Theodicy without Theodicy

Derrida captures both the imagination and the critical faculties with his theme of 'religion without religion'. Perhaps his greatest expositor, John D. Caputo, has ridden that horse all the way to the bank, if philosophers get to take anything to the bank, as it were. In his 'weak theology', Caputo offers his reading of Derrida's late writings, not to mention the various seminars in which these ideas play out on a stage of phenomenology, post-phenomenology and even a God without being. Caputo describes the deconstruction of confessional religions, and discovers the 'unconditional without sovereignty' which he identifies as the 'weak force of God'.

A religion without religion contains within it the deconstruction of classical theodicy, and perhaps points to a theodicy without theodicy. I might make the case that a religion without religion does not recognize anything that looks like a theodicy, whether with or without theodicy. Be that as it may, a theodicy without theodicy might take as its point of departure the power structure Caputo attributes to God in the metaphysical attitude: the problem does seem to boil down to power, its expression and its non-expression, its deployment in the world and its non-deployment.

I share with Caputo his disgust with theodicy as it usually plays out, as a means of explaining or justifying the misery, suffering and injustice visited upon the world, particularly upon the innocent. To drop 'mystery', a 'greater good' at the doorstep of horror and unspeakable suffering mocks God and the world, and constitutes the definition of obscenity.

Any reasonable person would think that, after the horrors of the 20th century (indeed the horrors of history), the 'end of theodicy' would have been a decisive one. Surely religion and theodicy would have died a permanent death by now, certainly by now; yet theodicy, like religion, lives on: what good is the death of God if theodicy and religion always rise again? 

Caputo's The Weakness of God dots its argument for the 'unconditional without sovereignty' with such occasions of the meaning and presence of the Omni-God against the weakness of God. But what of theodicy's corollary, the request (if not a demand) for an explanation or justification, the quality of which determines reason's permissibility of God? Playing out on the horizon of being, this crucial flip-side of theodicy allows God into, or disqualifies God from, the horizon of knowledge (albeit a certain kind of knowledge) and of being. God lives and dies by the swords of all kinds of positivisms, regardless of the side they take in the classic version of the great debate.

In a recent discussion on the 'priority of love' with a philosopher and friend, my interlocutor equated such priority with a 'theodicy without theodicy', and so I began this piece with the analogy of a religion without religion. His critique, which burns with concern for 'needless, unnecessary suffering of catastrophic proportions', runs adjacent to a critique of the Johannine Lazarus texts, and formulates its argument thus: Jesus, alive then and now, can call Lazarus or anyone else, then and now from death, but he doesn't. Now certainly the lingua franca of this critique is power itself, but also power within a will. The question asks, with all seriousness, why anyone ever suffers and dies, while a Jesus, very much alive and sporting a track record of doing nifty stuff, stands idly by and simply withholds miraculous power.

The question itself pokes at divine power and justice, but I do not think this question exhausts its theodical gesture by interrogating power. Its gesture also calls into question the various claims of religion for God and Jesus, in particular, Christian claims. So where do we start, start again? In other words, how is the priority of love, that God loves before he is, a theodicy without theodicy? Is it simply a fait accompli that a God who loves before he is, is a God who does not deploy power analogically (in terms of the human deployment of power), or deals in the structures of power at all? What is the difference between love and power when God does the loving? If Creation itself is an act of love, and not of sheer power, does a univocity of love put us in a position to create---is the power of love as intelligible as the love of power?

The problem gets even more complicated. How does one account for the urgency of the theodical gesture, and its logical aftermath---atheism---on the part of the positivist, when the theist finds this question oddly less than urgent? Can such urgency reduce to the desire to declare God nonsense under the scrutiny of sharply defined criteria for and of evidence? Do all theists secretly subscribe to Caputo's weak theology, acknowledging the obscenity of the theodical reply to the theodical question, yet somehow resolve to retain a faith in thematic religion (religion with religion), such as Catholicism? Are we all, deep down, Caputo's radical theologians? Do we radical theologians argue for an evidence invisible to the various positivisms in all sincerity? Is there any other place to go for a 'theology of the event'?

