Ketuvim: the Writings of James R. Getz Jr.

This is part of a series of posts detailing my thoughts on On Religion by John Caputo, a book read in preparation for the Emergent Village Theological Philosophical Conversation.

Caputo brings his little treatise on religion (without religion) to a climatic end in this last chapter. His basic premise has been foreshadowed all along: you can have religion, without religion. Meaning, one can have a deep love for something outside outside one’s self, be unhinged with a selflessness that defies bean-counter logic all the while avoiding the dark side of religion — the violence, the exclusivity, the ultimate claim to the Secret. While this conclusion is not surprising, Caputo’s steps towards this assessment bear repeating.

It is possible and indeed necessary for religions to have truth. This truth is basically the truth of being unhinged, of looking towards others, doing justice. Doing is the key. Religions do not have truth in the sense of factual knowledge (or Knowledge). They are not keepers of some Secret. Rather, religions are true in as much as they do religion. That is, in as much as they love, selflessly and unconditionally.

Of course, this is not the only option for religion in the wake of the post-secular situation in which we all live; and Caputo is honest to admit it. The other option, when faced with the abyss of a cruel universe that doesn’t care — a universe without a personified Force that watches over us — is to set one’s jaw and go on as the tragic hero. Ultimately, however, Caputo holds that we need to reject this Nietzschean religious tale, because it provides us not with a love of God but a love of machismo. Nietzsche’s view can never bring us to help those less fortunate, the downtrodden, the weak. Ultimately Caputo affirms:

Faith is faith that we can say that certain things are wrong, are evil. Faith is a memory that cannot be undone, and the hope of a transforming future.(p.125)

A beautiful statement! Caputo sees the question of what we love when we love our God(s) to be the essence in itself. The pre-modern answer (à la Augustine) was to see all love as ultimately the passion for God. The modern answer (à la Freud) was to see passion for God as really just a passion for love. But Caputo thinks that the ambiguity in itself is the real answer.

There is, I am arguing, a kind of endless translatability or substitutability, a holy undecidablility, let us say, between God and love, or God and beauty, or God and truth, or God and justice, in virtue of which we cannot resolve the issue of which is a version of which, which is the translation of which, which is the substitute for which. (p.127)

However, in the end Caputo does go beyond this utter ambiguity to state that God is not a “what” but a “how;” and the question should “How do I love when I love my God?” — a question of praxis and deed rather than ontology and dogma.

This is part of a series of posts detailing my thoughts on On Religion by John Caputo, a book read in preparation for the Emergent Village Theological Philosophical Conversation.

Before Caputo can get to his main argument, how to have religion without religion, there is one last problem to be dealt with. To pull analogies from the previous chapter that he does not entertain: before we can become Jedi, we must face Vader.

Vader, the Dark Side, the violent side of religion, it all points to the same thing and was always lying latently between the lines whenever Caputo described the religious as “unhinged.” To explain this dual aspect of religion — the power to love, the power to kill — he heads to the movies again. This time Caputo’s example is The Apostle, and he makes his point eminently. E.F. (Patrick Duvall) is a man who is unhinged, an apostle who comes bringing the sword of absolutes. While absolute love of the impossible is what Caputo sees behind religion, the severity of such absolutes used absolutely is the trouble he has with religion. It’s why he can say:

Religious are the people of the impossible, God love then, and impossible people, God help us.(p.94)

This all somewhat naturally leads to a discussion of the most impossible people of them all, the fundamentalists. What follows is several pages of borderline prophetic condemnation of religious fundamentalists: from health-and-wealth gospel preachers to Islamic extremists and even ultra-orthodox Jews. I truly covet his prose. His passion and exacerbation are palpable in his writing:

Fundamentalism is the passion for God gone mad, a way to turn the name of God into the name of terror…. Fundamentalism is an attempt to shrink the love of God down to a determinate set of beliefs and practices, to make an idol of something woven from the cloth of contingency, to treat with ahistorical validity something made in time, one more case of Aaron and the gold calf, one more confusion of the raft with the ocean. It represents a failure to see that the love of God is uncontainable and can assume uncountable and unaccountably different forms. (p.107)

What else can one say, but “Amen!”? I could speak of a tendentious logic, a lack of clear sociological delineation of those he lumps to together or even of a certain disdain with which these comments are made, but none of this matters one whit in regards to the power or cogency of his argument. Caputo ultimately sees the violence of fundamentalism as an expression of the repression on its part of the knowledge that it has no ultimate knowledge, as a way for it to forget that the secret is that there is no Secret. What one, who is religious, might call a lack of humility.

This is part of a series of posts detailing my thoughts on On Religion by John Caputo, a book read in preparation for the Emergent Village Theological Philosophical Conversation.

