Preamble:
I wrote
this paper for Loren Wilkinson’s Kenosis,
Creation, and Culture seminar this past fall. It assumes an understanding
of kenosis, a term meaning emptying,
lowering, or abdication, used by Paul in his letter to the Philippians to
describe the incarnation. My goal in the paper was to introduce the thought of
John D. Caputo to the class as a conversation partner whose work and ideas I
thought would assist us in thinking through a kenotic lens. In this paper I attempt to parallel stylistically
Caputo’s own progression of thought and style; to that end I have attempted to
develop the style and tone throughout. Caputo’s academic career has progressed from
classical scholarly endeavours to his pioneering of “weak theology,” which he
communicates through theopoetics. His writing has grown increasingly rhapsodic
and poetic, especially in his latest works The
Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event and The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps, wherein he plays fast
and loose with language and theological presuppositions. As such, my paper is written differently than a typical academic
paper. I am not going to pin down and define words in an established manner.
Instead, I will use the slipperiness of language to my advantage; recognizing
that within each word there is a surplus of meaning. This surplus causes definitions to remain
somewhat loose, and in this looseness a world of possibilities is opened up.
Throughout this paper I am embracing this world as a space in which to dwell. As
a listener or reader it is okay to be confused – it is part of the point. The
confusion is not to obscure intentionally, but to provide a new space in which
to think new thoughts. So I invite you to follow me through the paper, as it grows
increasingly rhapsodic, wandering down a path that might not, at first glance,
appear to be a fruitful one.
Word, words, and the Emptying Thereof:
Caputo as Exploratory Theologian
A
W/word contains a call, a haunt, a spook that lures toward the event within,
perhaps. Grasping the previous sentence requires an understanding of the theological
setting and intellectual space of John D. Caputo, the founder of “weak
theology.” In order to grasp these ideas one must cover a significant amount of
cerebral landscape, which will enable a parallel to be drawn between kenotic theology and Caputo’s weak
theology. Through a historical survey of influential ideas, the landscape
begins to take the shape of continental philosophy. Details of the vegetation
emerge in a distinction between the forest and trees through an interaction
with semiotics and the use of language. Entering the thought of Caputo himself,
deconstruction by way of a detour through two French thinkers uproots and
alters the forest in such a way as to reveal parallel paths: kenotic and weak. Caputo continues down
the spookier path of weak theology, engaging the dangers along the way. This
path includes tiptoeing through the valley of the “Death of God” to emerge on
the other side only to find that God does not exist, so much as God insists.
The landscapes, and the journey within it, lead Caputo out into an open plateau
of theopoetics and a theology of “perhaps.” This plateau provides Evangelical kenotic thinkers with some previously
undiscovered resources, and various paths to consider.
Caputo,
a Roman Catholic from Philadelphia, writes penetrating postmodern theology. He
is a continental philosopher, writing American continental philosophical
theology[1]
influenced by the French philosophical tradition of the late twentieth century.
Three elements define Caputo’s theology as postmodern. First, the hermeneutical
turn, following Martin Heidegger, is the realization that “[w]e ‘always
already’ are the beings that we are,” or in Donna Haraway’s words, he takes
seriously the situated nature of all knowledges.[2]
Second, the linguistic turn is that “[t]here is no such thing as a pure,
private, pre-linguistic sphere.” [3]
Therefore, progress occurs through creating new, more complex language that
transforms previous ideas. Third, the revolutionary turn, following Thomas
Kuhn, is an acknowledgement that “paradigm shifts” better account for the progression
of ideas than does linear development, necessitating “revolutions” to break dominant
paradigms.[4]
Caputo’s postmodern incorporation of these three turns makes his thought
innovative, even while being foreshadowed by key historical thinkers.
G. W. F.
Hegel, for Caputo, begins the end of the Enlightenment. Caputo explains it this
way,
[René] Descartes labored under a narrowly
ahistorical and purely mathematical idea of reason; [Immanuel] Kant shrunk
reason down to formal consistency and universality; and the British John Locke
and David Hume confined reason to its blunter empirical applications. Against
all this, Hegel showed that reason unfolds and develops in time, passing
through several forms (Gestaltungen),
and that it is realised in different ways, in different times and places.[5]
The importance of time, flux,
change, and history, correspond with Caputo’s appreciation of situated thought.
