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Christianity and Possibility
- Fordham University Press
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Christianity and Possibility J E F F R E Y B L O E C H L I. We do not yet know what it means to speak of the death of God, and not only because those who speak of it do not always have the same thing in mind. The simplest controversy is also the weightiest, and still the most painful: Is it only a persistent idol that dies, or must it be religion itself, as the practice of idolatry? Do the fires of suspicion only purify, or do they consume everything that touches them? What religion, if any, survives the fever of Sils Maria and Turin? Even while many of us struggle with that sort of question, there arrives another way to understand the death of God, and another debate about its consequences and limits. The problem, one hears, lies not so much with ontology as with politics, and specifically with the politics that accepts without further question the principle that each of us acts constantly from self-interest, and therefore inevitably in conflict with others. This of course would mean that war is prior to politics, which for its part could bring only a peace that consists of compromise. It would also mean that whatever interest a person has in a God who is alleged to transcend the political sphere must be treated first of all as precisely that—interest—and as such submitted to the rule of common order after all. To be sure, none of this quite banishes the possibility of religion or even religious faith, but it nonetheless does restrict its meaning in a manner that the believer may well resist. The God that can be comfortably kept in the margins of 127 civil society is no longer evidently God; the end of the theologicopolitical will also have been the death of God himself. One thus understands the strange solidarity, seen already in some of the Jewish Scriptures, between a prophetic voice claiming access to a dimension beyond the reach of earthly politics and an embracing critique of how politics treats the human dimension it is able to reach. For a certain tradition, the refusal of totality is at same time an affirmation of infinity. And faith in the true God would be the source of ceaseless revolution. Much of contemporary philosophy of religion is drawn toward one or the other of 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. Of course, one would like to think that these two efforts are complementary or even mutually supportive, but with few exceptions the arguments to that effect have been only suggestive, fragmented, or incomplete. Of those few, in recent memory only Richard Kearney’s The God Who May Be assigns that task specifically to hermeneutics. The founding principle, it turns out, must be ethical. ‘‘Religiously ,’’ says Kearney, ‘‘I would say that if I hail from a Catholic tradition, it is with this proviso: where Catholicism offends love and justice, I prefer to call myself a Judeo-Christian theist; and where this tradition so offends, I prefer to call myself religious in the sense of seeking God in a way that neither excludes other religions nor purports to possess the final truth. And where the religious so offends , I would call myself a seeker of love and justice tout court’’ (GMB, 5–6). We may note in passing that this ready criticism of the traditions is at first sight ambiguous. Are their offenses rooted in the heart of essential doctrine, in which case one must watch against the religious as such? Or are they rooted only in certain corruptions of doctrine, in which case the prescribed vigilance would lead to a rediscovery of the truly religious? There is no easy answer to this question , since one and the same argument says almost nothing at all about cult and ritual, and dedicates considerable energy to mining neglected insights of a tradition that otherwise reserves a place for them. Are we then to think that the insights which genuinely matter —in this case, the thought of a God who is possibility exceeding actuality, and of a soul defined by its own futurity—are not merely outside mainstream ‘‘Judeo-Christian theism,’’ but also at best indifferent , and perhaps even alien, to the mainstream commitment to worship? Kearney does not say so...