The Weakness of John Caputo

I'm going to do the questionable thing of weighing in before I've heard the podcast (it hasn't shown up in iTunes yet--what's going on? :). But just from the bit that you cited up above, what Westphal is calling 'thin soup' is the notion that our future hope is based only on the "logical possibility that the future will be better than the present" as opposed to a hope based upon a speech-acting God. In that sense,for me the contrast isn't really between having a 'humbly held hope' vs. 'dogmatic certainty' about the future, the contrast is between the different grounds of our humbly held hopes. Can we still have an open hope (not certainty) that a personal Creator is acting to bring about shalom? This would be my view, which is different from simply having hope that you can place logical probability bets on things generally getting better. But, does that last sentence even describe Caputo's view fairly? I haven't read him in depth. I did listen to a HBC interview with him where he seemed to be speaking pretty strongly against any kind of life after death, on the grounds that if there was life after death that would imply that God has some kind of power over death, and any kind of power attributed to God is Not Good (or at least totally inconsistent with God-as-weak-force), so we must acknowledge that God-as-weak-force doesn't have any kind of power over death. Therefore, we should find grace and beauty in the finite life we are given, but not hope for anything after, or beyond, that. And . . . that's a whole 'nother issue. But it does highlight the serious hesitations I have with Caputo. I love the quote you cited in the box above, but I'm not convinced we need a thoroughly deconstructed God in order to affirm the truth and beauty of the 'powerless power of the kingdom'.

Similarly, I've found that spending too much time trying to peek "behind the text" (historical-criticism, Source Criticism, Form Criticism, et al) can leave you skeptical that God is still speaking to you "in front of the text" (Reader-Response Criticism, Lectio Divina, etc.) We've been exploring this tension in my congregation's Bible study this fall using James Kugel's incredible "How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now" (http://amzn.to/qSqp8U) in which he continually juxtaposes how the Bible was actually interpreted by its earliest readers in contrast to modern biblical scholarship of the last 150 or so years. Great stuff.

I had a chance to listen to part one of the Westphal interview this morning on the way to an appointment. I listened to it with your blog post in mind. Westphal iss obviously a brilliant philosophical theologian and a careful reader, which is clear from his books. However, I would challenge him to have the same generosity toward Caputo as he does toward the Roman Catholic Church, whom he spoke of as coming to see as something like "fellow Christians with whom I have disagreements." It seems to me that Caputo is deeply steeped in Christianity and so strongly formed by the Roman Catholic Church that he cannot help but come from a place of Catholic Christianity in some respect. So I would challenge Westphal to say of Caputo that he is a "fellow Christian with whom I have disagreements," not to call into question if Caputo is even religious. That's just sloppy thinking and rude. If I'm remembering correctly, doesn't Catherine Keller celebrate on the blurb on the back of Caputo's "Weakness of God" something like, "In this book Caputo comes out of the closet as a theologian." Moreover there is "What Would Jesus Deconstruct?" that is even more "religious" in a sense. Maybe Westphal needs to read more Derrida ;) The parallel I would see is that Westphal is willing to be more charitable toward Catholics because they are similarly orthodox to his own background -- whereas (to bring Jungian analysis to the debate) Caputo seems to bring up Westphal's shadow side; that is, there seems to be something within Caputo toward which Westphal is negatively, irrationally hyperbolic. But that's for him and his therapist/spiritual director to explore.... I similarly saw a parallel with his snarky remark that, "No one prays to the Ground of All Being." I beg to disagree. I have spent many years doing Centering Prayer and reading folks like Merton. And I would say that perhaps no one kataphatically prayers to the "Ground of All Being," but that Centering Prayer is perhaps precisely about apophatically praying "to" the ground of all being. I agree with him in his discussion that we can be unduly one-sidedly apophatic, but he, again, seems to have some shadow around the apophatic (no pun intended). Perhaps he doth protest too much. Or as Jesus might say, "Physician, heal thyself!"

I haven't yet had a chance to listen to the podcast in question, but having read quite a bit of Caputo and Westphal, I agree with your take: Westphal is being unduly and uncharacteristically dismissive. Caputo's theology is much less "thin soup" and much more deeply nuanced and articulated with searing honesty.

