LAUSR

goal is not to arrive at proper language (whether positive or negative) for God, but rather to understand that divine transcendence demands that talk about God be understood as an unending round of saying and unsaying that functions precisely to leave one open to the divine that cannot be grasped. Here Newheiser rightly identifies a parallel with deconstruction, in that ‘both insist upon a negativity they cannot achieve, and both persist in an affirmation that is necessarily uncertain’ (p. 102), but his further claim that Dionysius thus exemplifies a Derridean model of ‘uncertain hope’ is doubtful at best. Here Newheiser confuses the Dionysian insistence that God is not a knowable object with the very different claim that God cannot even be identified, such that (as Newheiser reads Dionysius) ‘Christian practice [i]s an experiment that may be mistaken’ (p. 8) and ‘the individual cannot evaluate whether [union with God] is possible’ (p. 79). The idea that the Christian hope for life with God is ‘uncertain’ to the extent of perhaps being impossible simply goes beyond anything Dionysius (who rarely speaks of hope at all) says. This leads to the question of Newheiser’s account of hope itself. His aim – to find a way between despair and complacency or presumption – is admirable; and his characterisation of hope as a ‘disciplined resilience that allows us to admit that our cherished assumptions may be misguided and that familiar institutions may be unjust’ (p. 16) rightly emphasises the combination of persistence and humility that such a middle way demands. But the idea that hope, theologically speaking, is inherently uncertain and ‘is vulnerable to disappointment’ (p. 9) is flatly inconsistent with Paul’s claim that hope does not disappoint (Rom 5:5). In this context, the fact that hope cannot be seen (Rom 8:24) needs to be distinguished from the claim that it is uncertain (cf. 1 Cor 15:19, 32; 1 Thess 4:13ff.; Tit 1:2; Heb 6:18); for while how the hope that Christians confess will be realised is indeed uncertain, that it will be is not: ‘what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2).