Reframing God: John Caputo as theologian

The question of God is not a matter of a dispute about evidence, which can be resolved by rational argument and evaluation of the balance of probabilities. It is rather a question concerning each person’s response to the whole of their existence. ¹

This article explores how the work of John (Jack) Caputo articulates a belief in God that offers an alternative to the sceptic’s view that belief relies on a claim to substantial knowledge on slender grounds. Caputo is an American philosopher, lately Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University in the USA. For much of his career, Caputo’s work was published within the academic field of philosophy rather than theology, although he often seemed to come close to transgressing from the one to the other. His influential study of Jacques Derrida pioneered an unconventional religious reading of the French-Algerian Jewish postmodernist philosopher, usually regarded as an atheist. ² From then on, Caputo’s work progressively becomes more theological, and in The Weakness of God ³ he writes for the first time explicitly as a theologian. This is followed by the more popular What Would Jesus Deconstruct? ; ⁴ later, The Insistence of God ⁵ continued the theological trend, perpetuated by his most recent works, the part-autobiographical Hoping Against Hope, ⁶ The Folly of God ⁷ and Cross and Cosmos. ⁸

Caputo’s work on Derrida is the essential starting point for understanding his theology. In The Prayers and Tears he begins with a striking passage from Derrida’s 1991 work Circumfession (the title itself is a typical piece of Derridean word play, eliding ‘circumcision’ with ‘confession’), in which Derrida refers to his religion as ‘what my readers won’t have known about me’. He claims that, as a result of this ‘religion about which nobody understands anything’, he has been ‘read less and less well over almost twenty years’. ⁹ Accordingly, Caputo embarks on a project to read Derrida ‘better’, through the religious lens. He characterizes Derrida’s religion in the ever decreasing pattern of the French words sans savoir, sans avoir, sans voir (p. xxi): ‘without knowing, without having, without seeing’. ¹⁰ He sees here an extended commentary on St Augustine’s searching question: ‘What do I love when I love my God?’ ¹¹ The difference is that, whereas Augustine famously declared to God that ‘our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you’, for Derrida and Caputo the restlessness itself is the experience of God.

In exploring Augustine’s question, Caputo quotes a passage from Circumfession in which Derrida enumerates no fewer than 18 actions that constitute a (non-)answer to the question: ‘inviting calling promising, hoping sighing dreaming, convoking invoking provoking, constituting engendering producing, naming assigning demanding, prescribing commanding sacrificing’. ¹² Caputo comments: ‘eighteen ways to pray and weep, to dream of the innumerable, to desire the promise of something unimaginable, to be impassioned by the impossible’. These expressions of desire and longing for something yet to come form for Caputo the heart of a religious experience learned from Derrida; to Augustine’s confident ‘until they find their rest in you’, Caputo notes Derrida’s ‘postscript’, ‘and you are something or someone to come, always, structurally to come’. ¹³

In all of this, Caputo takes up the fight against what he calls ‘onto-theo-logic’, that Hellenistic way of thinking about God that proceeds from ‘an excessively essentialistic and epistemic frame of mind’, ¹⁴ concerned with acquiring knowledge about the kind of being God is. He comments tersely: ‘Yahweh is not a Greek meaning but a Jewish passion.’ ¹⁵ Moses asked God his name, to which the reply, variously translated, came: ‘I am’, or ‘I am who I am’. Caputo’s take on this is that it should not lead to a theology of God as Being; rather, ‘who I am, God told a nosey Moses, is none of your business’. ¹⁶ In this rebuff, Caputo sees the pattern of other biblical texts in which religious questions about God, or appeals to God, are rejected in preference for an insistence on justice, the care of the poor and needy, and action to change the world (Amos railing against sacred feasts and assemblies, Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats). The passion that is God is a passion for a future in which everything is transformed.

