After the Death of God

5. Sociologist of religion Richard Fenn describes this ideological crisis as follows: “The emergence of the radical death of God theology, therefore, is set within a cultural context of ideological crisis: in the absence of universals, of world-views and value-orientations, of sanctions for social arrangements, and of prototypes for individual motivations, the new theology acquires an empirical fit and significance far broader than its sources in academic theology would suggest.” In “The Death of God: An Analysis of Ideological Crisis,” Review of Religious Research 9, no. 3 (Spring 1968): 171.

6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 46.

7. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 6. In making this claim, Taylor is echoing a claim first made by Carl Raschke in Deconstruction and Theology (1982).

8. As the historian Hugh McLeod writes, “‘Christianity’ and ‘Christendom’ can be separated. There was Christianity for three centuries before Christendom. There are parts of the world, for instance China, where there has never been a Christendom, but where there are many millions of Christians.” In Hugh Mcleod, “Introduction,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 2.

10. Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 168.

11. McCleod, “Introduction,” p. 1.

13. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1972).

14. See especially William Hamilton, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer” in Radical Theology and the Death of God, ed. Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), pp. 113–20.

15. Søren Kierkegaard, Attack Upon Christendom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

16. Jack Miles, “Religion is Making a Comeback (Belief to Follow),” New York Times Magazine (December 7, 1997).

17. See Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1995).

18. See John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), and More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

19. Richard Rorty, “Foreword,” in Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, ed. Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. xi.

20. Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, p. xxvi.

23. Caputo has acknowledged his indebtedness to Vattimo on this point. See the introduction to his forthcoming The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), n. 9.

24. See John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

25. For more about Caputo’s theology of the event, see The Weakness of God.

26. Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 17.

27. See Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 28.

28. John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 7–8.

29. See John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

30. John D. Caputo, On Religion (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 37–66. Further references will appear parenthetically in text.

31. See Vattimo, After Christianity, pp. 69–82.

32. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 1. Further references will appear in text.

33. See Vattimo, Belief, pp. 80–84.

1. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 2003).

2. Richard Rorty has explained very well this issue by showing that it is the linguistic turn that has led us away not only from epistemology but also from traditional metaphysics because we never understand anything except under a description, and there are no privileged descriptions. We should interpret the phrase understanding an object as a slightly misleading way of describing our ability to connect old descriptions with new. “Being That Can Be Understood Is Language,” in Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. Bruce Krajewski (University of California Press: 2004), 21–29.

3. I have analyzed this problem in my After Christianity, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

4. There are some very interesting books on the origin of interpretation available now as Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Gerald L. Bruns, Hermeneutics: Ancient and Modern (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Gayle L. Ormiston, and Alan D. Schrift, eds., Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990), and The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990).

5. Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti (Indiana University Press, 2004).

6. Benedetto Croce, “Why We Cannot Help Calling Ourselves Christians” (1942) in My Philosophy, trans. E. F. Carritt (New York: Collier, 1962).

7. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964).

8. Editor’s note: By charity, the author does not mean simply the act of almsgiving or of helping the poor. The actual word he uses is that of caritas, which has a broader meaning than that of charity alone. It refers to grace and love or the generosity of spirit and the act of self-giving upon which genuine charity is properly founded.

9. Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) was an Italian poet and classical scholar. He was the longtime chair of literature at the University of Bologna. He is best remembered for his experimental poetry, which incorporated his extensive knowledge of classical antiquity. He wrote in both Italian and Latin and also translated English poetry.

1. While points 4 and 5 are obviously of Derridean inspiration, the background for points 1–3 is found in Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); see especially pp. 149–50. See also Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society, trans. D. Smith (New York: Crossroads, 1980), pp. 109–15.

2. Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute (New York: Verso, 2000), pp. 118, 159.

3. Thus, instead of saying ethics, we might paraphrase what Deleuze says (The Logic of Sense, 149) as follows: “Either [theology] makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.” Like Deleuze, theology, too, wants to “will the event,” which means “primarily, to release its eternal truth, like the fire on which it is fed.”

