MENGHAYATI KEMBALI IMAN KRISTEN LEWAT ANATEISME

Irelevansi Ontoteologi di Hadapan Penderitaan Manusia dan Ketidakpercayaan

Pada Allah

Secara etimologi kata ontoteologi merupakan gabungan dari tiga kata, yaitu kata
ta onta, theo dan logy. Kata ini merupakan bentukan dari kata ontologi yang mendapat
sisipan kata theo. Secara bahasa, ta onta berarti ada (being), sedangkan theo berarti
Tuhan, dan logy berarti ilmu pengetahuan. Ontologi adalah ilmu pengetahuan tentang
ada. Ontoteologi adalah ilmu pengetahuan tentang keber(ada)an Tuhan. Dalam konteks
filsafat, pembahasan tentang ada Tuhan dibicarakan dalam ontologi, khususnya dalam
konteks metafisika.1

Ontoteologi membangun imajinasi mengenai Allah yang beratribut moral yang

melampaui kemewaktuan, tidak berubah, superlatif dalam berbagai kebajikan, maha tahu,
maha berdaulat, sumber surplus maknawi dan berbagai kualitas-kualitas metaontologis
lain yang dilekatkan pada Tuhan.

Nihilisme Sebagai Sesuatu yang Kodrati dan Iman

Nihilisme adalah sebuah batas-batas resiko dari iman yang senantiasa melampaui
kemampuan verifikasi inderawi dan akali. Nihilisme mengajak kita berpetualang dalam
perziarahan penuh pertaruhan (wager) di dalam pengalaman bersama Allah setelah Allah
ontoteologi mati.

Berjumpa kembali dengan Allah setelah Allah (anatheism) di dalam pertaruhan

(wager)

Anateisme adalah undangan kepada peninjauan ulang adegan sejarah keimanan kita
dengan membuka diri kepada perjumpaan dengan sang Asing, sang Lain, yang kita pilih
atau tidak kita pilih untuk kita sebut Allah. Adegan perjumpaan dengan sang Asing inilah
yang menjadi inti dari pertaruhan perziarahan seorang anateis yang akan meresikokan diri
pada beragam kecemasan karena sifat keterbukaan radikal yang nir-prediktif, atau dalam
bahasa Kearney disebut Holy Insecurities.2

Lima Lipatan Pertaruhan Anateisme

Lima lipatan pertaruhan anateisme antara lain : imajinasi, humor, komitman, kepekaan
untuk membedakan, dan keramahtamahan.
1
Alister McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction (Malden, New Jersey:Blackwell publisher, 2010), 15.
2
Ibid., 9.
Penghayatan Anateisme dalam yang Material

Anateisme yang membuka mata kepada sisi subversif dari kekristenan yaitu materialisme
radikalnya, menjadi kekuatan dan alasan bagi iman (dengan rasa baru) untuk hadir di
ruang publik untuk menyediakan narasi keimananan yang mempenetrasi yang sekular,
melalui sekularisasi menuju sekularisme.3 Anateisme yang berbasis pada materialisme
radikal sadar bahwa iman Kristen yang berpusat pada Yesus Kristus tidak sedang datang
untuk memberi imajinasi semata soal makna hidup secara interior dan esoterik, tetapi
juga akan menjadi sebuah perjumpaan menubuh yang akan memberi harapan sekaligus
kegamangan yang suci soal hidup bersama dalam kebersamaan dan keadaban di ruang
publik.

TUHAN TANPA KITAB SUCI

KOMPARASI PANDANGAN THE GOD WHO MAYBE RICHARD KEARNEY DAN

THE PERHAPS JACQUES DERRIDA

God Who May Be

Jacques Derrida melihat pandangan Kearney tentang “God who may be” sebagai
pandangan yang tidak menempatkan Tuhan pada posisi sebagai yang tidak terbatas,
dalam arti penuh dengan kekuatan, dan maha kuasa, tapi justru sebagai yang tidak
berkekuatan.4 Tidak berkekuatan yang artinya Tuhan tidak memerlukan daya apapun atau
melakukan apapun untuk menunjukan kekuasaanNya.

