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Chapter four, “Unwilling Feeling,” reads John D. Caputo’s material theology and his conception of the insistence of God alongside Sara Ahmed’s work on what she names “affect aliens” and willfulness to offer biblical scenes of affect alien prophets. Jonah and Martha embody such moody prophecy in this scene. The chapter constructs and applies an affect hermeneutic to and with biblical texts in order to read for what might happen when we follow moodiness to unexpected theological conclusions. Jonah’s and Martha’s moodiness in their biblical tales reveal not what’s wrong with them, but rather serve as a lament against problematic theological interpretations and conscriptions of each character. These affect alien prophets exist as blockage; their existence stops up or slows down the normative flow. These biblical characters prophetically persist by remaining moody impediments to the story. To gravely attend to such prophets is to embrace alternate flows or undercurrents within the biblical story. Such an embrace invites us to look for alternate flows within our contemporary stories.

Kristin Beise Kiblinger responds to Elaine Padilla and Jon Paul Sydnor in conversation with the view of God developed by John D. Caputo. She observes points of agreement between Caputo and both comparative theologians with their common emphases on immanence (Padilla) and relationality (Sydnor), but argues that Caputo’s thought also challenges them both in significant ways. For Caputo, we inevitably condition what we know and thus God as the unconditioned cannot be known or present but remains “to come.” Caputo uses Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction as a hermeneutic principle that exposes conditionedness and thus keeps our theology humble and open. Kiblinger suggests that Sydnor and Padilla could benefit from following Caputo in his theology because Caputo’s work 1) helps respond to problems that have plagued past theology, 2) illuminates issues involving immanence and relationality, and 3) helps to justify (and lay the necessary theoretical groundwork for) comparative theology.

This chapter explores Derrida’s work in relation to apophatic theology, examining the ways in which the Dionysian inheritance is transformed in his writings so as to repeat differently the four themes of freedom, materiality, hierarchy, and universalism according to a new configuration of eros and ontology. This new configuration in turn becomes a problem for theology. These responses to the apophatic elements of Dionysius’s work are perhaps best captured by the twin poles of radical orthodoxy and deconstructionist Christianity. Although these two appear initially to be dramatically divergent responses to Derrida, I will show that both ultimately retain the same colonizing universalism of systematic theology.

This chapter presents a fragmentary vignette of contemporary conversation in American Christian theological culture. The figures discussed here represent three rather different contemporary possibilities of how a twenty-first-century postmodern Christian faith might look. What unites all three is a rejection of the simplistic oppositions between faith and doubt, and between religion and the secular. They all take religion quite seriously: Jürgen Moltmann and Raimon Panikkar are prominent Christian theologians; Panikkar was a Roman Catholic priest; John Caputo is an American philosopher and theologian whose work deconstructs the boundaries between philosophy and theology. They illustrate some of the requirements that religious faith must embrace if it is to be genuinely sustainable in today's world and not languish as a nostalgic relic that stubbornly relies on certitude.

This chapter explores the influence of postmodernism on theology, focusing on a debate published in the journal Modern Theology between Richard Kearney, John Caputo, and John P. Manoussakis on the question of Exodus 3 and Thomas Aquinas’s alleged onto-theology. It shows how hostility towards the maternal khora pervades the work of such theologians, and argues that their deconstructive enterprise subtly reinstates the God of patriarchal tradition. Citing Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Derridean and Levinasian influences on postmodern theology, it proposes that the Lacanian imaginary provides a more effective way of expressing the divine mystery than Derrida’s idea of difference. Rejecting any processual account of the coming to be of God, it insists with Lacan that only a God whose fullness of being is beyond all desire and need is capable of serving as the source and telos of human desire, without violence.

This chapter explores the possibility of using the reconceptualized notion of groundless ground as a new framework from which to envision a new form of self, of thinking and inhabiting the world, differently. A comparative reading of Glissant’s poetic, a poetic of resistance he calls “forced poetic,” and of continental philosophers’ theopoetic (Derrida, Caputo, Kearney, Keller), suggests the poetic as an epistemological alternative and political instrument that enables the possibility of an open cosmopolitical future and a relational self, born in the wombs of pain and trauma.

This chapter examines the move made by philosophers Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo to reconfigure prayer as sans, in which prayer would be to pray without knowing where to direct the prayers. It questions whether such prayer is possible and whether it reinscribes the exclusivist logic that it seeks to avoid. This chapter argues that such a prayer appears to be presented as superior to that of traditions with a determinate messianism, and with this Derrida and Caputo failed to escape religious violence.

This statement takes up John D. Caputo’s seminal work of “weak theology,” The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (1997). In addition to calling into question a careful reading of Derrida on the subjects of faith and reason, the author also critiques the elision of both skepticism and psychoanalysis as possible epistemologies.

