Holy Vulnerability and Sacred Anarchy
Philosophically superb, theologically sublime, and politically subversive; an irresistable examination of the destabilizing impact and revolutionary event contained in the kingdom of God: the reign of those least likely to rule, according to rules entirely unsuited for the rulers of this world; a holy anarchy and sacred subversiveness rooted in unruly banquets and frivolous economics provoked by lillies in the field: powerless, forceless, weak and unassuming...unable to demand anything, yet still entirely irresistable, irrepressable, and uncondtional; a truly brilliant attempt to answer Augustine's ancient question: What do I love when I say I that love God?; a crying hermeneutics that explores the meaning of our tears and what it means to cry to God, at God, about God, without God; a prayer for the good of theology, trying to find the best of theology in how well it prays; do not be deterred by Levinas, Heidegger, Badiou, Zizek or Derrida...this is a learned dialogue with St. Paul...a lover's quarrel between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche...a heartfelt plea and tearfilled prayer...a wreckless dive into tehomic depths...hoping without hope to find the power of love in the God of the weak. Little in the field of philosophy of religion compares to this book: theologians and philosophers may disagree, but they have yet to say it as well as Caputo does. Will read it again and again and again.
Should A Philosopher Prove His Thesis?
I recently read the very lengthy Introduction to religious-philosophy teacher John Caputo's The Weakness of God. I appreciate the meatiness of the Introduction, since it laid out the fundamentals of where Caputo was going.
Caputo rejects the teaching that God is sovereign over all things. He makes it explicit that he rejects any such concept of God. The rest of the book is a radical re-definition of the word "God". The theme of the book is that there is no strong God, and that any sort of "strong" theology -- a theology that affirms God's sovereignty. omnipotence, or omniscience -- is wrong.
Caputo does not prove his thesis. There is no anchor tying the thesis down to anything real. Like all postmodern philosophers, he undermines his own writings when he denies any close ties between words and the objective realities that those words signify. He denies the existence of the referent. He goes to great length to claim (with no proof), that the word "God" is not the same as that which he claims it represents --something he calls The Event.
But this denial of an unbreakable connection between words and reality is fatal to his own book! The same break with reality between words and referents applies to the words Caputo himself writes. Caputo in principle denies any sufficient harmony between reality and his own typed words on the printed page for Caputo to carry meaning.
His few quotes from Derrida helped me understand why so many other European philosophers regard Derrida as a word juggler not to be taken seriously by serious thinkers.
If you also feel that words ought to represent something real, then much of the Introduction is gibberish. The author affirms double negatives, denies his own assertions, asserts his own denials, and yet the book is written using the rules of traditional logic and grammar, and is even set out in orderly, numbered lists. In this way it is self-refuting from the first page.
I believe that words need to be treated as having meaning, if one is honest, and truly wants to communicate clearly with others. I also reject the idea that we can say whatever we want about God and just assume that others are obligated to agree with us; just as we are not free to make up facts about Grover Cleveland, the Yankees baseball team, or cellular regeneration and demand that others let us off the hook as far as factual accuracy is concerned. For these reasons, I regard Dr. Caputo's book as very silly.
A Dash of Devilish Derring-Do from Derrida
There is a marked difference between this lengthy volume and the short essay On Religion that John Caputo published in the Thinking in Action series. The former presupposed no prior knowledge of French philosophical debates or familiarity with the rhetoric of deconstruction. It appealed to all kinds of religious creeds or political proclivities, and offered a "big tent" religion where Neo-evangelicals as well as liberal Christians could find their place, along with non-believers and agnostics. And it drew its inspiration from popular culture sources as well as sacred texts to suggest the precepts of a "religion without religion" that did not offend anyone's creed or beliefs.
The Weakness of God takes up similar themes and ideas, but is much more narrow in its focus and in its appeal. Despite its claim that the kingdom of God welcomes outsiders and even drags people off the streets to the wedding banquet, there is definitely an insider flavor in this text written with an audience of fellow philosophers and social critics in mind. Readers who are not already members of the deconstructionist club will feel like the odd guest who cannot penetrate the private jokes and allusive references exchanged at the table. Some will even take offense at the quips and paradoxes that John Caputo offers, poking fun at the "long-robed ecclesiastical apparatchiks" or stating boldly that the first to enter the kingdom of God will be "gays and lesbians, illegal immigrants, unwed mothers, the HIV-positive, drug addicts, prisoners, and, after 9/11, Arabs." Clearly the book was not written to appeal to the Christian right.
I nonetheless find it a persuasive tract, especially for people of good faith who would like to believe but who always find their intellect getting in the way. In The Weakness of God, you won't find references to God as an almighty being with the power to intervene upon natural processes--what the author labels "strong theology", or the metaphysics of omnipotence, of miracles and divine interventions. Nor will you find any revelations about an afterlife that people would enter after they die (as Caputo notes, "we suffer from a scarcity of reliable reports from the other side"). Even on the issue of whether God exists as an identifiable entity, the author offers no final opinion, leaving the reader to find out by himself. As Caputo states, "I have not been authorized from on high to settle that venerable debate". And as Kierkegaard remarked, "if God were a giant green bird, and regularly and conspicuously appeared thus in the town square, there would be much less skepticism about him, but also less passionate faith."
For Caputo's faith is indeed passionate, and his weak theology should not be confused with a lack of enthusiasm or a disengagement from the divine call. John Caputo is not someone who "believes that he believes", as his fellow philosopher Gianni Vattimo puts it, he believes vehemently, and he is always praying and weeping for the coming of the kingdom. There is no contradiction between his passion for Christ and his lifelong engagement with the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher with a Jewish background who said of himself that he "rightly passes for an atheist." On the contrary, Caputo suggests that theologians could use "a dash of devilish derring-do from Derrida", and proposes, "in imitation of the Master who dined with sinners, to invite the theologians to sit down to table with deconstruction and other disreputable French sinners".