However, this does not mean that Caputo’s theology is no more than a kind of reductive liberalism – theology as social action – dressed up in postmodern garb. His little book On Religion ¹⁷ offers an accessible introduction to his thinking. In the first chapter, ‘The love of God’, he once again proceeds from Augustine’s fundamental question, developing three main themes, all of them rooted in Derrida. The first is that what I love, when I love God, is the impossible. For Caputo, ‘the impossible is a defining religious category’. ¹⁸ He insists that it is biblical: ‘[T]he Scriptures are filled with narratives in which the power of the present is broken and the full length and breadth of the real open up like a flower, unfolding the power … of the impossible beyond the possible.’ ¹⁹ Whereas for the relative future, the Aristotelian virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance will suffice, the absolute future requires the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity: in ‘the limit situation of the possibility of the impossible … we sink to our knees in faith and hope and love, praying and weeping like mad’ (a reminder of the ‘prayers and tears’ of Derrida). ²⁰

With ‘like mad’, Caputo introduces the second theme – the idea that religion is a form of madness – deploying another bit of word play. The Aristotelian virtues are known as the ‘cardinal’ virtues, from the Latin cardo, hinge, because all the other virtues hinge upon them. Caputo concludes that the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity ‘unhinge’ us; in religion we become ‘unhinged’. We fall into the madness of impossible things, like loving our enemies, forgiving the unworthy, welcoming the alien, embracing poverty, dying to the world in order to live; ²¹ every time we pray ‘your kingdom come’, we are aligning ourselves with this form of answer to Augustine’s question. But Caputo takes a third theme from Derrida, the idea of ‘the Secret’: the contention that the very madness of religion reveals the Secret to be that ‘there is no Secret, no capitalized Know-it-all Breakthrough Principle or Revelation that lays things out the way they Really Are and thereby lays to rest the conflict of interpretations’. ²²

It is at this point that we realize that Caputo’s theology is profoundly postmodern all the way down, and not just in the trimmings, and he begins to sound much more ‘apophatic’. The rationalist tradition is based on the notion that if we pursue knowledge far enough, we will Know the Secret. But the passion for the impossible that is religion is not to be understood as a known subject in pursuit of an unknown or unknowable object. Augustine experienced faith as calling him profoundly into question; Caputo compares St Paul in Romans 7.15, ‘I do not understand my own actions’, and comments that ‘we do not know who we are. We do not Know the Secret (notice the caps!)’. ²³ The embrace of our nescience (not-knowing) as not just some kind of temporary deficiency to be overcome in time by science (knowing) but as the fundamental truth of things is liberating. For one thing, it means that we are absolved of any responsibility to go about telling everyone else what they ought to believe. We are less prone to what Caputo calls ‘intellectual road rage’, ²⁴ where we simply cannot tolerate the fact that things don’t make sense. We are opened up to the madness of the impossible because there is no longer any point in exercising rational caution. We can say ‘Yes’ to what is to come, to a future we cannot even see coming, like Molly Bloom at the end of Ulysses: ‘And yes, I said yes, I will, Yes.’ ²⁵

The question of what I love when I love God is not a puzzle to which we need to find the secret key in order to be free. Caputo argues that it is vain to attempt to unravel the conundrum about whether, if ‘God is love’, it also follows, reductively, that ‘love is God’. The guardians of orthodoxy are interested in this question because it appears to entertain the possibility that people who are not religious at all in the usual sense, but who demonstrate love, could be seen as knowing God even while denying God. But (to return to the earlier play on words), if the religious door is ‘unhinged’, it swings open, and the guardians can no longer exercise the control of opening and shutting it to let people in or keep them out. ²⁶ ‘The whole idea,’ Caputo insists, ‘is to respond, to do the truth, to make truth happen … to do the impossible, to make the mountain move, to go where I cannot go, even if I do not know who I am or what I love when I love my God.’ ²⁷

For Caputo, institutional religion is unattractive because it thinks it knows too much; it is always pushed in the direction of regulation, manning the gates, a conditional hospitality that is not the impossible gift that Derrida wrote about. He counsels the churches, therefore, that ‘they ought to be disturbed from within by a radical non-knowing’, ²⁸ since ‘faith is always inhabited by unfaith’. ²⁹ Faith is not like concrete, in the sense that if you pour enough of it in, it eventually fills the entire vessel and then sets rock hard so that nothing ever moves again. And Jesus himself is ‘not the Answer but the place of the question, of an abyss that is opened up by the life and death of a man who, by putting forgiveness before retribution, threw all human accounting into confusion’. ³⁰

