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On The Weakness of God: a theology of the event. by John Caputo.
It is hardly possible to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a book called The
Weakness of God. The vocabulary for such an assessment has been cleverly, indeed
anarchically, forestalled. I would not be able, as a Christian theologian, to resist the
disarming call of such a text, to refuse its offer of basileic space and forgiven time, its
invitation to harbor. Not safe, not permanent, but nonetheless hospitable harbor. I can
only then listen with this text for its own call, for the resonances and dissonances of a
call and a promise that comprises its “hermeneutical pre-understanding,” its
hermeneutical situation and key to the kingdom. Whether the key opens the kingdom for
me or for many is more or less by definition an open question. I will therefore try to
articulate that question, which is not surprisingly a threefold question, as a question about
biblical theology.
Biblical theology might be a drearily modern Christian compound, where protestant
Biblicism tries to curb the philosophical imagination to which theology is from its pagan
origins tempted; and where in revenge doctrinal theology subjects biblical interpretation
to the alien disciplines of a propositional orthodoxy. I think a new family of biblical
theologies in a postmodern register is emerging, with varying branches, of which Peter
Ochs’ postliberal school of scriptural reasoning is a major one. I wonder if Jack Caputo’s
radical hermeneutics has not already in this new book generated another branch of
postmodern, indeed avowedly, postsecular biblical theology. I’m not sure this would be
an honor or an insult. But such biblical theology would only be the deceptively familiar
harbor of a hermeneutical event, where something else is stirring. It is something new in
theology, and by that same token something new in his own hermeneutics. Yet I do not
want to claim that Caputo is doing something altogether new in relation to his own
voluminous work on radical and more radical hermeneutics. His work has never not
been theological in its questions and its companions, its Kierkegaard and its Eckhart;
Heidegger, Husserl and then with singular messianicity Derrida , have let him kibbutz
with theologians, and as ever, with Elohim, Paul and Jesus. Nonetheless there is a leap
into the utterly other. I had read him before as an intimately and subversively theological
philosopher; now, as an intimately and subversively philosophical theologian.
Is this the leap into the most radical hermeneutics? Might seem to be the opposite, a nice
Christian return to God, albeit a weak one, as the devilish hermeneutics gives way to a
full scale scriptural hermeneutics. But the devilish hermeneutics had already inscribed
itself “on the road to emmaus,” and the scriptural hermeneutics, which is the “poetics of
the impossible,” is no angel—but for a fleeting reference to Serres’ angelology and
Gabriel’s angelic courtesy with Mary, in one scenario of the impossible. It reminds us
that the name God may be the incognito of the event, as surely as the event may be the
incognity of God. For while he has long deconstructed the high modernisms of the death
of God, refuting Taylor’s claim that deconstruction is the hermeneutics of the death of
God, there is no weakening of the radicality of deconstruction and its deconstruction of
authority and its authors: “the death of the author the death of God, is the narrow gate
through which we reach the kingdom of God. God is not the authority who enforces the
kingdom of God.”[116] But this is the very stuff of radical theology, theology that in its
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refusal of the worship of power goes to the root of its own imaginary: “The name of God
is possessed, not of ontological foundations, institutional support, a large bank account,
wiss guards, a television network or ecclesiastical authority, but only of phenoenoogical
appeal or solicitation.” That soliciation, that call, akin to the lure or divine eros of
process theology, becomes audible only when the din of diverse theological
dominologies with their church and state bully pulpits, dies down: in a certain vibrant
apophasis: “the silent promptings of God’s divinely subversive call.”299
So the first question of the threefold is whether it is the prominence of scriptural
interpretation in Weakness that pushes it over the line into theology? This is a trick
question. For in fact the book performs massively more scriptural hermeneutics than most
theology properly so called—so how would the preponderance of biblical interpretation
make it theology? This biblical density is apparent not just in terms of the iterations and
cadences of biblical metaphor characteristic of more biblical theology, but in the writer’s
willingness to dwell in specific biblical stories, to hang out in scriptural narratives for
whole chapters, engaging, interrogating, explicating, implicating himself in and between
the lines of scripture. As in the iconoclastic readings of poststructuralist biblical scholars
like Moore or Yvonne Sherwood, a jaunty irreverence engages us more surely in the
deadeningly familiar texts than an authoritative solemnity. But there is a radical
reverence at play in this reading, which renders it theology and not just deconstructive
hermeneutics. For the call is no joke: “for these texts are solicitations that call for a
response, appeals coming from I now not where about a way to be, a style of existence,
about a poetic possibility that we are invited to transform into existential actuality.”[117]
