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Reflecting God S A L L I E M c F A G U E Kearney’s hermeneutics of religion might be called a ‘‘covenantal process view without the metaphysics’’ or, perhaps more accurately, with only intimations of metaphysics. The ontological claim is there— God is coming, will come, can come—but only if we help God come, only if we do our part by witnessing to love and justice in the world. The relations between God and human beings are built on invitation and response, on the possibilities the divine offers us and our acceptance of these possibilities as our life vocation. ‘‘If we are waiting for God, God is waiting for us’’ (‘‘Re-Imagining God,’’ 9). Not waiting for us to become something, but to do something: what Kearney calls the small things, things like giving a cup of cold water to a thirsty person. He says this is ‘‘micro-eschatology.’’ There are several things I like about Kearney’s vision. First, his God is not beyond being, but emptied into being, on the side of being. ‘‘There is more to God than being. Granted. But to pass beyond being you have to pass through it’’ (‘‘The God Who May Be,’’ in Questioning God, ed. Caputo et al., 169). By ‘‘being’’ he includes the least of beings to whom we owe justice and love. The incarnate God appears to need us in order to become fully embodied. Kearney has a healthy Catholic sacramental sensibility that sees God everywhere and especially in the despised, the small, the particular, the details. This kenotic Christology is nontriumphalist; it is also a paradigm for us to follow as we answer, when called, ‘‘Here we are.’’ Needless to 362 say, this understanding of God puts a large burden on us. Are we up to it? In Kearney’s view, God’s power appears to be entirely in powerlessness. What of the immanence of divine love as the source of the world’s empowerment? Is his covenantal process view too slight in its ontological claim? Can we answer if we are not already empowered to do so or, as the tradition would say, already ‘‘in grace’’? For Kearney, God is in the details (the small and the least), and rightly so, but do we also ‘‘live and move and have our being in God’’? Another feature of Kearney’s work that I like is his ease in moving among different disciplines and genres. As a theologian whose ancillary field has been literature and literary theory rather than philosophy , I have sometimes felt second-class. One of the healthy deconstructive moves of the last few decades has been the blurring of disciplinary boundaries and the realization that concepts are not more ‘‘true’’ than are images. I believe Kearney would agree that metaphorical language—language that makes connections by novel associations—is more appropriate for the God who never stays still than is conceptual language which pretends to finality and certainty. The Scriptures, after all, are poetic texts, and any reliance on them as a source or resource for theology needs to take that fact seriously. Kearney’s use of Scripture, testimony, and literature builds a strong argument, not by logic or reason but by the piling up of wonderful, powerful images, testimonies, poems, and stories that create the meaning toward which he is groping. He leads the reader through signs, signals, images, and suggestions in the hope that an intimation of the God of possibility will appear. It did for me. His method of polymorphous suggestion enriches and builds with the hope that insight will occur at one or another level—scriptural, testimonial, literary. Finally, I find Kearney’s brand of deconstructive theology deeply satisfying as a Christian. He balances the two sides of Christianity: the Catholic, sacramental, incarnational side with the Protestant prophetic , iconoclastic side. Most deconstructionists work happily within the ‘‘Protestant’’ side; in fact, one could say that deconstruction is another version of Karl Barth’s Nein! to all ideologies or Paul Tillich’s Protestant Principle that denies absoluteness to any finite symbol. The ‘‘No’’ is easier to say than the ‘‘Yes,’’ especially the appropriate , minimal, humble, small, kenotic ‘‘Yes.’’ Christian faith, I believe, says both. What deconstruction reminds us is that our ‘‘Yes’’ must be small and honest. Kearney adheres to this admonition, but he does say ‘‘Yes’’: we are invited to the feast, to the banquet, by the Reflecting God 363 [3.17.154.171] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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