The Perhaps dan Khora

Derrida menngasosiasikan the Perhaps dengan peristiwa atau tindakan. Ia adalah

pengalaman akan “yang mungkin dan tidak mungkin” secara bersamaan.5 Disini kita
melihat adanya relasi sekali lagi antara “yang mungkin” dan “yang tidak mungkin”,
namun berbeda dengan Kearney, penekanan Derrida adalah “yang mungkin” dan “yang
tidak mungkin” dalam relasi peristiwa. Keniscayaan menjadinya peristiwa yang akan
datang melalui relasi yang rumit antara mungkin dan tidak mungkin. The Perhaps
mengacu pada situasi tak bersyarat yang melampaui ketidak terbatasan. Suatu situasi

3
Kearney, Anatheism,166
4
“I think you are absolutely right to attempt to name God not as sovereign, as almighty, but precisely as
powerless” (Jacques Derrida). Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments.in Deconstruction, God and the
Possible, by Richard Kearney. p.298
5
Derrida, As If It Were Possible…..,. p.343-370
yang yang sebenarnya lebih merupakan hasrat untuk ketidak berkekuatan dan bukan
sebaliknya. The Perhaps merupakan suatu keharusan dalam setiap pengalaman agar
pengalaman tersebut dimungkinan. Dan itu datang hanya dari “yang lain” yang tidak bisa
diprediksikan dari masa datang. Dan the Perhaps merupakan sebuah keterbukaan akan
masa datang, maka ia niscaya untuk “dimungkinkan” –nya peristiwa. Disini kita lihat
bahwa dalam relasi yang mungkin dan yang tidak mungkin ada keterlibatan “yang lain”,
dan ia menjadi penentu dari mungkin dan tidak mungkin. Lebih detail akan dijelaskan
pada penjelasan mengenai relasi “yang mungkin” dan “yang tidak mungkin”.

Khora menurut Derrida juga merupakan ketidak berkekuatan. Ia merupakan hal

diantara yang dimengerti dengan yang dirasakan, yang memungkinkan kita memikirkan
dan mengenali perbedan antara ada yang sejati dengan ketidak beradaan. Membedakan
saya dengan yang lain, atau yang lain dengan yang lainnya lagi. Khora ada tanpa
mengada, ia ada sebelum kosmos, tidak memiliki tempat, tidak memerlukan ruang,
sesuatu yang pra-filosofis, ia ada sebelum ada. 6 Khora ada tanpa perlu di afirmasi, ia
selalu ada dalam tindakan manusia.

TUHAN YANG AKAN DATANG DAN INISIATIF MANUSIA UNTUK

PERUBAHAN DALAM SEJARAH MEMBACA DERRIDA BERSAMA
KEARNEY

Iman dalam kerangka dekonstruksi adalah keterbukaan dan kepercayaan total

kepada yang akan datang, yang tidak pernah dapat dikerangkeng dalam bentuk present
apa pun dan tidak memiliki dasar yang eviden. Yang akan datang tidak pernah dapat
dihadirkan dalam figur apa pun, tidak bisa menjadi fenomen yang bisa ditemporalisasi
dan dilokalisasi. Supaya kehidupan bisa berlangsung secara adil dan ramah, dijiwai oleh
kesediaan saling memberi, mengampuni dan kerelaan berkorban, dibutuhkan keterbukaan
terhadap keadilan, keramahan, hadiah, pengampunan dan pengorbanan yang selalu akan
datang, yang tidak pernah bisa bersarang dalam sejarah dan dunia. Setiap bentuk
pemetaan atas keutamaan-keutamaan yang mencirikan kehidupan yang berkualitas seperti
di atas, secara niscaya mementahkan kualitas-kualitas itu sendiri.