For the sake of this preliminary sketch of a theodicy without theodicy, we might speculate that God has as much use for theodicy as he does for religion: God has no use for what passes for religion---What are your vain sacrifices to me? 'Vain' sacrifice, the religious gesture with a gargantuan injection of religion. Is sacrifice always a gesture of power? Religiously speaking, the only sacrifice that God ever asks is the one he asks of himself, and the one ostensibly carried out on Calvary. A sacrifice of God for humanity. That sacrifice is the only possible sacrifice that completely absents vanity. This is not to say that the unconditional call of the event of God asks nothing of us; it simply does not ask us to sacrifice because of its inherent vanity. Even Abraham doesn't get to sacrifice, not even in the most famous sacrificial near-miss of all time.

So, then, the urgency of the question: a power than declines its exercise --- a will that wills not the 'good', where the very existence and meaning of that power hangs in the balance---no exercise, no being. Is it here, I wonder, where a theodicy without theodicy finds itself and its answer: if being is denied by empirical establishment of a lack of evidence, does that lack locate God beyond essence, otherwise than being---does positivism then give credence to a God without being, or does it relegate the whole matter to the ever-growing heap of nonsense? If willing the good for the other passes for love, then it is a strange love indeed that does not always and forever will the good for all of creation. What has happened to an appeal to the univocity of love?

But not so fast. The urgency of this theodical question also interrogates the lack of urgency on the part of those for whom the concrete players are not held to what must assuredly be a responsibility to their power. A theodicy with theodicy has no other recourse but to conclude irrational obstinacy, an embrace of a studied naïve magical realism. Presumably a theodicy without theodicy would have richer choices. Indeed, in any hypothetical theodicy without theodicy, doubt plays out very differently than in the classical theodicy with theodicy. So, then, which do we doubt, 'love' or 'the good'?

Emmanuel Levinas once suggested that Judaism is a religion for adults. It goes without saying (and this is perhaps why thinkers like Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Falque do not say it explicitly) that Christianity is also a religion for adults. One of the ways, it seems to me, Christianity enjoys a status similar to Judaism, is its rhythm of cataphasis and apophasis. Meister Ekhart asks God to free him from God. We ask in faith for God to help our poor faith. It also goes without saying that any responsible faith, any adult religion, would be constituted by doubt. This is not the destructive doubt of paralysis and positivism, but more akin, ironically, to Descartes' reduction to doubt, which, with its corrosive edges, tears down everything to the bare bones of an encounter with the infinite. Doubt begins the expedition to the discovery of a new world of contradiction and paradox, a world of Yeatsian 'terrible beauty', a world both beautiful and treacherous.

A theodicy without theodicy interrogates power itself, and empowers doubt to be its examiner. The 'doubting Thomas' of the Johannine tradition does not earn condemnation, even if that tradition does find him a bit comical, taking himself, as he does, just too seriously. No, not condemnation, but instead, this most adult of the apostles receives a gift; Thomas utters the highest Christology in the Gospel tradition: my Lord and my God.  Such belief anchored by doubt has always been offered by the Christian tradition as authentic over and against any brand of fideism. Doubt is the business end of reason; its drive toward a mature faith and authenticity leads not to postivism's dead ends and nonsense, but to think again. If not being, or a version of being, or of ontological difference, then toward what does declarative prayer direct itself?

It simply cannot be that the question of a Jesus, a God, who can but doesn't, ends the matter. That's just another way to say Roma locuta, causa finita est---we are trying to get beyond such positivisms. The theist and the atheist stand on different, not opposite, ends of the same question. But on what do they stand when they angle their stands at the same question? Is it the very 'ground of being' which some believe to 'be' God? No, I think not; a 'ground' is no place to stand if the question is being. A ground of being is just a being upon which being stands. That's simply the infinite regress of more of the same---classical theodicy in a slightly different light. What would a theodicy without theodicy stand on; what does a religion without religion stand on?

