"The God Who May Be": Ch. 1-3

Now for some advanced preparation for the 2007 Theological Conversation.

The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion: by Richard Kearney, Chapters 1-3.
by Doug Davis

How ironic it is to observe so many monotheistic followers still failing to recognize the message: that God speaks not through monuments of power and pomp but in stories and acts of justice, the giving to the least creatures, the caring for orphans, widows, and strangers; stories and acts which bear testimony—as transfiguring gestures do—to that God of little things that comes and goes, like the thin small voice, like the burning bush, like the voice crying out in the wilderness, like the word made flesh, like the wind that blows where it wills. (51)

I want to start my comments by stating something of who I am as I interpret and make meaning (for myself and maybe others) of Kearney’s narratives. I train/educate/prepare/profess to/indoctrinate school administrators as a professor of educational leadership. One of my central projects in my work is to improve public education. I am also a practicing Catholic and for the past nine months I have been participating in Emergent conversations. While the conversations deeply resonate in my spiritual life, I also find strong relevance within Emergent discourse for thinking about leadership and education.

I am also a member of a loosely-knit group of professors of educational administration with the banner of Leadership for Social Justice (LSJ). The goal of our group is to better prepare school leaders to be agents of social justice in both the manner in which they run schools and the development of schools as learning institutions that will serve to promote a more socially-just and democratic society.

While I applaud and support the work of my colleagues in this group and find them to be talented and committed scholars, there is something missing that offends my postmodern sensibilities. Simply, social justice is frequently essentialized and viewed as a defined goal, as if there is some quantifiable measure of justice and injustice that may be measured, modified and corrected in a certain way. The resulting moral imperative for those who prepare educational leaders is to increase “the capacity for social justice” within the practice of school management. In addition, the “other” in need of social justice is almost always defined; typically as a member of a group, or a subject of a specific “identity,” that has suffered injustice. Thus, justice becomes something to be realized through an identification of the other that allows for identity politics to systematically, through policy and defined praxis, promote justice. My concern is that injustice itself is dependent on social construction of subjective identities. Injustice is the essentialization of the other; a failure, to use Kearney’s understanding of persona as possibility of transfiguration, of an “openness to the persona of the neighbor in each instant…” (18).

Derrida, Caputo, and Kearney (and many others) provide me with a means to critique (dare I say, deconstruct) some common themes in the LSJ narrative. My hope as I engage in this scholarly work and discussion, in and external to my field, is to strengthen the LSJ effort. In these comments, however, I plan to focus on Kearney but I want to briefly scaffold my thoughts on my recent (and as yet unfinished) reading of Caputo’s “Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida.”  While the subject of this book is Derrida and religion, the concept of justice is inseparable from a discussion of Derrida and religion. Caputo discusses and explains key ideas from Derrida’s work including, the “absolute other” as all “others” (including God), the “impossibility to come,” messianic time, negative theology, and the impossibility of a gift. Regardless of some differences Kearney portrays between his views and Derrida’s and Caputo’s, there are many common ideas that will provide fertilizer for fruitful conversation in Philadelphia. The key common theme, however, is a twist of the eschatological kingdom (to come) that equates the kingdom with God to come or “The God Who May Be”, the possibility that God may be the promised kingdom. For Derrida (and Caputo), the messianic coming of God is always, and will always be (as is justice, democracy, and one might also add, the kingdom), the possible impossibility, or the impossible possibility. Kearney, on the other hand, speaks of the “God of the possible” and states “…the God-who-may-be offers us the possibility of realizing a promised kingdom by opening ourselves to the transfiguring power of transcendence.”
Kearney suggests that Transfiguration is crucial to understanding and realizing the possibility of God and the kingdom to come and this is the subject of his book. While these comments are a somewhat simplistic and over-generalized presentation of Kearney’s well-supported arguments, my goal is to briefly consider some implications of this work for efforts to promote justice (or I could say God’s “kingdom”) through education.

