The god who may be

After this post I read Richard Kearney’s The God Who May Be and enjoyed it. He is indeed a theist but one who thinks that God in some sense needs humanity to effect what is usually called the Kingdom of God. This seems entirely plausible to me, and I’ll take it as my working model until something better comes along. Since reading it I’ve become sensitive to how frequently the adjective ‘Almighty’ is attached to god in the liturgy and how problematic that is. I wouldn’t want to say god is impotent without us, as I think there is evidence that god can and does act beyond what humans are capable of. In fact, sometimes people doing what they are capable of seems to be enabled by a divine impulse. I did find the book slightly odd to read, however, as I felt that its main thesis could have been stated and explored more briefly. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t sufficiently appreciated Derrida and Levinas but I thought the text often allusive and wordy. I was struck again by Charles Taylor’s ability to take on board the insights of the continental tradition whilst retaining the kind of clarity and rigour associated with the analytic style. My admiration for him increased after reading this book.

Heidegger and Kearney

Steiner interprets Heidegger as regarding poets as being closest to the meaning of being. But only some poets. ‘The poet names what is holy.’ An analogy with religion suggests itself: only a few individuals have the heightened feel of and for the divine and the ability to express it. The rest of us follow along as best we can, but can’t be expected to be such first order witnesses, just as we cannot all be poets. Heidegger’s question of ontotheology raises many questions but one of them is, since God is what I like to call a ‘weird entity’ in that s/he does not behave predictably, how is it that we can know reliably what God is like? Must God inevitably appear as capricious? The record of divine acts in history is meant to guard against this by showing God as loving and helping, but there are multiple times when God does not. Can this be explained by Richard Kearney’s idea of the God of the possible who needs us just as we need God. Kearney cites Ettie Hillesum who told God we would help him, take responsibility for God where he couldn’t take responsibility for himself. Perhaps God is only able to act when we make what the Celtic tradition called ‘thin places’, where humans are so attuned to the divine as to allow it to unconceal itself in us (to put it in Heideggerese). This is not to say God is limited to what humanity can do but that God, on the whole, does not act without our consent and help. This in turn may help explain why it is more difficult to establish divine justice as the scale on which we act increases: too many constraints come into play, against which we cannot assert our will. Only over a very long time may we climb out of such a situation.

a god neither omnipotent nor dead

How should we respond to the theodicy question? Affirm traditional divine omnipotence or take the option of a dead/weak god? Neither seems quite right. The former doesn’t feel sensitive to the atrocities of history, the latter has to ignore all kinds of religious experience. One could say that although reports of the death of God have been greatly exaggerated they were not outright fabrications. What if the truth is closer to a via media here: God has some power but depends upon us for its exercise and realization? What if God constrains herself to act only when we make space for her in the world, only when we achieve some transparency to the divine, whether consciously or not? This could be summarized in the gospel saying in which Jesus could not do many miracles in his home town because of the lack of faith found there. This would perhaps go some way towards explaining why it is that religious experience seems to work on the personal level but not on larger group levels. It is possible for individuals to act on the basis of self-sacrificial love and kenotic service but it seems unrealistic, perhaps impossible, to posit this as a basis for a polity of any large size (as Niebuhr recognized). Hence I have been involved in decision in which a local church decided to give up money owed to it and to forgive qua a group, to take two examples. Yet churches, which are in theory founded on such kenotic ethics, to embody and preserve them, at the larger institutional level find it difficult to work according to what should be their own logic. And so such divine kenotic logic is almost never seen at work at national or international levels, in which a Hobbesian state of nature seems to hold sway and politics is inseparable from violence (as Weber pointed out in ‘Politics as a Vocation’).

It is sometimes difficult to tell when one’s ideal speculations, such as the above, are insightful or worthy of a crackpot. Yet in the most recent issue of Philosophy and social criticism there is an article by Richard Kearney on Paul Ricoeur which may suggest just what I had been wondering. ‘God is all he is able to be’ but ‘this enabling depends for its actualization on human will acting in accord with divine grace’. ‘…God as posse, in contrast to theodicy and cosmological externalization, is not a panacea for history’s victims…[but] a God who is willing to efface his own being for the sake of giving more being to humans…The notion of divine posse – of an enabling God who says ‘You are able!’ – repudiates all forms of theodicy and theocracy by returning power and responsibility to humans…Such a divinity is ‘capable’ of making us ‘capable’ of an increasingly abundant existence; and it does so by emptying divine being into non-being so as to allow for rebirth into more being’.

This seems to capture what death of god theologians want – the avoidance of immaturity and irresponsibility that can be fostered by religion – without making a patently false claim: that religion makes people necessarily immature (clearly some of the most clear-sighted and mature human beings have been religious). It even grants the notion of a kind of death of god, but one followed by re-birth in a different form. Now I don’t know if Kearney means this as some form of realist theism, which is how I had been thinking of it, but it sounds stunningly fascinating and promising.