In such a preliminary piece, I must do a little damage control, and ask a more modest question. The fact is this, good people, atheist and theist alike, positivist and other-than-positivist alike, stand together in this world. 'Where do they stand?' is another way of asking 'how are things between them?' They stand before each other across the same abysmal question. If each encounters the face of the other, then they must stand on that which is before being itself. They stand, in short, on the love that is prior to being, on the claims made upon them before they are even 'selves'. This is the threshold upon a theodicy without theodicy, properly recognized and pronounced by someone who does not even believe such anteriority is either possible, or that it matters even if it were possible. His pronouncement accuses me, as his atheism calls my theism into question. What matters, at least at this point, is our standing; and we stand before the same voice, the same call from what is harbored in the name of God. How we hear it, and where doubt leads us, and what urgency moves us, makes all the difference in the world, even if we can share that world, even if the discovery of joy or crushing sadness awaits us in this shared world. Events are like that.

The Folly of God: John Caputo's Tetragrammatology

It is unclear to me if John Caputo's The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Polebridge: Salem, OR, 2016) [F] is the final installment in a trilogy comprised of his earlier work, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event [W], and The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps [I]. I am equally unsure that the last 3 books Caputo has published does not comprise some kind of valediction, as there is language in It Spooks, Hoping Against Hope and even F that is elegiac and valedictory. Perhaps these observations are nothing more than a recognition of Caputo's farewell to the academy, though he seems to pop up everywhere these days.

F is a brief volume that lays out Caputo's own (Tetra)Grammatology, in which he articulates the great themes of his previous work. In a nutshell, Caputo wants to leave a lasting impression of these four letters of deconstruction:

1. Anything culturally mediated is constructed.
2. Anything constructed is deconstructible.
3. Deconstructibility arises from any mediation, as inscribed spacetime ('from below') or from the 'pressure' of the undeconstructible itself ('from above').
4. Deconstructibility is constituted by conditionality, and undeconstructibility is constituted by unconditionality. (F, 23-29).

Hence, the call, the pure call that has captured the imagination of those enthralled by what's been going on in continental philosophy, unconditional and without sovereignty (cf. W), pressures 'from above' (but whence we know not), from undeconstructibility.

Unconditionality and undeconstructibility play out in the trace, the 'gramme' as Caputo states. The trace is what is already there, what already might be there, written before the letter is traced there. This is the locus of 'perhaps' (cf. I). The trace does a good deal of heavy lifting, for Caputo, and certainly for Derrida. Caputo repeats Derrida's grammatology in F (in his trilogy?) as a writing of a 'tetragrammatology' (my coinage, not in Caputo or F) of deconstruction, which is a way of making straight the path of the conditions for the release of the event (cf. W) which calls from the unconditional, anonymously.

After all this prolegomena to charity how can Caputo get it so wrong? How can he, after tracing the Protestant Principle  (after Barth's [ecclesia] semper reformanda) through the Jewish Principle (after Derrida's "semper deconstruenda"), let 'narrative time' lull him into misreading simul justus et peccator as an economy of a false gift, falsified by reciprocity? The sheep and the goats of Matthew 25 are pure Vorstellung, and they must not be read as a corruption of innocence (F, 119ff.). As I have argued elsewhere, all the parables and parabolic narratives (of which Matthew 25 is clearly one) are perlocutionary acts.

A more subtle hermeneutic allow for the possibility that the goats and sheep are the existential reality of the 'blessed of my father.' These actors in Matthew 25 are at once sheep and goats, and are liable to an act of faith and the justice to come already visited upon them. Caputo, then, has mistraced the trace in his reading into some imagined economy of reward and punishment. The sheep are traced into the goats, the goats into the sheep; and that trace is unconditional and without sovereignty---the goat-sheep in the 'blessed of my father' is undeconstructible. We must not, as Caputo warns (F, 126f), "confuse the unconditional (undeconstructible) with the conditional (deconstructible)." We must "[r]emember that in all this" (even when we appear in Matthew 25) "we play the role of the justus et peccator."


If W, I and F are a trilogy, then they certainly offer a vision of religion, not necessarily one 'without religion,' but one which itself is the trace that ghosts the letters in 'confessional' religions. The religion of the trace is the religion that is already traced in the insistence of the letter in all religion. Whenever the word is written, it is traced upon a form that comes from somewhere,  that can never completely be traced over, leaving a slight blur, a haze on the page that lets the words reverberate, that lets the already written come though the tracing of a letter. There is a quietude there, in the gentle beckoning of the trace, the call of the trace that quickens the letter of the word, and the word of the letter. It insists from above and from below, and even from the legacy of Caputo's tetragrammatology of the perhaps---the weakness, the folly and the insistence of God.

