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Between the Prophetic and the Sacramental R I C H A R D K E A R N E Y Merold Westphal has been one of the most significant voices in Continental philosophy of religion in recent years. He, along with Paul Ricoeur, has contributed what might be called a specifically Protestant inflection to the ongoing ‘‘theological turn in phenomenology,’’ a movement that otherwise bears the largely Catholic accent of thinkers such as Marion, Henry, and Chrétien. Yet another contributor to this debate, the theologian David Tracy, has made a useful distinction between what he calls the ‘‘sacramental’’ character of the Catholic vision and the ‘‘prophetic’’ character of the Protestant. He sees both as complementary, the former emphasizing the more immanent and incarnational aspects of Christian revelation and the latter the more transcendent and eschatological. It is, perhaps, something of a paradox to find Merold and me switching roles in this respect, at least in terms of a recent debate on the relationship between the ‘‘God-who-is’’ (actuality) and the ‘‘God who may be’’ (possibility ). As Merold himself wryly puts it in ‘‘Hermeneutics and the God of Promise’’: ‘‘I the Protestant [am] more sympathetic to Aquinas than he [Kearney] the Catholic’’!1 But what lies behind this denominational quip is a deeper issue, namely, Westphal’s prioritizing of divine actuality over divine possibility. He links this preference back to great Christian metaphysicians like Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm, as well as to the Hegelian dialectic. He acknowledges that he and I share a common commitment to an eschatology of promise that goes beyond an ‘‘ontotheology’’ of static presence. ‘‘Essences and substances,’’ he agrees, ‘‘do not, as such, make 139 promises’’ (86). He also endorses our common vision of an ethical, personal , and dynamic deity, in addition to our emphasis on the historical and phenomenological character of divine ‘‘everlastingness,’’ as opposed to some purely abstract and atemporal ‘‘eternity.’’ But he affirms that it is a mistake to confine the entire metaphysical tradition to the limits and shortcomings of what Heidegger and deconstructionists call ‘‘ontotheology .’’ Wishing to rehabilitate a strong ontology of act and actuality against my own hermeneutics of divine posse, Westphal clarifies our difference as follows: ‘‘It seems clear that there can be no promises without an actual promiser. The possibilities opened up by the promise have their ground, at least in part, in the actuality of the promiser, which of necessity precedes them insofar as they are not reduced to mere logical possibilities. The very logic of promising requires us to ‘to subordinate the possible to the actual’ in this sense.’’ He elaborates: ‘‘Only an actual God can make promises. From the fact, affirmed in faith, that the possible exceeds the horizon of the actual, as defined by the natural and social orders as we are familiar with them, it does not follow that it exceeds the horizon of the actuality of the God who promises. It is, rather, the very act of promising that opens up those excessive possibilities and thus precedes them’’ (87). According to Westphal, my hermeneutics of a possible God is unwarranted by a proper reading of Western metaphysics or the Bible. Neither, he claims, supports my suggestion that ‘‘God is as dependent on us as we are on God’’ (88). The God of the Bible is a God of love and promise, no ifs, buts, or maybes. Divine love is not conditional or dependent on us. Consequently, Westphal insists that the correct translation of Exodus 3:14 is the traditional ‘‘I am who am’’ rather than my nontraditional revisionist translation, ‘‘I am who may be.’’ Now, I concede much of what Westphal says. I think it is true that, at least in The God Who May Be, I somewhat underestimated the need for a proper balance between divine possibility and actuality. To be fair, I did speak of an ‘‘onto-eschatology’’ at crucial points in my argument in order to avoid an unhelpful ‘‘either/or’’ dichotomy between ontology and eschatology (for example, in my critique of Levinas and Derrida); but I admit that I did not lay enough emphasis on this implication of ‘‘onto-eschatology’’ or link it back to the great medieval metaphysicians like Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm (although I did attempt a number of ‘‘hermeneutic retrievals’’ in my brief concluding readings of Aristotle, Cusa, and Schelling). I was still too much under the sway of the Heideggerean ‘‘overcoming’’ (a term obviously amenable to...

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