaardian faith.²⁹ What makes this positive is not merely its religiosity but that it is open to alterity and to otherness. Unlike Nietzsche, Kierkegaard’s concept of faith concedes that its movement toward inwardness (i.e., the hidden inwardness of faith) is only penultimate and that there is a final movement toward the other, as in Westphal’s reading of Works of Love and his concept of Religiousness C.30 In his summary, Westphal distinguishes Nietzsche’s suspicion to Kierkegaard’s faith thus:

By contrast, Kierkegaard, who knows as well as Nietzsche how easily professed virtues are really splendid vices, does not give up on compassion and neighborly love but seeks to show how their true form is essential to human flourishing. By virtue of his fundamental willingness to find that decentered selfhood that can experience the other as truly other, Kierkegaard has the basic moral resources needed for a critique of modernity’s moral Cartesianism, the placing of the self, individual, and collective at the center, thereby making wealth and power, personal and national, the overriding goals of life. Like the Hebrew prophets before him and Levinas after him, Kierkegaard is a philosopher of shalom rather than of polemos [the latter being the primary designation for Nietzsche].³¹

What is interesting is that Westphal appropriates a hermeneutics of suspicion to articulate a postmodern, theistic faith that can incorporate Nietzsche while still keeping its core religious values intact. Moreover, this Aufhebung of suspicion into faith helps it maintain these values through discipleship! However, perhaps his ultimate appeal to Kierkegaard fits a bit too neatly into this argument. Yet, for now, what this shows is that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is aufgehoben in Westphal’s concept of positive postmodernity, which doubles as his concept of contemporary faith.

Westphal elaborates on this faith in Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, adapting the same hermeneutical posture to argue how discipleship can bring oneself closer to God. In the previous chapter, I pointed out the ways this leads the text to be read eschatologically, and I articulated this through what I call a Westphalian Aufhebung, by which something is taken up but not outright negated by an opposing antithesis, and yet still reconstituted (or recontextualized) into the whole. While this is the language of Hegel, I contend that Westphal utilizes a particular understanding of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics for his foundation. Ricoeur allows the believing soul to take suspicious critique seriously, and once she has explored this suspicion in-depth, she can appropriate from it helpful concepts without negating her own faith. Hence, the Westphalian Aufhebung: Nietzsche’s atheism does not outright negate Christianity; rather, it helps cancel out ways the Christian faith can lapse into self-service. More directly, Nietzsche’s atheism never negates Kierkegaard’s theism; rather, it opens Kierkegaard’s theism to be read as a social (or ideological) critique that reorients society.³² This appropriation of Ricoeur gives the believing soul a space to speak, to listen, to critique, and to inform her discipleship. It also gives Westphal impetus to exploit different interpretations of texts:

Paul Ricoeur describes his relation to his philosophical predecessors as reinterpretation and re-appropriation “thanks to a meaning potential left unexploited, even repressed” by traditional readings. I seek to appropriate unexploited and even repressed possibilities of secular postmodernism for the renewal of theism and its essential linkage to the renewal of theists.33

In the conclusion, Westphal describes his debt to Ricoeur and Gadamer for his hermeneutical phenomenology, specifically regarding their understanding that texts are “marked by particularity and [historical] contingency.”³⁴ All of this is to say that Westphal’s model of appropriation is directly influenced by what he sees as Ricoeur’s own appropriations, such as with Husserl and Freud. Westphal’s understanding of Ricoeur’s style of appropriation thus permits him to take important ideas from disparate and possibly opposing thinkers (e.g., Barth and Aquinas, or Levinas and Kierkegaard) and then reconstitute those ideas into his project.

If Westphal’s model of appropriation follows Ricoeur’s own, however, one thing that differentiates them is how each uses appropriation to advance his philosophical-theological projects. Ricoeur’s philosophy is deeply hermeneutical, but this is only (or at least, primarily) a detour toward a phenomenological understanding. In that vein, Ricoeur’s phenomenology still rigorously maintains a restriction to how sources can be used and what phenomenology can or cannot say. Ricoeur, in other words, stays within the limitations of phenomenology whereas Westphal does not. This is why I eventually find that Westphal is a hermeneutical thinker exploring phenomenology rather than a hermeneutical phenomenologist.

Finally, where is the sympathetic imagination in Westphal’s work after God, Guilt, and Death? For example, although he maintains that Transcendence and Self-Transcendence can be read by the believing soul and the nonbeliever alike, his text changes genres for each. For the believer, it has a “pastoral intention” and for the nonbeliever it has, surprisingly, “an apologetic intention.”³⁵ No longer is his work sympathetic as it blatantly holds a confessional disposition. He is not allowing room for the believing soul to speak but is speaking on behalf of (and to) the believing soul. Moreover, note that the apologetical intention is that of explanation. He does not give a rational defense of faith so much as explain how faith can lead to self-transcendence and possibly transcendence. Further, the preface also declares that he explored these two notions of transcendence in God, Guilt, and Death but did not explore them in “strict correlation with each other as I am attempting here.”36 While that work described religion as not merely instrumental—as though it were a means to an end—in bringing about a sense of transcendence, Westphal left the relationship between the self and God, Wholly Other, unexamined. Perhaps this is because Westphal thinks that a description of religious transcendence, and the type of faith needed to bring about this experience, cannot adequately be interpreted. Perhaps it can come only from a testimonial reflection. For Westphal, the task of faith is essential to self-transcendence, and although a description can reveal ways the self enters into such a relationship, it cannot direct or inform it. Westphal’s thinking, however, has continually sought to direct believing souls in this relationship. Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, as a pastoral work, advances this trajectory by clearing away ‘bad God-talk’ (onto-theology) and prescribing a path for the believing soul to experience divine transcendence. He does so entirely through a confessional perspective precisely because his Christianity informs his understanding of both transcendences:

As a Christian, I believe that the church, for all its failings, is the best place to encounter transcendence and experience self-transcendence. But my phenomenological analysis will signify structures that might occur, mutatis mutandis, in relation to synagogue, church, mosque, temple, or none of the above, as in what Derrida calls ‘religion without religion.’³⁷

After he acknowledges other areas in which such transcendences can occur, his own Christian belief shades this ecumenical understanding. Mutatis mutandis, here, reveals that certain foundational structures in his thinking may need to be changed for this ecumenism to happen. This, in and of itself, is nothing revelatory. A hermeneutical thinker such as Westphal typically presents his biases and prejudices to readers for consideration. However, when one looks at how Richard Kearney situates his own prejudices in The God Who May Be, one sees an entirely different perspective:

So how do I respond to the standard hermeneutic question: Where do you speak from? … Philosophically, I would say that I am speaking from a phenomenological perspective, endeavoring as far as possible to offer a descriptive account of such phenomena as persona, transfiguration, and desire, before crossing over to hermeneutic readings…. Religiously, I would say that if I hail from a Catholic tradition, it is with this provisio [he continues, explaining his ethically informed sense of religiousness]…. But regardless of labels, I would like to think that the kind of reflections advanced in this book are vigorously ecumenical in terms of interfaith dialogue.38

Kearney attempts to maintain the purely descriptive character of phenomenology, and more important, he describes his work along the lines of reflections on the subject of God rather than a direct, theological engagement with a particular (concept of) God, therefore rigorously maintaining an openness to other faith traditions. Whereas Westphal directly says that his work comes from a Christian perspective that might occur in other faiths, Kearney strictly employs a phenomenologically descriptive methodology that, in keeping with the original intent of the hermeneutics of suspicion, recognizes that Christianity influences his own perspective and that he will vigilantly try to be aware of this throughout the work. From both acknowledgments we can essentially distinguish each project: Westphal uses his biases and prejudices to advance a theological project, whereas Kearney attempts to advance a strictly phenomenological project while being cognizant that he cannot completely avoid his biases.

