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

by John D. Caputo

I am more interested in Yeshua than in Christianity.

Prayer emerges from the distance between insistence and existence. Prayer is the precarious way God's insistence seeks existence. The “insistence of God” refers to the insistent way that God calls upon us, while “prayer” refers to the act of calling upon and responding to God's call, remembering always that the name of God is the name of trouble.

I do not merely refer to how much double-dealing and self-deception prayer involves, how much prayer is a power play, how much the will of God is a cover for willful men, for power and domination, plain and simple.

I am interested in still more: how much God's own “being” is rocked by trouble, how deeply troubled is God's own tumultuous makeup, how precarious is God, the name of God, the event that insists in the name of God. So the precariousness falls on both sides—God and us.

Theology has usually preferred to think that God oversees the churning seas or commands them or walks on them, whereas I see the both of us together, praying and weeping together in the same sea-tossed ship.

more deeply considered, the name of God arises not from a projection but from a projectile coming right at us, a problema in the original Greek sense, which literally means something thrown up in our way, a hurdle to be scaled, a barrier to cross, a rock aimed right at our heads.

God is the problem, not the solution!?

God is a problema, a provocation, an insistent disturbance, a solicitation, a visitation by a stranger, like a call calling I know not what, or an insistent knock on our door in the middle of the night. That makes prayer an exposure to a projectile, a willingness to stand out in the open in the middle of a storm, where there are projectiles everywhere carried by the wind, hence the extreme opposite of a projection. Levinas calls it a trauma, by which he means not a psychopathic trauma that results in narcissism but an ethical trauma to our narcissism, and that is well said.

If the name of God is not causing us a great deal of difficulty, it is not God we are talking about.

Exod 3:14; Job 1:20; Cf. Mark 15:34.

put it in a way calculated to rattle the faith of the faithful, to pray to God is to acknowledge that God too is praying, on his or her knees, weeping over the world, as much in need of help, as much in trouble as are the rest of us, praying like mad for a response. That means that when I speak of “prayers and tears,” I do not merely mean the prayers and tears of Saint Augustine, or of Jacques Derrida, beautiful as these are, but also God's own tears and prayers. God, too, is praying and weeping over a good outcome for Jerusalem, for the world.

in my view religion is a double binding, a double-sided bind, including both God's insistence and our existence. Each is bound to the other, we to God and God to us, each in need of the other, like two lovers who depend upon each other for everything.

God is great—great trouble, a great question, a great problem.

To employ a Deleuzian trope, I treat God as a problem—not only for us but for God—to which the world is a solution, a series of solutions, provisional, tentative, throwaway solutions (which in other contexts go under the name “history”).

God's problem is that God insists, is an insistent problem that won't go away, that God is in permanent trouble, just like us, and it is up to us to deal with it, since we are the ones who do exist. We are the people of God, the ones assigned or singled out to respond to what is being called for in the name of God.

In my vocabulary, the insistence of God means the insistent problem, task, challenge, obstacle, hurdle, question, and barrier that goes under the name of the “event,” an idea I keep coming back to, circling around, refining and defining, but without trying to be too confining. The name of God, I keep saying, is the name of the chance of an event, a chance for grace, but that spells trouble, a problem, to which the world, and our being-in-the-world, are a series of shaky solutions.

Theism and atheism are symmetric idols, similar contractions of the genuine problema, idle distractions when it comes to an insistent God, who has no time for such diversions and is interested in deeds.

“God” is the name of the chance of an event, of an eventiveness of the peut-être, an eventiveness that, while often enough traveling under other names, happens with unfailing regularity in “religion” and “theology,” which give harbor to the insistence of “God.”

The weakness of God means that God is not an agent who does things or fails to. We are the agents and so we are also the ones who fail. God's perfection is that God does not do anything wrong, but that is only because God is not a being who does things in the first place.

