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After the Death of God

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

After the Death of God

John D. CAPUTO and Gianni VATTIMO

Edited by Jeffrey W. ROBBINS

With an Afterword by Gabriel VAHANIAN

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2007 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51253-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Caputo, John D.

After the death of God / John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo /

edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-231-14124-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Philosophy and religion. 2. Death of God. 3. God (Christianity)

4. Christianityphilosophy. 5. Deconstruction.

6. PostmodernismReligious aspects. 7. Postmodern theology.

8. Belief and doubt. I. Vattimo, Gianni, 1936

II. Robbbins, Jeffrey W., 1972 III. Title.

B56.C27 2007

211dc22 2006036009

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

For Jacques Derrida

Contents

Introduction: After the Death of God
Jeffrey W. Robbins

Toward a Nonreligious Christianity
Gianni Vattimo

Spectral Hermeneutics:
On the Weakness of God and the Theology of the Event
John D. Caputo

A Prayer for Silence:
Dialogue with Gianni Vattimo

On the Power of the Powerless:
Dialogue with John D. Caputo

The Death of God: An Afterword
Gabriel Vahanian

First and foremost, the editor would like to express his deepest gratitude to Gianni Vattimo and John D. Caputo, who generously gave of their time and energy to make this book possible. Their collegiality is a model for the intellectual life, their commitment is a model for responsible political and ethical engagement, and this book is both a testament to my appreciation to them and as a faithful record of the dialogical spirit that animates their thought and work. a special thanks as well to Gabriel Vahanian for lending his theological perspective with a postscript that helps make the connection between the original vitality and excitement that characterized the death of God movement in its earliest days to the present.

I must kindly thank others as well who were integral to this project: Gary Grieve-Carlson, who provided invaluable assistance in the original conception of the project and contributed his insight for the respective interviews; Jordan Miller for his assistance with the transcriptions; Carissa Devine for her work on the index; and Wendy Lochner for her encouragement, enthusiasm, and professionalism throughout the process of seeing this project to completion.

The dialogue with Gianni Vattimo took place in Rome, May 21, 2005, and the dialogue with John D. Caputo took place at Villanova University on august 19, 2004.

Finally, credit must be given to Lebanon Valley College for its 20042005 colloquium on God in the Twenty-first Century. This project grew out of the conversation sparked by this yearlong colloquium, which hosted a number of key figures who are exploring the changing nature of contemporary religious thought and practice. I would like to thank the college, most especially President Stephen MacDonald, for this valued institutional support apart from which this book would not have been possible.

In religions perpetual agony lies its philosophical and theoretical relevance. As it dies an ever more secure and serial death, it is increasingly certain to come back to life, in its present guise or in another.

HENT DE VRIES, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion

I

Is God Dead?

So that, in truth, Thou didst Thyself lay the foundation for the destruction of Thy kingdom, and no one is more to blame for it. Yet what was offered Thee? There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happinessthose forces are miracle, mystery, and authority. Thou has rejected all three and hast set the example for doing so.

DOSTOYEVSKY, The Grand Inquisitor

On April 8, 1966, the cover of Time asked, Is God Dead? When published, it was the best-selling issue in the magazines history. It announced to the public a theological movement that was making its way into the mainstreamnamely, radical death of God theology. This theological movement was in fact a collection of various disparate voices and perspectives. It ranged from the cultural theologians grappling with what they termed the post-Christian era,

What they all shared in common was a collective sense that Western culture in general, and the Judeo-Christian tradition in particular, had entered a profound ideological crisis. Either religious language had lost its meaning or, even worse, the inherited meanings had grown perverse in the wake of a long list of modern atrocities. World wars, genocides, nuclear armament, and the cold war standoff between the East and the Westtogether these twentieth-century realities turned the optimism associated with the modern period to a deep and lasting pessimism. As the contemporary political philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have written:

Modern negativity is located not in any transcendent realm but in the hard reality before us: the fields of patriotic battles in the First and Second World Wars, from the killing fields at Verdun to the Nazi furnaces and the swift annihilation of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the carpet bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia, the massacres from Setif and Soweto to Sabra and Shatila, and the list goes on and on. There is no Job who can sustain such suffering!

Those who spoke of the death of God, therefore, were attempting to locate themselves within this hard reality before us, and, like the ancient book of Job from the Hebrew Scriptures, they were asking the age-old question of theodicy about the meaning of suffering and the reasons for Gods apparent silence in the midst of it all. They were acknowledging that the old moral and theological platitudes had somehow fallen short and admitting that the Bibles answer of vicarious suffering is perhaps inadequate in the face of the twentieth centurys experience of genocide and potential for nuclear annihilation. To borrow a phrase from the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we can consider the death of God movement as a coming-of-age, an effort at honoring our history by following a certain cultural and theological rite of passage.

In this sense, even though the preoccupation of contemporary theology no longer centers around the death of God, this radical theological movement still speaks to us today as it testifies to a moment of transition and crisis within Western religious consciousness and thereby helps to establish the genealogy that would develop into what we now know as postmodern theology. Indeed, two of the main theorists of postmodern theology, Carl Raschke and Mark C. Taylor, both suggested a direct link between the death of God and postmodern deconstructive philosophies. As Taylor wrote in his landmark work, Erring, from 1984, Deconstruction is the hermeneutic of the death of God. In addition, the death of God theologies came to be associated with a certain spirit of secularism that permeates almost all facets of contemporary Western society.

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