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

by John D. Caputo

The name of God is the name of a deed, of what is to be done, something that may or may not be done, something that demands to be done with or without God, something that may be done under other names, something structurally to-come where what happens rests upon our response and may end up being a disaster.

Khora is nothing human but neither is it a monster, and this because “she” does not belong to the order of presence, but serves only as a nickname for the spacing of différance, the play of traces within which anything—void or plenum, fear or hope, good or evil, ground or abyss, monster or angel—is inscribed.

Khora is not a monster, not a thing at all, good or bad, but the spacing of peut-être, the slash between maybe/maybe not, the distance between these binaries, which means these binaries are provisional inscriptions, contingent unities of meaning, constitutable and substitutable in différance.28

I have in mind the unconventional idea that God, like Zarathustra's great star, is not really and truly God without us, that the insistence of God requires our existence and so depends on us.

The divine life is incarnated in us, and God's weakness requires that we do all the heavy lifting. God insists, while we exist. I treat the name of God as the name of an inexistence, an insistence, a call that is visited upon us and demands our response, so that God and the divine omnipotence are more radically emptied into the world. “God, perhaps” means that the name of God is the name of the chance of the event, one of the names, one of the events, which are innumerable and impossible.

God does not exist; God is a spirit that calls, a spirit that can happen anywhere and haunts everything, insistently.

Far from being a full-scale retreat into the safety of agnosticism, “God, perhaps” names a new theology with the courage of an eerie non-conviction, that calls for a new species of theologians, for venturers upon the turbulent seas of a perilous “perhaps,” equipped only with the thinnest of protection, like a sheep amid wolves, theologians of risk, whose subject matter is the irreducible danger of life. This is all contracted in the small word “perhaps,” which inspires fear even among sovereigns, for fear that the being of God lies in may-being.29

When I speak of the “insistence of God” I mean that God does not exist or subsist but that God insists, while it is the world that exists. God's insistence requires God's inexistence. The world's existence requires God's insistence.

If I say that God's essence lies in God's insistence, I mean that while metaphysics turns on the distinction between essence and existence, what I am calling here a “poetics” of the “perhaps” turns on the distinction between insistence and existence.

God is an insistent claim or provocation, while the business of existence is up to us—existence here meaning response or responding, assuming responsibility to convert what is being called for in the name of God into a deed.

So where metaphysics theorizes the distinction between of essence and existence, a poetics describes the “chiasm,” the “intertwining,” of...

In a chiasm, each depends upon the other, neither one without the other. God needs us to be God, ...

A theology of the event is not supposed to end up in pantheism or reinventing “panentheism,” which is a fetching idea and close to my heart, but in the end a bit too far-fetched, still more metaphysics.

A theology of the event is instead a poetics, a post- or quasi-phenomenological undertaking trying to avoid the traps and trappings of metaphysics. A poetics that takes up the name of God is a theopoetics.

Non-metaphysical theopoetics in the nameof god...

On the whole it is better just to say that God insists and to leave the existing to us, where the question of “existing” is a matter of human responsibility.

The insistence of God refers to the insistence with which God calls upon us, while prayer means calling upon a God who calls. The insistence of God means that the being (l'être) of God is may-being (peut-être), the “maybe” or “perhaps” of an ambiguous promise/threat, which may be leading us into grace or into the worst evil, and prayer means we are trying to hang on.

when I use the word “prayer,” this has nothing to do with the pieties of religion.

I am thinking of expressions like “being left without a prayer,” meaning we have no chance, the odds are long, the chance is slim, the situation is dangerous and impossible. I am thinking of “hanging on by a prayer,” of someone reduced to pleading, praying, which i...

Praying in a precarious situation is all a basic matter of phenomenology and etymology and it does not necessarily have anything to do with theology. The theologians arrive at a scene that has already been constituted in human experience.

Prayer is being human.

My interest in theology stems from an interest in something much older than theology, older than the hoariest theologian, something that can do with or without theology, and would be at best the business of a new species of theologians. I would understand it if, at this point, the orthodox theologians feel rejected, if they get up and leave, before my lecture has even started, rejecting out of hand the very idea that this is theology at all. I share their suspicion. Indeed, such a suspicion of what I am doing is the condition under which I do it, under which I conduct what I am calling a “radical” theology. I would publish this book under protest if the orthodox theologians did not protest it. If this “theology” were not suspect, if it did not threaten a walkout by the pious, I would not be associated with it. What I call theology is possible only under the condition that it might not—perhaps—be theology, that it might be impossible for it to be theology, that it might be impossible, plain and simple.

So I can only pray for the patience of the orthodox. But they are right, and I readily admit it, the Bible would never have broken all the records for book sales if Exodus 3:14 read, “I am, perhaps, who I am, but then again I might not be. It might turn out that, after all, I am not who I say I am, or that I am not who you think I am.”

The impossible just might be possible, perhaps. Is that not our constant prayer? Is that not why we pray? Is there any other reason to pray? Is that not God, perhaps? Is that not the sort of thing that is always going on with “God,” in one way or the other, what is happening in the name (of) “God,” what is always being insisted upon in and by this name? That is my question, my thesis, my hypothesis, my presupposition, my concern, my faith, my wager, my prayer.

Think of this book as a prayer, a prayer to be faithful to God, perhaps, where “perhaps” is the element of prayer.

For it is always necessary to say “perhaps” when it comes to God, to let a certain cloud of unknowing and uncertainty settle over sacred names, like grace and prayer, theology and God, over all the divine names, omninames too powerful and intimidating to be trusted by doves and sheep.

