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51 three Re-imagining God Richard Kearney I come in the little things, saith the Lord —Evelyn Underhill God, if God exists, exists not just for God but for us. And the manner in which God comes to us, comes to mind, comes to be and to dwell as flesh amongst us, is deeply informed by the manner in which we think about God— in short, how we interpret, narrate and imagine God. This, I suggest, calls for a philosophical hermeneutics instructed by the various and essential ways in which God ‘‘appears’’ to us in and through ‘‘phenomena,’’ and ‘‘signals’’ to us in and through ‘‘signs.’’ It is my wager in this essay that one of the most telling ways in which the infinite comes to be experienced and imagined by finite minds is as possibility—that is, as the ability to be. Even, and especially, when such possibility seems impossible to us. But let us be clear from the outset: I am not saying this is the only way, or even the most primordial way—just that it is a very telling way, and one which has been largely neglected in the history of western metaphysics and theology in favor of categories like substance, cause, actuality, omnipotence, absolute spirit, or sufficient reason. So I am not proposing posse as some newly discovered (or recovered) Master Word—some extraordinary Meta-Code which might unlock the ancient Secret of divine nature or naming. God forbid! Our Richard Kearney 52 proposal is far more modest than that—namely, a tentative exercise in poetic conjecture about a certain overlooked aspect of divinity, seeking guidance on the way from phenomenological description and hermeneutic interpretation. I will proceed by means of three concentric circles—scriptural, testimonial and literary. Traversing this threefold ‘‘variation of imagination,’’ I hope to identify some key characteristics of the God of the possible as it reveals itself to us poetically. The Scriptural Circle My efforts to rethink God as posse draw primarily from the biblical message that what is impossible for us is possible for God. This latter notion of messianic possibility is evident in many Scriptural passages. In Mark 10, for example , we are told that while entry to the Kingdom seems impossible for humans, all things are made possible by God. The exact text reads: ‘‘For humans it is impossible but not for God; because for God everything is possible (panta gar dunata para tōi Theōi)’’ (Mark 10:27). In similar vein, we are told in St. John’s prologue that our ability to become sons of God in the Kingdom is something made possible by God: ‘‘Light shone in darkness and to all who received it was given the possibility (dunamis) to become sons of God.’’ The term dunamis is crucial and can be translated either as power or possibility—a semantic ambivalence to which we shall return below. Further evocations of the possibilizing power (dunamis pneumatos) of the Spirit are evidenced in Paul’s letters to the Corinthians and Romans; but perhaps most dramatically of all in the Annunciation scene where Mary is told by the angel that the dunamis of God will overshadow her, and that she will bear the son of God—‘‘for nothing is impossible (adunatēsei) with God’’ (Luke 1:35–37). In all these examples, divinity—as Father, Son, or Spirit—is described as a possibilizing of divine love and logos in the order of human history where it would otherwise have been impossible. In other words, the divine reveals itself here as the possibility of the Kingdom—or if you prefer to cite a via negativa, as the impossibility of impossibility. A hermeneutical poetics of the kingdom looks to some of the recurring figures—metaphors, parables, images, symbols—deployed in the gospels to communicate the eschatological promise. The first thing one notes is that these figures almost invariably refer to a God of ‘‘small things’’—to borrow from the wonderful title of Arundhati Roy’s novel. Not only do we have the association of the Kingdom with the vulnerable openness and trust of ‘‘little children,’’ as in the Mark 10 passage cited above (vv. 13–16); but we also have the images of the yeast in the flour (Luke 13:20–21), the tiny pearl of invaluable price (Matthew 13:45–46), and perhaps most suggestive and telling of all, that of the mustard seed (Mark 4:30–32)—a minuscule grain that blooms and flourishes into...

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