I think that I only remain open to the Caputan appeal to a poetics of the impossible,
because it modulates regularly and rhythmically into the poetic possibility—else it would
remain a flippant utopia of the text. That call for a response, from within a context—the
church is just one name for it—that is itself constituted by the call, may define the
difference between theology and philosophy, or indeed religious studies. We understand
the word of God to be in some sense alive and calling, and theology therefore to be a
contextually responsible discourse, responding to that call. For Caputo “scriptural
heremeneutic” is “where the Word of God, the Scriptures, undergo what we might entitle
a methodological transformation into an event. “ This definition quite precisely
disempowers the strong scriptural theology of a scientia divina that deploys a divine
revelation with a uniquely authorized provenance and on the opposite front the reading
of scripture as a mere document to be studied historically or comparatively without
“engaging my existence or passion.” This is Caputo’s consistent dance: to sidestep both
the authoritarian traditions and the modernisms that remain content to relativize. In his
avowal of the appeal to responsive actualization, I hear the claim of a more radical
relationality, that may elude and forgive both the absolute and the dissolute. The
transformation of scripture itself into an event is the most radical hermeneutics.[[ Of
course I am still begging the question, praying and begging, what is the event. [and how
would it be relational] In the meantime, let me reframe the initial question: if it is
scriptural hermeneutics that renders this philosophy not just theological but theology—is
this precisely because scripturual discourse itself takes the form and the content not of a
theology but a theopoetics? And the logos of John that warrants theology as such is a
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high point of scriptural poetry, rather low on logic.. If theology however remains
enmeshed in the logics of ontotheology, Its redemption may lie precisely in “taking the
scriptures as the site of an event”, liberating the word of God to its breathing, its ruach
and its poetic creativity. But not to literary dissolution: for “a poetics makes a truthclaim: “a poetics does not record the strong force of hard facts; it describes the weak
force of a call for the kingdom, or for justice, which is true even if the real world is truly
unjust.”[118]
Two sentences of Caputo’s early in the Lazarus chapter can be applied to any biblical
narrative: they put his hermeneutics in a nutshell: “What event stirs within this story?
What event is harbored there and kept safe, sheltered but also concealed?”237] [The
same syntax extends to any doctrine: what event stirs within, is harbored within, this
dogma, this symbol, this name? Of course in the infinite regress of interpretation the
doctrines are themselves already harbors of harbors, shelters of shelters, tempted to close
the harbor and build themselves into fortresses or cathedrals by the sea.
Try as I might, I cannot find fresher or more precise language for liberating theology
from its literalisms or its univocalisms, without losing its truth-traction. We have in the
harbor of the event a metaphor of metaphor; and a gift for a tehomic theology, or any
meditation upon the shining face of the dark depths. For the oceanic chaos of creation—
at least the biblical creation narratives—will wash out meaning, drown us in its
postmodern indeterminacy and undecidability, flood out our constructions and our
communities in the interest of an infinite multiplicity. The tehom requires precisely the
harbors of meaning. As a theology of the event, the weakness of God is a prolonged
meditation on the event harbored in the name of “God.” For some of us this weakening
of the name of God will seem a reduction of a strong reality; for others it makes theology
possible. I am grateful for the harbor given theology by the very metaphor of the harbor.
Sheltered for the moment from the navies of orthodox ex-nihilism and the storms of
modern nihilism, I can pose the rest of the question, which is multiple.
While I find myself happily berthing in the metaphor of event harbors, that of
weakness—the weakness of God, of theology, of hermeneutics—leaves me at sea. I
understand the meaning that the weakness-metaphor harbors for Caputo, and share I think
a participation in that event: of the deconstructing of the divine omnipotence in favor not
of a no god, a dead god, but of a possibly better one—a more believable, more worthy,
indeed more biblically and existentially resonant divinity. Yet I find I must ask various
cumbersome questions—“weak” by what measure? According to the measure of strength
understood as dominance, as the power to subjugate, to subject, even to produce ex nihilo
the subjects of one’s kingdom? Calvin seems to offer the most consistent version of a
strong God, blowing out of the water all the compromises of medieval split level
causality, of divine permission, and early modern deism: God as the foreordaining
omnipotence without whose express will no raindrop falls; and who therefore has
absurdly but consistently double predestined us already to choose God or sin. This hearty
omnipotence exercises an all controlling, preemptive providence, a divine superpower
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,which by various improvident mechanisms I have been belaboring in the face of the sole
global superpower, energizes Christians to emulate. Certainly by the standard of
dominance any God who is either imaginable or morally worth imagining, will be weak.