DETOURS AND POSSIBILITIES: KEARNEY’S HERMENEUTICAL-PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHODOLOGY

Kearney’s understanding of Ricoeur follows Westphal’s similar reading in God, Guilt, and Death, albeit with varying emphases. As such, Kearney would probably agree with Westphal’s description of religious experience, or at least accept his methodological approach. It is only when Westphal adopts the role of the believing soul that their projects’ methodology diverges. Therefore, for the sake of simplicity, my primary focus here is on how Kearney’s use of Ricoeur differs from Westphal’s later writings, and thus I do not completely review Kearney’s reading of Ricoeur.³⁹ What I intend to show is how Kearney’s fidelity to Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology challenges Westphal’s thinking and further reveals his project as theological.

Whereas Westphal is a hermeneutical thinker exploring phenomenology, Kearney is a thinker who begins in phenomenology and then employs hermeneutical detours to craft a stronger, descriptive understanding of the phenomena in question. The essential difference between Westphal and Kearney comes down to this disposition, but it can be broken down even further to how each reads Ricoeur’s relationship to Husserl. As we have covered, Westphal has little faith in the Husserlian project. His reading of Ricoeur is shaded by this prejudice, seeing Ricoeur as an ally in support of his critique. Thus, Westphal takes a sharp hermeneutical turn presumably alongside of Ricoeur.40 Westphal clearly understands that Ricoeur is deeply influenced by Husserl but he takes from Ricoeur a phenomenology that is, if not anti-Husserlian, then post-Husserlian. However, as the term postmodernity implies that modernity is still with us in some form (without modernity there could be no post-modernity), so Husserl remains very present in a post-Husserlian phenomenology. To put it somewhat churlishly, if Ricoeur takes the hermeneutical turn, he doesn’t kick Husserl out of the car altogether.⁴¹ It can seem as if that is the case for Westphal’s reading.⁴² Contrariwise, Husserl’s standing in Ricoeur’s work is something that Kearney takes more earnestly than Westphal does: Kearney’s phenomenological analysis—via Ricoeur—is deeply situated in a Husserlian influenced phenomenology and he attempts to supplement it, not overcome it, through hermeneutical detours.⁴³

This is clearly seen in Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, where Kearney presents a phenomenological project on otherness through a hermeneutical exploration of how otherness can turn on the fear and fascination of the divine and the monstrous. He proceeds by reading texts that present otherness in the extreme, that describe the monstrous and the divine. However, Kearney first and foremost maintains that this is a phenomenological project, albeit through a hermeneutical path that twists and turns with each examined text. Phenomenology, here, is necessary because, without it, the hermeneutical interpretations he attempts may fall in on themselves, collapsing like a house of cards.

Kearney shows this in the introduction, where he details the necessity of such a phenomenological methodology against a solely hermeneutical approach.⁴⁴ Here, he notes that those who see themselves as primarily hermeneutical, in somewhat of a “post-phenomenological” stance, fail to properly understand the self-other relationship, either through conflating both to the point that there is little to no difference between them or, conversely, “separating them so schematically that no relation at all is possible.” The problem of proceeding without phenomenology, he continues, is the tendency:

to externalize the category of alterity to the point that any contact with the self smacks of betrayal or contamination. The attempt to build hermeneutic bridges between us and ‘others’ … should not, I will argue, be denounced as ontology, onto-theology or logo-centrism—that is to say, as some form of totalizing reduction bordering on violence. For such denunciation ultimately denies any form of dialogical inter-being between the self and other.45

Kearney is aware of how his own project, even within a phenomenological methodology, can fall into this collapse between the self and the other, and thus he employs a countermeasure of suspicion against his project.⁴⁶ As such, the work employs a phenomenological method throughout, with textual readings illuminating but not becoming the means by which he explains alterity; the texts themselves are matters of exploration but not, ipso facto, arguments for alterity unto themselves. Thus, there is little by way of appropriation, at least in the way texts are read, in Kearney’s Strangers, Gods, and Monsters. However, methodologically, Kearney has appropriated aspects of Ricoeur’s phenomenology (as well as, it should be mentioned, Levinas’s). What matters to us is that Kearney, contra Westphal, has not conjoined or taken up these texts to make a hermeneutical point and has not placed his sources into dialogue. Rather, he presents a phenomenological project that utilizes these texts as descriptive markers that inform his phenomenology. Notice that I am using “into dialogue” here in the same way that Westphal often places chosen texts alongside others. His dialogues between two thinkers often work as a means of negating certain aspects of each’s thought, taking them up in a Westphalian Aufhebung.

In Kearney’s Strangers, Gods and Monsters, the concept of alterity, as described in his reading of certain texts, discloses the ways in which otherness is comprehended and ‘dealt with’ (to put it broadly) in various cultures, which speaks to a larger sense of the human comprehension of otherness. This differs from a typical Westphalian project in that Westphal, if he were interested in such a topic, would have attempted to hermeneutically establish a concept of otherness that gathers various textual readings into a larger whole. In doing so, he would, hypothetically, utilize a dialogue between Levinas and Kierkegaard to construct a quasi-phenomenological understanding of what, hermeneutically, he has appropriated. Phenomenology, in this imaginary construct, is not so much a methodology to be employed but an evolution of an existentialist style of philosophy.⁴⁷

Kearney’s thinking, in contradistinction, refuses to be anything but strictly phenomenological. Turning to Anatheism, published after The God Who May Be, one can see that this extends to even his most personal philosophical texts.48 “Anatheism” is Kearney’s term for the concept of returning “to God after God,” as a space between atheism and theism, broadly speaking.⁴⁹ This exercise is very personal to Kearney, as one can see from how he employs his own experiences throughout the work and personally reflects on his various intellectual influences.⁵⁰ Justifying this personal approach and answering the question “Why not other texts or authors?” Kearney replies, “Because in each case I write of those who marked me most.”⁵¹ However, even though Anatheism emerges from a deeply personal background, in the project he refuses to advocate for any kind of “new religion” or particular “theology.”⁵² He instead advocates for a philosophical “wager” that posits a thought experiment concerning what one should do about the concept of God in light of what Christians, particularly in Western society, have collectively and personally experienced in such a traumatic century.⁵³ It is, in essence, remaining faithful to how Westphal defended Ricoeur’s philosophical-religious reflections against Janicaud: Kearney is describing a concept of God and religious understanding in which one can choose or not choose to dwell. It is not his concern what one does, theologically, with his work. Rather, he wishes to describe and comprehend the possibilities of God in light of our present history.

Kearney draws his line between philosophy and theology on the possibility of claiming God’s existence. The philosophical enterprise of reflecting on God can only point to openings and pathways for religious action; it cannot traverse those pathways. To do so is to take on a character or disposition that negates the entire project: by taking a path one has occluded oneself from taking others, and therefore one enters into a theological, or at least a confessional, discourse. Contrastingly, Westphal chooses a path in his writing, and while I have been somewhat critical of Westphal’s undertaking, his choice is not without merit. In many ways it outshines Kearney’s philosophy, as we shall see. In this section, we have explored how these divergent paths follow how each writer reads and utilizes the work of Paul Ricoeur, with Westphal’s path being one of appropriation and Kearney’s being one that remains, at least on a methodological level, more faithful to Ricoeur’s own project. I have maintained that this demarcates a line between theology (Westphal) and philosophy (Kearney).

In the following section we explore how this line is followed throughout their work by contrasting Kearney’s The God Who May Be with Westphal’s theological eschatology. This comparison centers on the question of just how ontological do we need to be concerning our understanding of God. Or, more pointedly, just how much being does God need to have for our faith? For Westphal and Kearney, this question breaks along a theological and philosophical divide in response to these questions. This divide is further defined by the hermeneutical approach each utilizes when engaging religious texts, and the truth claims that are either accepted or bracketed out in this engagement.

