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I wish to thank Stephen Williams for his thoughtful and articulate response to On Religion. He raises questions that go to the heart of what I was proposing, and I am grateful for the opportunity to respond. When he writes that the point of my work is to argue that religion provides "a messianic space" that gives our search for justice "its deep dimension, power and, perhaps, meaning," he expresses sensitively what I am trying to do. He and I are agreed that love and justice go to the core of religion and about the danger of religious exclusivism. But he is worried that I have dogmatically made it impossible for there to be a "clear revelation," by which I think he means one that is clearly true to the exclusion of others. So he argues for an exclusively true revelation—the Judeo-Christian one—but without exclusivism, without pride and arrogance. That prompts a suggestion concerning the conditions under which a just and loving God might reveal Godself truly in just one time and place. Still, we cannot expect that even that revelation would be "universally clear," because human beings are as prone to flee the light as to seek it.

I begin with the point about "dogmatic skepticism," namely, claiming definitely to know that we cannot know certain things: "John Caputo says that no one can know whether or of what kind God may be." The emphasis falls on the "no one": you or I might be skeptical about knowing this, but to claim to know that no one can know it is dogmatic. If "knowing" whether or what God may be means that valid philosophical arguments to this end have been or will be forthcoming, then I am guilty. But, like almost all philosophers from Kant to the present, religious and nonreligious, I have perfectly "good reasons," principled ones, for arguing that attempts to sail that far beyond experience by way of speculative argumentation inevitably run amuck, which also explains why these arguments enjoy acceptance only among people of faith. I would not call this view "dogmatic" except in the technical sense that I hold it to be true, which I do.

I would put a different emphasis on this sentence: "no one can know whether or of what kind God may be." I argue that our understanding of God is guided by faith, not knowledge in a "standard form epistemological sense." (I will clarify in a bit why I use this phrase.) But I make a living promoting the religious side of "postmodernism." On Religion is a (slightly popularized) argument that the days of dogmatic metaphysical theism and atheism are over (see especially chapter 2) and that postmodern means post-secular. So my delimitation of our knowledge of God comes by way of making room for faith. I make everything turn on the "love of God" and on determining just what that love could mean.

Williams continues: "But let us consider what that implies. Let us assume, ad hominem, the intelligibility of the traditional Judeo-Christian notion of God." I accept this assumption. The text continues, but with my italics added: "On Caputo's account of things, no one is justified in claiming to know that such a being exists." I agree.

Williams concludes: "That means that there is no clear revelation of or by such a being. For if there had been such a revelation, someone, somewhere might be justified in claiming to know that such a being exists. No one is so justified; therefore there has been no such revelation."

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