Caputo, however, is no classical Hegelian. Søren Kierkegaard’s stinging,
satirical, and incisive critiques of Hegel’s interpretation of the Christian tradition
undergird much of Caputo’s thought. Kierkegaard and Caputo see it as a
laughable concept that the entire mystery of the Christian tradition was made
plain by a Hegelian metaphysic.[6]
Therefore, rather than achieving synthesis Caputo’s dialectic attempts to split
down the middle, and in so doing resembles Kierkegaard’s unresolved dialectic.
Caputo applies
his dialectic to language itself, with the assistance of Paul Ricoeur. Prior to
the linguistic turn, individuals may have unthinkingly affirmed that religious words
correspond with the Real. However, the hermeneutics of Ricoeur raise the
awareness that a text does not have a single fixed meaning.[7]
A text may have a meaning that one can approximate as the original, but a text
also has a life beyond this first meaning. A rich text will have a subsequent
history, through which it will continue to gain meaning.[8]
To explore this meaning, Ricoeur turns to the symbolic nature of texts: “All
symbolic language is a language which says something other than what it seems
to say, and by its double meaning, releases meaning, releases signification.”[9]
The meaning is then found within the symbol, which is not only limited to
written texts; rather the “entirety of human existence is a text to be read.”[10]
After this linguistic moment, two paths diverge, two ways of speaking.
One can, like Ricoeur, empty words of direct relation to the Real, find
multiple meanings, and follow the path of semiotics. Alternatively, one can
attach epistemic degrees of certitude to words, concepts, and the relation
between the word and the Real.[11]
Caputo follows the first path, while process theologians, as an example, tend
to follow the second.[12]
Caputo’s
own intellectual development occurred in three major movements. His academic
career began with “a more scientific, a more exegetical interpretation of the
relationship between Heidegger and the religious tradition.”[13]
Then in Radical Hermeneutics, he
found his own voice.[14]
The book moves from the “Repetition and the Genesis of Hermeneutics” in
Kierkegaard, Edmond Husserl, and Heidegger through “Deconstruction and the
Radicalization of Hermeneutics” in Jacques Derrida, concluding with a proposal
of postmetaphysical rationality and an openness to mystery. Caputo, taking on
his own project, distinctly entered his third phase in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion,
and his subsequent theological treatise The
Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, in which religious motifs become
prominent spaces for postmetaphysical philosophy to play.[15]
This playing occurs in the space opened up between signifiers such as
sing/ring/king, in what Derrida calls différance,
signalling a break from the structuralist hegemony of closed formalizable
systems.[16]
Caputo utilizes
postmetaphysical thought to retain the right to ask any question.[17]
Metaphysics, from Caputo’s point of view, prevents such a radicalization of
thought, as one inevitably will be pushed “back to the fold of metaphysics.”[18]
In the space of postmetaphysical thought, one “cultivates an acute sense of the
contingency of all social, historical, [and] linguistic structures.” This
“radical” sense of contingency, occurring in the process of being unwrapped,
opens one up to the risk of being exposed to the event harboured within each
circumstance, word, and idea.[19]
These weak events, I propose, are events haunted by kenotic thought.
An
event, for Caputo, does not exist (in
an onto-theo-logical state); events insist.[20]
Therefore, to describe an event is an elusive task, for events are “what we
cannot see coming,” and they “are not what happens but what is going on in what happens.”[21]
The event is “something je ne sais quoi,
something going on in what I desire.”[22]
To get to this unknowable X, Caputo makes use of a form of Derridean deconstruction.
Caputo frames deconstruction in the positive: “deconstruction must not be
mistaken as something destructive or merely skeptical because at its heart
deconstruction arises not from negation but from a deeper affirmation of
something, I know not what, from a faith (foi)
in an event, heeding a call, an exigency, a summons, an injunction, and
imperative.”[23] It
is the weak force of a call.