What shall we say then? Is Caputo an atheist? I will approach this through his essay ‘Who comes after the God of metaphysics?’, published as an introduction to a collection of essays on religion drawing on the work of contemporary European philosophers. ³¹ Caputo begins with a stark contrast between Hegel and Kierkegaard. Hegel is the grand systematician, whose philosophy attempts to encompass all there is to know within the monumental self-realization of Geist, ‘Spirit/Intellect’, through human history. It is a juggernaut that can go in only one direction, with massive inevitability, towards a prescribed destination. It represents the apotheosis of metaphysics, beyond which there is no return but that ultimately loses touch with human reality. The tradition claimed to know too much, and this was exemplified at its most audacious in Hegel. But Kierkegaard is the herald of the end of ontology, of big metaphysics, requiring an ‘Abrahamic leap of faith in fear and trembling’ in place of overweening Hegelian confidence in the grand historical project of God. ³² For Caputo, metaphysics could never recover after Kierkegaard. He writes: ‘[F]or it is clearly not God who is dead, an illusion entertained mostly by academics, but … the God of metaphysical theology; it is speculative ruminations on God’s nature and causal arguments demonstrating God’s existence.’ ³³ Caputo thus represents a radical rejection of a form of metaphysical theism, but not the embrace of atheism.

The question is: ‘What becomes of God and of religious faith after the onto-theo-logical “first cause” has been sent packing?’ ³⁴ According to Caputo, clues can be found throughout the work of contemporary philosophers, both Jewish or Christian (Lévinas and Marion) and ostensibly atheist (Derrida and Irigaray), who nonetheless ‘cannot stop talking about God’. ³⁵ ‘Who comes after’ begins with the phenomenological method that allows religion to speak for itself, on its own terms. From the mystics such as Eckhart to the Romantics like Schleiermacher and right on to the early work of Heidegger, Caputo traces an alternative tradition of enquiry that tries to get under the skin of what religious faith is, to get a handle on its texture and feel, to explore it from the inside, and only by this method to dare to tiptoe towards any kind of articulation of what God-language might signify. For example, Lévinas attempts to articulate God in terms of a distinctive kind of experience: ‘a name that demands a response, the biblical “here I am”, and its whole power lies in the responsibility it awakens in us to serve the neighbour and the stranger’. ³⁶ Caputo comments elsewhere ³⁷ on how the French form of ‘here I am’, me voici, has a connotation the English lacks, which is that the respondent (in this particular example from Lévinas, Abraham when God calls him to sacrifice his son Isaac) refers to himself as object, not subject: literally ‘here is me’ or perhaps ‘behold me’. Caputo observes that ‘it puts Abraham in the accusative, on the receiving end of a command, a call, an obligation, turning him inside out from a nominative I (who can take charge) to an accusative me (who is given a charge)’.

The challenge this poses to mainstream theological methodologies is that, try as we might, we are never in the position of the one doing the ‘calling’, never able to ‘grasp’ (apprehend/comprehend) who or what it is that calls. We cannot get ourselves round into a position on the forward side of God, so to speak (as Moses was told, ‘you shall only see my back, but my face shall not be seen’); we can never be ‘one step ahead’ and so be in a position to dictate the game, which is the position Caputo thinks the metaphysical philosophers pretend to be in. We are always needing to be bending ‘towards God’ (literally à dieu), in the posture of the one who entreats, the supplicant, never the initiator; always the object, never the subject. In yet another piece of French word play, ‘à dieu’, ‘to God’, also of course means a taking of one’s leave, ‘goodbye’ (derived from ‘God be with you’). At the very moment of responding ‘to God’ there is also a leaving: we have to part company, to get on with living the response. Never do we greet God with our ‘bonjour’, initiating the goodwill; we acknowledge the encounter only after the event with our farewell – ite missa est, we ‘go in peace to love and serve the Lord’. ³⁸

So what manner of believer in God might Caputo be? He is intrigued by Derrida’s own description of himself as someone who ‘rightly passes for an atheist’. In a response to these words, in an interview with the Irish scholar Mark Dooley, Caputo notes that ‘Derrida, who quite rightly passes for an atheist, uses the name of God with a sense of irony and tongue in cheek, which belong to the very structure of rightly passing-for’. ³⁹ With typical playfulness, this phrase manages both to confirm that people are right to conclude that Derrida is an atheist, and, in the use of the words ‘passes for’, to suggest that they might be mistaken. The same might be said of Caputo’s religious faith, that he ‘rightly passes for a believer’: because ‘in the same way that Derrida puts his atheism in doubt and makes ironic use of the name of God, the several religious traditions must put their faith in doubt and recognize the contingency of the name to which they are absolutely attached’. ⁴⁰

