Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion)

by John D. Caputo

God does not exist; God insists.

In each case, God is an inexistent solicitation, to which we are to be the existential response. We are responsible for the existence of God. We are the ones God is waiting for to make the Kingdom come true, for God to be God. In the end, the real question is not “Does God exist?” but rather, as Katharine Sarah Moody puts it on my behalf, “Will there have been God?”

But if the good news is that the world has been reconciled to God by the cross, the bad news is the world seems not to have noticed.

The reconciliation refers to the call that is made upon us by the world to seize and savor this passing cosmic moment in all its transient glory.

The cross is not magic. It does not magically dispel the course of evil, or stop global warming, or alter the laws of thermodynamics. The cross is an event in which the difficulty is not dispelled but disclosed, not extinguished but exposed, not crossed out but made visible.

Love is an expenditure made without the expectation of a return, without support or guarantees. Love is the heart of a heartless world, the difficult glory of a crucified world. Love burns brightly in the sky of a dark and mysterious universe where even the stars are mortal.

Death is a difficulty, but it is not a punishment for the wrongdoings of our first parents; life is difficult, but it is not a trial through which we must pass to earn an eternal reward. Mortality is not a wounding disability but the enabling condition that lends life its intensity, tenderness, poignancy, and beauty, let us say its wounded glory, the difficult glory, that has tasted the bitter truth.