This chapter discusses the postmodernist's treatment of politics in Heidegger's works. Postmodernist writers particularly approach the issue of Heidegger's politics as one that introduces profound and meaningful political questions for the postmodern era. The chief postmodernist that is discussed in this chapter is John Caputo. The chapter agrees with Caputo's rejection of Richard Rorty's position that Heidegger's political engagements were happenstance and not a deliberate attempt in Heidegger's part. Furthermore, the chapter discusses Derrida and his reflections on Heidegger—hoping to gain more insights on the kind of questions that postmodernists raise when considering Heidegger and politics. Derrida's method of reading, and his problematizing approach, are examined in this chapter. But although Derrida is given particular attention, other postmodern critics are also taken in for their own insights and responses to the problem.

This chapter presents an exchange of ideas by Jacques Derrida, John Caputo, and Richard Kearney regarding the desire of God. Kearney opens up the conversation by noting that Derrida has done more than most other living philosophers to make people sensitive to issues of messianicity and messianism and to the three calls of God: donne, pardonne, and abandonne, and by asking how do we read in the dark. Caputo replies that the distinction between the messianic and the messianisms is a tension that people inhabit, and that it would never be a question of choosing one or the other. Derrida, in response to Kearney, states that the essential feature of reading requires some darkness and that it distinguishes reading from seeing. Derrida also discusses the issue of hospitality raised by Caputo.

John D. Caputo reminds us that the impossible immobilizes us on the cognitive level, but then we shift to the conative, to the sphere of praxis and the pragmatic order. This is where Saint Thomas Aquinas developed his theology of grace even to the point of a theology of “merit”, wherein our grace-enabled praxis creates our eternal destiny. As Caputo might put it, we experience the impossible by doing it. For Aquinas, merit is not a psychological category of motivation — it is grace realism in the pragmatic order. Aquinas developed his theology of merit within his theology of grace, elaborated in the philosophical categories of Aristotle. He spoke of “human nature”, which is the essence of the human being as source of human activity unto a human end. As part of the modern vocabulary, the term “experience” fell under the suspicion of the Vatican, which delayed the development of any modern Catholic theology. Today, postmodern philosophy and theology question subjectivity together with the objectivity of metaphysical language as appropriate loci for talk about God.

After announcing the unabashedly speculative and ontological aim of this book, this chapter critiques the possible-God theology and “weak theology” of Richard Kearny and John Caputo respectively. Instead, the prospect of an eternally actual, but contingent, God is posed.

This chapter provides a very brief and very general characterization of a deconstructive reading of negative theology. It discusses, in addition to Jacques Derrida himself, the interpretations by John Caputo and Kevin Hart of Derrida's reading of Pseudo-Dionysius. Calling negative theology here, is, as all traditions, varied and multiform, and Derrida's deconstructive analysis and critique of one of its featured practitioners should in no way be taken as an authoritative representation of the tradition as a whole. The chapter then focuses on a certain apophatic desire of its own: a twofold desire—theologically, to “save the name” of God from human mastery, and in doing so, to ethically “save the neighbor” from the always toxic consequences of said mastery. The chapter then suggests an alternative strand of the theological tradition that may provide resources for the apophatic desire of theologically minded interpreters of deconstruction.

Chapter Eight asks what remains of a forgiven offence. It demonstrates that Jankélévitch is torn between the two primary Biblical metaphors for the effect of forgiveness, the extinction of sin and the covering up of sin. The extinction of sin entails perfect forgetting, whereas covering up removes or perhaps transforms the charge of sin without forgetting. This chapter examines whether forgiveness, in the words of John Caputo, inaugurates a virginal time or a forgiven time through a critical appraisal of Jankélévitch's seemingly contradictory claim that forgiveness makes as if the offence never occurred and that forgiveness can make a tabula rasa of the past, utterly annulling what has been done in an inverted act of creation. It argues that Jankélévitch posits the ontological and logical impossibility of the simultaneity of position and negation, which breaks with the logic of the law of identity in what Nicholas of Cusa calls a coincidentia oppositorum and concludes that Jankélévitch distinguishes between the human possibility of forgiveness and the idea of forgiveness.

This chapter is a discourse between Edith Wyschogrod and John D. Caputo on postmodernism and the desire for God. In the postmodern culture of images, so-called virtual reality raises the problem to a new level. Nothing is more common in the postmodern world than the replication of the violence of interactive video games and Internet images. In a world of semblances, people die by violence, but their deaths are and are not understood as being real. Violence is envisaged as simultaneously actualizing and de-realizing death. If all is semblance, a game, death's finality is fictive, undecidable. What is more, if transcendence and immanence are inextricable, the atheist could see le désir de Dieu not only as our desire for God but also as God's desire. So the amor dei, le désir de Dieu, in this culture of images, is to be the imago dei, to let the images of God fly up like sparks, and to affirm a certain holy undecidability between the “image” and “God”.

In Theology without Metaphysics, Kevin Hector offers a broadly Wittgensteinian theory about the nature and deployment of human concepts and predicates with the goal of showing how both can be applied to God in a non-metaphysical way. In this way, he hopes to show that cataphatic theology is not inherently metaphysical, and that one can therefore engage in it without falling into idolatry or violence. After brief clarification of the ‘idolatry’ and ‘violence’ objections against metaphysics, followed by an explanation of the way in which Hector’s proposal is supposed to provide a non-metaphysical way of doing substantive, cataphatic theology, this chapter identifies five difficulties that beset Hector’s view.