4. The theological character of the event is brought out by Alain Badiou who calls it a “laicized grace” or a “grace without God,” which is an occurrence of a marvelous but mundane or immanent sort, not magic or supernaturalism. Think of a fortuitous visitation by something that we did not invite, the arrival of something unexpected, unforeseeable, unprogrammable, uncontrollable, and even unwarranted. We did not do anything to produce, earn, or deserve it; on the contrary, we must make ourselves worthy of it, after the fact, as it were. See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 122–23. For Deleuze, this grace is waiting everywhere and in everything—it is just a question of realizing or actualizing it—while for Badiou the grace of the event is exceptional and it is a question, not exactly of making ourselves worthy of whatever happens to us, but of remaining faithful to the grace of an exceptional event, of allowing ourselves to be galvanized and organized and fired by the fire of the event, while laying aside the unnecessary and even cumbersome doctrine of the All. As Badiou puts it very nicely, for Deleuze, grace is all, everything is grace, which is the view of Georges Bernanos’s Curé d’Ars, at the end of his famous Diary of a Country Priest. Everything is the will of God, whereas, for Badiou, grace is an exceptional moment, like the one that unhorsed Paul on the way to Damascus, making the story of Paul the story of his fidelity to this moment. These are two different theologies of grace. Indeed the debate between Deleuze and Badiou can be seen as that of a couple of hoary theologians arguing about grace behind seminary walls. See Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

5. Deleuze is closest to Derrida, and I am closest to Deleuze, when Deleuze insists that the event is not what occurs but “something in that which occurs, something yet to come,” which “signals” us and “waits for us and invite us in.” The Logic of Sense, p. 148.

6. When Deleuze speaks of willing the event as willing what happens to us, which sounds like countersigning everything that happens as inevitable, he is trying to rehabilitate Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence. He would have done a lot better to follow Badiou’s advice and drop the whole idea of amor fati, because it is only getting in the way of what he really means by willing the event. Deleuze avoids the fatalist implication only by saying that we should love not whatever happens, but rather the event that transpires in what happens, a distinction that completely transforms the Nietzschean theory to the point of near unrecognizability. See The Logic of Sense, p. 149,

7. “Nothing more can be said, and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one’s own events, and thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth, and break with one’s carnal birth—to become the offspring of one’s events and not of one’s actions, for the action is itself produced by the offspring of the event” (The Logic of Sense, pp. 149–50). Deleuze, in short, every bit as much as any evangelical Christian, wants to be “born again.” And who does not? Who would not want a chance to make another start, to have one more birth, and this time around to glow with all “the splendor and magnificence of the event,” with a divine splendor, having taken on a divine glow!

8. In The Logic of Sense the event is artfully cast as an irreducible irreality, in a certain dialogue with Husserl (pp. 96–99), or as an “absolute nature,” in a surprising dialogue with Avicenna (p. 34). Either way, the event cannot be reduced to any of its mundane appearances and is allowed to circulate freely in a joyous indifference both to the existential sphere, where it is realized under the conditions of individuality, and to the logical sphere, where it is expressed under the conditions of universality.

9. That is the force of Derrida’s distinction between the pure messianic that haunts the historical messianisms like a ghost. The same cause is promoted by Badiou’s work of showing the Pauline proportions of the event, where “God is not partial” and the event is not restricted to a particular group specifically set apart by a privileged ethnicity, social status, or gender. The event is available to each one in his or her singularity—there there is neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, free man nor slave. The “universality” here is only superficially incompatible with the singularity; the singularity is the universality, indeed, the only possible form the universality can take, constituting what Derrida calls the “universality of singularity.” For, by taking individuals in their singularity, we have subtracted not the regionalizing and particularizing characteristics of the individual, which is impossible and undesirable, but any arbitrary privilege attached thereto, any partiality of treatment, in order to inscribe around each one, each singularity (tout autre), a zone of absolute respect, just in virtue of this very singularity, which is very singular (est tout autre). The universality of singularity is a patch quilt universality, a rainbow coalition.

10. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

11. For the most part, in Derrida’s earlier writings theology tended to mean the very name of the transcendental signified, of everything that arrests the play of traces, even as Deleuze, in The Logic of Sense, could not think of things mean enough to say about theology, which seemed to him to be the very name of the Sedentary, the Reactionary, the sleepy drift of dogmatism that tries to close off the event (pp. 72–73, 103), to which a good deal of the history of theology bears witness. Only once did it hit Deleuze, in the essay on Klossowski the editors added in the appendix, that “it is our epoch”—let us say, these postmodern times in which we have discovered the potency of the event—“which has discovered theology.” Deleuze was being as sassy as usual when he said this. He had in mind what he called a “structure,” a “form which may be filled with beliefs,” which he described thus: “Theology is the science of nonexistent entities, the manner in which these entities—divine or anti-divine, Christ or Anti-Christ—animate language and make for it this glorious body which is divided into disjunctions.” (p. 281). I am taking Deleuze at his word and, without being drawn into everything that Deleuze finds in Klossowski, and I accept that text as recognition enough that theology provides a shelter for the event, a place to cultivate its force and nurture its fire.