In
Derridean deconstruction Caputo sees a biblical resonance. Deconstruction
scoffs at universals and their hegemonic oppression; in a similar fashion the
biblical tradition undermines absolutization through the upholding of the
orphan and the alien.[24]
Here in the undermining of universals, power, and strong forces, one can draw
the connection between kenotic thought
and Caputo’s weak theology. As stated, the parallel occurs through Derrida, but
in order to understand Derrida a detour through the thought of Emmanuel Levinas
is helpful. Derrida’s relationship to Levinas’s thought became clearer in late 1980s,
when Derrida began writing about more patently religious ideas such as gift and
forgiveness.[25]
Levinas
enables Derrida, and subsequently Caputo, to use kenotic thought without affirming a metaphysic or the cosmology
implied in Paul’s use of the word kenosis
in Philippians 2:7. Levinas, in his essay “Judaism and Kenosis,” argues
that the ramifications (or traits) of kenotic
thought exist within Judaism without needing an incarnation.[26]
Levinas states, “[t]erms evoking Divine Majesty and loftiness are often
followed or preceded by those describing a God bending down to look at human
misery or inhabiting that misery.”[27]
Levinas goes even further in saying “there is an inseparable bond between God’s
descent and his elevation.”[28]
It is a bond necessarily manifested in God’s affinity in suffering.[29]
Levinas’s
kenotic thought plays out in Caputo’s
“hieranarche,” the holy disturbance
and disarray that occurs when exposed to the event that is harboured within the
name of the Kingdom of God. Levinas develops his kenotic ideas through the parable “The Moon that makes itself
little.”[30] It
is a parable of Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi that includes a discussion between the
Moon and the Creator, which explains why, of the two lights created in Genesis
1:16, one had to be lesser and the other greater. The Moon makes the astute
observation that two kings cannot wear the same crown; the Creator’s reply is
that this is indeed the case and since the Moon recognized this incompatibility
of equals, the Moon should make itself smaller. This “discussion” occurs in
between the first part of the verse, where the two lights are created, and the
second part where they are distinguished as greater and lesser. Rabbi Shimon
ben Pazi then connects this declaration of God to the Moon to a textual variant
in Numbers 28:15, a variant that can render the verse as a pronouncement that
an offering needs to be offered as “a sin-offering on behalf of the Eternal.”
When read this way, an offering on behalf of God is offered to make amends to
the Moon because the Moon was told to become lesser. It is a complete
“disordering” of the hierarchy, which Levinas then parallels with kenosis, stating “[h]ierarchy is
necessary, but I can already see that it is necessarily unjust.”[31]
The story, for Levinas, reveals a “glorious lowering” – that is a scandal to
reason – and necessarily confuses the ontology of being when viewed as hierarchical.
Caputo, not affirming kenosis and its
metaphysical or ontological hierarchy from Philippians 2:6–11, begins from the
end-point of a Levinasian kenotic
understanding where the ontological hierarchy is already undermined. Therefore,
one can understand Caputo’s weak theology as being analogous, mutatis mutandis, to Sarah Coakley’s
third way of utilizing the term kenosis
– that being when the term and concept of kenosis
are useful in paradigmatic or illustrative ways when addressing God’s relation
to the world.[32]
Instead
of kenotic, Caputo views his theology
as “a theology of the cross.”[33]
What occurred on the cross, in Caputo’s view, was not a veiled omnipotent power,
but a weak power writ large. Therefore, he thinks Slavoj Žižek is only
half-right to say the perversion of Christianity is that through the cross
humanity learns that there is no Big Other. The other half is that in this
abandonment lies the weak force of God.[34]
Therefore, Caputo takes seriously texts like:
For God’s foolishness is wiser than human
wisdom,
and God’s weakness is stronger than human
strength...
But God chose what is weak in the world to shame
the strong;
God chose what is low and despised [ta agene] in the world,
Things that are not [ta me onta],
To reduce to nothing things that are [ta onta].
(1 Cor. 1:25, 27–28 )[35]
The power of God, in light of such
texts, is redefined to be an unconditional promise without overwhelming force.[36]
The promise, or event that calls from within the name of God, is the
possibility of the impossible.[37]
It is a call into the future, a call to realize what was previously considered
impossible.[38] Following
Derrida, such a conception enables the possibility of hope, for “[h]ope is hope
only when it is not permitted.”[39]
In other words, to hope is to hope against hope for the impossible![40]
Searching
for the impossible, Caputo often “plays” with French, Greek, and Latin words in
the style of the French linguistic deconstructionalists, shedding the excess to
expose the event within. It is a language of without – or paralleling kenotic
thought, it is an empty language – a language that Caputo describes as silence:
“Silence is language, but it is language without
language.”[41]
Yet, silence “is not to be taken as a simple or absolute silence, an escape
from language into the Mystical Secret, a mystical hors-texte, but rather as a linguistic operation transpiring in the
inner chambers and most secret resources of textuality and écriture.”[42]
It is a silence that cuts! Caputo can then read Meister Eckhart’s prayer, “God
rid me of God,” as a prayer that splits between the binary of “Being” and
“Nothing”[43] –
a dangerous prayer that “tears”[44]
toward the harboured event.