Iman Kristiani yang inkarnatif merupakan keterbukaan terhadap Tuhan di tengah

pergumulan dalam sejarah dan masyarakat. Iman, seperti dikatakan Johann Baptist Metz,

6
Niall, Lucy. Khora, Plato’s and Derrida’s Definitions. 2008
berarti solidaritas dengan dunia dan sejarah, yang tidak memunggungi dunia dan sejarah,
tetapi sebagai kekuatan untuk transformasi sejarah dan masyarakat.7

Gagasan Richard Kearney yang berjudul The God Who Maybe. Richard Kearney
dijadikan rujukan, sebab dia dapat dinilai sebagai pemikir yang berhasil berinteraksi
secara kritis kreatif dengan Derrida dan dengan paham mengenai makna inisiatif
perubahan yang dilakukan manusia dalam sejarah di tengah dunia. Pada bagian terakhir
akan diberi catatan kritis atas tanggapan Kearney.

1. Merindukan yang akan datang – risiko hidup sekarang

2. Richard Kearney : Allah yang akan datang dan microeskatologi
3. Teodice sebagai bantu sandungan : tanggapan Kritis atas Kearney

THE GOD WHO MAY BE

1. Toward a Phenomenology of the Persona

Each person embodies a persona. Persona is that eschatological aura of
‘‘possibility’’ which eludes but informs a person’s actual presence here and now. I
use it here as another word for the otherness of the other; just as I use ‘‘person’’ to
refer to my fellow in so far as he/she is the same or similar to me (empirically,
biologically, psychologically, etc.). At a purely phenomenological level, persona is all
that in others exceeds my searching gaze, safeguarding their inimitable and unique
singularity. It is what escapes me toward another past that I cannot recover and
another future I cannot predict. It resides, if it resides anywhere, beyond my
intentional horizons of re-tention and pro-tention. The persona of the other outstrips
both the presenting consciousness of my perception here and now and the
presentifying consciousness of my imagination (with its attempts to see, in the mode
of as-if, that which resists perceptual intuition). The persona of the other even defies
the names and categories of signifying consciousness. It is beyond consciousness tout
court. Though this ‘‘beyondness’’ is, curiously, what spurs language to speak
figuratively about it, deploying imagination and interpretation to overreach their
normal limits in efforts to grasp it—especially in the guise of metaphor and narrative.
This persona is what Levinas names la trace d’autrui; and it is not unrelated to what
Derrida calls the enigma of ‘‘alterity’’; nor ultimately to what, in many religions,
7
J.B. Metz, “Compassion. Zu einem Weltprogramm des Christentums im Zeitalter des Pluralismus der
Religionen und Kulturen”, dalam J.B. Metz, Lothar Kuld dan Adolf Weisbrod (eds.), Compassion.
Weltprogramms des Christentums. Soziale Verantwortung lernen, Freiburg: Herder 2000, 9-18 (17).
 goes simply but often quite misleadingly by the term ‘‘spirit’’
(pneuma/anima/âme/Geist). I will endeavor here to develop the notion of persona in
terms of a radical phenomenology of transfiguration.8

2. I Am Who May Be
God transfigures and exceeds being. His esse reveals itself, surprisingly and
dramatically, as posse. The Exodus exchange between God and Moses might, I have
been suggesting, be usefully reread not as the manifestation of some secret name but
as a pledge to remain constant to a promise. God, transfiguring himself in the guise of
an angel, speaks through (per-sona) a burning bush and seems to say something like
this: I am who may be if you continue to keep my word and struggle for the coming
of justice. The God who reveals Himself on Mount Horeb is and is not, neither is nor
is not. This is a God who puns and tautologizes, flares up and withdraws, promising
always to return, to become again, to come to be what he is not yet for us. This God is
the coming God who may-be. The one who resists quietism as much as zealotry, who
renounces both the onto-theology of essence and the voluntarist impatience to
appropriate promised lands. This Exodic God obviates the extremes of atheistic and
theistic dogmatism in the name of a still small voice that whispers and cries in the
wilderness: perhaps. Yes, perhaps if we remain faithful to the promise, one day, some
day, we know not when, I-am-who-may-be will at last be. Be what? we ask. Be what
is promised as it is promised. And what is that? we ask. A kingdom of justice and
love. There and then, to the human ‘‘Here I am,’’ God may in turn respond, ‘‘Here I
am.’’ But not yet.