Hence, in this essay, “perhaps” will serve as a dim but guiding light, a slightly anarchic quasi-principle, a principle without principle, whose flickering lead we are asked to follow with fear and trembling.

my faith is placed in what is going on in the name (of) “God” and of “theology,” which is the insistence of the event, or the chance of the event, and the corresponding faith that God can happen anywhere. My faith is deeper than faith in God and cannot be contracted to faith in God.

What corresponds to insistence is a deep and structural faith; what corresponds to existence is a belief that some being is or is not there.

My faith is faith in faith itself—it's faith all the way down, and there is no bottom—which is what is involved in having faith in the event. Insistence is a pure trembling, a specter, almost nothing, like a spirit. There's no one out there, no hyper-entity, to ensure it will all turn out well in the end. According to my hermeneutic principle—which is never to avoid the difficulty in life34—the event that is going on in theology only emerges once we set loose this dangerous and problematic “perhaps,” which sets loose the trouble w...

In what follows I will present my case for a theology of “perhaps” in three steps. I would call these steps my three pillars except that that is too strong and erect, too edifying and foundational a thing to say in deconstruction. So as opposed to proposing three pillars of a strong theology I will speak instead of the three pills of a poetics of “perhaps,” three pills that theology has to swallow in order to get over its fear of this small word “perhaps.”

The first step, the one I have already begun, is the elaboration of what I am calling the “insistence of God.” That involves delineating the strange grammatology or poetics of the “perhaps.”

I single out the structure of “insistence,” which I have begun to identify as the “chiasm,” not a double bind but a double binding or mutual intertwining, of God to us and of us to God, each in need of the other, each praying like mad, prayer being the precarious way God's insistence finds its way into existence—

In the second step the accent shifts from the insistence of God to the insistence of the discourse called for by the insistence of God.

I formulate an idea of a “radical theology” as a “theopoetics,” that rethinks the logos in theo-logy as a poetics.

I agree that this will upset the digestion of orthodox theopoetics, who ever since The City of God have enjoyed a steady red-meat diet of logic and onto-theo-logic, which is chided by Derrida as “carno-phallo-onto-theo-logo-centrism.”

I will come out of the closet as a kind of Hegelian whose theopoetics is opposed to the Kantians (my “two types”). This no doubt will come as a surprise to my readers who, ever since Radical Hermeneutics, are used to hearing me hold forth that the radical element in hermeneutics lies in getting rid of the closet Hegelianism of Gadamer and Ricoeur. I still believe that, but I have since been born again about Hegel, given a new grace, having chanced upon a way to think of myself as a Hegelian.

I serve up a heretical version even of Hegel, claiming we truly bring the Spirit down to earth only when the Spirit alights on the plane of the “perhaps.” There can be no “events” in Hegel himself, not finally, not in any really robust sense, because Hegel's Geist supplies an underlying “logic” that undergirds or oversees and hence in some way or another “foresees” what is coming.

Hegel's God on earth is still too powerful and “providential” a divine force for my new species of theologians and for my weak and spectral “perhaps.”

In the final part, I criticize my theopoetics as having been thus far too humanistic and anthropocentric and so I turn to the cosmic dimensions of my “perhaps.” I return to the figure of Eckhart's “Martha,” whom I treat as the mother of a new religious realism and materialism, and I accuse myself of having been in the first two parts of this book, perhaps, too much on the side of Mary and her “beautiful soul.”

Caputo self-deconstructs within the same book!

A cosmopoetics takes root in a contemporary cosmology and it requires us to start by rethinking the distinction between the human and the inhuman, which is, perhaps, not as rigorous as we think

This cosmopoetics helps us answer a contemporary movement, led by Quentin Meillassoux, who argues that Kant effectively undid the real Copernican Revolution and replaced it with a phony one in order to leave the door wide open to “fideism,” to the “theological turn” and the “return of religion.”

inspired by Martha's realism and materialism, and by a certain heretical Hegelianism, I propose that if we stay with the difficulty of being-nothing all the way down there may be (cosmic) grace on the other end

the concluding proposal of my theopoetics of “perhaps,” a cosmo-theopoetic realism and materialism that turns on what I call the “nihilism of grace,” in which I locate another albeit unnerving sense of “resurrection,” as “more life,” not “eternal life.”

Nihilism is very close to the pure gift, and so, while any form of nihilism sounds like terrible trouble, my wager is that being-nothing will turn out to mean being-for-nothing, life “without why” (more Meister Eckhart), which I propose constitutes the grace of the world

In the end, I ask, what is it that calls in the sounding of our “perhaps”? Is it the insistence of God, of life, of the world? Perhaps what is coming is “perhaps” itself. Perhaps, all that will remain of “religion” and “God” will be left clinging to the grace of “perhaps”

Perhaps.

My criterion of truth is how well we have learned to deal with the fear of one small word, “perhaps.”

I measure theology by the extent to which it avoids the pitfalls of a too-comforting piety—of pious prayers and pious theology portrayed on gilded postcards. I avoid piety like sin itself.

the measure of religion for me is that it be without religion.

I bear witness to my love of theology by searching for a theology to come, with or without theology, with or without God, or religion, all along praying like mad, with or without a book of prayers, praying for courage in the face of one small word, “perhaps.”

The American Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Doctrine issued a statement in 2011 that academic theologians can be a “curse and an affliction upon the church.”4 That I take to be high praise, excellent evidence that the theologians in question are on the job and doing something right.

The research and relentless interrogation of scripture, doctrine, and tradition undertaken by such theologians expose the contingency and historical constitution of beliefs and practices that the hierarchy wants the faithful to consider eternal and handed down by God.