The consequence is that Caputo's theology of the event strongly reflects contemporary debates among French philosophers, and a familiarity with the works of Derrida, Levinas, Deleuze, Marion, and others, is a prerequisite to penetrate the intricacies of this book. If there were a separate denomination for deconstructionists, then John Caputo would be its vicar. The kingdom of God that he calls for, a "kingdom without sovereignty" where the only rule "is the rule of the unruly, of the weak and foolish", can only be compared to the annual meeting of the Cultural Studies Association. But his pursuit of what Derrida calls the "weak force of the unconditional that lack sovereignty" can also claim the authority of the Apostle, as the whole book explores the paradoxical consequences of Paul's proclamation about the "weakness of God" in 1 Cor. 1:29.
As the author points out, The Weakness of God could very well have been published in Slavoj Zizek's Short Circuits collection, were it not for the Slovenian editor's despise for "weak thinking" and deconstructionist talk. Caputo's idea is "to stop thinking about God as a massive ontological power line that provides power to the world, and instead start thinking of something that short-circuits such power and provides a provocation to the world that is otherwise than power." He produces a series of short circuits between canonical texts and modern writings, between the Book of Books and the cultural studies' curriculum. Here the Genesis narrative of creation is crossed by Babylonian myths as recorded by feminist scholar Catherine Keller, the wedding feast of Matt. 22:1-14 is paralleled with the maddest hatter's party imagined by Lewis Carroll (as read by Deleuze), the resurrection of Lazarus is read along the miracle of the child in Levinas' Totality and Infinity, and there is a strong similarity between the kingdom of God and the rule of the gift, of justice, of hospitality, and of forgiveness that form the ethico-political horizon of deconstruction.
For John Caputo, the act of healing a man on the Sabbath is an act of deconstruction. The title of his latest essay suggests a line for a bumper sticker that his readers may wish to use: What Would Jesus Deconstruct?
...........
This is a beautifully written book. In light of the current global situation, this book will be welcome to some. Yet Caputo's project has severe limitations. In terms of substance, 'theology of the event' amounts to deconstruction adorned with alot of god talk. Caputo, let alone Derrida, provides no way of talking about 'sin', that rather unpopular word that implicates us all in the problem of violence. Waxing poetic about the world and the powerless can amount to bad faith when one rejects a framework for thinking agency, and especially if one doesn't emphasize the contingency of violence. Given Derrida's Nietzschean insistence on the neccesity of violence, taken with Caputo's uncritical fidelity to Derrida, it is clear that Caputo creates unsolvable problems for his position, especially if it claims to be Christian.
If you are interested in philosophy/theology of weakness, I would recommend Benjamin & Adorno, or Metz and Moltmann, over Caputo.
a book that comes just in the nick of time
What a gift of a book, one coming upon us just in the nick of time!
Just as fundamentalists of all persuasions--who worship the tiny and pathetic god of power--
have propelled us over the edge and unto unspeakable brutality and grief;
here comes the antidote via John Caputo--one of our most trusted and original thinkers.
Caputo has simply brought to the forefront what is the most explicit reading of the Gospel,
in particular in the Beatitudes and the parables
(for those who have eyes that see and ears that hear, that is):
the God of Jesus is the total antithesis and full contradiction of power.
The consequence of this stand offers us a truly revolutionary turn in thinking about God.
In a nutshell this is what Caputo daringly and poetically says at the end of the book:
"The 'Kingdom of God' is a celebration of the blessed event of the foundering of the 'world,'
of the excess and open-ended shock that is delivered to the world by God.
The truth of the event harbored by the name of God triggers the potencies that stir in things,
releasing their pent-up charges of divinity, rocking the world with the shock of the divine.
The result is the grace, the graciousness, the aleatory gratuitousness of the gift,
the water-into-wine madness of the kingdom, the divine sparks of the sacred anarchy."
Regarding what he means by 'event,' here I paraphrase from the introduction:
Event cannot be held captive by a confessional faith or creedal formula.
An event cuts across the distinctions among the various confessions, and
even across the distinction between the confessional faiths and secular unbelief,
in order to touch upon a more elemental quality of our lives...
It would be better to say that the event is the subject matter,
not of a confession, but of a circum-fession in which we 'fess up' to being cut and wounded
by something wondrous, by something I know not what...
The event happens to us: overtakes us and outstrip the reach of the ego.
An event is not our doing but it is done to us (even as it might well be our undoing).
An event is an excess, an overflow, a surprise... an uncontainable incoming.
An event refers to an impulse as aspiration simmering within... somethings that groans to be born.
Event overflows any entity;
it does not rest easily within the confines of the name of an entity,
but stirs restlessly, endlessly, like an invitation or a call, an invocation ('come')
or a provocation, a solicitation or a promise...
Event is a disturbance within the heart of being that makes being restless.
Truth is more like night than a light, and the event itself is as risky as it is promising.
Truth is something one needs to have the heart for, the courage to cope with or expose oneself to...
The movement of the event has to do with a transforming moment that releases us
from the grip of the present and opens up the future in a way that makes possible a new birth,
a new invention of ourselves...
Event is not what is present but what is coming.
Theology tries to follow the tracks of the name of God,
to stay on the trail it leaves behind as it makes its way through our lives...
The name of God is a word forged in the fires of life.
....
And on and on Caputo goes with searing phrases that burn dead-letter clutter to ashes
and thus clear a space for new growth to just happen.
(5 reviews)