3. Transfiguring God
The post-paschal stories of the transfiguring persona remind us that the
Kingdom is given to hapless fishermen and spurned women, to those lost and
wandering on the road from Jerusalem to nowhere, to the wounded and weak and
hungry, to those who lack and do not despair of their lack, to little people ‘‘poor in
spirit.’’ The narratives of the transfigured-resurrected Christ testify that after the long
night of fasting and waiting and darkness and need-afloat on a wilderness of sea-
breakfast is always ready. The transfiguring persona signals the ultimate solidarity,
8
I first attempted a sketch of such a project in chapter 8 of Poétique du possible. Entitled ‘‘La
Transfiguration de la personne,’’ this chapter was deeply influenced by both Emmanuel Levinas’s notion
of the ‘‘trace’’ developed in Totality and Infinity (1969) and Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘‘alterity’’ outlined
in Writing and Difference (1967) and Of Grammatology (1967)
 indeed indissociability, of spirit and flesh. Today a triumphal monument crowns the
hill of Thabor, compromising Christ’s request for discretion, for nothing, no tents, no
temples, no memorials, at most a trace or scripted testimony. Today Christians, Jews,
and Muslims are still fighting over who should own or exercise ‘‘sovereignty’’ over
the places of their sacred stories-the tomb of Abraham in Hebron, the Wailing Wall,
the Dome of the Rock on Mount Moriah, the ‘‘millennial’’ space in front of the
Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth (a giant edifice towering over the ground
where a humble young woman once knelt). And various Christian sects-Armenian,
Greek Orthodox, Coptic, Protestant, and Catholic-still skirmish with thuribles, bibles,
and crucifixes over rights of priority procession through the Church of the Nativity in
Bethlehem or the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The message of transfiguration so
easily disfigured. How ironic it is to observe so many monotheistic followers still
failing to recognize the message: that God speaks not through monuments of power
and pomp but in stories and acts of love and justice, the giving to the least of
creatures, the caring for orphans, widows, and strangers; stories and acts which bear
testimony-as transfiguring gestures do-to that God of little things that comes and
goes, like the thin small voice, like the burning bush, like the voice crying out in the
wilderness, like the word made flesh, like the wind that blows where it wills.
And since the enigma of transfiguration never ceases to remind us that we are
embodied creatures who inhabit lands in space and time, and still need pilgrimages to
holy places at sacred times, I would tentatively add these scattered testimonial traces
of the transfigured Christ which I witnessed during a recent visit to Israel-for as a
Christian it is all I have any competence to invoke: the ruins of Capernaum and Tabha
where Jesus and the apostles took refuge after their expulsion from Nazareth; the
vacant hill-caves of Sitve and Avdat where the Christian Naboteans (a people of the
Spice Trail now extinct) rested on their passage through the Negev desert; or the
sequestered, humble hermitages of Saint George and Maar Saba carved into rockcliffs
in the hills of Judea. These fragments of stone and story, these traces of fragile
testimony, still resist-as they have resisted for centuries-the triumphalism of
ecclesiastical empire. Hideouts, off the beaten track, without foundation. Cut against
the grain. Self-effacing, modest, vulnerable, welcoming. Sanctuaries for migrants.
Shelters for the exiled. Footholds for the forgotten. Arks. Perfect places for rejected
personas to come and lay their heads. Ciphers, perhaps, of a transfiguring God.