12. In Being and Time, §7c, Heidegger says that potency is higher than actuality.

13. With Tillich, I displace the notion of God as a summum ens or an ens omnipotens who can intervene in the course of natural events, as supernaturalism; but I also displace the notion of God as the Being of beings, or ground of Being as ontologism, and I locate the properly deconstructive or postmodern element of radical theology in God, or rather the event that transpires in the name of God, taken as the claim made upon us unconditionally but without force, physical or metaphysical, ontical or ontological. That might be a called a “death of God” theology but, for the reasons I give below, I take that to be a misleading description.

14. Badiou, Ethics, 47.

15. In a kind of postmodern analogy to Tillich’s point that religion has to do with an ultimate concern, let us say here that it has to do with an irreducible or even unconditional desire, as opposed to our more proximate and quotidian desires. We cannot produce a final formulation of our desire, but that is not bad news, for it gives rise to an incessant and productive stream of provisional formulations of what we desire, which is what Tillich meant by symbolic. These formulations are cut to fit the needs of what Heidegger called the factical situation in which we find ourselves, which is why these formulations are “hermeneutical,” albeit with a hermeneutics that requires radicalization. Deleuze himself touched upon one of the most famous of such formulations of our desire—the desire for a new birth—when he spoke of “becom[ing] the offspring of one’s own events, and thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with one’s carnal birth” (The Logic of Sense, pp. 149–50). Whether he appreciates it or not, Deleuze here drifts appreciably close to Paul’s theology of grace: we have put off the body of death, guilt, and transgression and made the transition to a new life, from the flesh to the Spirit, from the old creation to a new creation, from the old being to the new being, or, with a slightly postmodern twist, from the economy to the crowned anarchy of the gift, of grace.

16. To be sure, inasmuch as the “New Testament” is a vintage example of a “text,” a pastiche woven from multiple authors and redactors with multiple theologies in different churches transcribed by not always neutral scribes, I am prepared to concede that this thesis is frequently enough contradicted by the opposing thesis, by a good deal of bravado about the mighty power of God.

17. It is also worth noting that the entire passage begins with a citation of Isaiah 29:14, in which the prophet has God say: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise.” If we recall that “destroy” (apolo) was rendered into Latin in the vulgate by destruere, which was picked up by Luther in the Heidelberg disputations, who spoke of a destructio of pagan philosophy (Aristotle’s metaphysics), which was then passed on to Heidegger, who spoke of a Destruktion of the history of metaphysics, which was translated by Derrida as déconstruction, then we might offer the following translation of this passage from Isaiah: “I will deconstruct the metaphysics of presence of the philosophers, says the Lord God.” By which the sacred authors certainly meant, on my view, I will release the event these philosophers mean to prevent. Let my events go!

18. On the orthodox telling, this death was the embodiment par excellence of divine love and divine freedom, an act of supremely free identification with the human condition, made in sacrificial payment for the sins of the world. Like a lot of other writers today, I am not edified by the spectacle of a bloody sacrifice made for any reason, by anybody to anybody, and I am even less edified by the bloody sacrifice of the Divine Son to the Divine Father. I find the very idea of blood sacrifice primitive and the idea of a father requiring or being satisfied by such a sacrifice of his son to be morally repugnant. Of course, on my terms, this entire discourse is symbolic, but symbols are important. One should avoid a symbolic description of the scene of Jesus’s execution rooted in an excess of patriarchal violence and a violent masculine imaginary.

19. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Derrida distinguishes the law from justice by saying that bad laws have force but lack justice, while justice of itself has no force but lays claim to us unconditionally. On this Derridean schema, God is more like justice than the law. See Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” trans. Mary Quantaince, in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–69.

20. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 148.

21. That is, of course, an almost irresistible way to imagine the event. Still, it is possible to cooperate with the irresistible forces of imagination without being deceived by them. That is what we call literature—the willing suspension of disbelief—or scripture, Sacred or not so sacred. But it is in the end a mystification to treat these figures and images literally—even a dangerous mystification—if the result is to get us in the habit of depending upon a bail out by this divine superbeing at critical moments when things threaten to go wrong. The name of God is the name of an unconditional claim, a call and an address, but it is not the name of a superhero, be he (sic!) cosmological or metereological, historical or physiological, coming over the hill in the nick of time to bail us out.

22. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1885), p. 6.

23. This exclusivism is a tendency of monotheism itself, which is why it is necessary to offer a deconstructive reading of the “chosen people” of the sort that Levinas gives, according to whom being chosen is a structure of the ethical subject as such, not simply the Jews, where one is chosen, called upon, by the address of the other, not a sectarian God.

24. See note 13 above.

25. Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 80.

26. I have almost found this phrase in Vattimo, who seeks “the most radical version of hermeneutical philosophy.” Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 49. His telling of hermeneutics is more Heideggerian, mine more Derridean. He adapts Heidegger’s history of Being by saying that in it Being “weakens” from “structure” to “event, ” from metaphysics as delivering the objective structure of reality into a history of “interpretations” of Being. The strong thought of metaphysics is thinned out or attenuated into the realization that we have to do only with certain “sendings” of Being in which Being presents a certain face to us, which we “interpret.”

27. Jeffrey W. Robbins, “Weak Theology,” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 5, no. 2 (April 2004) (www.jcrt.org); and Ulrich Engel, O.P., “Religion and Violence: Plea for a Weak Theology in tempore belli,” New Blackfriars 82 (2001): 558–60. Engel argues that, in view of the demands of religious tolerance, the great monotheisms must weaken their strong dogmatic traditions in favor of a weak and pacific theology.

28. I have also had in mind Walter Benjamin’s idea of a “weak Messianic power,” of a Messiah turned toward the past, the dead and forgotten, where we ourselves in the present occupy the messianic position, as the ones whom the dead were waiting for to redeem their unjust suffering. We are impotent to change the past—we cannot raise the dead from their graves—while the “messianic force” lies in the remembrance, the recollection, the thinking on that crosses over into devotion, Andenken/Andacht, like a prayer for the dead whose death was violent or unjust. While we cannot alter their death, we can by recalling it find ourselves summoned to promote a more just future, so that we are responsible not only for the dead but for the future, for the children. See Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of History,” no. 9, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: 1938–40, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 4:389–400. What Johann Baptist Metz—under the influence of Benjamin—called the “dangerous memories of suffering,” of the unjust death of Jesus, of unjust suffering everywhere.

29. Vattimo, After Christianity, pp. 24, 72.

30. I don’t quite understand Vattimo’s one criticism of Altizer and the 1960s school—that they did not view secularization as a positive affirmation of divinity based on the Incarnation. Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 37.

32. Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, The Future of Religion, ed. Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 53.

33. Fundamentalist literalism is not only a form of intellectual suicide and a hermeneutical mistake; politically, it results in mutual intolerance and violence. The West is true to itself and true to the Gospel only insofar as it renounces imperialism and practices political hospitality, both within its own borders with regard to immigrants from the third world and in international relations. “Christianity” does not mean a particular sect but cosmopolitan political compassion and national and international hospitality.

34. Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 69.

35. Ibid., pp. 77–79.

37. Jacques Derrida, Given Time, vol. 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 101, n. 18.

38. Vattimo is making a consciously “Christian decision,” he says, which separates him from Levinas and Derrida, who belong to “first stage” religion (of the Father). I don’t see what improvement is made by saying that it would only be a “dogmatic hardening” of religion that would oppose Judaism and Christianity, as this opposition seems to me to go to the essence of the distinction between strong and weak theology: Christianity “weakens” by de-Judaizing. Vattimo, After Christianity, pp. 37–38.

40. Vattimo, Belief, pp. 83–84.

42. See John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 108–19 (especially 112–13).

1. See Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 17.

2. Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, ed. Santiago Zabala, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

1. See Gregg Lambert, “Against Religion (Without ‘Religion’): A New Rationalist Reply to John Caputo’s On Religion,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 5, no. 2 (April 2004): 20–36. See also Caputo’s response to Lambert, “Love Among the Deconstructibles: A Response to Gregg Lambert,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 5, no. 2 (April 2004): 37–57.

2. See Charles Winquist, “Postmodern Secular Theology,” in The Surface of the Deep (Aurora, CO: Davies, 2003), pp. 199–212.

1. Which reminds me: the subtitle of my first book, The Death of God, was deliberately truncated by my editor, a noted literary critic, and changed from “a cultural analysis” to “the culture of our post-Christian era.” Only later did I learn from a reputed French philosopher that analysis, the word expunged, is precisely the term by which ancient Greeks would have rendered what we were beginning to call deconstruction.