At the end of the last century, there was something of a cottage industry of academic explorations of the intersections between deconstruction and theology, ranging from the a/theologies of Mark C. Taylor and John Caputo on the one hand, to attempts to show convergences between Derrida and Karl Barth in the work of William Stacey Johnson and Walter Lowe on the other. While the pace of explicit theological engagement with Derrida has since slowed, David Newheiser argues that there is still much to draw from such comparisons, most especially for the project of grounding and sustaining a political theology that is at once hopeful and duly attentive to the risks of hegemonic overreach.

Newheiser's analysis places Derrida in conversation with the mysterious sixth-century writer known as (Pseudo-)Dionysius the Areopagite. This pairing will not be surprising to those who have followed the literature on theology and deconstruction, where the resonances between Derrida and negative (or apophatic) theology have figured prominently – not least because of Derrida's own evident interest in figures like Dionysius, Eckhart, Silesius and other proponents of apophaticism. Whereas most have judged these two bodies of work to be finally incompatible, however, Newheiser argues that both provide important resources for productive political engagement by virtue of their common commitment to pursue concrete practices even in the recognition that such action can claim neither to be grounded in certain knowledge nor to generate assured outcomes. Although in different registers, he contends, both Derrida and Dionysius bear witness to the significance of an ‘uncertain hope that avoids the oscillation between presumption and despair’ (p. 151).

The argument is open to assessment on two levels: first, the author's exegesis of Derrida and Dionysius, and second, his understanding of hope. Within this framework the most compelling feature of the book is Newheiser's reading of Derrida, which draws on the full range of his corpus and consistently offers both clear exposition and compelling assessments of a notoriously difficult writer. Against interpreters (which include Derrida's advocates as much as his defenders) that see in the positing of différance a commitment to endless play that is politically disempowering, Newheiser shows that Derrida's rejection of certainty in knowledge and judgement is in no way meant to preclude political engagement. As Newheiser summarises, for Derrida ‘if everything is subject to doubt, this means that every judgement is doubtful, not that judgment is precluded’ (p. 30). And while conceding that Derrida is unquestionably an atheist (albeit ‘of a certain sort’, p. 109), he persuasively argues that careful attention to his treatment of religion in general (and negative theology in particular) is far more subtle and nuanced than both his champions (Martin Hägglund) and his critics (Jean-Luc Marion) contend.

The reading of Dionysius is less persuasive. Newheiser rightly insists that Dionysius’ apophaticism should be understood first and foremost as an ‘ethical discipline’ (p. 47) rather than a formal analysis of reference and predication. Indeed, for Dionysius the 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).