The titles of two of Caputo’s self-declared works of theology bring the point home. The Weakness of God: a theology of the event substitutes ‘event’ for ‘being’ or ‘substance’ as the fundamental category for naming God, and promotes the desirability of a ‘weak theology’ in which the name ‘God’ denotes ‘a call rather than a causality, or a provocation rather than a presence or a determinate entity’; it names ‘an event transpiring in being’s restless heart’, that ‘settles down below in the hidden interstices of being’. ⁴¹ The Insistence of God: a theology of perhaps substitutes ‘insistence’ for ‘existence’ and celebrates the beauty of the domain of ‘perhaps’ as the launchpad for the madness of the impossible. ‘Strong theology’ insists on bipolar ‘categories of theism and atheism, belief and unbelief, existence and non-existence … true and false’. But weak theology ‘is content with a little adverb like “perhaps” … introducing modalities, conditions, degrees, and exceptions, focusing on … little prepositions, not big propositions’. For Caputo, the ‘might’ in ‘God Almighty’ ‘turns out to be the subjunctive might of “maybe” or “might be”, whose reach extends all the way to the impossible’. ⁴²

‘Event’ and ‘perhaps’: two indicators for a contemporary texture of believing. Caputo’s theological work offers a stimulating intellectual contextualization for the kind of doctrinally agnostic yet experientially rich texture of believing that characterizes the religious quest of seekers in late modernity. It resonates, for example, with the popular testimony of Francis Spufford, who admits that ‘God’s non-necessity in explanations is a given’, ⁴³ and that in writing about the experience of God he is inevitably ‘firming it up’ in a way that isn’t true to the reality that is ‘only just there’, ‘slips out of reach’, ‘eludes definition’. ⁴⁴ The edifice of faith is like an upturned pyramid: the whole thing rests precariously on its point – perhaps one might say its ‘vanishing point’. ⁴⁵ It might confirm the poignant account of one who has moved from the deepest possible immersion in the Church to leaving organized religion behind, Richard Holloway, in his autobiography Leaving Alexandria, when he confesses:

I am left in the ruined house listening for the whisper … I am tugged still by the possibility of the transcendent. But only whispers and tugs; nothing louder or more violent. Religion’s insecurity makes it shout not whisper, strike with the fist in the face, not tug gently with the fingers on the sleeve. Yet, beneath the shouting and the striking, the whisper can sometimes be heard. And from a great way off the tiny figure of Jesus can be seen on the seashore, kindling a fire. ⁴⁶

After a long personal pilgrimage and much detailed historical study, Karen Armstrong arrives at a similar destination, but, like T. S. Eliot, concludes that it is a way of arriving at the place from where we set out, as if seeing it for the first time. ‘During the early modern period,’ she argues, ‘Western people fell in love with an ideal of absolute certainty that, it seems, may be unattainable,’ such that ‘the quest for truth has become antagonistic and competitive’. ⁴⁷ By contrast, today ‘it is perhaps time to return to a theology that asserts less and is more open to silence and unknowing … We may find that for a while we have to go into what the mystics called the dark night of the soul or the cloud of unknowing.’ ⁴⁸ And if this theology of ‘perhaps’ demands some kind of authenticating ‘event’, this might lie only in religious experience – not ‘fervid emotional piety’ but ‘the normal workings of our mind and … how frequently these propel us quite naturally into transcendence’; a kind of ‘ecstasy’ that can often be intimated, for example by listening to music.

Caputo’s approach to theology seeks to describe a quality of living, a quality attributed to religious faith and therefore identified as God. There is no alternative route to pinpointing God as someone or something: God is not an Object to be argued over, to be somehow appropriated and ‘believed in’; there is only the experience of a certain texture of living. Caputo’s work offers a resource to help the churches take far more seriously the responsibility of providing genuine hospitality to those embarked on the quest for a faith to live by, in a ‘no strings attached’ way. These laboratories for growing faith cultures will need to enable engagement with the span of the Christian symbolic resource, in silence and sacrament, language and laughter, prayer and partnership, discipleship and dialogue. This will not be a process in which, somewhere down the line, however distant, there lurks the finishing tape: the stage at which ‘commitment’ has been reached and is measured by the propriety of practical orthodoxy, by ticks in boxes and signatures on the dotted line. Respecting the integrity of persons means that those who seek a faith to live by will come in their own good time, if at all, to the glad hope that inclines its face towards the final mystery, as a flower bends towards the sun.