Discovery at Bethany, Redux

Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. (This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.) So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you love is sick.”

When he heard this, Jesus said, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days, and then he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.”

“But Rabbi,” they said, “a short while ago the Jews there tried to stone you,and yet you are going back?”

Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Anyone who walks in the daytime will not stumble, for they see by this world’s light. It is when a person walks at night that they stumble, for they have no light.”

After he had said this, he went on to tell them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.”

His disciples replied, “Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better.” Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep.

So then he told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.”

Then Thomas (also known as Didymus) said to the rest of the disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Now Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home.

“Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

“Yes, Lord,” she replied, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”

After she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary aside. “The Teacher is here,” she said, “and is asking for you.” When Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who had been with Mary in the house, comforting her, noticed how quickly she got up and went out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there.

When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked.

“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.

Jesus wept.

Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”

But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. “Take away the stone,” he said.

“But, Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.”

Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”

So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.”

When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen,and a cloth around his face.

Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”

Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.

“What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one. So from that day on they plotted to take his life.

Therefore Jesus no longer moved about publicly among the people of Judea. Instead he withdrew to a region near the wilderness, to a village called Ephraim, where he stayed with his disciples.

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, many went up from the country to Jerusalem for their ceremonial cleansing before the Passover.They kept looking for Jesus, and as they stood in the temple courts they asked one another, “What do you think? Isn’t he coming to the festival at all?” But the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that anyone who found out where Jesus was should report it so that they might arrest him. [John 11, NIV]

Jesus discovered that Lazarus had been in the tomb 4 days (John 11:17).

Jesus had just told the disciples that Lazarus was dead, and that he rejoiced for them that he was not there as sickness became death, so that they would believe. At first the disciples thought Jesus was speaking metaphorically about a sleeping Lazarus, so he spoke to them more directly: Lazarus was plain and simply dead. Jesus rejoices not in that death, but in the faith-to-come that Lazarus' death will celebrate. Still, he wept that Lazarus and his sisters suffered, for he loved them (11:5). Joy for some, and mourning for others. 

Such is the face of love in the topsy-turvy world of the 4th gospel. Jesus loved them so much, that he stayed where he was for 2 more days; for Lazarus' illness was not unto death, but that the bright splendor of God will shine through it. Jesus makes use of the day: when it is light, the light will shine forth. Even the gathering mourners connect the death of Lazarus with the work of the day when the man born blind was recreated to see the light of the world (11:27; cf. John 9); light makes the difference between night and day. Darkness is useless, ruined space and time. For Lazarus, night becomes day, the splendor of the day.

In order for John to speak to us through the storied history of readings of his Gospel, we must, as Caputo has convincingly argued, allow scripture (for us, this pericope) to undergo a "methodological transformation into an event" in which the 4th evangelist's voice can make an appearance (Weakness of God, 117; Caputo's emphasis). This twofold transformation identifies the unconditionality of what's brewing in the text---the call---and then gives John's voice presence to us. We allow this voice to appear in all its freedom by freeing it from the layers of exegesis, historical analysis, and especially the onto-theology that has grown around it. This strategy is the epoche, the suspension of what has become the natural attitude toward this text (and others of course). To free our vision from its prejudices and presuppositions, the natural attitude of a strong theology undergoes the phenemenological reduction that bring the event of the pericope into sharp relief (cf, Weakness, 115-17).

The traditional reading of the raising of Lazarus presents a Jesus that deliberately delays his return to Bethany to permit suffering and death only to rebuke it in a demonstration of the divine 'testosterone' (Caputo talks like that). It is a very short journey from such an onto-theology to a harsh theodicy that lays such evils within the divine omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence and renders God's goodness incomprehensible. The text might very well be complicit in such a strong theology, but by bracketing off all that strength, something else wants to get itself done.