Persona: Kearney’s Phenomenology in The God Who May Be

Kearney begins The God Who May Be by presenting a radical phenomenological framework that posits a description of God without the concept of being, or esse. Rather, he employs the concept of persona, which he claims is a better way of describing the self’s relation to the other and, by extension, the relationship between the self and God. Persona, as a phenomenological concept, relates to how one can understand “the otherness of the other,” where, “at a purely phenomenological level, persona is [or represents] all that in others exceeds my searching gaze, safeguarding their inimitable and unique singularity.”54 Latent in persona are the possibilities that the other holds beyond one’s gaze or understanding. This indicates the ways the other’s selfhood is beyond one’s complete grasp. Kearney sees in the concept of persona multiple possibilities of understanding the other that may come to fruition through our relationship. Nevertheless, these new understandings do not place limits on future experiences that may deepen my comprehension of the other. From this, one can come to comprehend these possibilities as having an “eschatological aura” where the appearance of possibility “eludes but informs a person’s actual presence here and now.”⁵⁵ Kearney’s concept, here, is following Levinas’s phenomenology, particularly Levinasian Καθαυτό.⁵⁶

Persona, in this framework, configures the other as something that is “present in absence, as both incarnate in flesh and transcendent in time”; that is, she is real and present, yet her otherness transcends this real-time experience and thus she cannot be completely grasped. Kearney goes on to buttress this concept by accepting its paradoxical nature as presencing-yet-absencing the other through the two extremes of “pure presence (thing)” and/or “pure absence (nothing).”⁵⁷ These two extremes either call forth an idol from the other, which can be totalized, or one sees the other as pure transcendence and wholly other, where the attempt to manifest this otherness creates an ideological construct. In preventing either extreme, and to accept this paradox, Kearney employs an as-if proviso, where “the other always appears to us as-if s/he were actually present,” yet it acknowledges that what is present before us is not a complete presence or a total understanding of the other’s selfhood.58 In relation to God, who Kearney notes is not a self, this as-if proviso remains. He employs the as-if proviso to reveal how the persona of God presents-yet-absences himself to the human self. Kearney, here, is using Ricoeur’s as-if proviso in the sympathetic imagination to proceed between the total acceptance and negation of the other’s presencing, be it God or an other self. Kearney thus uses the as-if proviso to inform his concept of persona and to make sure it stays on a course between the two extremes; however, he also maintains Ricoeur’s typical use of the as-if proviso to keep his project philosophical and as ecumenically open as possible.

This rather dense opening chapter lays the phenomenological foundation for Kearney’s project. It shows how he intends to address the concerns of onto-theology and to consider God outside of a metaphysical structure.⁵⁹ Persona, for Kearney, is a stronger form of understanding God, as it denotes how God’s appearance to humanity is a presence-yet-absence. In Levinasian fashion, these appearances inform the human self of God’s self, yet this information is not complete. It also opens a relationship between the self and God and, within that relationship, myriad possible future experiences that deepen the self’s understanding of God.⁶⁰ For Kearney, basing his phenomenology on persona reveals the posse, or possibility, which arises in this relationship. This is relational, and it does not require (and even rejects) an understanding of God as esse, or existence. Understanding God through existence, Kearney argues, is faulty since it builds a metaphysics, which he finds is a “recipe for war,” as we shall see.⁶¹

Hermeneutics and Possible Truth Claims: Kearney’s Biblical Detours

To describe how a relationship with God is possible, Kearney begins his first hermeneutical detour through the initial encounter between Yahweh and Moses. It is, for him, an exemplary account of how God’s revelation commands and promises through a presencing that becomes more realized throughout the relationship between God and humanity. However, while dealing with the realm of possibility, Kearney maintains his hermeneutical wager and makes no statement as to whether or not this event actually occurred; that is, he has not made an actual truth claim concerning this moment of revelation.

From what we have covered, note how markedly different Kearney and Westphal’s approaches to ontology are: Westphal’s construction still perceives God as something related to being, whereas Kearney attempts to diminish the ontological aspect of God by working through a framework that describes God as possibility. When the two discussed this difference at the colloquium held for Anatheism, Kearney states that he does not hold a belief in God, “as a thing ‘out there,’ which we can describe phenomenologically” and, consequently, one must turn to hermeneutics to find an understanding of God.62 This, of course, is a rather sharp reading of esse within ontology, and one that Westphal probably does not accept.⁶³ Yet still, one can see how Westphal’s adherence to historical truth claims—that God has existed in human history—sets his project apart from Kearney’s. Additionally, one can see that Kearney, by avoiding existential claims concerning God, presents a descriptive, philosophical project; one that takes the presumption of revelation as a mere possibility. Hence, he only describes how this could have occurred while not stating what occurred. Yet Westphal does more than ‘possibilize’ these occurrences and he attempts to understand God as a being after onto-theology. The question between the two men, essentially, is a question of just how much being does God need to have for our faith? This recalls the question between Westphal and Caputo: just how radical do we need to be?

Continuing in The God Who May Be, Kearney sees the biblical encounter of Moses and God in Exodus 3 as the beginning of God’s eschatological promise, and thus a pivotal moment in humanity’s experience of God’s posse; God’s persona, through the burning bush, initiates a relationship with Israel through an eschatological promise. Kearney only describes the possibility of an eschatological moment, thereby avoiding a proto-evangelical, historical unfolding; he is not staking a truth claim about salvation and God’s role in salvation. He brackets out these concerns to hermeneutically explore the event’s possible meaning and how it might reveal the ways our motivations bring about the kingdom of heaven, here on earth, and how they relate to a future eschatological promise. He is threading a needle, basically, trying to vigorously remain ecumenical and philosophical by steadfastly remaining in his hermeneutical-phenomenological framework. If he were to make a truth claim here, stating that this event actually happened, he might cross into the bounds of theology, positing that God has historically ‘happened,’ or existed within human history, raising questions concerning God’s esse in historical-human time. Westphal, conversely, stakes his work on truth claims presented in biblical revelation and although he tries to remain philosophical, I argue that he ‘fails.’ This is where he enters into a theological discourse, and this ‘failure’ deepens the ontological divide between him and Kearney. Recall that, in Overcoming Onto-theology, he tries to explain how theism can thrive in a postmodern framework and that one can use postmodern critique without abandoning theism. One of the concerns that emerges from Kearney’s reading of a God of posse is that it lacks a foundational relationship with humanity. Without situating God within an ontological framework, the problem becomes whether this hermeneutical concept of God is merely an interpretation of texts and not a lived, dynamic experience.

Kearney counters this by trying to reorient the conception of such a dynamic experience through a description of how the God-self relationship is freely given and participation in it is voluntary. His concern about the God of power and sovereignty, understood primarily through esse, is that it might overwhelm this free choice. He gives one example in the colloquium where, when the angel Gabriel comes to Mary to begin the Jesus narrative, Mary is free to choose to accept this gift from God. A God of power and sovereignty (a God of potestas, as Kearney calls it) might not give her this choice and perhaps would have overwhelmed her. Yet she freely participates.64

He initially develops this thesis in The God Who May Be though explaining Moses’s free choice. Kearney describes how Moses’s encounter with God’s persona in the burning bush centers on Moses asking for God’s name. God responds to this question with the statement: “‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘eheyeh,” or, as Kearney notes from the New Jerusalem Bible, “I am who is,” also typically translated as “Yahweh.”⁶⁵ Kearney’s hermeneutic thesis capitalizes on the name Yahweh to consider the possibility that it can be interpreted as “I am who may be,” and hence the God who promises.⁶⁶ By clouding this name in a construction that resists translation, Kearney considers that God is revealing himself as the one who suffers alongside his people. Moreover, in refusing to give a direct name, God has repudiated all the ways “that [one could] seek to appropriate Him here and now as some thaumaturgical property. Instead, God keeps himself open for a future, allowing for a more radical translation of his nameless name as ‘I am as I shall show myself.’”⁶⁷ In this way, God not only resists appropriation but also may be understood as “theophanic and performative.”⁶⁸ Theophany relates to God’s appearance through revelation and performance relates to the command latent in the name itself. As Kearney clarifies, the performative notion of the holy name of Yahweh further reveals how Moses and Israelites can come to a greater understanding of God by following his promise:

