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This chapter explores the influence of postmodernism on theology, focusing on a debate published in the journal Modern Theology between Richard Kearney, John Caputo, and John P. Manoussakis on the question of Exodus 3 and Thomas Aquinas’s alleged onto-theology. It shows how hostility towards the maternal khora pervades the work of such theologians, and argues that their deconstructive enterprise subtly reinstates the God of patriarchal tradition. Citing Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Derridean and Levinasian influences on postmodern theology, it proposes that the Lacanian imaginary provides a more effective way of expressing the divine mystery than Derrida’s idea of difference. Rejecting any processual account of the coming to be of God, it insists with Lacan that only a God whose fullness of being is beyond all desire and need is capable of serving as the source and telos of human desire, without violence.

This chapter explores whether there is more to agnosticism than a failure to take a position. Philosophy and theology are often faced with an impossible choice between the Scylla of theism and the Charybdis of atheism. Concentrating on metaphysical and epistemological agnosticism rather than psychological agnosticism leads to an exploration of Richard Kearney’s anatheistic wager. Drawing deeply on continental philosophy, Kearney offers a way of drawing theism and atheism into a constructive dialogue. Kearney, it is argued, redeems agnosticism by presenting it as an essential truth about the nature of philosophical thought about the divine. Against the oppositional logic that contrasts theism and atheism, Kearney’s anatheism shows how both theism and atheism are necessary in the search for the divine. In contrast to the certainty of both new atheists and old fideists, Kearney’s anatheistic wager inscribes agnosticism at the heart of the quest for God.

This chapter notes a few systematic considerations that arise in Kearney's discourse. It remarks on three points: how the question of God comes up; the question of the nature of possibility with reference to God; the erotics of God, and agapeic possibilizing power. The discussion distinguishes six different senses of possibility or creative possibilizing: possibility with respect to origin; possibility with respect to creation; possibility with respect to coming to be, what creation effects; possibility with respect to becoming; a further sense of possibilizing might be connected to selfbecoming; and finally, a sense of the possible emergent beyond self-becoming in which the other possibilizes a freedom released beyond powers of self-determination. The chapter ends with some remarks on the erotics of Kearney's God. This is related intimately to the theme of the possible, and the theme of the “lover” and the “theorist”.

This chapter looks at Kearney's hermeneutics of religion, reflecting on the concept of God. It claims that Kearney's hermeneutics of religion might be called a covenantal process view without the metaphysics or, perhaps more accurately, with only intimations of metaphysics. The ontological claim is — God is coming, will come, can come — but only if people help God come, only if they do their part by witnessing love and justice in the world. His God is not beyond being, but emptied into being, on the side of being. By “being” he includes the least of beings to whom we owe justice and love. The incarnate God appears to need people in order to become fully embodied. Finally, the discussion reflects that Kearney's brand of deconstructive theology is deeply satisfying as a Christian.

This chapter discusses the enthusiasm of Richard Kearney. It notes that Richard Kearney is a genuine “enthusiast,” in the genuine sense of the word. His writings are contagiously enthusiastic, charged and exciting, moving and inciting, full of prayers and tears. But Kearney is an enthusiast in the ancient and literal sense of entheos, a man filled with God, driven by a passion for God, and that is the Kearney that is presented here. For Kearney, God is the possibility of all possibilities, the possibility beyond all possibilities. The discussion first sketches the possibility of Kearney's God of possibility, of God as the posse beyond esse. Then it adds a second word about Kearney's enthusiasm, aimed at complicating it, bedeviling it, making it all the more ambiguous and aporetic. It concludes with a description of the khora — the devil that justice demands people give his due.

This chapter presents David Tracy's views on the possibility of God when he was interviewed by Christian Sheppard. The exchange focuses on Tracy's new book The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion. The discussion reflects on Tracy's views of Kearney and of the present debate on the category of the Impossible for speaking of God. Tracy notes that there are two predecessors of this debate: Angelus Silesius and Kierkegaard writing under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, and that it is Derrida who has most fruitfully reread for people the crucial fragments from their texts. The chapter concludes by stating the difference between Tracy's God and the God who May Be.

