The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion)

by John D. Caputo

I argued some time ago that what does the work of “ethics” in a theology of the event is a “poetics of obligation,” which gives up looking for deep metaphysical foundations of obligation and learns to appreciate the groundlessness of what is happening in obligation.5 Here I am arguing that theology undergoes a parallel transmutation, learning to serve as a poetics of the event insisting in the name (of) “God,” to appreciate what it insists in the name of God so as to bring it to words in an alternate genre or discursive form—without heading for the hills of apophatic silence and without straying on to the bombastic battlefields of theism and atheism.