In this essay we attempt a redefining of the phenomenological method as this has been developed mainly through three ''reductions'' 1 represented by three thinkers whose work advanced phenomenological research in novel ways: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Marion. Our rehearsal of the phenomenological tradition aims at formulating a set of controversial questions: Is it, perhaps, time for a fourth reduction that would better serve the sensibilities of the so-called phenomenology of the apparent? And if so, what might be (...) its guiding principles, its ways of operating, its scope and aim? Such a fourth reduction, we believe, would not seek to overcome or discard the preceding movements of reduction; rather, it would strive to complete them by rehearsing, retrieving, and repeating them. In some sense, a fourth reduction could be a corrective recapitulation of the transcendent, ontological, and dosological 2 reductions. In the following pages we will try to flesh out what the basic principles of a fourth reduction might be by clarifying further the definition of the prosopon and its pertinence for a phenomenology of the experience of God. Husserl's transcendental reduction called for a return ''to the things themselves,'' where consciousness refocuses on the phenomena as they appear in themselves and by themselves (eidetically), cutting through, as it were, the layers of preassigned signification that common usage has accumulated over them. (shrink)