So when I say God is praying, I am speaking of God's calling, God's insistence. When I say that we are praying, I am saying that we are calling upon God and also that we are responding, answering in the name of God, in the name of something, God knows what.

“Religion” is a chiasm,9 a mutual ligature (on the old etymology of “religio”) of God's prayers and ours, each bound to the other, rigorously (the alternate etymology), an intertwining of God's need for us and our need for God, a binding of the precariousness of our existence together with the precariousness of God's insistence, the chiasm of insistence and existence, of inexistence and existents.

In what metaphysics imagines to be a perfect world, one in which the distance between insistence and existence has been closed (per impossibile), prayer is perfectly unnecessary.

Prayer emerges from the vertigo of “perhaps,” from the tension between hope and threat, between faith and incredulity.

Prayer is the risky business of disturbing the present with the prospect of an unforeseeable future and the memory of an immemorial past, with the chance of the event.

Divine “providence” arises from the assumption that somebody must know what is going on, and if not God, then who? Who, indeed! Suppose no one knows what is going on? That is the event. Is there not an event in God? Is not God an event?

The primal phenomenon in my conception of prayer is the chance of grace, which is the chance of the event, of the “perhaps.” The undecidable fluctuation between grace and chance, between these two gratuities, is the very element of prayer and theology and God.

In an impious theology such as this, “perhaps” and “may-being” are the very element of God, of the precariousness of God and of the ambiance of prayer, let's say the “quasi-transcendental” field upon which they all sink to their knees, where it is the “quasi-” that spells all the trouble. True transcendentals hold things firm; quasi-transcendentals are open-ended.

There is no better way to save the world than with religion, and also no better way to burn it down.

The people of God are, for better or worse, impossible people, people with a taste for the impossible, with a taste for the worst violence and for the most radical justice.

I am suggesting something unsafe and out of order, slightly anarchic, hier-anarchical, an-archeological, un-saving. I favor a kind of impious anti-theological theology, with anti-dogmatic doctrines, where infallible institutions and inerrant books are the only heresy, because they contradict the “essence” of God, where God's essence lies in God's insistence. Accordingly, I think of God as a disturbance of the peace.

The “event” means what we cannot see coming (voir venir), no one, God or human. The name of “God” has the effect of setting things on a new course, of making things new—for better or for worse. “For better or for worse”—the traditional words of the wedding ceremony—is the hallmark of a theology of “perhaps.”

The “undecidability” of the name of God means translatability; it means that when we say “God” we might have something else in mind, or that others might have other names for what we do have in mind.

the name of God is the name of undecidability itself, a paradigmatic name of this instability, of all the unstable transitions and unsteady passages that transpire between things, between words and things, between words and other words, between words and deeds. That is the permanent lesson of mystical theology and of the docta ignorantia, which is why Derrida says he does not trust anything that does not pass through mystical theology.

The God Who Is “Perhaps” itself, provided we can say such a thing, is a way to name the irreducible restiveness of our lives no less than of the restiveness of God's own restless heart.

The name of God is intertwined with every name, with naming itself, where naming means to call for a response, where “come” opens up the field of naming, dreaming, desiring, praying, weeping.

The chiasm of insistence and existence is not a new idea. It is as old as God. As Angelus Silesius writes: God Does Not Live Without Me I know that God cannot live an instant without me; Were I to become nothing, He must give up the Ghost.11 Silesius is putting to verse an idea that goes back to Meister Eckhart, who wrote: It is God's nature to give, and His being depends on His giving to us when we are under [submissive to Him]. If we are not, and receive nothing, we do Him violence and kill Him.12

What has been traditionally called death of God theology is a headline grabber but it is a misleading misnomer—it should have been called the birth of God.13 God's death does not consist in God becoming human but in not becoming human. The death of God means that the insistence of God is a seed sown in rock, that it withers on the vine, that it goes unheeded, that God does not come to exist, that the name of God fails to be the name of a deed and is nothing more than a tinkling cymbal.