4. Desiring God
 The deconstructionist response to this postmodern dilemma would seem to be
twofold—believe and read! In spite of our inability to know for sure ‘‘who speaks’’
behind the many voices and visages that float before us, now present now absent,
now here now elsewhere, Derrida tells us that we must continue to trust and have
faith. ‘‘Je ne sais pas, il faut croire,’’ as the refrain of Memoirs of the Blind goes. But
if our belief is blind, and each moment of faithful decision terrifying, we can always
be helped by the vigilant practice of meticulous reading. We must never abandon our
responsibility to read between the lines. ‘‘In order to overcome hallucination we have
to listen to and closely read the other,’’ insists Derrida. Reading, in the broad sense
which he attributes to this word, is an ‘‘ethical and political responsibility. In
attempting to overcome hallucinations we must decipher and interpret the other by
reading. We can not be sure that we are not hallucinating by saying simply ‘I see.’ ‘I
see’ is, after all, just what the hallucinating person says. No, in order to check that
you are not hallucinating you have to read in a certain way.’’ In what way, we might
ask? ‘‘I have no rule for that,’’ Derrida humbly concedes. ‘‘Who can decide what
counts as the end of hallucination? It is difficult. I too have difficulties with my own
work.’’9
But in spite of these avowed difficulties, Derrida and Caputo have, I believe,
done more than most contemporary philosophers—theist or atheist— to make us
sensitive to the three calls of God: donne, pardonne, abandonne. The problem is that
these calls are, for deconstruction, always made in the dark where the need to discern
seems so impossible. So my final question is: how do we read in the dark?
One tentative response might be this: we may approach the enigma of sacred
eros by inviting various great texts on the subject-from the Song of Songs, and its
legacy of religious and secular interpretations, to the contemporary philosophies of
the ‘‘desire of God’’ in thinkers like Levinas, Derrida, and Caputo-to confront, cross
over, and ignite each other so that the sparks that fly up from their friction may shed
some light onto our dark.
Having attempted such a multiple hermeneutic approach, however cursory, in
the readings rehearsed above, I conclude with a tentative summary hypothesis. While
God’s lovers will always continue to seek and desire him whom their soul loves, they
have always already been found, because already sought and desired, by him whom
their soul loves. Their eros occupies a middle space, a two-way street between action
and passion, yearning and welcome, seeking and receptivity. A doubling of desire
9
Derrida, ‘‘Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility,’’ pp. 65–83.
 well captured in the advice given to Nathanaël in Gide’s Nourritures terrestres: ‘‘Let
your desire be less expectation than a readiness to receive’’-‘‘Que ton désir soit
moins une attente qu’une disposition à l’accueil.’’ 10 When it comes to God at any
rate, you rarely have one without the other. Attente and accueil are the two Janus
faces of desire. Why? Because desire responds to the double demand of eschaton and
eros. God’s desire for us-our desire for God.

5. Possibilizing God
Husserl discloses the teleological idea of possibility which motivates the
development of reason toward a universal goal-but there always remains some
ambiguity in Husserl’s phenomenology as to whether this telos is transcendent of
history or immanent in it.11 There is always a lingering suspicion that his elusive
notion of ‘‘God’’ may slip back into some kind of rationalist or idealist theodicy
where the possible is predetermined from the outset.
Bloch, for his part, grounds the possible firmly in the dialectical history of
striving toward utopia; but his neutral position on the eschatological status of the
noch-nicht leaves this ‘‘theologian of the revolution’’ uncommitted at a theological
level. One cannot avoid the surmise that the Utopian Possible in question is at times
nothing other than the dream-projection of a universalist humanism.
Heidegger’s notion of the ‘‘loving possible’’ clearly goes beyond both the
transcendental idealism of Husserl and the dialectical humanism of Bloch. It stops
short, however, of identifying this ‘‘possibilizing power’’ (das Vermögen des
Mögens), with a theistic or theological God. Heidegger is more interested in Being
than in God; and the curious ‘‘saving god’’ he invokes in his final days is probably
more akin to the God of Apollo and the poets than to Yahweh or Jesus.
Finally, Derrida exposes the intriguing enigma of the impossible-possible, and
even links this to the ‘‘origin of faith’’; but the faith in question is a deconstructive
belief in the undecidable and unpredictable character of incoming everyday events
(what he calls ‘‘experience in general’’) rather than in some special advent of the
divine as such.

AFTER GOD

10
For this and other citations and ideas, I am indebted to Mark Patrick Hederman, Manikon Eros (Dublin:
Veritas, 2000).
11
. On this ambiguity, see Louis Dupré, ‘‘Husserl’s Thought on God.’’
 Husserl’s transcendental reduction called for a return ‘‘to the things themselves,’’
where consciousness refocuses on the phenomena as they appear in themselves and by
themselves (eidetically), cutting through, as it were, the layers of preassigned
signification that common usage has accumulated over them. Heidegger’s ontologica
reduction guided consciousness’s eye in seeing that phenomena, even before being the
manifestation of this or that thing, simply are. This understanding of phenomena as
beings led Heidegger’s thought to a retrieval of the difference between beings and the
horizon of Being. The dosological reduction disclosed a structure more ulterior than
phenomenality and being, that of unconditional givenness.