In short, the nameless Name is not an acquis but a promissory note. Its self-disclosure is inextricably tied to Moses’ commission to go and announce to his fellow Hebrews their liberation and redemption. “You shall know that I am Yahweh your God, who frees you from the burden of the Egyptians….” Henceforth, Yahweh is to be experienced as a saving-enabling-promising God, a God whose performance will bear out his pledges. As Psalm 138 makes clear, “You have made your promised word well above your name.”69

For Kearney, this performative aspect of Yahweh, interrelated with the name’s theophanic qualities, is what opens God to be understood as an eschatological, promising God. This continues his phenomenology of persona, as this disclosure allows humanity to experience God, in the here and now, while pointing to a futurity of experiences that may unfold as partial fulfillments of God’s promises. This experience comes via a messianic temporality that is outside of human history. Furthermore, Kearney advances his phenomenological method to make a description of God’s nature in an eschatological framework through human participation. This eschatological framework is dynamic since God commits himself to his people, “as pure gift,” and one is free to choose to follow God. Elaborating on this relationship, Kearney states, “With the revelation of his Name, God says of himself something like ‘with you Moses—and with Israel throughout history—I stand or fall!’ Exodus 3 is the proclamation that God has invested the whole of himself in his emissary’s history.”⁷⁰ This reveals how God instigates a historical and eschatological relationship with his people who, by their own expression and action, are free to shape and change this relationship. History, however, is fashioned only as a hermeneutical concept. Kearney is still deeply situated within an as-if proviso, although here it takes on a different character and is more in line with Ricoeur’s sympathetic imagination than the way he employed it to accept the paradox of persona. Additionally, freely participating in this eschatological relationship brings about these eschatological moments, or micro-eschatologies, by which this promise becomes present in the here and now yet also absences this promise by pointing to what is yet to come.⁷¹

Westphal’s Transcendence and Self-Transcendence follows a similar path by which the self-transcendent act brings about the Kingdom here on earth, via God’s transcendence, yet always points to the future Kingdom yet to come. Both thinkers employ Levinas for their concept of revelation where what is experienced rends the self to a futurity of experiences through the acts which bring about this initial encounter (self-transcendence, micro-eschatology). However, Kearney’s view of revelation diverges through his emphasis on these events as possibilities. Furthermore, both employ Levinas’s argument that the self’s relation to the other is integral to revelation; however, through Kierkegaard, Westphal posits the notion that God has acted within history and has, on occasion, revealed himself to humanity outside the self-other relationship. Westphal, in other words, sees different types of revelation, or ways revelation can occur. Kearney’s philosophy does not elaborate other forms of revelation, and although he uses singular moments of God revealing himself (e.g., the burning bush, Jesus as the Stranger in Anatheism), he adheres strictly to a phenomenological analysis.

Westphal’s thought postulates a theistic God where this special divine action is immanently conceivable. Furthermore, Westphal’s use of biblical stories diverges from Kearney’s. Westphal accepts that “God’s involvement in the production of those [i.e., biblical] texts is such that they are the Word of God,” regardless of the human error that might occur in their writing.72 Throughout all of his texts, Westphal’s approach to the Bible is confessional. Even though he vacillates between walking alongside and directly speaking for the believing soul, he is always a believing soul himself, and this always already informs him. Consequently, he is never as devoutly phenomenological as Kearney, and his work is resultantly more theological.

Continuing with The God Who May Be, Kearney advances his phenomenological reading of eschatology through the transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Thabor, where Jesus reveals his dual nature. Linking this narrative to his concept of persona, Kearney notes that the Gospel writers used the term preopen heteronym, which “means literally ‘his face was othered.’ And yet he somehow remained some one, for he was still recognized as himself.”⁷³ Simultaneously, Kearney presents the idea that Jesus’ transfiguration continues the promise and command of Yahweh while deepening the relational comprehension between God and humanity; God is further revealing himself through the transfigured Christ while also continuing his promise. Kearney’s hermeneutical phenomenology of persona thus describes how Jesus could be the God of Yahweh while also being Jesus-the-man.

Kearney further elaborates upon Jesus’ dual nature by showing how Jesus, and the divine voice through which his otherness is announced, resists a totalization. Noting how Jesus’ disciples wished to set up a temple cult, the voice intervenes and commands them to merely listen to Jesus. “In this manner,” Kearney states, “the voice of transcendence speaks through Christ as divine persona, thereby arresting [their] idolatrous impulse … to fuse with [Jesus’] person or to possess him as a cult object.”74 This follows the presencing-absencing schema of a phenomenology of persona, where the disciples ‘have’ Jesus in their sights—they can see him and his divine otherness—but they cannot totalize his presence through a cult of idolatry. Jesus simultaneously remains recognized yet wholly other. Noting how this narrative testifies to the struggle of God’s people, Kearney states that “the transfiguring persona signals the ultimate solidarity, indeed indissociability, of spirit and flesh.”⁷⁵ God is still with God’s people, either through Moses and the continuing story of the Israelites or through Jesus and his suffering along with his disciples.

Jesus’ role in this solidarity, for Kearney, brings about a messianism where God not only participates in the deliverance of his people but also directly suffers for and with them, as with Jesus’ crucifixion. The solidarity is deepened, the gift is better understood, and the human self’s need for a transcendent otherness is further revealed.

Kearney’s description of the self’s desire for God—where the self’s desire to be fulfilled by a something-otherness causes a searching and restlessness—effectively places the self in an ethical framework that helps bring about these eschatological moments.⁷⁶ It is similar, in many ways, to Westphal’s concept of self-transcendence, primarily given how both thinkers situate these eschatological moments through an ethical encounter with the other that may bring about a greater Other, God. In Kearney’s case, from this notion of desire comes the moment where God becomes ‘possibilized:’ the impossible can become possible by following and enacting God’s promise. This enacted faith in the possibility of the impossible evinces the same trust that made the disciples see Jesus as both a man and wholly other.⁷⁷ Within this possible impossibility, the promise of God continues and is partially realized in the self’s participatory relationship with God “until the Kingdom comes—and with it a new heaven and earth.”⁷⁸ This happens in a messianic time that “supersedes the linear, causal time of history moving ineluctably from past to present to future.”⁷⁹ Adding to this, Kearney retrieves from the prologue of the Gospel of John a concept that humanity has a familial relationship with God, where John states that humanity is both born of flesh and of blood, and as children of God. Humanity, according to Kearney’s reading, thus holds an affiliation with God—humanity being born of God makes humanity interrelated with God, and one’s participation in God’s promise helps us comprehend this interrelationship.80 Therefore, concerning messianic time, the self participates in bringing about the kingdom of heaven here, in historical time, while participating in the Kingdom through messianic time. The self’s experience of God transcends historical, linear time to enter into messianic time, where the impossible is made possible.

This transcendence of historical time indicates that the desire for God is an affiliation to and with God, expressed through God’s promise and command: what we desire is something impossible (a relation with the divine, who is wholly other), but it is made possible through God’s promise that he will forever be with us—in solidarity with our cries and suffering as well as rejoicing in our moments of happiness. This dynamic promise is brought about here on earth through the command to participate with God in this solidarity, in the time of causality and history. God just does not ‘come’ and overflow us with his presence, rending open our sense of time or being. Rather, we must participate with God as God participates with us. The God who would just overflow humanity would be a God of power, a God of ontology or esse. Instead, our participation merges causal and messianic time through those moments when revelation makes the impossible possible. Instead of being dependent on esse, God’s posse becomes realized (in linear time) through our participation with God’s promise.