Caputo looks to Jesus' tears, as they foreclose on a deliberate delay, which would be 'impossible'. He concludes that Jesus could simply not get there in time. Yet, once we collapse an "all too human love for displaying power," our vision becomes unobstructed (Weakness, 257-58). We see what John is giving voice to: to the very humanity of Jesus in all its fear and suffering. We see that at the moment the word of Lazarus' illness reach Jesus, his beloved friend had already died, unbeknownst to the messenger. Jesus stays across the Jordan (10:40) for 2 (δύο) more days and then returns to Bethany where he discovers that Lazarus was already in the tomb for 4 ( τέσσαρας) days. It apparently takes him 2 days to complete his return (presumably the same 2 days it takes for the word to reach him across the Jordan). Over the six day period between the departure of the word from Bethany to Jesus' return there Lazarus had died, a death which coincides with the delivery of the word of his illness. John has crunched the numbers he has enumerated for us; it was there all the time, but only now visible in the reduction: Jesus knew at the moment of hearing the word of Lazarus' illness that his beloved friend had died; and he shares this sad news with his disciples who at first misunderstand him. In his profound grief for his friend he rejoices in the disciples' faith-to-come; for Lazarus will not stay dead. John's mathematical time forecloses on any calculus of the divine strength to orchestrate a show of its muscle, which flexes enough in the voice of Jesus calling life upon the dead.


John wants us to see the depths of Jesus' humanity here---the generosity of his joy for his disciples and of his grief over the loss of his friend. In 11:35-38, Jesus' tears cause the Judaeans to marvel at his 'love.' Jesus is then moved deeply and then toward the tomb (11:38). The word ἐμβριμώμενος suggests a reaching deep within himself. Such a reaching doubtless informs the 2 days Jesus needs to compose himself before he returns to a place of sadness, which is a place very near a death by stoning (John 10).

The story does not end with death as Jesus told his disciples, yet neither does it end with Lazarus alive. It ends with the prophecy of Caiaphas and the plot to kill Jesus. Despite the faith that the miracle stirs in some, some others still report to Jesus enemies (those who caused him to retreat across the Jordan in the first place). So this is the situation at Bethany: it is a place of great danger and great love; a place of joy and grief and, with the life restored to Lazarus, the acceleration of the way to the Cross. There is no greater love than this: to lay down one's life for a friend. This is the event released at Bethany. To see it clearly, we even have to bracket off all that  'power' and choose the weakness of God. John, given his voice back from a bracketed dogmatic theology he does not know, tells us simply that Jesus loves in the weakness of his tears. 

Love---agape, philos---discovers suffering and mourning within itself. Lazarus discovers the light from the darkness of the tomb as the man born blind finds sight at Siloam. These are short journeys of discovery, as these figures step from darkness into the light. Jesus' own journey to Bethany discovers that love weeps in the face of suffering, and his tears are the tears of love. Jesus wept; God wept. And weeping swept away death, as darkness fades into light. Jesus loves and weeps as we love and weep. And tears melt into prayers for more light. Jesus' prayer is a very public prayer that connects him to the Father and brings the hearers of the prayer to faith. Jesus presents the discovery that love, faith, mourning and suffering entangle the doxa of God. 

Though our old friend Nietzsche looked with contempt upon Christianity, he could sing the very song of darkness, midnight's song, where joy and suffering are of a piece, joy deeper yet than suffering in the eternal morning that quickens the eternal night. The light of the sun is its shining joy as the benighted become enlightened. Midnight awakens from its dream into the ebb and flow of joy and sorrow whose currents flow in a single sea of recurrence. The Mitternachtslied is a very Christian moment for the philologist of Basel when read through Lazarus' eyes, or the eyes of the man born blind. Or if the eyes just can't have it, it is the moment of the very voice of midnight. Midnight accepts joy and suffering in eternity where love encompasses its rhythm with all its syncopation, its unexpected accents on suffering, mourning and joy. This is love. This is metanoia, the event harbored in the raising of Lazarus. 

The movements of bodies undergird the movement of a coming to believe. The disciples with Jesus move with him from Jerusalem to across the Jordan, and then back again across the Jordan to Bethany, where their faith-to-come materializes. Martha and Mary move from where they meet Jesus to where they were staying. First Martha alone meets Jesus on his way to the tomb where she proclaims her faith that he is the Messiah. She returns to Mary to tell her Jesus has come. Mary goes to meet Jesus, and utters the same faith in the Martha's own words ("my brother would not have died").  Mary and Martha move together with Jesus to the tomb where their faith reveals the glory of God. These motions are the grammar of a change of heart, and change of life, a new life in the presence of the human fully alive.