The unfortunate problems of chapter 2 extend into chapter 3. If one has not bought Caputo’s arguments for the unique convergence of the secular and the sacred in the postmodern milieu, his springboard for chapter 3 becomes muted at best. Luckily, his interpretation of people as cyber-spirits and his discussion of the religious themes in Star Wars are both fascinating even if one has not taken a leap of faith on his periodization of history. His thesis is to explain how religion has evolved in our postmodern era; and while some might argue with his examples, his cultural analysis is at least intriguing.

The premise for Caputo’s discussion of cyber-spirits is predicated on the fact that modernity could never have predicted the world in which we live. How is it that the most affluent and technologically savvy society in history could still believe in God? Caputo opines that our cyber-culture has weakened the distinction between the real and unreal. We can go to virtual stores and purchase real books. Some of us consider people close friends we’ve never met and can only identify by an obviously pseudonymous nick. In an era when even a modestly budgeted film can contain CGI the categories of possible and impossible blur, and it is this blurring that Caputo seems to see as explaining the prevalence of religion in our technological age.

But before completing his historical tale and bring home the overarching moral, Caputo takes us to a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away. A place filled with mystical power, and a lot of CGI. While anyone nursed at Lucas’ mythological teat will notice the odd problem with Caputo’s facts, his analysis is largely spot on. Lucas takes Campbell and runs it through Asimov and came up with one of the greatest epics of modern times. Caputo’s point is that religion adapts. His religious ideals of being slightly unhinged, motivated by selfless devotion come through in his analysis of Star Wars; and it provides probably the best contemporary analog yet for religion without religion. With the Force, the impossible is possible.

However, the truth is that the Force provides only a religion without God. It still is a religious system with a dedicated creedal system, a strict hierarchy and definitive delineations of the sacred and profane. Only those who know the force can enter the Temple. Only those deemed worthy, adept and teachable may become Jedi. It is still, in short, a religion. But I’m getting ahead of myself in my critique of Caputo. For I, like him, am keeping my cards close to my chest till the game is over.

This is part of a series of posts detailing my thoughts on On Religion by John Caputo, a book read in preparation for the Emergent Village Theological Philosophical Conversation.

The second chapter of On Religion moves away from Caputo’s wrestling with the description of religion to an historical overview of the philosophy of religion. The reason for this is to contextualize the discussion and to explain why he is writing on religion, and (more importantly) why this marks a break with recent philosophical tradition. In other words, it is to explain the postmodern condition, taking a few potshots at modernity along the way.

Yet such an historical overview is apt to be cried by the very postmodern position that Caputo argues from, and he is careful to state at the outset:

I solemnly warn the reader to be extremely uneasy about any such easy periodization for, hero that I am, I accept no responsibility for it.(p.38)

Such a comment at the outset should put a reader on guard, and indeed there is much to being looking out for in this chapter. As is to be expected (and was even foreshadowed), Caputo cherry-picks a history of religion and philosophy to his liking. All good history makes an argument, to be sure, but one wonders if Caputo’s claims to truth can survive a history of Western Christianity that makes no mention of the Protestant Reformation. The arguments mounted by all sides during these turbulent years provide the ammunition used by the later Enlightenment scholars that he does interact with in detail. However, an understanding of the Enlightenment as post-Reformational is counter to his overall schema and as such passes over in silence. More’s the pity on that, I would have enjoyed his reflections on Luther, Calvin, and my beloved Menno. Yet, the real problem with Caputo’s reconstruction of history isn’t the figures chosen but the very schema he adopts to tell it.

Caputo periodizes religious history into three epochs: 1) the sacral age, 2) the secular age, and 3) the post-secular age. The sacral age was pre-Copernican, an era where faith and reason had not yet been divorced, a time when there was not as yet a dichotomy of secular and sacred. The secular age extends from the Copernican revolution, through Kant and Hegel, and into the early twentieth century. It is the age of science and reason, where observable facts held sway. The post-secular age begins with the odd couple of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who both decried the systematized world of Hegel and each saw the world as a chaotic storm. Caputo sees them as the prophets of postmodernity whose unheeded message came to fruition in the genocidal angst of the twentieth century’s wars. The smashing of Reason opens up the older categories of faith, the love of God, and the impossible. However, this post-secular world takes the benefits of the secular age with it — a sense of democracy, a value in the individual, humanism in the best sense possible.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it is probably because it is. For Caputo’s grand paradigm (or meta-narrative) of history is an Hegelian dialectic! Just as the generations before, we find ourselves having the best of all ages while creating a unifying paradigm that encompasses them all! Let the reader beware.

I have no problem with the overall analysis that Caputo is giving. Postmodernity, when done right, is exactly what he claims: a molding together of the sacred and the secular, a critique of a critique. However, I find it disingenuous to speak so highly of Nietzsche’s hammer of chaos crashing the idol of Hegel’s systematization, while all the while using this same program one’s self. History is far more messy than his reading of it bears out, and I for one enjoy a history that is a bit “unhinged.”