Kearney calls this ‘possibilizing God,’ where the teleological possibility in this relationship confronts us with a future that is unknown yet desired. He does so through a Derridean faith that places its hope on the “impossible-possibility” paradox where one hopes that something might happen in one’s day-to-day lives that transcends ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ experiences of the possible—that is, that something miraculous might happen.⁸¹ Since a thorough exploration of possibilizing God would take us beyond our scope, we will set aside Kearney’s further explication of the impossible-possibility. However, what Kearney concludes from these readings is that a possible God, “understood as the eschatological may-be,” can be seen as radically transcendent.⁸² This possible God calls God’s people into a relationship that eschatologically unfolds an understanding of ‘the God who may be’ while simultaneously revealing a deeper understanding of humanity.

If one were to follow along the lines of the Economic Trinity, this dynamic relationship could be seen as paracletic, where the Holy Spirit dwells with those who, gathered in God’s name, work to bring about the Kingdom. Kearney, for his part, discusses a similar notion in the final chapter, where he reflects on the Trinity as “God-play” and the “poetics of the possible God.”83 Poetics, here hermeneutically retrieves a Trinitarian model in which the three divine actors are seen as players in creation, withdrawing their powers to allow creation to exist, to have an esse:

My eschatological reading … sees the divine Creator as transfiguring our being into a can-be—a being capable of creating and recreating new meanings in our world—without determining the actual content of our creating or doing the actual creating for us…. In short, the divine nous [i.e. the plural form of the trinity, together yet distinct] transfigures out capacity for seeing into a capacity of seeing; it makes us able-to-think at the same time as it makes the world think-able.⁸⁴

Kearney’s eschatological reading sees an understanding of the Godhead as posse, where the best ‘name’ for God is one denoting possibility. Yahweh, as a name revealing God’s persona, reveals God’s posse through its use of ‘may-be.’ God, as the divine Creator, gives humanity a glimpse of himself through his eschatological promise, and Christ, as the “perfect ‘Image’ of God,” gives people a transfigured ‘face’ that they can place alongside the name of Yahweh. However, as Jesus’ face is transfigured, this image only gives us a glimpse, “through a glass darkly.”⁸⁵ This prevents a totalization of God by preventing God’s image and name from becoming an idol, where all one understands of God is all that one can see. One cannot fully comprehend the Lord of Creation through the image and face of Jesus; one can only deepen her relationship and comprehension of God’s eschatological promise through Jesus. The Holy Spirit continues this promise through its ongoing relationship between God and his people. Here, the Holy Spirit works in these micro-eschatological moments, where God is present here on earth, and the impossible is made possible, by participating in the believer’s life while also receding in order to make room for the believer’s freedom of action. God, through his eschatological promise and as the Holy Spirit, is kenotic: God lets go of creation to allow it to exist, to be free and to participate in God’s promise. Understood as play, this letting go opens a space for the self to experience the God of possibilities. An example Kearney gives of this letting go is the notion that we can only gain the Kingdom by losing it, namely “renouncing the illusion that we possess it here and now. If we think that we have the Kingdom, it can only be in the mode of the ‘as if,’ as imaginary, a play of images.”⁸⁶

This play of images is best understood, for Kearney, as “three distinct persons moving toward each other in a gesture of immanence and away from each other in a gesture of transcendence,” where each at once join in play with creation while also distancing themselves to let creation be, as “an interplay of loving and letting go.”87 This hermeneutical model, then, can be seen as poetical and creative since it at once presences an understanding (through promise and command) yet still absences, leaving room for participation and interpretation of the possibilities within the encounter.

At first sight Kearney’s notion of play and poetics seems to overcome some old difficulties, yet the same problem of ontology arises with a poetics of the possible since it does not see the encounter as factual. These are mere descriptions of what is possible in the relationship between the Godhead and humanity; they do not (and cannot) inquire into the factualness of the encounter itself. By now it is clear that this is the major break between Kearney and Westphal: it is the difference between proclaiming the possibilities of a relationship with God, and proclaiming the actualities that this relationship has occurred and continues to occur. What is not so clear are the implications of this break for each thinker and how it relates to the distinctions between philosophy and theology.

Sovereigns and Strangers: Why Couldn’t the King Throw a Feast?

Returning to Kearney and Westphal’s divergent uses of Ricoeur, we can see how Kearney is maintaining a vigorous, ‘ecumenical’ position by bracketing out any particular truth claims regarding the event of revelation. He brackets out issues of factual accuracy regarding the biblical narratives he uses, and more important, he thinks that he needs to do so. As a hermeneutical phenomenologist, his concern is not with the actuality that revelation has occurred, but that revelation might be possible and, if so, how that could be hermeneutically understood and phenomenologically described. He reaffirms his philosophical position by stating that he “is not a theologian” and his project is a “philosophical questioning” where he merely posits his own hermeneutical wager regarding the relationship between God and the self.⁸⁸ Kearney notes throughout that this philosophical questioning is an attempt is to explore whether theism or atheism is the “only way” to conceive of this relationship.⁸⁹ By describing God as posse, Kearney attempts to move beyond the atheism-theism binary toward how God might be thought of and experienced. However, by bracketing out the truth claims in the religious traditions he uses, he also might be bracketing out the promise and command of God; for how can God make such commands and promises without entering into humanity’s state of existence and becoming a part of a people’s tradition?

Kearney’s answer, perhaps, is that God does not enter into causal-chronological time but instead that one enters into messianic time: one’s causal history interrupts or trespasses into messianic time at the moment of revelation, where one’s own esse enters into the realm of impossible possibilities; an inverted interruption of history. Although this is a ‘possible’ answer to the critique above, it still does not satisfy since all that we experience becomes a moment of our history and, as such, we must rely on an event that has occurred. Even when God is seen as posse, he still relies on some form of existence to manifest these micro-eschatologies to continue his promise and to fashion himself into the Son of Man who redeems and continues this eschatological promise.

This is where Westphal’s theology primarily outshines Kearney’s philosophy of religion. Westphal boldly stakes a claim that these things have occurred and thus one needs to consider them as historical events, to some degree. These events are a part of a living, historical tradition which informs his thinking and what he sees as his task of faith seeking understanding. Despite his concern for onto-theology, God’s theistic existence, God’s esse, is a necessary concept for understanding God. As such, he attempts to explain (and sometimes describe) theism in light of postmodern critique. Despite this critique, Westphal never wavers from an orthodox Christian faith in God.

At the colloquium for Anatheism, Westphal argues for the necessity of ontology and thus shows his orthodoxy. In response to Kearney’s anatheism, which follows the same methodology and description of God within The God Who May Be, Westphal raises the question of God’s sovereign nature. “[Kearney sees] God as a sovereign or a stranger,” Westphal remarks, “why not, a sovereign-stranger? Sovereignty or hospitality, why couldn’t the King throw a feast?”90 He notes that if one reads the Bible as hermeneutical accounts of revelation, one cannot forget the fact that God acts, that God rewards and punishes, and that God gives and enforces laws:

On [Kearney’s] journey … he wants us to travel lightly, and it seems to me that he wants us to travel too lightly…. He clearly wants us to abandon a sovereign God, and he talks about religion assuming too often the power of sovereignty resulting in theocracy. He talks about the sovereign power being too easily transferred in human agencies. And who could dispute that … history is full of instances of that kind. But it seems to me that the solution [to] that problem is not to abandon the sovereignty of God but to complain about the human entities that deify themselves and do wicked things in the name of God.91

