The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion)

Customer Reviews

John Brooks 2008-05-05

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

I recently read the very lengthy Introduction to religious-philosophy teacher John Caputo's The Weakness of God. I appreciate the meatiness of the Introduction, since it laid out the fundamentals of where Caputo was going.

Caputo rejects the teaching that God is sovereign over all things. He makes it explicit that he rejects any such concept of God. The rest of the book is a radical re-definition of the word "God". The theme of the book is that there is no strong God, and that any sort of "strong" theology -- a theology that affirms God's sovereignty. omnipotence, or omniscience -- is wrong.

Caputo does not prove his thesis. There is no anchor tying the thesis down to anything real. Like all postmodern philosophers, he undermines his own writings when he denies any close ties between words and the objective realities that those words signify. He denies the existence of the referent. He goes to great length to claim (with no proof), that the word "God" is not the same as that which he claims it represents --something he calls The Event.

But this denial of an unbreakable connection between words and reality is fatal to his own book! The same break with reality between words and referents applies to the words Caputo himself writes. Caputo in principle denies any sufficient harmony between reality and his own typed words on the printed page for Caputo to carry meaning.

His few quotes from Derrida helped me understand why so many other European philosophers regard Derrida as a word juggler not to be taken seriously by serious thinkers.

If you also feel that words ought to represent something real, then much of the Introduction is gibberish. The author affirms double negatives, denies his own assertions, asserts his own denials, and yet the book is written using the rules of traditional logic and grammar, and is even set out in orderly, numbered lists. In this way it is self-refuting from the first page.

I believe that words need to be treated as having meaning, if one is honest, and truly wants to communicate clearly with others. I also reject the idea that we can say whatever we want about God and just assume that others are obligated to agree with us; just as we are not free to make up facts about Grover Cleveland, the Yankees baseball team, or cellular regeneration and demand that others let us off the hook as far as factual accuracy is concerned. For these reasons, I regard Dr. Caputo's book as very silly.

A Dash of Devilish Derring-Do from Derrida

Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE 2008-04-13

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

There is a marked difference between this lengthy volume and the short essay On Religion that John Caputo published in the Thinking in Action series. The former presupposed no prior knowledge of French philosophical debates or familiarity with the rhetoric of deconstruction. It appealed to all kinds of religious creeds or political proclivities, and offered a "big tent" religion where Neo-evangelicals as well as liberal Christians could find their place, along with non-believers and agnostics. And it drew its inspiration from popular culture sources as well as sacred texts to suggest the precepts of a "religion without religion" that did not offend anyone's creed or beliefs.

The Weakness of God takes up similar themes and ideas, but is much more narrow in its focus and in its appeal. Despite its claim that the kingdom of God welcomes outsiders and even drags people off the streets to the wedding banquet, there is definitely an insider flavor in this text written with an audience of fellow philosophers and social critics in mind. Readers who are not already members of the deconstructionist club will feel like the odd guest who cannot penetrate the private jokes and allusive references exchanged at the table. Some will even take offense at the quips and paradoxes that John Caputo offers, poking fun at the "long-robed ecclesiastical apparatchiks" or stating boldly that the first to enter the kingdom of God will be "gays and lesbians, illegal immigrants, unwed mothers, the HIV-positive, drug addicts, prisoners, and, after 9/11, Arabs." Clearly the book was not written to appeal to the Christian right.

I nonetheless find it a persuasive tract, especially for people of good faith who would like to believe but who always find their intellect getting in the way. In The Weakness of God, you won't find references to God as an almighty being with the power to intervene upon natural processes--what the author labels "strong theology", or the metaphysics of omnipotence, of miracles and divine interventions. Nor will you find any revelations about an afterlife that people would enter after they die (as Caputo notes, "we suffer from a scarcity of reliable reports from the other side"). Even on the issue of whether God exists as an identifiable entity, the author offers no final opinion, leaving the reader to find out by himself. As Caputo states, "I have not been authorized from on high to settle that venerable debate". And as Kierkegaard remarked, "if God were a giant green bird, and regularly and conspicuously appeared thus in the town square, there would be much less skepticism about him, but also less passionate faith."

For Caputo's faith is indeed passionate, and his weak theology should not be confused with a lack of enthusiasm or a disengagement from the divine call. John Caputo is not someone who "believes that he believes", as his fellow philosopher Gianni Vattimo puts it, he believes vehemently, and he is always praying and weeping for the coming of the kingdom. There is no contradiction between his passion for Christ and his lifelong engagement with the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher with a Jewish background who said of himself that he "rightly passes for an atheist." On the contrary, Caputo suggests that theologians could use "a dash of devilish derring-do from Derrida", and proposes, "in imitation of the Master who dined with sinners, to invite the theologians to sit down to table with deconstruction and other disreputable French sinners".

The consequence is that Caputo's theology of the event strongly reflects contemporary debates among French philosophers, and a familiarity with the works of Derrida, Levinas, Deleuze, Marion, and others, is a prerequisite to penetrate the intricacies of this book. If there were a separate denomination for deconstructionists, then John Caputo would be its vicar. The kingdom of God that he calls for, a "kingdom without sovereignty" where the only rule "is the rule of the unruly, of the weak and foolish", can only be compared to the annual meeting of the Cultural Studies Association. But his pursuit of what Derrida calls the "weak force of the unconditional that lack sovereignty" can also claim the authority of the Apostle, as the whole book explores the paradoxical consequences of Paul's proclamation about the "weakness of God" in 1 Cor. 1:29.

As the author points out, The Weakness of God could very well have been published in Slavoj Zizek's Short Circuits collection, were it not for the Slovenian editor's despise for "weak thinking" and deconstructionist talk. Caputo's idea is "to stop thinking about God as a massive ontological power line that provides power to the world, and instead start thinking of something that short-circuits such power and provides a provocation to the world that is otherwise than power." He produces a series of short circuits between canonical texts and modern writings, between the Book of Books and the cultural studies' curriculum. Here the Genesis narrative of creation is crossed by Babylonian myths as recorded by feminist scholar Catherine Keller, the wedding feast of Matt. 22:1-14 is paralleled with the maddest hatter's party imagined by Lewis Carroll (as read by Deleuze), the resurrection of Lazarus is read along the miracle of the child in Levinas' Totality and Infinity, and there is a strong similarity between the kingdom of God and the rule of the gift, of justice, of hospitality, and of forgiveness that form the ethico-political horizon of deconstruction.

For John Caputo, the act of healing a man on the Sabbath is an act of deconstruction. The title of his latest essay suggests a line for a bumper sticker that his readers may wish to use: What Would Jesus Deconstruct?

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a book that comes just in the nick of time

Indiana University Press

John D. Caputo

5 reviews

release date: 2006-04-07

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Product Description

Applying an ever more radical hermeneutics (including Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, Derridian deconstruction, and feminism), John D. Caputo breaks down the name of God in this irrepressible book. Instead of looking at God as merely a name, Caputo views it as an event, or what the name conjures or promises in the future. For Caputo, the event exposes God as weak, unstable, and barely functional. While this view of God flies in the face of most religions and philosophies, it also puts up a serious challenge to fundamental tenets of theology and ontology. Along the way, Caputo's readings of the "New Testament", especially of Paul's view of the Kingdom of God, help to support the "weak force" theory. This penetrating work cuts to the core of issues and questions - What is the nature of God? What is the nature of being? What is the relationship between God and being? What is the meaning of forgiveness, faith, piety, or transcendence? - that define the terrain of contemporary philosophy of religion.