332 JERRY A. GLADSON Bible. God is “God for us just in so far as we do not possess him”. He alludes to expectancy such as appears in Lam 3, an anxious “ waiting ” for God that pervades Scripture 47. In this sense, Tillich’s paradoxical description of the theologian echoes the uncertainty in Lamentations. “Every theologian is committed and alienated”, he writes. “He is always in faith and in doubt; he is inside and outside the theological circle. Sometimes the one side prevails, sometimes the other; and he is never certain which side really prevails” 48. A parallel to postmodern indeterminancy and uncertainty and Lamentations 3,55-57 may be found in the work of William De- smond 49. Desmond wrestles with what he calls the postmodern “ allergy to transcendence”, which strips the world of “signs and traces of the divine”, and absolutizes human autonomy. Con- sequently, a modern silence about God has emerged, born not of reverence or awe but of hostility and irritation. This bends down- ward, Desmond claims, toward an ultimate, unbearable nihilism, yet at the same time reopens us to the “porosity of being”. How can one speak of God in such a climate? Desmond’s response is that we must speak of God metaxologically, that is “ from the middle”, from within human experience. From this intermediate location we cannot see the beginning, end, depth, or heights of Being, and so have no direct access to God. Humanity stands in an ambiguous or equivocal position with respect to the divine. To speak of God therefore requires using images and representations that require equivocity or an inevitable doubleness. Naming and imaging God is necessary (otherwise the word “God” has no content) and impossible in the sense that all images univocally fall short. We may speak of God only indirectly, cautiously, with reticence, particularly with reference to making claims about God. Indirect speech about God is metaphorical, a metaφein, a “carrying between”, carrying across a gap, speaking of ¥ the beyond from the midst of finitude. Metaphorical speech often P. TILLICH, Shaking the Foundations (New York 1948) 150-151. 47 P. TILLICH, Systematic Theology (Chicago, IL 1951-1965) I, 10. 48 For what follows, I draw from the analysis of William Desmond’s 49 thought in C. SIMPSON, Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern. William Desmond and John D. Caputo (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion; Bloomington, IN 2009) 91-97. Simpson gathers from Desmond’s writings a convenient consensus of his philosophical analysis.