Cross and Cosmos

A Theology of Difficult Glory

John D. Caputo

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253043146
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Religionsphilosophie

John D. Caputo stretches his project as a radical theologian to new limits in this groundbreaking book. Mapping out his summative theological position, he identifies with Martin Luther to take on notions of the hidden god, the theology of the cross, confessional theology, and natural theology. Caputo also confronts the dark side of the cross with its correlation to lynching and racial and sexual discrimination. Caputo is clear that he is not writing as any kind of orthodox Lutheran but is instead engaging with a radical view of theology, cosmology, and poetics of the cross. Readers will recognize Caputo's signature themes—hermeneutics, deconstruction, weakness, and the call—as well as his unique voice as he writes about moral life and our strivings for joy against contemporary society and politics.

PART 1

THE CROSS

1

A RADICAL THEOLOGY OF THE CROSS

A THEOLOGIA CRUCIS RADICALLY CONCEIVED REQUIRES THE CRUCIFIXION of the God of being on the cross of nonbeing, of the God of wisdom on the cross of foolishness, of the God of power on the cross of the weakness (1 Cor 1:20–25). Everything is demanded of theology, up to and including the most austere renunciation, the most shocking deprivation of its privileges, of its regal aspirations as the queen of the sciences, of its own special knowledge, revelations, and inspirations, requiring it to be poor and itinerant, naked and obedient, even unto death. Still more, the same thing is asked of God in the highest. Even what has been called the theology of the cross up to now, in whose debt this work clearly stands,¹ has preserved the eternity, transcendence, and sovereignty of God, so that if God suffers it is because God is strong enough to take on suffering, to absorb suffering into the eminence and immensity, the mystery and abyss, the sovereign power of the Godhead.

But on the more radical view taken here, of a vulnerable and nonsovereign God, the call that is called in and under the name (of) “God” calls for even more. It demands we go still further, so that the cross touches on the sovereignty of the Godhead of God on high, exposing what is called “God” in the great monotheisms to weakness and nonbeing. This crucifixion, this dereliction, denuding, deconstruction, and desertification of God, does not contradict the eminence or the power of the name (of) “God”; it is what constitutes a God worthy of the name (digne dicitur). God’s power is constituted by powerlessness and nonsovereignty, God’s eminence by being what is least and lowest among us. Otherwise, the name of God is a power play, a strategic move made by theology on its adversaries, a play that turns God into a player in the game of power played in the world, where theology and its God holds all the cards, where the God of glory inevitably wins (theologia gloriae), and theology, in the long run, is all about winning, which is unworthy of God and theology.

I begin with an exegesis, but I do not end there. I pursue what we are given to think in 1 Corinthians 1–2 beyond what its author could have intended to say in order to stay on the tracks of a matter to be thought. I seek to follow Paul where he did not lead by probing the force of what Paul has captured in the explosive expression “the weakness of God” (to asthenes tou theou) in order to construct not a radical philosophy of Saint Paul, as does Stanislas Breton,² but a radical theology of the cross. We follow the way of the cross to the bitter end, depriving theology of its glories and inscribing weakness and nonbeing in the depths of the Godhead. We pursue the foolishness of the logos of the cross to the point of an austere faith that, unadorned with the ornaments of religion and divested of the garments of doctrine, presses forward through death to new life and through crucifixion to a surprising resurrection and unlikely and difficult glory.

Method: 1 Corinthians 1:19—destructio (apolo)

Clearly such a proposal requires some explanation of its method, which I draw from Derrida, but not without recourse to both Heidegger and Bultmann. All three thinkers condense their work into a term of art that is semantically negative—Destruktion, Entmythologisierung, déconstruction—even while the point of their work is affirmative. In order to avoid giving that linguistic impression, I often speak instead of a “hermeneutics”—but a radical one, which means this hermeneutics does not lack the heart for the heartless operation of the cross, for the dismantling signified by the negative prefix. Hermeneutics thus construed follows in its own way along (meta) the way (hodos) of the cross. The theologia crucis that follows represents a hermeneutical Good Friday, both a theology of the cross, of the Crucified, and a theology crucified, itself subjected to the cross, stripped naked, humbled, and divested of its power and prestige. The dying off in these methods is real and unremitting, but it is neither morbid nor nihilistic. It always serves the purpose of life, not death—of new life born of passing through death. But it is always without compromise, without economy, without Docetism, which would make weakness and folly a cunning strategy that takes the powerful by surprise.

What Heidegger calls Destruktion belongs to a work of “repetition” or “retrieval” (Wiederholung) that recalls what has fallen into oblivion. Retrieval requires hermeneutical violence or unbuilding (Abbau) in order to loosen what is to be restored from its sedimented condition. It makes contact with something going on in the history of metaphysics that metaphysics as such is unable to think. This does not mean razing metaphysics to the ground but breaking through to the ground of metaphysics as the treasure house of what is to be thought. “Overcoming (Überwindung) metaphysics” releases something uncontainable in metaphysics.