For Westphal, the critique of onto-theology should be read through humanity’s perversion of God’s sovereignty for its own gain; he sees onto-theology as revealing the ways humanity manufactures a metaphysics that can be wielded as a weapon against others. His response to onto-theology is not to do away with the power of God but to limit how that power can be understood—and thus co-opted—by human thought. Kearney agrees with Westphal’s critique, acknowledging how the concept of God’s sovereignty far too often becomes the cause for bloodletting. Having witnessed his family’s distress after World War II and his native Ireland’s religiously political civil war reminds him of this tendency.⁹² However, Kearney departs from Westphal by regarding the issue of God’s sovereignty as unnecessary and even dangerous. Kearney agrees with the critique that he wants to get rid of a sovereign God, wishing to replace it with a concept of a God “of the small things.”⁹³

Kearney argues that sovereignty is applied to God, specifically the “God of Platonism or [the] God of the philosophers,” sovereignty becomes “the notion of a pure act that excludes any form of possibility.” This is the construct of God as “unmoved and unmoving … of an indivisible God … who, when delegated to the powers of the world, becomes the one and indivisible emperor, becomes the one and indivisible sovereign king, and then one and indivisible sovereign state [which is] … a recipe for war.”⁹⁴ For Kearney, this is bad politics as well as bad theology, it is helps construct an onto-theological metaphysics and it strips God’s ability to love and to bring about justice.⁹⁵

Conversely, Kearney shows how one can go beyond sovereignty in search of love and justice. As an example, he argues that sovereignty is what divided Ireland and the United Kingdom for almost three hundred years and that the impasse concerning which country could rightfully claim Northern Ireland was broken once both sides took the issue of sovereignty off the table: “Eventually someone said, ‘let’s get rid of sovereignty. Let’s have a post-nationalist, a post-unionist situation where we forget about sovereignty.”⁹⁶ And so the impossible became possible: the concept of joint sovereignty was accepted—“a contradiction in terms”—and “people in Northern Ireland could be Irish, or British, or both; and that meant going beyond the idea of sovereignty as one and indivisible.”⁹⁷

Furthermore, Kearney proclaims that “that the sovereign God and the sovereign nation-state have been a source of huge misinterpretation and huge violence.98 “This is why he embraces the God of potentia or posse, who is “the God of multiplicities and pluralities.”⁹⁹ He elaborates by stating ways this God delegates and diminishes his authority through plurality, first with the three different angels visiting Abraham, and then through the Trinitarian pattern finds throughout the Bible. This reading sees a God who requires interaction and interpretation, a God of hermeneutics, which requires one to return to the tradition in order to look forward to future possibilities. For Kearney, the God of possibilities invites us to participate in making the impossible possible:

[The power of] potentia, or posse: … for me, is [one of] invitation. It is the power of powerlessness. In the sense of what [Nicolas of] Cusanus called, ‘divine posse is a child’s cry in the street.’ … It is a cry in the street, a cry in the wilderness that invites us to respond; to give posse, esse. To give flesh to the word. And if we don’t say yes, it doesn’t happen. There is no sovereign power here, no absolute power that can impose itself. So the invitation … [calls us] to say yes or no. And it’s a God of desire, there’s no God of desire in the sovereign being that has no possibility.¹⁰⁰

For Kearney, it is humanity that gives God ontology: it is our participation with God, in God’s promise, which gives flesh to the Word, and thus to God. This is a free choice and our response determines revelation and how God unfolds his relationship to humanity: if Moses says no to the divine voice, then there is no Exodus. If Mary says no to Gabriel, then there is no Jesus. God kenotically relinquishes his power and Christians have become the inheritors of the Kingdom, a Kingdom whose king is no longer sovereign. Yet Westphal’s question of whether God can be both sovereign and hospitable remains. Kearney’s philosophical God follows an abnegation of God’s esse where God is completely dependent on human interaction. Kearney’s God holds a similar weakness to John Caputo’s God, who reveals a similar dependence.¹⁰¹ Perhaps Westphal might claim that Kearney—like Caputo—has cooked a very thin soup, which neither nourishes nor fulfills the soul. For Westphal, one must express God in ontological terms, a God of esse, for how else is one to understand these moments of revelation which cannot be expressed in Levinasian, ethical terms? How is one to regard the Bible as true if we do not hold to some degree that these events actually occurred? His entire project rests on a faith that accepts God’s revelation and even though it can be expressed in an ethical relationship, it still has to be open to the idea that God can simply ‘be’ without humanity, or that God can reveal himself in any and every possible way.

Westphal’s three modes of revelation—ethical, maieutic, and/or mediated immediacy—follow this perspective.102 The issue of sovereignty, for Westphal, ironically takes root with the suspicion that Kearney is stripping God of the possibility to appear on God’s terms; as if hearing God through a child’s cry in the street is the only way to hear God. This is why truth claims matter to Westphal: these claims do not limit God; rather, they express the myriad possibilities at God’s disposal. God can come in a burning bush, or through the love of the neighbor, or he can come and bring about justice, or he can empty himself on the cross and abdicate his power. However, these claims do not prevent God from appearing in other fashions and ways. Moreover, a philosophy that uses these revelatory moments while bracketing out their historical particularity, their factualness, and how they are assembled within a particular tradition, fails to adequately express how a religious concept of God is possible. Indeed, it fails to even consider how it is feasible to follow such a God without these attachments. Kearney’s project makes great philosophical strides toward describing certain aspects of God and revelation, and his kenotic description of human participation deepens our understanding of revelation’s role in ethics and how God’s promise might be conceived. Yet still, bracketing out all of the above in the name of removing a metaphysical, sovereign God raises concerns regarding how one can receive this God within one’s tradition. How a does such a God exist in a shared history with God’s people? How does one worship, pray, and dance before this God? Incarnation requires ontology; inscription requires truth claims.

Nevertheless, in defense of Kearney, one needs to remember his phenomenological methodology and what it can and cannot do. Kearney’s phenomenology aims to be merely descriptive. It expressly endeavors to understand God between theism and atheism, so it will naturally not be fully in line with the tradition from which it gathers its texts. In other words, his philosophical project is decidedly different from a theological project which is situated within a tradition and, with that tradition, must accept certain matters of fact. Westphal’s critiques are valid and sound as theological critiques. However, these critiques fail to take into account the limits of Kearney’s discipline and the particular, defining goals of that discipline. As Westphal stated earlier, to give a phenomenology of prayer is not to pray and to describe confession is not to confess. While Westphal crosses over into theology, and thus embraces the truth claims of that tradition, Kearney remains at the limits of his profession: he goes right to the edge of philosophy and peers over into theology, and merely describes what he sees. However, what he describes is not a part of theology, nor is it part of a tradition that comprises theology. This is where Westphal catches Kearney in a rub: his phenomenology, while attempting to remain within the contours of its methodology, fails to be completely descriptive by positing a different sort of God. His consideration of a ‘different way’ to conceive of God between atheism and theism fails to consider that the God of which he is speaking has already been spoken for. This is not to say, however, that Kearney cannot, or should not, present such a God. Rather, when he does, he is mindful of this God’s purely philosophical nature and is aware that what he retrieves from his hermeneutical detours is never purely philosophical. They are embedded in and are composed by a particular tradition. His ‘hermeneutical wager’ partially recognizes this when it separates his work from the tradition and openly states that he is merely retrieving something out of this tradition. However, when he excises the essential characteristic of esse from his retrieval, his wager fails to ultimately retrieve anything and, rather, constructs something new and different. “How much ontology do we need?” thus becomes not just a question for how to understand God; it becomes a question for how we do theology and philosophy: how much can we retrieve of God from within particular traditions—and how much can we manipulate this retrieval—while remaining faithful to our methods and purposes? Can philosophy rightly take from theological discourses anything it wants in order to do philosophy, or should it be bound to the traditions from which it takes? Conversely, recall where I cautioned that some philosophers might charge Westphal with a lack of rigor when he appropriates freely from philosophical sources, arguing that Westphal does so to prescribe a particular theology, yet this did not absolve him of this lack of care in respecting his sources.103 Here, one can see that this critique can cut both ways and that both theologians and philosophers might need to be more vigilant in respecting the particulars of their sources, especially when appropriating from different genre discourses.