The first chapter develops a phenomenology of the persona.  Persona is defined as “this capacity of each of us to receive and respond to the divine invitation” (2).  Kearney addresses what he considers to be “crucial contemporary debates on the notion of an eschatological God who transfigures and desires” (9). Kearney describes possibility of transfiguration of the other as the “otherness of the other.” Persona is there but cannot be grasped; it escapes our gaze. There is an enigma of presence-absence. Thus, the future possibility of the other is impossible for me to know. “The persona is always already there and always still to come” (12). Regardless, there is a desire to fuse or to appropriate the other’s persona that is related to the desire to fuse with God. This requires, however, a present God. In contrast, Kearney suggests: “To this fusionary sameness of the One I would oppose the eschatological universality of the Other” (15). Thus, one’s capacity to lead for justice through defining and knowing the other is shown to be impossible and attention is turned toward an ethical call for transfiguration of the self: “The fact that universal justice is an eschatological possible-still-to-come creates a sense of urgency and exigency, inviting each person to strive for instantiation, however partial and particular, in each given situation” (15).

Kearney provides examples of religious transfiguration in the next two chapters that illustrate the human role in the acceptance of the gift of the kingdom or transfiguration. The second chapter interprets the epiphany of the burning bush. Recounting the story and describing Moses as a man who longed for a God of justice and liberty, Kearney questions interpretations of the meaning of God’s name. He suggests that a more meaningful (true) translation might be “I am who may be” rather than “I who am” or “I who am not.” Kearney contrasts his view of the signature of a God of the possible with the ontological reading of the story that views “the proper name of God revealed in Exodus 3:14 is none other than the absolute identity of divine being and essence” (23). Thus, God is conceptualized as a categorical being with substance (definable yet remaining transcendentally undefinable). The divergent eschatological interpretation emphasizes “the ethical and dynamic character of God” (25). The focus is placed on the I/Thou relationship whereby the promise of the kingdom from God is realized through human ethical living. Kearney explains:    

Here God commits Himself to a kingdom of justice if his faithful commit themselves to it too; the promise of Sinai calls forth a corresponding decision on behalf of the people. To phrase this otherwise: the I puts it to the Thou that the promise can be realized only if those who receive it do not betray its potential for the future. Not that this is a matter of conditional exchange—turning the Exodus revelation into an economy of give-and-take. No, the promise is granted unconditionally, as a pure gift. But God is reminding his people that they are free to accept or refuse this gift. A gift cannot be imposed; it can only be offered. A gift neither is nor is not; it gives. (29)

Kearney calls for a new hermeneutic of God as May-Be, an onto-eschatological hermeneutics, or a “poetics of the possible” (37).

Chapter three, “Transfiguring God,” further explores the Biblical meaning of transfiguration through narratives of Mount Thabor and the four paschal apparitions. At Mount Thabor, according to Kearney, the person of Jesus is “metamorphosed” into the persona of Christ. Among the many meanings of the transfiguration, Kearney emphasizes the call to avoid making Christ an idol:

The disciples’ effort to fix Christ as a fetish of presence, imposing their own designs on him, make it necessary for God to intercede from the cloud and bid them attend to Christ’s otherness: “Listen to him!” In this manner, the voice of transcendence speaks through Christ as divine persona, thereby arresting the idolatrous impulse of Peter, James, and John to fuse with his person or possess him as a cult object. (42)

This allows for a messianic persona of Christ beyond the finite person Jesus of Nazareth providing a preview of the kingdom to come, a call to/from God. Again, however, “this eschatological promise requires not only grace but ethical action on our part” (45). The third chapter ends with a recounting of the four paschal testimonies of the resurrected Christ. In these accounts, Christ was not recognized at first by those who know him and there was a common sharing of food. But, most importantly, Kearney reminds us:

The post-paschal stories of the transfiguring persona remind us that the Kingdom is given to the hapless fishermen and spurned women, to those lost and wondering on the road form Jerusalem to nowhere, to the wounded and weak and hungry, to those who lack and do not despair of their lack, to little people “poor in spirit.” (51)

May those of working for peace and justice be know by our fruits, our “fruits of love and justice, care and gift” (49). But if my reading of Kearney is fair, my work for the Kingdom begins with me.

Comments

[RODNEY NEILL]

My thanks Doug for you very well written, clear and lucid post - I have not read any of Kearneys work but it strikes me as a rehash of liberal theology which reduces the substance of the Christian message to 'Jesus was a good man who preached the ethic of love and justice'. Such central themes as salvation, justification by faith, redemption, eternal life and many others are ignored in this reductionistic interpretation - Jesus is the ideal liberal humanist of the Enlightment Age.

Rod