After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy

Kearney’s Endless Morning

Kearney’s Endless Morning C A T H E R I N E K E L L E R In at least two registers—one of genre and one of doctrine—Richard Kearney’s philosophical theology appears suddenly and luminously at the forefront of theology itself. In other words, it invokes a ‘‘possible God,’’ and thus a possible theology. Theology has wanted the fully actual, active God, however, not a possible one—and so has generated an impossible one. The possible God suggests a third space, indeed a certain kind of posse of theology itself, a ‘‘paradox of future anteriority’’ (Kearney’s Levinas) for a freshly Christian sense of eschatological possibility. Responding to his work mainly by way of his Villanova lecture, ‘‘Enabling God,’’ I’ll sound these two registers , then ask, soliciting the metaphor that ends the lecture—how endless is Kearney’s ‘‘morning that never ends’’? First, in terms of genre of possible speech about ‘‘God,’’ Kearney is exploring 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.’’ He finds here ‘‘explicitly poetic epiphanies of the possible,’’ enabling him to ‘‘transcend the confessional limits of theism or atheism ’’ (‘‘Enabling God,’’ 12). He does not thereby attenuate the (possible ) content of God talk so much as gently shift its potency from the propositional to the imaginal. This hermeneutical motion supports the sense of those who believe that theology must risk a return in style to the heteroglossia of Scripture and the multimedia of liturgy, 355 to the affective and aesthetic genres of the spiritual imaginations—if it is to stand a chance of postmodern rebirth. And if, therefore, it is to address anyone besides ‘‘believers.’’ Kearney’s appeal (via G. M. Hopkins) to a deity ‘‘of transfiguration rather than coercion, of posse rather than power, of little rather than large things’’ (12), pertains to rhetorical genre as well as to dogmatic content. For a God of coercive power requires a theology of coercive arguments. As Kearney I think implies, a poetic discourse already forfeits a certain univocal force of reference, and therefore does not properly signify an omnipotent God. What we may call a transfigural discourse does not control, but ‘‘enables,’’ its significance . So also a deity of transfiguration does not control, but enables, its creatures. In other words, 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. Second, only such a deity can be ‘‘good’’ in the sense that Kearney derives from Plato, Jesus, and Cusa: ‘‘not able to be non-good,’’ and thus ‘‘not responsible for evil.’’ This means that God cannot be classically omnipotent—whether in the sense of a Scholastic primary cause, which ‘‘permits’’ but does not ‘‘cause’’ evil, or in the less squeamish sense of Calvin, who decries permission and affirms the admittedly ‘‘horrible doctrine’’ of double predestination (the eternal damnation of unbaptized infants is for God’s glory). Either way, nothing happens apart from the will of God. In the switch from a discourse of divine controlling power to that of enabling love, Kearney offers a beautiful gift to theology. Besides process theology and much feminist or ecological theology, few Christian thinkers have risked giving—or is it accepting?—this gift. Some will find Kearney’s God too sweet ‘n’ low, indeed ‘‘powerless .’’ From the vantage point of a self-deifying masculinity, God is either omnipotent or impotent. This would be a familiar objection to process theologians, whose God, operating by ‘‘divine lure’’ rather than ‘‘controlling power,’’ controls no outcomes in history. For each event is a concrescence of divine desire and creaturely freedom—a freedom free to thwart a Good that is, as for Kearney, inseparable from God. As one able to be a theologian only by way of a certain transfigural feminism, I applaud Kearney’s contribution to the deconstruction of omnipotence. Kearney is helping to unfold—indeed, to ‘‘explicate’’ in Cusa’s sense—the third way of an (en)abling power. Among his metaphors, I prefer ‘‘enabling God’’ to ‘‘power of the powerless.’’ The divine is better conceived as the alternative, en356 Catherine Keller abling power rather than as an external...