This reveals the problem with losing a distinction between philosophy of religion and theology, and how thinkers far too often forget the discipline and aims that distinguish one from the other. Kearney’s project cannot function as theology, and although Westphal’s critique is correct, he primarily critiques a theological encroachment he sees within Kearney’s use of his religious tradition.

CONCLUSION: WESTPHAL, KEARNEY, AND THE THEOLOGICAL-PHILOSOPHICAL DIVIDE

Throughout this chapter, and throughout this book, I have argued that there is a distinction between theology and philosophy. However, some may inquire why this distinction is even necessary. I find that this objection is overruled when one places Kearney and Westphal in discussion, since it shows how their methodologies (even though deeply rooted in the same influences) diverge and create two, fundamentally different projects; they start with the same principles and concerns, yet wind up in markedly different places. This is because one speaks as a philosopher and within a philosophical discourse, whereas the other (unknowingly, perhaps) speaks as a theologian within a theological discourse. This is also why I have chosen Kearney over Caputo as Westphal’s true dialogue partner: Kearney and Westphal are more alike than they are different, yet their projects are distinctly separated through their intentions and purposes. Kearney, as a philosopher, is freer to explore conceptualizations of God outside of any particular tradition even while he hermeneutically retrieves aspects within particular traditions to do so. Westphal, however, is more theologically bound. His work is tied to a particular faith and he thinks and writes in light of that faith: for him it is always faith seeking understanding, and that faith has baggage. It has a tradition and has content to which he is obliged. Even though Westphal has proved that he could do otherwise (as one can see in God, Guilt, and Death), his obligation to the content and tradition from which his faith arises is a discernable and deliberate choice.

In conclusion, one can see these distinctions by how each thinker approaches the critique of onto-theology: Kearney wishes to disregard any sense of esse in God as metaphysical and thus harmful; Westphal wishes to see the critique of metaphysics as a purely of human concern that does not prevent God from having an esse; still, both present their findings in an eschatological framework. Philosophically, perhaps one could describe the self’s relation to God without crossing into onto-theology. However, when this description becomes implemented within a tradition, that is, when it becomes more than a description, it takes on the issue of particularity and, with it, the concerns of ontology and metaphysics. A philosophical response may be to do away with ontology altogether, such as one might see in Kearney’s possibilizing God and his understanding of messianic time. In contradistinction, theology may resort back to its tradition—to an exploration of sin and the human condition—and Westphal’s project does just that by aligning the onto-theological critique with sin, particularly with the notion of concupiscence and sin. His overcoming of onto-theology follows a path of salvation, where faith in the promise and command of God leads to self-transcendence and, eventually, to one being taken up by God’s transcendence. For Westphal, his project remains within a framework where this faith in God and revelation can be understood (I would contend, must be understood) within a Christian tradition. Kearney’s project, contrariwise, retrieves from the Christian tradition but it evades from being understood through that tradition. It seeks to explore philosophical notions between theism and atheism, and it perceives that there is a way to do so outside of onto-theology; perhaps the impossibility of overcoming onto-theology is made possible through this ‘between.’ Yet even if it is possible, even if Kearney’s may-be God solves this Gordian knot, it floats above any tradition without directly entering it.104

This is not to say that philosophy of religion is not important for believers; rather, it speaks to how philosophy approaches religion from a different angle. Kearney’s contribution alone raises important questions concerning how placing God within an ontological framework can lead to God becoming co-opted for selfish gain, leading to a recipe for war. In response, Kearney’s proposed wager invigorates the discussion about God’s plurality and has spurred on a dialogue concerning the importance of concepts such as the Trinity and natural theology. In a philosophical vein, I appreciate how his fidelity to the hermeneutical-phenomenological method reveals the ways Westphal’s work fails to be a proper phenomenology. Therefore, it presents a critique to Westphal regarding how he goes about appropriating his sources and how he uses philosophical methodologies for his own theological project. The critique cuts both ways, as I have mentioned, yet I have mainly focused on the theological side of this critique since we have previously explored various aspects of the philosophical side.

In the future, I hope that the philosophical-theological discussion will maintain its ‘dash’ so that it does not become a theosophical discussion in which these respective disciplines begin resembling some sort of metatheology, or metaphilosophy—even the thought of doing so sounds irresponsible. Yet still these disciplines can engage each other, highlighting differing aspects and understandings of God and humanity while still respecting their particular boundaries.

NOTES

  1. See GTPD, “Between the Prophetic and Sacramental”; “Is There a God after God?,” Boston College Magazine, http://frontrow.bc.edu/program/westphal. This is a video recording of a colloquium for Kearney’s Anatheism with Westphal being an intervener. I refer to time signatures (e.g., min. 85) when citing it.

  2. I have chosen The God Who May Be since it provides the phenomenological basis for Kearney’s more recent works. For example, Anatheism largely stems from his eschatological ‘may-be’ God.

  3. SF, xiii, TST, 3n5.

  4. See chapter 6 in this volume.

  5. GGD, xi–xiii. This notion also stems from Ricoeur’s research into psychoanalysis, particularly in Freud and Philosophy and The Symbolism of Evil.

  6. GGD, xi.

  7. GGD, 11. He quotes from Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 10, 19.

  8. GGD, 5–9.

  9. Recall that, from Westphal’s reading of Gadamer, bias is not always pejorative.

10. GGD, 20. This incorporation of a hermeneutics of suspicion directly relates to Westphal’s first phenomenological text in which he uses Nietzsche to critique Husserlian phenomenology, which further reveals how Ricoeur’s hermeneutics influences Westphal’s phenomenology. See Westphal, “Nietzsche and the Phenomenological Ideal,” Monist 60, no. 2 (April 1977): 278–288.

11. GGD, 21.

12. Ibid., 22.

13. Or, in the very least, it is a nonapologetical position.

14. See chapter 4 of this volume.

15. Merold Westphal, “Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Phenomenology of Religion,” in Reading Ricoeur, trans. David Kaplan (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 109–127.

16. Ibid., 112.

17. Ibid. Westphal is quoting from Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 47–53.

18. Westphal repeats this in “Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Phenomenology of Religion,” 113.

19. Ibid., 114.

20. ‘Tacitly’ since Westphal does not outright explain this appropriation; if one reads the text with an eye on how Westphal uses hermeneutical phenomenology throughout his work, then one can clearly see that this is the case.

21. Westphal, “Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Phenomenology of Religion,” 114.

22. Obviously, some of Ricoeur’s work does not follow this strict model, such as certain essays in Figuring the Sacred (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) and Thinking Biblically (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). I am solely talking about Ricoeur’s philosophical writings.

23. Westphal, “Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Phenomenology of Religion,” 114.

24. Again, this is not a negative critique; placing Westphal into this discourse elevates the importance of his work.

25. SF, xiii–xv, 3–9.

26. Ibid., 144.

27. OCOT, 142. This echoes the final chapter of SF, “In Conclusion: The Dangers of Suspicion.”

28. OCOT, 143: “I have in mind not to abandon these negations [in light of their dangers] through a desperate defense of realism … but their Aufhebung, their teleological suspension, their incorporation into a larger whole of which they are but parts, however crucial.”

29. Ibid., 144–146. Westphal couples this suspicion with a so-called “hermeneutics of finitude” (138). This hermeneutics acknowledges the limited (finite) nature of human understanding and is the first step to entering into a hermeneutics of suspicion. Like recovering from addiction, the first step is recognizing the problem and the second is to create an environment that precludes temptation of relapsing.