This dangerous “tear” attempts to cut between faith and
reason, not wanting to choose. Yet, the danger is not only to beliefs, but also
to oneself, as Ricoeur’s linguistic turn was also an existential one. “That is
to say, the dialogue of the believer and the atheist is not—anymore—a dialogue
with the other, but a dialogue with oneself.”[45]
This existential turn blends kenosis and
semiotics in the work of “Christian Atheists,” who have grappled with the
ramifications of this turn. “Whether it is Žižek’s double kenosis, Caputo’s
highest contradiction, or [Peter] Rollins’s a/theistic approach, there is
surely a God that is beyond the theist and the atheist, the knowable and the
unknowable, the past and the future, and so on, until all dyadic forms have been
exhausted.”[46] This
turn is a type of “Death of God” theology, yet an important distinction lies
between Caputo/Žižek/Rollins and “Death of God” more classically articulated by
Thomas J. J. Altizer/Mark Taylor. The former may all be described as “rightly passing”
as both atheist and Christian. The latter, however, use a Hegelian metaphysic
or “dissolve” to speak of God’s disappearance into the world without remainder as
occurring through “kenosis as a
zero-sum game in which the transfer of being is made at the expense of the
‘religion of the father’ and to the advantage of his local incarnation.”[47]
Into this context, Caputo offers the adverb “perhaps” and its negation “perhaps
not.”[48]
This weak adverbial duality assists in the weakening of binaries. Catherine Keller
sees such movements as positive: “The more theology absorbs the methods of
deconstruction and pluralism, the more the opposition between secularism and
religion can itself be deconstructed.”[49] Such a
movement loosens the grip of absolutism within both philosophy and theology.
Caputo offers kenotic
thinkers the gift of his theopoetics, in that it conveys a different
understanding of God than previous languages laden with hierarchy.[50]
The usefulness of the weak verbs and adverbs of “insistence,” “call,” “haunt,”
and “perhaps” unfold a horizon of new conceptions with which to speak of the
event harboured in the name of God or even a re-imbibed metaphysical God,
perhaps.
Theopoetics
has the potential for a wide range of applications. For example, considering
politics Caputo states, “a reformation of political thought would require not
ridding ourselves of theology but rather reexamining our theological
presuppositions and learning to think about theology differently, which means
to think about God otherwise, to reimagine God.”[51]
This is a future about which Caputo muses, “[w]hat would it be like were there a politics of
and for the children, who are the future; a politics not of sovereignty, of
top-down power, but a politics that builds from the bottom up, where ta me onta (I Cor 1:28) enjoy pride of
place and a special privilege?”[52] In such
a vision, “the weakness of God is not the last word but the first, coming as a
call or provocation that solicits our response, our witness to the call, which
is what comes next, like an ‘amen’ or a second yes.”[53] This is
a politics of a time oriented to the future, one that remembers, while looking forward
to heal.[54] “Viens, oui, oui.”[55]
Furthermore,
a kenotic, or weak, theology perhaps opens
up space for a more humble engagement with the other. Consider, as Caputo does,
“Derrida’s famous saying that he ‘rightly passes’ for an atheist, meaning that
atheism is a belief which must be weakened and made porous so as not to close
off the underlying event of faith.”[56] If such
a notion were able to permeate the strong theologies of confessional
congregations perhaps it would enable Evangelicalism to be spooked by the event
in the other in such a way as to
engage more humbly and offer hospitality to all of creation.[57]
Perhaps
the “other” engaged by weak, or kenotic,
theology is method itself. In the reading of all reality as symbol, along with
Ricoeur, might one not also seek the event harboured within method itself? If
so, would not a method that followed kenosis
be more in line with the power of weakness that shames the strong? Could one’s
method be shaped without enacting a “power over” through epistemic certitude,
embodying a ta me onta instead of a ta onta epistemology? Would not a weak
method that haunts and calls look very different from realism, or even critical
realism? Perhaps.
Caputo
treads the murky waters of postmodern religious thought, situated in his own
particular moment with the river of his tradition behind him. It is from these
depths he charts out a provocative philosophical theology, a voyage upon which
one may choose to embark. These waters appear to have navigational challenges
at every turn; however, the course appears to parallel, at least in some
respects, the kenotic map previously
explored in the Christian tradition. This congruency does not disperse the dangers,
yet it appears to hold promise, perhaps. Like every great expedition, Caputo embarks/concludes
with a prayer:[58]
I am praying not to be lost, praying because I am
already lost, praying not to get any more lost than I already am, praying that
my prayer does not make things worse. I am trying to think while praying, to
pray while thinking, praying like mad – for theology, for theology’s truth, for
the event.[59]
By Silas Krabbe
Bibliography
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I–IV. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010.