This metanoia recreates the self, reborn like Nicodemus, that other weaver of light and dark. Not a return to the womb, but a womb-ing of the self that finds itself in relation to the givenness of love. From love, Jesus gives Lazarus more time; for Lazarus does not experience resurrection. Resurrection is unto the eternal beatific vision of love itself; but more time is all the eternity we get in this world. Martha knew this all too well; she knew the Resurrection is not for this day, but the last day. She also believed that Jesus was the Resurrection, and that on this day of his return to Bethany, that fact means more of this life. More life, more time---these symbolize the Resurrection-to-come. The symbols of life and time play out among love and suffering, the rhythmic complexity of love, which constitute the calculus of relation with the divine.

The heuristic elements of raising Lazarus call for a hermeneutics that embraces the text as Jesus loves and weeps, as Martha believes, as the disciples believe,  as love punches out its percussive melody, as midnight embraces the rhythm of waking and sleeping, living and dying. Even the day, Jesus' favorite time, the time of doing the work of God, discovers something beyond it. The day cannot contain the event of more life and time, and we cannot remain an older self as the event pulls us into something new. And though we can see in the light of the world, we cannot see into it; yet it sees us in its fullness and we know that we are seen, that we are loved, that we are loved before we are, by a God who loves before he is.

Coins in a Fountain: The Coin Tricks at Capernaum and Jerusalem

Ad fontes!

Back to the thing itself!

More water, Gunga Din!

quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus [Ps. 42]


Few would argue that Jesus was arrested, tried and executed for his unwavering allegiance to Rome and the Temple. Something else was definitely going on. Was the issue Jesus' subversion of the norm? Even a toothless subverting source is better off the scene, better off dead, from the perspective of a dedication to the status quo: business as usual and normal operations. I have suggested in a recent post that Jesus, in his manipulation of currency, subverted an invitation to subversion and the sovereignty of Caesar (a reading of Matt. 22), and also subverted the sovereignty of the Temple (a reading of Matt. 17). The historical critical method can only do numismatics (and locate Torah-sources and traditions) for these interesting pericopes, and while its true that Matthew's 'render unto Caesar' find itself within the broader Synoptic tradition and therefore more amenable to the method, the Temple tax pericope is attested only in Matthew, and of less interest to historical method where it bears even less fruit. Since Roman and Temple taxes persisted well after Jesus left the scene, even unto the demise of both, one might rightfully wonder just what kind of subversion I am identifying here (and in the gospels in general).


The last thing I am interested in is reducing Jesus and the Christ-event to the merely subversive. That approach has been done and leaves us with a failed political rebel among countless other failed rebels in the dust bin of history. The Christian tradition certainly acknowledges the political and economic dimension of the challenges Jesus presented to his time and place, but it does not understand that dimension apart from the announcement of the Kingdom of Heaven, the Incarnation and the Redemption (and indeed so much more). Nonetheless, the 'coin tricks' at Capernaum and Jerusalem in their own way announce the Kingdom that unconditionally lays claim to any and all earthly kingdoms. At Capernaum, Jesus makes a coin appear, and at Jerusalem he makes a coin disappear. So where is the subversion?


"Show me the money," says Jesus to the Pharisees' disciples and the Herodians (Matt. 22:19). Reading the image on the coin, Jesus identifies Caesar, and the coin disappears into the coffers of the Roman treasury. All that remains is the possibility that something might appear that belongs to God. "The way of God according to the truth" stands against the trap---the invitation to insurrection, subversion---and subverts an invitation to a subversion of the "imperial tax" (Matt. 22:16-17). The subversion of a subversion leads only to 'marvel.' Caesar has his name all over the denarius, and Jesus asks his interrogators what God has His name all over: marvelous. Yet this marvel of Jesus' wisdom and authority exercises a new, exciting and very subversive sovereignty over the very structure of taxation. The currency of earthly kingdoms is devalued in Jesus' suddenly appearing Kingdom, which somehow dictates how it is to be used to open upon that which belongs to God.