The fourth reduction does not seek to overcome or discard the preceding
movements of reduction; rather, it strives to complete them by rehearsing, retrieving, and
repeating them. In some sense, the fourth reduction is a corrective recapitulation of the
transcendent, ontological, and dosological reductions.

What, then, is the fourth reduction? As Richard Kearney has phrased it in the
opening essay of this volume, the fourth reduction ‘‘leads us beyond the horizons of
‘essence,’ ‘being,’ and ‘gift’ back to existence, that is, back to the natural world of
everyday, embodied life where we may confront once again the Other as prosopon.’’

We will try to flesh out the basic principles of the fourth reduction by clarifying
further the definition (discussed elsewhere) of the prosopon and its pertinence for a
phenomenology of everyday experience.

It could be relatively easy to accuse the fourth reduction of being partial,

especially in comparison with the three preceding ones, since it either reduces
phenomena to the experience of the Other as prosopon or it excludes phenomena (any
other than the Other) by being applicable only in cases where another human being is
involved-having little or nothing to say about an entire world of phenomena (things,
feelings, events, etc.). Indeed, how does this tree that I see through my window, or this
paper that I am writing on, ‘‘fit’’ in such a prosopic reduction? Would it not be absurd,
by the very definition of prosopon, to subject this kind of phenomena to the fourth
reduction, to the extent that they lack a face (and the capacity of relationship that only a
face can offer) and, therefore, can never take the place of the Other? In other words, the
fourth reduction is said to reduce the world to the Other as prosopon, who now becomes
its privileged (and unique) example. Its partiality, in other words, would have been a
humanism, or personalism.
The Extroversion of Tropos

The fourth reduction gives us indeed the totality of phenomena (every kind of
phenomenon) through the prosopic relationship. The tree in front of me and the paper I
am writing on, a text or a feeling, an event and a work of art, although they might
radically lack a face, are still capable of appearing in a prosopic fashion. For they would
never appear if they didn’t relate themselves somehow back to a person. If this pen is not
the pen that I use to write (or not write) to you, or for you, or about you, then what is it to
me? The pen in itself (detached from any prosopic relationship) is meaningless. One
could actually pose the question if I could possibly ever see the pen as a pure object
(outside of the relational nexus). Only in relation to someone (you, the prosopon) the pen,
or any other object, acquires meaning. The seed of relatedness is already contained in
Husserl’s breakthrough of 1900, the realization that, albeit in perception, imagination, or
memory, consciousness is always a ‘‘consciousness of. . . .’’ For what else is this ‘‘of,’’
which unites the intending consciousness with its intended world, if not the indication of
a relation? To the extent that the consciousness is intentional, it is also relational.

In fact, the entire objection against a ‘‘religious’’ misreading of phenomena

implies an alternative, second possibility: a nonreligious, secular reading. Therefore, such
an objection reproduces the pagan (or ‘‘primitive,’’ according to Levinas12) distinction
between the sacred and the secular-a distinction rendered inoperative by the prosopic. To
read the eschatological back in the ordinary of the everyday means to contaminate the
temporal with the eternal; to blur the distinction between a secular and a sacred world; to
let the separation between the holy and the unholy collapse. It is, thus, in vain to raise the
question of the ‘‘citizenship,’’ as it were, of the phenomena: Is this face in front of me a
phenomenon that belongs to the order of the secular (and thus the face of another), or is it
a sacred phenomenon (and thus the face of God)? For the fourth reduction-precisely in its
ability to overcome such a Manichaean view of the World-this is nothing but a pseudo
dilemma; the face of the Other is essentially both the face of another and the face of God.
Like matter in quantum physics, it can be both, either particle or wave. It depends on how
I am able to receive the Other and on how the Other is able to give itself. Phenomenology
should not and cannot decide a priori (i.e., prior to my relation with the Other and with
the World) how to classify phenomena-as if she were an old librarian shelving books
under the right call number.