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More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are. Bloomington, IN:
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Philip. “Religion and Science.” Video Lecture. Mission Soulutions.
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Terms in Process and Realilty. Claremont, CA: P & F Press, 2008.
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Tripp. John Caputo on the Journey from Radical Hermeneutics to the Weakness
of God [Barrel Aged]. Podcast. Homebrewed Christianity. Accessed October
15, 2013.
http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2013/10/02/john-caputo-on-the-journey-form-radical-hermenutics-to-the-weakness-of-god-barrel-aged/.
Kennel,
Maxwell. “The Highest Contradiction: The Dyadic Form of St. Paul Among the
Philosophers.” The Other Journal, October 19, 2010.
http://theotherjournal.com/2010/10/19/the-highest-contradiction-the-dyadic-form-of-st-paul-among-the-philosophers/.
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Emmanuel. In The Time of The Nations. Translated by Michael B. Smith.
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Putt,
B. Keith. “What Do I Love When I Love My God?: An Interview with John D.
Caputo.” In Religion With/Out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D.
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28 (1973): 203–224.
[1] Caputo’s discourse, philosophical
theology, is mainly governed by philosophy as the limiter and definer of the
discourse, contrasting theological philosophy; though Caputo argues, the two
are never truly distinct. John D. Caputo, Philosophy and
Theology (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006), 44.
[7] Caputo relies more heavily on Jacques Derrida
and Heidegger than he does on Hans-Georg Gadamer or Ricoeur, as he does not see
them as being radical enough. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics:
Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1987), 5. However, for the purpose of this paper
Ricoeur can/will assist in understanding the linguistic turn to semiotics.
[8] Tripp Fuller, John Caputo on the
Journey from Radical Hermeneutics to the Weakness of God [Barrel Aged],
Podcast, Homebrewed Christianity, accessed October 15, 2013,
http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2013/10/02/john-caputo-on-the-journey-form-radical-hermenutics-to-the-weakness-of-god-barrel-aged/.
[9] Paul Ricoeur, “Two Essays By Paul
Ricoeur: The Critique of Religion and The Language of Faith,” trans. R. Bradley
DeFord, Union Seminary Quarterly Review 28, (1973): 220–221. The turn to linguistics is a
re-direction Ricoeur made while responding to the Masters of Suspicion: Karl
Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, who critiqued the origin, not
content, of the text.
[11] Philip Clayton, “Religion and Science,”
Video Lecture, Mission Soulutions, accessed October 25, 2013,
http://www.missionsoulutions.com/partners/homebrewed-christianity.
[12] Evangelicals have tended to ignore that
this linguistic turn has taken place and tend to want to say all things with
absolute certainty. When they do plunge into these waters with seriousness, they
tend to follow Thomas Reid and Scottish common sense realism. It is a strain of
thought currently being re-popularized by Reformed epistemologists.
[13] B. Keith Putt, “What Do I Love When I
Love My God?: An Interview with John D. Caputo,” in Religion With/Out
Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo, ed. James H. Olthuis
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 150.
[15] John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears
of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1997); John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of
the Event (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006).
[17] Derrida defined philosophy as “the right
to ask any question,” Caputo then applies the “right to ask any question” to
theology. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God:
A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 69;
Fuller, John Caputo on the Journey from Radical Hermeneutics to the Weakness
of God [Barrel Aged]. Before dismissing postmetaphysical
thought too quickly, Karl Barth is also “postmetaphysical” though for different
reasons. Oversimplifying, Barth attempts to do theology without philosophy or
metaphysic so that all action is from the side of God, whereas to impose a
metaphysic would necessitate putting human thought before Revelation. Caputo,
taking the other side, utilizes postmetaphysical thought to reflect back upon
humanity, to allow for a human way of speaking.
[19] Caputo, The Insistence of God, 63. “Radical” when used by Caputo is used in
this way of being radically exposed, rather than using “radical” etymologically
as getting back to the “root.”
[21] Ibid., 82–83. Thus, event spoke of by Caputo is
different from Barth’s event of revelation as a happening within space-time
that corresponds to an eternal decision in the will of God. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed.