This chapter argues that Kearney makes a wager in The God Who May Be. He holds that the God of the possible, posse, is much closer to the God of desire and promise than scholasticism's old metaphysical God of pure act, esse. The wager takes more specific forms, namely that it is wiser to interpret divinity as a possibility-to-be than as either pure being in the manner of ontotheology or as a pure non-being in the manner of negative theology; and that it is wiser to take “the mediating course of narrative imagination” between two polar opposites in contemporary thinking about God, that of Levinas, Marion, and at times even Derrida, and that of Campbell, Zizek, Lyotard, Kristeva, and Caputo. The chapter concludes that of all the twentieth-century notions of the possible analyzed by Kearney, Derrida clearly comes the closest to stating what Kearney is after.

This chapter discusses Kearney's search for the middle way. In his efforts at negotiating and reconnoitering a third way, Kearney has written a trilogy, Philosophy at the Limit, developing in Ricoeurian fashion a hermeneutics of critical discernment and narrative imagination dealing with limit situations of death, deity, sublimity, trauma, and terror. The discussion begins with Kearney's basic wager that God as May Be is much closer than the old deity of metaphysics and scholasticism to the God of desire and promise of the scriptural narratives. The chapter suggests that his Ricouerian strategy of narrative imagination needs not so much supplementation as a radicalization in accord with its own internal dynamic. Kearney's Ricoeurian theme is evident at the end of the third book, where he summarizes his project: that people are beings at the limit, and that people are beings who narrate.

This chapter explores what might be called the incarnate historicity of the phenomena of the life, death, and potential rebirth of the “same” God of the Western ontotheological tradition. It holds that for the multivalent advent concepts, or in metaphysical parlance, parousia concepts, of the Western tradition are the indispensable conditions of a present return to the God-who-may-be through the God-who-was. The discussion looks into the eschatological theogonies of the God-who-was and the God-who-may-Be. By recasting Kearney's project in the terms of a Hegel–Heidegger, or system-deconstruction, tension, and by defining this ambiguous middle place as an eschatological theogony, it attempts to clarify the tension necessarily remaining in Kearney's own “onto-eschatological” discourse. It also suggests that Kearney's discourse must necessarily lean more closely to the romantic side he insists that if the God-who-may-be turns out to be a monster when expectation turns to realization, or possibility to actuality.

This chapter discusses mystic maybes, looking closely at the works of Matthew Arnold and Richard Kearney. Matthew Arnold objected to the idea of flirting with mystic maybes and calling it religion. The discussion suggests that Arnold and Kearney share a common purpose: dissociating metaphysics and the Bible. In Literature and Dogma, Arnold shows that the right construction on the Bible involves a real experimental basis. In so doing, he thinks, people distance themselves from metaphysics. He follows that people do not have to base their faith on an unverifiable assumption to start with, followed by a string of other unverifiable assumptions of the like kind, such as the received theology necessitates. Over a century later, and responding to different pressures, Kearney proposes to explore and evaluate two rival ways of interpreting the divine — the eschatological and the ontotheological.

This chapter examines the works of Richard Kearney, focusing on his The God Who May Be. This volume presents an attempt at a new itinerarium mentis in Deum, which Kearney claims to be both phenomenological and hermeneutical. An important point is Kearney's definition of the eschatological, which privileges a God who possibilizes the world from out of the future. In the introduction of the book, Kearney claims to develop a new hermeneutics of religion. The discussion notes three methodological pseudonyms of his philosophy of posse, in order to qualify his hermeneutics: dynamatology, metaxology, and metaphorology. At the end of The God Who May Be, which intends to open up a phenomenological and hermeneutical debate concerning theological issues of contemporary phenomenology, it reflects how we are to understand Kearney's paradoxical statement that “the phenomenon of the persona surpasses phenomenology altogether”.

This chapter discusses the registers in which Richard Kearney's philosophical theology appears at the forefront of theology. The possible God suggests a third space, a certain kind of posse of theology itself. The discussion responds to his work mainly by way of his Villanova lecture, “Enabling God”. It asks, soliciting the metaphor that ends the lecture — how endless is Kearney's “morning that never ends”? In terms of genre of possible speech about God, Kearney explores what may be called a theopoetics. For this work he does not seek to define the proper style for God talk so much as perform it by example, as in the intensive citation of poetry of his literary circle. It holds that a theopoetics in genre disables divine omnipotence in dogma. In so doing, it enables Kearney's “enabling God,” as a God who enables the creatures in their own creativity.

