For empirical theology, the only authority is experience; and all empirical theological construction is a free construction by experience on experience. It is a construction by the present on the past, by the interpretive side of experience on the receptive side of experience. It is free, rather than bound by an unchanging norm, because it is a construction by the present as it reinterprets the past. Yet it is constrained, rather than completely arbitrary, because it is a construction on-based on and limited by-what is inherited from the past. This commentary on construction is elementary, at least for those empirical theologians working out of the process philosophies of William James, John Dewey, and, especially, Alfred North Whitehead. What is not elementary is what, in such a processive context, history is and means. On this question hang the present religious authority and meaning of the Bible, of the historic church, and of recent historic events. Either empirical theology shows how it derives its conclusions from history, or its conclusions are unexplained. It cannot rationally or spiritually intuit a historical order out of some eternal logos or divine will. It must look to the near chaos of history itself and out of this alone ascertain an order; and it must say how that order is religiously meaningful. But most important, it must say how religious order can be generated at all in the ever-moving flow of history. In what follows, I will describe how some of the recent ideas of two persons, a French philosopher and an American physicist, might suggest to empirical theology a relevant notion of how historical orders and meanings are generated. I refer to Jacques Derrida, the founder of