Caputo’s Pauline tour de force, his divine strength made perfect in weakness, offers
passionate witness to the lie—yes, really, untruth—of omnipotence. Yet still I need the
proviso—that God names an event that is weak by the word’s and the world’s common
usage.- If power means power-over, then God is either weak or nonexistent by the
standards of dominance. But do we not seek to exercise in our own thinking, teaching,
activism—power, rather than weakness, and as much of it as possible? And yet power
differently measured, alternatively defined? Power as the influence—the in-fluency of the
tehom itself, as we actualize it in our decisions? Perhaps my reticence is the dual effect
of two decades long theological movements, equally committed to the dismantling of the
theopolitics of domination. Feminist theology has no interest in pursuing a weak
theology but in outgrowing the structures and strictures that keep our voices weak; and to
grow our own strength we have heeded the call of an alternative power, a power that does
not lord it over, a power of empowerment, akin to a radical or social democracy—s’il y
en a. And my patrilineage of Whiteheadian thought, with the God who is the poet of the
universe; or the fellow sufferer who understands—does not intend to lessen God’s power
but more radically to convert it: God’s will is translated into the divine eros of the
universe, with a lure for each event of becoming. This god is neither omnipotent nor
impotent but attractive. Of course it goes over the edge into a confidently kataphatic theologic that I can only translate into an apophatically tinged theopoetics. Nonetheless
process theology lets me teach seminarians: who would not be able to worship, let alone
preach, the weakness of God. For of course it is this weakening of God of which various
theological authorities already accuse both feminism and process theology. But more
than strategy is at stake: don’t we want to empower resistance to the delusional and
destructive dominance? Don’t we hope, weep and pray not for weakness but for
alternative power, for an energy of shared actualization—not a God who will do our
work for us but one who inspires nonviolent but nonpassive, indeed transformative
works? This divinity and its creaturely actualiations would exemplify not a nonpower
but the power of love. But between divine weakness and the divine lure, I recognize a
certain “holy undecidability,” leaving our divergent rhetorical contexts to provoke
decision.
And finally. “The event.” The name of God is the name of an event, of an event that
comes calling at our door which can and must be translated into the event of
hospitality.”269 This event is far from a merely dark horizon of the unpredictable; it
radiates a certain satyagraya, a truthforce that is inviting in its calling, but that inverts, to
appear as the one who calls and asks for hospitality. Does the theology of the event
adequately thematize this dimension of reciprocity? Is it too anxious that to acknowledge
this assymmetrical mutuality would be to cash in the gift for a mere exchange? Does the
event that is harbored itself give harbor to the myriad and motley relations that make up
its basileia? In other words, in this event- hermeneutic (I am refraining because I want to
be a good guest from saying event-metaphysic) how is the relationality that comprises
our existence, our selves, our bodies, our planet find its needed conceptual welcome?
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For I understand the event to be Caputo’s best present translation of the ousia of
substance metaphysics. He recognizes its affinity to a Whitehead read through Deleuze,
who is reading Leibniz by way of a Joycian chaosmic reading of Whitehead. All are here
working to replace ousia with event. But then for Whitehead and Deleuze the event is
not a locution for God but for what becomes—indeed, for therefore what comes to be,
what is not a self-contained or self-identical entity but nonetheless our best concept of
what actually exists. For Whitehead, the event is an event of constitutive interrelation, in
which any creature—I at this moment, here—emerge causa sui from the ocean of
influences that power or overpower my present possibility. Event for Caputo is not an
ontological or cosmological category; he is not describing spacetime, as Whitehead might
be, as a pointillistic or electronic field of events. Caputo is thinking of special
happenings, with a high if not moralistic normative charge—the stuff not of actual
entities but that dreams are made of. Our best stuff, minus all stuffiness. And somehow
always not yet, always yet to come, the messianic without the sword-tongued messiah,
the eschatological without being teleological. He is reading Deleuze on the Alice and
Wonderland of the “very specialthings: evetns, pureevents”, transcribes it as the basileia:
“the coming of the kingdom is an outcoing, from evenire (Lat), the coming-out, the
evenement of bursting out of something we did not see coming..” Ah but there comes the
asymptote, close but not closing in on a cosmological event: for if the event is not as
Moltmann and perhaps Levinas seem to insist a coming that repudiates becoming, that
comes from an exterior—of alterity or advent—and precisely does not emerge, does not
come out from is already happening, then after all it may have cosmological meaning. Or
chaosmological.
Why does this matter—aside from my perverse desire to spread a certain Whiteheadian
contamination in this hospitable but continental harbor? It matters because of the bodies
that Caputo cares about radically,most radically. Among whom the basileia must be
starting already, whenever, wherever, or it is nothing but—history. For if we cannot find
a way to describe the existence, the becoming, of these very bodies as events, I fear they
will be abandoned to the same old sameness of ousiology and its exousias, its authorities.
In other words if we cannot describe our bodily lives as events, or perhaps more precisely
as series of collective, interrelated events, chains or braids of repetitions, iterations that
provide the rhythmic alternative to the delusional stability of substances….. then won’t
“the event” occupy a rather too familiar place of transcendence, merely beyond, over and
against, always impossible, the bad impossible of a bad infinite? I would think the
nonsubstantial but material and spiritual processes of our interdendent creaturely
becoming—tohuvabohu—need precisely an event-cosmology to harbor them. Even if
the Weakness of God doesn’t need to accomplish this, the theology of the event might. I
find the truth of this event, and the event of this truth, too, well, powerful, to abandon to
its cosmological evasion. precisely in its willingness to take the risk of theology and thus
the risk of the 800 lb gorilla: the risk of a truthtradition that threatens to come in and
kibosh the very event—quote 299?--that is delicately emerging here. “god’s divinely
subversive call” –whatever event God names—lures us together to this risk even as it
offers us this fresh theological harbor…..
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