God is what God does, and what God does is what is done in the name of God, which is the birth of God in the world. The death of God means that God's call goes unheard, is stillborn. The birth of God means the prayers and tears of God gain a hearing in the world and God comes to life in the world, in the people of God, in deeds, in the way the world “worlds,” as Heidegger would say.

Thus the counterpart of the weakness of God is the responsibility this weakness imposes upon us to be strong, to assume responsibility for ourselves, to take charge of our lives, to answer the call that is issued in the name of God. When God calls, we are put in the accusative, put on the spot, made responsible.

Eckhart's sermons stand at the head of a tradition that leads up to German Idealism, in which there is a “death of God” in a stronger and more literal sense and a great solicitation of orthodoxy

As a metonym for the event, the name (of) “God” can happen anywhere, but God needs us to happen at all. God calls upon us to let God be God in us, Eckhart says.

The responsibility for God's existence falls upon us and has to be cast in the future active participle: it remains to be seen whether God will have been or whether God will be stillborn, whether what will have been will be called God.

Does God exist? It remains to be seen. It depends upon the event that is harbored within the name of God and whether we make ourselves worthy of that event or bring shame upon it. We will only be able to determine whether God exists after the fact, that is, whether this na...

There is a resistance corresponding to every insistence. Calls can be misunderstood, misheard, misleading, mistranslated, miscommunicated and the results can be a disaster. God's being is as precarious as ours, and we are both praying like mad because of the precarious and iffy being we share, the being of may-being, where peut-être is the medium and the message.

The weakness of God becomes strong in the response we make to the event, rather the way that Bonhoeffer called for a “mature” and “religionless” Christianity made mature by human beings who are not waiting for a God to save them; in the way that Kierkegaard said that the name of God is the name of a deed; and in the way that Walter Benjamin said that we are the messianic generation, the ones that the dead are waiting for to bring them redemption. The call is only made manifest in the response that is made to it. The response is what exists and bears the only witness we have to what insists.

The “words of God” means God's prayers, in which we come upon God weeping over the world, entreating our help.

A chiasm woven from a double prayer, a double binding, and tears redoubled where the meaning of prayer, and God, and “coming” are all interwoven with “perhaps.” Come, for better or worse. Yes, yes, perhaps. Viens, oui, oui. To pray is to enter an abyss of provocation and perchance, where God's abyss is our abyss, a double abyss, in which no one can see what is coming. If I were ever invited to be a guest curator of an exhibition meant to honor a theology of “perhaps,” I would announce a collection of representations of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41–42).

Tears, of course. Not perhaps. Lord, and yes, all humanity, let us have mercy on all the suffering creatures in this world.

Hospitality means to say “come” in response to what is calling, and that may well be trouble. We might say that hospitality is an example of an event, but if so it is an exemplary one, a paradigm, maybe even a surname for any and every event, which can come at any moment, like a wayfarer in need of a cup of cold water unless, perhaps, he is a thief in the night.

Hospitality in its paradigmatic sense requires putting ourselves at risk instead of creating a closed circle of friends (the same). It is the effect of a visitation by the hostis, the “stranger,” who might be hostile.

The inability to identify the one who is coming, who may perhaps be here to do us harm, and to predict or control this coming is not a passing problem with hospitality that will hopefully be corrected at a later time. It belongs to the very structure of insistence. That failure to be certain is not a failure but a “negative capability,” a power to sustain uncertainty that structures the insistence of hospitality.

The “come” of hospitality and the “come” of prayer are isomorphic; in both cases, “come”—like the “yes” of a vow—is addressed to what we cannot see coming. If things had greater clarity and security and a more certain outcome, we would not need to make vows or to pray or, better, we would be unable to, as the vow and the prayer would suffocate with self-complacency.

Both hospitality and prayer say "Come!" to the "perhaps." Both participate in the event by faith.

The non-knowing is the more radical side of mystical theology that has always unnerved the churches.