Geoffrey William Bromiley and Thomas F Torrance (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson
Publishers, 2010), 2:262. Caputo’s event is also different from
event in process theology, in which event is occasions that make up stable
entities. John B Cobb, Whitehead Word Book: A
Glossary with Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Realilty
(Claremont, CA: P & F Press, 2008), 23.
[22] Caputo, The Insistence of God, 84. Events are always contained in, but not by their signifiers.
[23] Ibid., 73. Foi
(faith) is different from croyance
(beliefs). Croyance is the definitive
strong beliefs (credos), while foi is
more applicable to the event, especially in faith’s wishing the event to come.
Thus, one can be a croyance atheist,
but affirm the foi, thereby
undermining the binary.
[24] Fuller, John Caputo on the Journey
from Radical Hermeneutics to the Weakness of God [Barrel Aged].
[26] Emmanuel Lévinas, In The Time of The
Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: Continuum, 2007).
[27] Ibid., 101. “Thus, in verse 3 of Psalm 147, ‘He who healeth the broken in
heart, and bindeth up their wounds’ is the same one who, in the following
verse, ‘counteth the number of the stars, and giveth them all their names’” (102).
[29] Ibid., 116. Levinas, having previously rooted
ontology in the human, stating, “[t]he human is the possibility of a
being-for-the-other” (112), doubles the suffering of God in comparison to one’s
own. Since one must be-for-the-other, one does not pray for oneself. Rather,
“[o]ne prays for oneself with the intention of suspending the suffering of God,
who suffers in my suffering . . . who suffers both for man’s sin and for the
suffering of his atonement” (116).
[32] Sarah Coakley, “Kenosis: Theological
Meanings and Gender Connotations,” in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 193. The other two ways that kenosis is used, according to Coakley,
are Christological and Trinitarian.
[34] Ibid., 43. The Big Other is a god who works deus ex machina (God from the machine),
a God who is as a “device” that comes in and solves the protagonist’s problems
to resolve the conflict in a plot arch.
[41] John D. Caputo, More Radical
Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2000), 250.
[43] Ibid., 255.
[44] “Tears” can be read with a dual meaning,
since the “cut” toward we-know-not-what will involve the “cries” of those
engaged. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of
Jacques Derrida, 340.
[45] Ricoeur, “Two Essays By Paul Ricoeur: The
Critique of Religion and The Language of Faith,” 204.
[46] Maxwell Kennel, “The Highest
Contradiction: The Dyadic Form of St. Paul Among the Philosophers,” The
Other Journal, October 19, 2010,
http://theotherjournal.com/2010/10/19/the-highest-contradiction-the-dyadic-form-of-st-paul-among-the-philosophers/. These are various ways of discussing the
internal human duality between faith and doubt, faith and belief, or God and
the self. Specifically, kenosis plays
a role in Žižek’s understanding: “Žižek also reiterates the argument that he
presented in The Monstrosity of Christ for a “double kenotic”
dialectical understanding of God’s contradictory nature. Instead of seeing God
as the simple “unity of opposites” (as Caputo may have us do), Žižek suggests
that in God there is “dialectical relationship between the Universal
and the Particular” (45). Instead of seeing God as a “higher synthesis” of
the categories of the universal and the particular, Žižek proposes that double
kenosis is the proper way in which to apprehend the dialectical nature of God:
God is both self-alienated and alienated from humankind, and these two
alienations overlap. Žižek asks rhetorically whether “antagonism [is] inscribed
into the very heart of God, or is ‘Absolute’ the name for a contradiction
tearing apart the very unity of the All?””
[47] Putt, “Religion With/out Religion,” 158;
Caputo, The Insistence of God, 80, 272 n. 4; John D. Caputo, After
The Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 69.
[49] John D. Caputo and Catherine Keller,
“Theopoetic/Theopolitic,” Crosscurrents, Winter 2007, 109,
http://www.crosscurrents.org/Caputo0406.pdf (accessed October 18, 2013).
[50] Caputo, The Weakness of God, 210. Gift in Derrida and Aquinas is a giving
that can have no return. As such, receiving Caputo’s “gift” and taking it in a
direction he does not intend, such that it does not return to him may actually
be the best way to receive his “gift.” Caputo, The Insistence of God, 63. Theopoetics is the discursive shape of
radical theology. It uproots the logos
of old theology and its propensity toward binaries, in exchange for a poetics.
[58] This paper has attempted to parallel
stylistically Caputo’s own progression of thought and style. To that end I have
attempted to modify the style and tone throughout. As such, it is fitting to
close with a prayer, more so than a conclusion, as the insistence of the event
never concludes.
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