The structure of taxation in the Temple cult fares no better than Rome's in the Kingdom of Jesus.  Matt. 17 presents an interaction absent in the other Synoptics. "What do you think, Simon, do kings tax their very own, or other than their own? Peter said, 'other than their own.' 'The children are exempt,' said Jesus." The logic of the Kingdom accomplishes two tasks here. The first condemns the Temple for taxing other than their own; the second removes the 'other than their own' to be children of another order. The Temple and its tax disown those from whom it collects. There is an unmistakable humorous tension in this moment. Peter doesn't want Jesus to be seen evading taxes, and Jesus wants Peter to catch a glimmer of the truth while avoiding offense. Ostensibly, the collectors of the Temple tax wait at the door. We think we know what will happen next: a fishing trip and eventual payment of the tax. The text moves on to the counting of brothers, and we are left to imagine how the payment is made.


The tradition of the temple tax finds its origins in the Mosaic codes (Ex. 30:11-16). In 1st century Palestine the temple tax was already a big business. The collectors will collect the tax or make some big trouble. Do they go fishing, too, I wonder; do they wait for Peter to return with the money? Returning to the Temple precincts without the money seems unlikely. Since they collect the tax from 'outside the family,' a family of wealth and privilege, those outside the family most likely have worked hard for the money, and the tax would be some kind of burden on them. That burden might even be constitutive of the tax. If so, Jesus sourcing the tax whence he does is already a bit subversive.  The collectors want coin, not fish, so either Peter needs to catch a fish and sell it fast, or find the coin exactly where Jesus locates it. If so, it's found money, perhaps even a lost Temple tax, especially if it is as Jesus says it would be: the exact denomination and value. Maybe one of these selfsame collectors dropped it in the lake at some point earlier in the story. Or maybe Jesus saw that one of the tax collectors dropped the coin where he stood, and winked that information to Peter who doesn't go fishing at all, but instead went dusting the threshold. Could be; who knows. Matthew tells us nothing of the actual hand-off of the tax. So, we are left with a rather pointed fishing trip and a coughed up shekel.


Unless, of course, this story, unique to Matthew, is not a numismatic piscatorial exercise at all; but a word to the wise. The Temple imposes its tax on ta me onta (cf. 1 Cor. 1), the 'nothings' of this world that make nothing out of ta onta, the 'somethings' of this world (cf. 1 Cor. 1:28). In the Kingdom of Jesus, a sovereignty without sovereignty exerts the power of weakness in the kingdoms of the earth.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven  [Matt. 5:3, 10]


The nothings, ta me onta, already are in the space and the conceptual field of the advent of the Kingdom, though they pay taxes in coin to the kings of the earth. Blessed are the taxed, those thought of as other, for they nullify the taxers and the children of kings. The Kingdom is like a stag drawn to the font of waters, as those who thirst for righteousness, the insisting 'pure call,' are drawn to the weak force of God.
The two coins found in these biblical fonts affirm forms of life within a Kingdom whose weakness overpowers the strong forces in those kingdoms where the commerce of taxation holds sway. The economy of the coin carries no weight with Jesus. The lingua franca of the Kingdom is of a different order, and while the coin of the koine is still something to the somethings, the nothings (suddenly in their midst) nullify the somethings, and allow what belongs to God to appear.

Spectral Christianity

Although the possibility remains that some of John D. Caputo's critics might dismiss his work as so much post-modern theosophy, I have found his work refreshing and authentic. I certainly have some difficulty with some of his strategies in The Weakness of God and The Insistence of God, but the movement from an apophatically derived humongous onto-theological entity to 'the event' is fascinating and compelling. Does Caputo pass for an atheist? of course; yet the creative gesture of dissolving the Tillichian 'ground of being' into vocative, middle-voiced insistence treats the problem of omnipotence in a very satisfying way.

Truth be told, omnipotence has never enjoyed an unassailable place in dogmatic theology. There are some things that God simply cannot do. Despite all the literary violence in the Old Testament, the God of theology cannot be the agent or source of murder or human sacrifice. He just can't do it, and that's the conclusion of the strong theology which Caputo critiques in his work. Though Caputo does not begin in dogma, he would rejoice in the theological discomfort with omnipotence as evidence of the haunting of orthodox theology by a radical, weak theology.