30. See chapter 5 in this volume.

31. OCOT, 146.

32. See chapters 7 and 8.

33. TST, 7. Westphal quotes from Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 298.

34. TST, 227.

35. Ibid., 2. See chapter 7 for more on how he places this book into these genres.

36. TST, 3.

37. Ibid., 6.

38. Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 5–6. Emphasis is mine.

39. For a stronger understanding of Kearney’s reading of Ricoeur, see his On Paul Ricoeur (London: Ashgate, 2004).

40. For more evidence, see Westphal, “Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Phenomenology of Religion,” 109, 115–116, 118–119; Westphal, “Nietzsche and the Phenomenological Ideal,” 278–277, 281.

41. Boyd Blundell’s Paul Ricoeur: Between Theology and Philosophy does us a great service by showing how Ricoeur’s other primary influence, his mentor and teacher Gabriel Marcel, balances out Ricoeur’s philosophy, preventing it from diverting into a “spirit of abstraction” through Husserl. Husserl and Marcel, as cantilevering influences, allow Ricoeur to maintain a phenomenological methodology that acknowledges its limits while also engaging in a more existential-hermeneutical enterprise:

“The ease in which [Ricoeur] separates out the ‘method’ of phenomenology from the ‘idealism’ implies that it is phenomenology rather than hermeneutics that is undergoing the process of grafting [i.e. appropriation]. In this sense, Ricoeur’s phenomenology was not a ‘pure’ phenomenology onto which hermeneutics was later grafted; rather, it was an existential phenomenology that developed into a hermeneutic phenomenology. Or … [to clarify] it was a phenomenological existentialism (in Marcel’s sense of existentialism, which stresses the embodied, participating subject) that developed into a phenomenological hermeneutics. On this reading, hermeneutics was not grafted onto phenomenology, but rather the phenomenological method was transplanted from existentialism to hermeneutics. To cast it in terms of detour and return, Marcel’s reflexive philosophy of existence was the original moment of belonging, Husserl’s eidetic method was the distanciating detour, and the return to belonging was the enriched sense of belonging-to (Zugehörigkeit) and dependence-on (Abhängigkeit) characteristic of Gadamer’s Hermeneutics. In Ricoeur, the three moments are held together in the pattern of detour and return that was derived from Marcel’s practice of secondary reflection.” Blundell, Boyd, Ricoeur: Between Philosophy and Theology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 65.

42. For more, see chapter 6. Recall that this position even extends to his reading of Levinas as a critic of Husserl, who was not a hermeneutical phenomenologist.

43. Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur, 15–17, 29–33.

44. Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters (London: Routledge, 2003), 7, 9.

45. Ibid., 9.

46. Ibid., 10–14, 37. Kearney’s use of the hermeneutics of suspicion is somewhat tacit but emerges through his considerations of the problems that might arise in his project.

47. By “existentialist style of philosophy,” I mean an attempt to understand the self through things outside the self (the ‘world’ and the self’s interaction with that world and with others within that world). The divide I am making between existentialism and phenomenology is based primarily on method: how one chooses to explore the self in relation to what is outside the self. On the issue of Westphal hypothetically involving Levinas and Kierkegaard, see how they are employed within Transcendence and Self-Transcendence to give a phenomenological construct to the implications of his previous two sections (on onto-theology and God-talk). See also “Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task,” where he utilizes the phenomenology of the two (recall that Westphal sees Kierkegaard as a proto-phenomenologist) to explain and prescribe the task of theology. Neither, as phenomenologists, is employed to disclose a meaning of theology in light of religiously understood phenomena. Rather, they are used more for their existential discoveries.

One can also see a similar process in Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue, where each’s thought is explored around concepts to arrive at insights derived from the convergences and divergences of their thought. It is almost like a chemist who proceeds by mixing two substances together to make a reaction. Although Westphal’s dialogues, in this fashion, have produced great ‘reactions,’ the point I am making is how markedly different this process is from a more phenomenological (perhaps Husserlian) methodology.

48. I am not including his works of literature in this scenario.

49. Richard Kearney, Anatheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), loc. 28.

50. Ibid., loc. 149.

51. Ibid., loc. 128.

52. Ibid., loc. 171.

53. Ibid., loc. L. 199, L. 173.

54. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 10.

55. Ibid., 10.

56. For more on Levinas, see chapter 6.

57. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 10–11.

58. Ibid., 10.

59. Ibid., 1–8.

60. Ibid., 15–18.

61. Kearney, “Is There a God after God?” mins. 82–85.

62. Ibid., min. 68.

63. Kearney spoke at the colloquium’s end, and Westphal had no chance to respond.

64. Kearney, “Is There a God after God?” mins. 92–95.

65. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 21. Kearney, unless otherwise noted, quotes from the New Jerusalem Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1990).

66. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 22.

67. Ibid., 27.

68. Ibid., 28.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid., 29.

71. For more on ‘micro-eschatologies, see Richard Kearney, “Paul’s Notion of Dunamis,” in St. Paul among the Philosophers, ed. John Caputo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

72. GTPD, 205, 178.

73. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 40.

74. Ibid., 42.

75. Ibid., 51.

76. See, for example, ibid., 54–56, 60–62, 63–64, 67–69, 78–79. It should be noted that Kearney relies heavily on mystical encounters such as that of Nicolas of Cusa.

77. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 81. Possiblized is Kearney’s neologism.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid. Kearney calls this messianic time: “We cannot think of the time of the persona except as an immemorial beginning (before the beginning) or an unimaginable end (after the end). That is precisely its eschatological stature—the messianic achronicity which breaks open the continuous moment-by-moment time of everyday chronology” (17).

80. Ibid., 81: “The light shone in darkness … and to all those who received it was given the possibility of becoming children of God.”

81. Ibid., 98–100.

82. Ibid., 100.

83. Ibid., 101–102. Poetics is derived from the Aristotelian term nous poetikos (De Anima 3.5), where the term suggests a ‘making mind,’ or a creativity, which Kearney sees in the possibilizing God.

84. Kearney, The God Who May Be, 102.

85. Ibid., 103.

86. Ibid., 108.

87. Ibid., 109.

88. Kearney, “Is There a God after God?” min. 76. The wager in Anatheism follows from the wager he poses in The God Who May Be. Additionally, Westphal and Kearney have exchanges regarding their approach to God after the critique of onto-theology in GTPD and in a retrospective work on Kearney’s thought, After God. I chose to focus upon their exchanges at this colloquium since this is the one place where both Westphal and Kearney directly and thoroughly address each other’s respective criticisms. See also GTPD, 139–150; 163–180; John Manoussakis, ed., After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 39–54, 78–93; Westphal, “The God Who Will Be: Hermeneutics and the God of Promise,” Faith and Philosophy 20, no. 3 (July 2003): 328–344.

89. Kearney, “Is There a God after God?” min. 80.

90. Ibid., min. 84. The following transcription is my own, Westphal and Kearney spoke extemporaneously and therefore some pauses and phrases have been omitted for clarity.

91. Westphal, in Kearney, “Is There a God after God?” mins. 37–40.

92. Kearney, “Is There a God after God?,” mins. 72–75.

93. Ibid., mins. 94–96.

94. Ibid., min. 84.

95. Ibid., min. 85.

96. Ibid., min. 86.

97. Ibid., min. 87.

98. Ibid., min. 86.

99. Ibid., min. 88.

100. Ibid., mins. 88–90.

101. John Caputo, The Weakness of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Caputo, much to his delight, notices the same. See his “Richard Kearney’s Enthusiasm: A Philosophical Exploration on The God Who May Be,” Modern Theology 18, no. 1 (2002): 87–94.

102. See chapter 4.

103. See chapter 6.

104. Importantly, Kearney himself argues that he does not intend to create a “new religion” or theology of his own. See Kearney, Anatheism, loc. 171.