Demythologizing follows an analogous rule. It is not the destruction of myth but its hermeneutics, the interpretation of the mythological schema so that we can understand what it means for our life today, when the mythological schema itself is obsolete. In the New Testament, not unlike a Greek tragedy or Shakespearean play, our lives are put on stage, inserted into a great cosmic drama with a divine dramatis personae, supernatural players acting in dramatic (mythopoetic) time and space. God dwells on high, up in the seventh heaven, Satan down below, in the dark and forbidding recesses beneath the earth. On the earth between, legions of angels from on high do combat with demons in a proxy war between God and Satan. The Pauline promise of new being, of life not death, is transcribed as a new “age,” the coming time, brought about by the God come down to earth, who vanquishes the powers and principalities. In the “end-time,” the God will come in judgment, when in a great apocalyptic confrontation the enemies of the God are dashed to pieces and death is defeated. But of course, as history attests, death and destruction, suffering and evil, continue unabated; the end time does not come, two thousand years now and counting. The hurried command to prepare turns out to be a false alarm. There are no demons, but there are viruses and bacteria; no Garden of Eden, but there is evolutionary biology; no “heaven above” or “Hades below,” but solar systems and galaxies in an ever-expanding universe that radically relativize “up” and “down.” What is needed now is hermeneutical violence that disengages the proclamation from the mythic time and space into which it has been transcribed. What has come is the time of demythologization, the age of interpretation, which means rereading these myths, not ridiculing them.

What Heidegger calls destruction and Bultmann calls demythologization depend on what Derrida calls the structure of the “trace,” the ability of the signifier to function in the absence of what it signifies. Because of this ability, the trace is “iterable,” repeatable, removable from its original context and able to take on new life in a new context. Otherwise, signification would be tied to the immediate presence of the signified, communication would be bound hand and foot, and traditions would be unable to move beyond their inaugural moment. Indeed, if a trace is not repeatable, it cannot even be used the first time; it would not be a trace but a senseless sound or mark, dumb presence trapped inside itself. Deconstruction is the general theory of the trace (gramme, grammatology), of its necessary contextuality and recontextualizability, which is what Derrida means by the “text” and why he says there is no signification outside the textuality of context and recontextualizability.

Without such “play”—recontextualizability—the trace would be deprived of a future, and the very point of deconstruction is this future. Its motive and desire is to embrace the risk of repetition, of the ambiance, ambiguity, and polyvalence of the trace, precisely in order to experience its promise, toward which in every case deconstruction is turned, just the way the logos of the cross is turned toward the promise of resurrection. It is fitting that the first word of deconstruction, “come,” viens, oui, oui, the affirmation of the promise, of what is to come, which Derrida calls the “event” (événement) is the last word of the New Testament (Rv 22:20). But what is to come is not to be confused with an eschaton, a “coming age” or future happening, which is what he calls the “future-present.” The “to come” (à venir) is a not a coming era but a “weak messianic force” that presses in on the present construction in order to allow it to have a future, a promise never free from risk.³ Deconstruction is the affirmation of the in-coming (invention) of the event, the reinvention of the event, again and again.

So, in each case, we see the same logos, or ana-logos—destruction is retrieval, demythologizing is reinterpretation, deconstruction is reinvention—which is the logos of the cross: crucifixion is resurrection. As we have seen above, this is not a whimsical association but a matter of a rigorous philology. With the spirit and the letter of the word déconstruction in mind, let us read what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 1–2.

Ta Me Onta (1 Cor 1:28)

Paul tells us he did not meet Jesus in the flesh, which explains, at least in part, why references to what Jesus said and did are so rare in the letters. Nonetheless, in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians, I think he has distilled the very core of the gospels, and in particular of what I prefer to call the poetics of the Kingdom of God sayings. By poetics I mean the constellation of metaphors and metonymies, parables and paradoxes, images and narratives that cumulatively evoke the lived experience of the Kingdom, its form of life. A disturbingly different semantic performance, the poetics of the Kingdom is the topsy-turvy dynamic of these sayings, the reversals, the paradoxes, the shocking logic in virtue of which the last are first and the first are last, the lost are saved, the outside are inside and the inside are out, the weak are strong, and the foolish are wise. Indeed, in New Testament scholarship this logic or alogic is one of the markers of sayings with an authentic tradition behind them. A poetics always requires an interpretation, hermeneutics. Paul boldly and audaciously confronts the Corinthian elite, while not sparing the feelings of the saints, forcibly reminding them of the humbleness of their condition, albeit in a spirit of brotherly love.⁴ Paul is absolutely frank: They are not wellborn, not well educated, not wise or powerful as the world knows wisdom and power. They are in fact lowborn and despised, low-down and of no account. To use John Dominic Crossan’s marvelous English translation, they are “nuisances and nobodies” (ta me onta).⁵

No philosopher can fail to appreciate the pointedness of ta me onta where Paul, who we have reason to believe has never read Heidegger, is not so much “overcoming metaphysics” as overwhelming it with irony and mocking. What he says is meant to shock the Corinthian elite by taking on one of the most revered words in their philosophical vocabulary, to on, while taking his stand—tauntingly, polemically, ironically, mockingly—with the opposite. Against all reason, all logic, all ontologic, all onto-theologic, he prefers nonbeing to being, being nothing to being itself. The dripping irony, the sarcasm, reminds one not of Heidegger’s ponderous German but of the barbs and biting wit that Kierkegaard directed at Hegel and the mockery Luther directed at Aristotle. In common use, the Greek word ousia, which the philosophers translate as “substance,” as if the word dropped into their laps from the moon, refers to one’s property, to earthly possessions, even to real estate, a usage that conducts a not-so-subtle transfer from what one owns to what one is, from having to being. The communication between the two senses, one high and the other common, shows up in modern English in expressions like a person “of substance” or the “powers that be,” where the ontological order is enlisted in the service of the sociological order. Ousia meant having a big house, plentiful slaves, and beautiful garments, all the trappings of power, possessions, and prestige. Having swells into being; not having shrinks into not being. So, Paul taunts the logic of being, power, and wisdom of the Corinthian elite and takes his stand with the logic of nonbeing, weakness and foolishness, strategically reversing the logic of being with the logos of the cross, wi...