Caputo's 'hauntology,' as he calls it, does not originate with him. I would think that every theological punctuation finds its engine in a haunting. The council of Nicaea was no doubt haunted by what was tearing Constantine's Empire apart---the very nature of Jesus Christ (ah, those were the days when christology could disrupt an empire). The holy spirit spooked the council fathers into consubstantiality, and the rest is, as it were, history. The Second Vatican Council found itself spooked not only by Catholic dogma, but also by the palpable ghosts of the very flower of modernism: the Shoah . And, most recently, the extraordinary Synod of Bishops is haunted by St. Francis himself as it sets its agenda to address just what family and love really are in the post-modern world.

The Weakness of God is the more sanguine of the two works, as The Insistence of God is written with a healing black eye, and I have a greater affection for the former than the latter, perhaps because any  weak theology that I would adopt would not approach anything with a chip on its shoulder. Still, both works share a broad, sound intellectual underpinning that gives a voice, a language, to what may be coming in new theological gestures. The hopeful enthusiasm of Weakness emerges as the sobriety of a critique of speculative realism in Insistence. The relentless logic of development in Weakness, yields to some jagged insertions (e.g., Caputo's response to Zizek) in Insistence. Interestingly, I agree that Caputo sympathizes with much of Zizek's work, and even with Meillassoux (doesn't Caputo meet Meillassoux in the latter's perverse but brilliant piece, Spectral Dilemmas ?).

The problem of God and religion remains in Zizek, Caputo, Meillassoux and in the work of all the other thinkers Weakness and Insistence engage. Caputo's grand step away from God-as-ground-of-being, or even as Robert Barron has recently called God, "ground of contigency," provides fertile soil for dialogue, even with the so-called new atheists. I wonder how distant Sam Harris's 'spirituality without religion' is from Caputo's "religion without religion"; or perhaps the former's 'self-transcendence' is from the latter's 'insistence'? If Barron is right that serious theists call the unconditional, unconditioned ground of contingency "God," then, despite how metaphysical the sound of ground appears, the event of religion as response to God's insistence remains possible. Serious theists who acknowledge that the grounding of contigency is what religion calls the Creator of the Universe would seem to be open to scripture and religion as events harboring other events.

The Call from the Cross

 "Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" [1 Cor. 22-24, NIV].

Paul could have barely calculated how his words would resonate today when theology must fend off secularism with one hand and rewrite the Cross in the postmodern world with the other. If the cross is not a scandal or foolishness for today's mind, many would find it at the very least peculiar. What kind of 'call' from the cross is heard today, from such a dim and remote past? Such a 'call' would have to be transhistorical to be heard in the din of the technological world, but what would make it so? Still, positivism's death knell to religion and faith is premature, and the cross limps through the desert of the real seeking out hearers of the 'call.'

This is a very strange kind of power here. The cross is the assertion of the secular power to keep the malcontents in check, and daydreamers in fear. Rome has no need to call anyone; Rome demonstrates, marches and executes the pax Romana. The cross is the symbol of Rome's reach, and of the impotence of its subjects. This power of the cross is of a different order.

A few years ago, John Caputo could write about The Weakness Of God, and the powerlessness of the cross even as the cross makes unconditional claims on those who respond to its 'call'. Certainly Catholicism is no stranger to a God for whom nothing is impossible that is real and possible, and a God who acts in the world through secondary causes, but Caputo's thesis does not hover over the palimpsest of Catholic theology comfortably. How could Caputo's theory of God be comfortable atop a theology of a triune God and dogmatics? No, that could not be the model.

Yet, a weak God and a weak theology does indeed speak to the postmodern world and post-structuralist thought. I am not certain that Caputo has not moved the theological dialogue forward in an authentic way.

Thought of as an event, the cross is a strategem within the Christ event. It is only through the lens of the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus that the cross can 'call' at all. Were it not for the resurrection, for example, what would have become of his life? Would he not be yet another failed messiah? How does hearing the call make such a man the 'power' and 'wisdom' of God?

My next post will engage Caputo's work in depth and attempt a synthesis with Catholicism. Or maybe not. Perhaps several posts, or several series of posts, will be required to engage this provocative thinker. A response to the call of the cross is what God intends by his invitation through the event. This conundrum is a struggle worth pursuing. Deconstruction calls as well, from its position at the foot of the cross. Such calls demand a response from those who hear them, from those who see a signature.