Bo, Of course I take your point about not being dogmatic about prolepsis ... you're absolutely right that hope and certainty are not the same thing, and I am as suspicious as you are about the latter. To be fair to Pannenberg, his confidence that the Resurrection of Christ really is the start of the eschaton is tempered with a stress that in one sense God is still 'in the dock' to the extent that the world doesn't look very much like it's headed in the direction of the ultimate cosmic reconciliation of which the New Testament speaks. This side of eternity the jury is very much out as to whether creation is a successful project or not, or whether the collateral damage has been too great! We all know there's an uncomfortable amount of messily unredeemed business that still needs clearing up out there (name your genocide, epidemic, earthquake here) ... This is where the more politically-orientated 'theologians of hope' such as Moltmann and Johann Baptist Metz strike a very sober note in reminding us to look at world history from the perspective of its many victims and their cry for justice. If it is to be realistic, theological hope in this sense seems to require a negative component in the recognition of how BAD things are, which rules any kind of triumphalism (particularly with regard to the Church's track record). We hope 'against the evidence', and if we don't acknowledge the weight of this negative evidence we're not being very honest IMHO. Hope however also surely requires some kind of positive grounding if theology is not to be vulnerable to Marx's 'opium of the people' critique and Feuerbach's accusation that theological discourse is just anthropology (this is where I can understand Westphal's need for a God who deals in 'speech-acts', who cannot be reduced to psychological projection). For Moltmann, Pannenberg and more recently NT Wright in 'Surprised by Hope' the bodily resurrection of Christ, viewed proleptically, is just that ground. Again, no cause for tub-thumping here - a mysterious element of hiddenness and incomprehension remains in the Gospel post-Easter accounts that we should acknowledge, but this-worldly evidence of the power of God to defeat death itself nonetheless. There's a distinct similarity here to the Eastern Orthodox emphasis on a proleptic reading of the Transfiguration which is behind David Bentley Hart's statement of hope in his remarkable book 'The Doors of the Sea' written in response to the tragedy of the 2004 tsunami. Without trying to cast any kind of glibly positive gloss about Divine Providence in the face of suffering, and mercilessly critiquing all attempts to see natural catastrophes as the outworking of God's purposes, he recognizes that 'protest atheists' of the Ivan Karamazov variety really have a substantive case against an overly optimistic Christianity. Things out there simply look terrible and there's no point in avoiding that fact. And yet...Hart finishes with a visionary passage that really struck me as keeping the negative and the positive in a proper tension in the hope of ultimate transfiguration in spite of everything. As he puts it, 'there is in all the things of the earth a hidden glory waiting to be revealed, more radiant than a million suns, more beautiful than the most generous imagination or most ardent desire can now conceive.' This is an intuition against the evidence, rather than certitude, but it sounds pretty much like an expression of authentic faith to me. With a large dose of fear and trembling. Peter

First the Hauerwasian point, then another bit on the OP. I figure I'm the wrong person to comment on this because, as someone who teaches the ancient Greeks (in literature and rhetoric classes) and a layperson-level theology course (a capstone required for all majors) just about every semester, I spend my professional life looking at the content of people's convictions and what forms of existence lead to and result from that content. I picked up my Hauerwas habit when I was an undergrad, but teaching what I teach week in and week out at a small Christian liberal arts college, I get more convinced every time I teach such things that content matters. Certainly there's always a range of possibilities when one interprets that content, but there are times when I look at someone who's changed the content of things so radically (as Socrates does to the Homeric gods, as Boethius does to Plato, and so on) that I'm more inclined to point to the "new thing" and name it as different in kind rather than in degree. In other words, I'm the sort of historicist who wants to name new things as new things, and that tends to land me with Westphal contra Caputo, with Hauerwas contra liberal theology, and so on. With regards to the OP, I revisited the segment of the interview where Caputo used that phrase, and he seemed to be summing up the nature of the "Merold and Jack Road Show" rather than laying out a thesis about Caputo's corpus. I realize there's more to your objection than that phrase, but honestly, it's the same sort of thing that I tend to say when I describe the CHP to people who haven't heard any episodes, so I don't reckon I should cast the first stone! :)

Thank you for that feedback. That was really helpful. and as I understand it, Moltmann's participatory idea was THE major difference between the two "Theology of Hope" architects (with Pannenberg). But do you see what I am saying about hope being... hopeful and NOT certain? That is sort of the whole 'wish' thing I was alluding to. Sure, we can participate (I like that a lot) and we have faith, but it is tough to be dogmatic about a proleptic event! (yet some do it). I understand what Westphal is saying: that it is not the 'promise' which holds our hope but the promiser. I find that very credible. There is just something in this line of reasoning that seems suspicious to me. Thoughts?

Bo, I listened to both parts of the Westphal interview with great interest (and am currently working my way through the audio of the Fuller course over at http://taddelay.com ), particularly the parts on philosophers such as Jean-Luc Marion - of whom I'm a big fan - and Caputo. I too enjoy reading him and find much of what he says resonates profoundly with the kenoticism that surely has to be central to any theology worth talking about these days. I thought the Emergent Village sessions with Richard Kearney and Jack C. in 2007 were inspirational. However, I think that what Westphal is looking for is a balance between an acknowledgement of the justified comeback of the apophatic tradition and the cataphatic approaches of Wolterstorff and Plantinga that he clearly values. I guess that for him Caputo has taken apophasis so far that the element of revelation in the Incarnation gets left out of the picture. A veiled, strange and deconstructing revelation to be sure (Balthasar is brilliant at highliting the paradox), but revelation nonetheless. You can take that or leave it, of course, but that sounds like Westphal's view. As you mentioned Pannenberg regarding grounding hope in a firmer way than Caputo can offer Merold H., Moltmann's take on the 'logic of promise' both in 'Theology of Hope' and in the section on the 'hermeneutics of hope' in the later 'Experiences in Theology' is also one that I find very compelling. He argues for a performative view of hope in that hoping in the Biblical notion of promise is actually how that promise is actualized. That's the difference from wishful thinking, in that for Moltmann hope participates actively in the divine promise.

I might be the wrong person to respond to this, given that I'm a low-grade Hauerwasian, but I've often said similar things about other writers (though not about Caputo, with whom I'm not all that familiar): given assertions A and B and C, why would this person still desire to identify as X? I don't see that as a "defend the fortress" statement so much as an observation that what seems logically to follow does not in fact follow.