This chapter discusses divinity and alterity. Divinity and alterity have haunted phenomenology since its beginnings. The fourth reduction draws on these themes that are already to be found in Kearney's Strangers, Gods, and Monsters. The discussion poses three questions of Strangers, Gods and Monsters. The first is methodological, concerning the place of philosophy in the project of the book. It suggests that Kearney's hermeneutics is committed to a concept of philosophy as practical, and that this colors his debate with Levinas and Derrida. The second question deals with the basis on which he criticizes these “prophets of absolute alterity.” The third question examines the account of Heidegger's last gods. The chapter argues that Kearney sees philosophy as having practical efficacy in the light of extraphilosophical commitments, commitments to some version of the Judeo–Christian god. This commitment is assumed rather than defended in his critique of Heidegger.

This chapter proposes a new hermeneutics of religion which explores and evaluates two rival ways of interpreting the divine — the eschatological and the ontotheological. This new hermeneutics revolves around the distinction between the eschatological and the ontotheological. With Kearney, it seeks to affirm the importance of the eschatological. It suggests that God talk should be at once future-oriented and metafuture-oriented. Such eschatologically oriented God talk should inform people about epistemology, ethics, spirituality, and metaphysics. The discussion then turns to Kearney's central thesis about actuality and possibility: “God neither is nor is not but may be”. It argues that “is” is associated with ontotheology; the “is not”, with negative theology rather than with atheism; and the “may be”, with the eschatological God talk he wishes to defend.

The opposites, sacred and secular, are in an ‘original’ or ‘polemical unity’ in Christ and do not have their reality except in Him in a polemical attitude toward one another bearing witness in this way to their common reality and unity in the God-Man. History’s movement consists of divergence and convergence from and toward Him. One cannot, therefore, understand secularism and the secular and secularization apart from the fact that the secular is what is continuously being accepted and becoming accepted by God in Christ. Influenced by the work of Bonhoeffer, Bulgakov, and Richard Kearney and invoking Orthodox liturgy and iconography, Gallaher points to a church that images Christ and the Trinity by manifesting itself in kenosis. He argues for a move from an Orthodox anti-secularism that simply denounces and shakes its fist at the West to a positive Orthodox theology of secularism that tries to see how Orthodoxy might witness boldly to Christ in the modern pluralistic and secular West.

This chapter reports that in Strangers, Gods and Monsters (2003), Richard Kearney set out on an ambitious exploration and critique of the role of the ‘Other’ in Western thought, and especially as it has developed in modern ‘Continental’ theory. It notes that though it is hardly crucial to the overall scope of his argument, England and Ireland are offered as antitheses which represent a defining instance of ‘othering’. It adds that England as ‘self’ and Ireland as ‘other’ was, in this interpretation, the foundation of all later forms of the colonial construction of the ‘other’ that stemmed from the impact of British imperialism.

This chapter examines Christianity and the question of possibility of God. It asks whether it is only a persistent idol that dies, or religion itself with the practice of idolatry. It argues that the God kept comfortably in the margins of civil society is no longer evidently God. The end of the theologicopolitical will also have been the death of God himself. Much of contemporary philosophy of religion is drawn toward these debates, either affirming the glory of a God beyond every idol, or demanding a demonstration of the mercy and justice of a God opposed to every totality. Following all of Kearney's argument, the chapter claims that this will lead not only to the emergence of a new and better idea of God, but also to the discovery of greater intimacy with God.

This chapter examines the senses of the possible arising from Kearney's conception of the divine. In the first place, it suggests the lightness of taking wing or exceeding the speed limit, so as to leave behind both the finished matters of the past and the actuality of the present. A second path of thought is suggested if one takes the possible in the adverbial form of the perhaps. This rules out the sense of the possible with which Kearney is not concerned such as in logic — the possible figures among the modalities, under two forms: “possibly the case” and “possibly not”. The discussion notes that the God of the possible, the God who may be, is not very distant from the God of the Cross. In both discourses, “God depends on us”, and it is one's responsibility that is engaged in the transfiguration of the world.