The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event by John D. Caputo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Helping God Escape

Our largely secularised world prides itself on its freedom from the deadly virus of religious dogmatism. This condition, one might believe, frees us also from the need to know anything about theology.

But it is the remnants of religious doctrine which lurk in our presumptions about what constitutes reality that are often more potently destructive than any explicit dogma. These remnants are largely unconscious, undiscussed and impenetrable except in a theological genre.

I believe that 'power' is one of the most important of these theological remnants. And John Caputo is arguably the world's leading thinker about how we might make them explicit, and thereby a matter of some debate, and perhaps even choice. Caputo puts the matter bluntly: "One of the most fundamental fantasies of religion is the fantasy of power." Among other things it is this fantasy that religion perennially tries to sell to those in power, for its own advantage, that destroys religion from within. And it is this fantasy which The Weakness of God seeks to reveal as such.

Power is an inevitably theological problem in that no matter where or how it is exercised - politically, militarily, socially, within the family, the firm, or the charitable organisation - it provokes the question of its legitimacy and its ultimate source. The assertion that the legitimate font of power is the monarch, or the law, or the president, or even The People, begs the question 'Why?'. Historically therefore, one way or another, Ultimate Power, God in some guise, is invoked as its justification.

Caputo's idea is to stop thinking about God as a massive source of ontological or dynamic power that connects via spiritual high tension lines to governments, ruling hierarchies, and individuals. He invokes instead the (rather undogmatic) Judaeo-Christian idea of the "power of powerlessness", a weak force (for lack of a better vocabulary) which is exerted by the "unconditional claim" that we have on each other as human beings.

God, for Caputo, is neither a set of doctrinal propositions nor a fixed point of belief, nor a sovereign power or authority. God is a "call, a promise, and a hope". In traditional theology God is termed 'not a thing'. Caputo conceives of God in a similar way, as an 'event'. "The name of God is powerful because it is the name of our hope in the contract Elohim makes with things when he calls them 'good', when he calls them to the good...The name of God is the name of an unconditional promise not of unlimited power".

Caputo is not a closet atheist or anti-traditionalist. Neither is he a biblical literalist. But he is keenly sensitive to questionable interpretations. For example, a rather persistent doctrine of creation ex nihilo, from nothing, doesn't stand the test of comparison with biblical testimony. In Genesis the movement is not from non-being to being at all; it is from being to the good. Thus this presumed fundamental power of God can be seen as a philosophical rationalisation - of someone's existing power to be sure.

Caputo spends a great deal of thought on the biblical Kingdom of God. "The Kingdom of God is the event called by the name of God,... [it is] the contradiction of the 'world' (cosmos) which is the order of power and privilege and self interest, of the business as usual of those who would prevent the event."

Caputo's message, despite the apparently archaic but precisely apt terms in which it is expressed, is for 'prophecy'. "A prophet belongs not to the order of being...but to the order of the event, of the call, ... a troublemaker who speaks for justice now." The task of the prophet is to release what is happening within the name of God in the world.

So, if you're thinking that, I don't know, maybe the Democratic Party in the USA, or the Labour Party in Britain, or the Social Democrats in Europe, could use a new foundation for their political life, perhaps there is something in Caputo that touches a nerve. Is there even a possibility for a political party of weakness ro exist?

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