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

The Divine ‘Perhaps’

I first read this book when it was published in 2015. It was important to me then because it formulated a stance on theology - what Caputo calls theopoetics - which I had been struggling with for some years. Inspired by his earlier works on the weakness of God, I had sought a way to understand theology as literature, and literature as what theology was trying to emulate as an ideal.

Upon re-reading the Folly of God, I find that in some ways I have left the book behind. Caputo has penetrated my thinking so thoroughly that it seems he is reminding me of the obvious. This is a reflection of his simple, direct, and witty style. On the other hand, there is much in this short book that I had missed completely or simply forgotten about. The density of Caputo’s ideas is often masked by the clarity of his prose. I now find many of these hiding in plain sight.

I suppose that many who enter into Caputo’s oeuvre may have a similar experience. He is easy to understand but not so easy to comprehend. I doubt anyone is adequately prepared to ‘get’ him completely until he or she has been prepared by his work itself. This is not so much a matter of logic as it is experience in thinking through the import of what he has to say. In other words, Caputo’s real effect is to change one’s values, that is, what one takes notice of in the world.

This ‘transvaluation’ can be an emotional as well as an intellectual trauma. I’ve noticed my own response to be a sort of PTSD which takes time to settle down. This was especially acute while I was still in an academic environment in which more ‘traditional’ theological concepts reigned. Since my retirement, the tensions I felt in being unable to discuss Caputo’s concept of divine weakness and its implications have miraculously dissipated, proving if nothing else that sometimes it’s advantageous not to have anyone to talk to.

Central to Caputo’s theology is the idea of the ‘unconditional.’ This is not an idea that is meant to triumph over other ideas, or to solve problems in existing theological narratives. As Caputo says, “The unconditional is not a winning strategy and theology is not about winning.” In a sense, therefore, Caputo is delightfully anti-evangelical, not out to convert or to convince, or to score doctrinal points but to help people like me figure out the meaning of the unconditional in our own circumstances.

Caputo makes a claim which has historical connotations: “... the best interests of theology are to be found deep down in the depths of our experience.” This claim can easily be mistaken for a call to return to a Romanticism of the early 19th century, to a God of emotion, feeling and subjectivity. It is however a simple reversal of a metaphor - God is not to be found in the heights but in the depths. And the experience he’s talking about is not individual but collective. The more of us whose experience is recognised, the deeper we go.

Evangelicals, indeed most believers, attempt to make God into an object and then to argue the existence of that object. This is patent blasphemy, an attempt to control the meaning of God for the purpose of exercising power over others. “A Supreme Being causes supreme problems” is how Caputo summarises theology of the Heights.

Not the least of these problems is political, namely that we are lead to believe that power has a source outside of humanity and that this power is distributed in a sort of cascade down through governments, and organisations, and families (historically mostly male) to the lowliest of the low. Indeed, this has been the standard line throughout the history of political theology, long before the politics of theology was seen for what it was - a method of justifying the powers that be.

Echoing the German-American theologian Paul Tillich, Caputo points out that atheism is “the best religious and theological response to such an idea of God.” Tillich, in turn, had been brought up in the Lutheran tradition of the so-called ‘theology of the cross,’ a tradition that emphasizes the self-debasement of God, not in order to conquer but to submit to the needs of others. Caputo, therefore, although radical, is radically Christian in his respect for atheism. I imagine that he accepted everything Christopher Hitchens ever said about the absurdity of most religious claims.

“Theology begins with atheism,” but it doesn’t end there for Caputo. The point is that it is a waste of time arguing for or against anything called a Supreme Being. He quotes a great European mystic, Meister Eckhart, to demonstrate the significance of a theologically sensitive atheism. Eckhart claims in his memoirs that he “prays to God to rid him of God, to make him free of God.” This is precisely the point of what is called ‘negative theology’, the elimination of constructions, almost always self-serving, of what we want God to be. The atheistic presumption is a quick intellectual root to the same starting point.

For Caputo, as for Tillich, God is the Unconditional. That is, God is not an identifiable entity; God is no-thing. God is not great. God is not a cause, much less the First Cause. God is, however, that which allows us to say ‘there is a God,’ whether such a statement is true or not, or has meaning or not:

“God is not a highest being but the very being of beings, or the ground of beings, the light of beings, the deep, boundless, ceaseless, illimitable, unrestricted resource of anything and everything, of every word or distinction between words that we utter. That means that everything we say about God is ‘symbolic.’”

At this point, I think that I go further than Caputo and Tillich are willing to go. I see no difference between the citation above and a statement that God is language itself, or perhaps more precisely that God is all of the potential literature which can be produced through language. Language, in other words, is the Unconditional, that which is without limits.

Not that there is any lack of things which are temporarily beyond (or below) our ability to express in language at any moment. We have no language, for example, with which to express coherently the instantaneous action at an infinite distance of quantum mechanics; or the phenomena of black holes. But we shall. At which point other ‘beyonds’ will have surfaced (probably by penetrating more deeply into the physics of what is near at hand).

So language itself has no limits. We couldn’t even express the Unconditional without it. Language, of course, doesn’t exist as a perfect Platonic entity in some metaphysical heaven. It is always ‘embodied’, primarily in that cultural artifact called literature. But the existence of that literature as an artifact, does not mean it is controllable or can be conditioned by the artificers.

Literature has its own life which is affected by us and which affects us. It surrounds us. It puts itself at our abuse as well as use. We seek its wisdom, counsel, and assistance. Some of us devote our lives to its proliferation. All of us carry parts of it deep within us which inspire and constrain what we do and what we want. It does this meekly and without any overt or directed intention of its own. In short, it serves, as a gift of grace.

And yet existing literature, God with us as it were, is not the entirety of the Unconditional. There is a deus absconditus, a hidden God, who waits and calls from an unknown we call the future. That literature of the future has no form whatsoever, even abstractly. It, unlike quantum mechanics and black holes, is permanently beyond our comprehension or ability to describe. We might be able to anticipate technological developments but we are blind to the directions language and its literature will take.

This, for me, is theopoetics. I don’t want to claim that theopoetics is God, that would be obviously self-contradictory. But I do want to suggest that theopoetics is what has traditionally been called the Word of God, God revealing himself to human beings. The distinctive feature of that Word is its authentic inclusivity. In fact inclusivity is the definition of authenticity, not some claim to antiquity or revelatory authority. This is a Word that is always tentative, always changing, but always pointing to the ‘divine perhaps.’

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