“Weak theology,” Humility and the Reality of a Life Lived Before the Inbreaking of God: The insights of John D. Caputo and Luis Cruz-Villalobos
We present here at the permission of Dr. Caputo and Dr. Cruz-Villalobos the Preface of his book, “Theological Poetry” (of which the second edition is forthcoming).
Too many key concepts to attempt to review. Just read it and see what you think.
“It is my pleasure to offer a word in advance to Luis Cruz-Villalobos‘ Theological Poetry.
The link between theology and poetry runs deep, both historically and conceptually. The Jewish and Christian Scriptures belong to ―world literature,‖ which means that like all literature these texts give words to the deep structures of human experience. In the case of the Scriptures this means the experience of God, of God‘s in-breaking, interruptive, even traumatic intervention in our lives. The ―word of God‖ is the word of the other-in-us, the words that rise up in us in response to something that addresses us, something that has transformed our lives, something that takes place in and under the name (of) ―God.‖ The word of God means the words we give to God so that God may speak to us. As such, the Scriptures are a logos, a saying and speaking of God, and so they are irreducibly theo-logical.
In saying this, of course, I do not have in mind the scholarly studies, the abstract arguments, and the technical discourse of ―academic‖ theology, which is an artifact of the university. I mean instead a more elementary logos and pre-conceptual theology, let us.
say a discourse nourished by a pre-logical logos. I mean an archi-theological discourse that is deeply embedded in a complex of narratives and hymns, of prayers and parables, of songs and poems, of epistles, homilies and injunctions, in which different communities give different expressions to different experiences of ―God.‖ The Scriptures gives words to what God calls, to what God calls for, and to what we call in calling upon God. They give word, in short, to a more primordial logos, to a pre-logical logic, or paralogic, of the call—of what is calling, what is being called, and what is being called for—in the name (of) ―God.‖ This is the stuff a more nascent and inchoate theology, where the name of God is not the name of a supreme entity but the name of a call, and the people of God are the people of the call.
The Scriptures, thus, are not theological in the strong sense of the logos that is part of its etymological root.
The word theology is after all a ―pagan‖ word— nowhere to be found in the Scriptures—that goes back to Aristotle, where it represents the highest form of episteme (scientia), meaning a disciplined, rationa- lized discourse in which everything is organized in such a way as to support its claims. That is why I distinguish between a ―strong‖ theology and a ―weak‖ one. In this way I mean to distinguish between a discursive form that takes place in the active modality of claiming, of making claims, and a discourse that holds itself in reserve, that takes place in the receptive mode of being-claimed, of being-laid-claim-to, and hence of speaking in the mode of responding to a prior address by which it is always already overtaken. Theology in the strong sense is characterized by a classical Greco-philosophical discursive mode, by a system of propositional claims that are implicated in the historical development of the Greek concept of logos, something that is singled out in the contem- porary discussion of the ―onto-theological.‖ The logos of strong theology refers to predicative claims, saying something about God, approaching God as a constituted object of discourse, as the subject of a set of predicates, as the bearer of certain conceptual properties, which are expressible in propositions purporting to determine certain divine attributes. These propositions are folded together into strings of propositions, into proofs or arguments, which make up a body of knowledge, a complex of true assertions concerning the existence and nature of God.
Strong theology is about entities, propositions and proofs. It first emerged in Christian antiquity when the early Christian movement, in search of self- understanding and in contact with Greek philosophy, was caught up in a series of ―Christological‖ controversies that were eventually given canonical formulations in the early councils and their ―creeds.‖ To be sure, theology at that point had not acquired the trappings of late scholastic or modernist disco- urse, the technical terminology, the formality of argumentation, the systems and protocols of the university; it still conceived itself as sapientia, a wisdom for life, not scientia, and it did not think itself possible outside of Christian community and practice. But even then, the essential thing was there from the start—the war over propositions that is witnessed by the simultaneous birth of heresiology, the outburst of polemics against the so-called dissidents, the aggressive combat over the correct claim, the ―right belief‖ (orthe + doxa) uncon-taminated by those who ―choose‖ (haeresis) their own way, who willfully separate themselves from the orthodox. Where there is (strong) theology, there is heresiology. The birth of theology was the birth of twins. From its earliest beginnings, theology, strong theology, is preoccupied with the separation of true and false propositions, true and false claims. It eventually acquired the form of a university or ―scholastic‖ discourse, first, in the quaestio disputata of the high middle ages and then in the modern university where it is at least as technical a discourse as the other humanities or social sciences and, like them, has to struggle for respectability in the face of the ―mathematical‖ sciences.
By weak theology I do not mean something debili- tated, ineffective, and anemic but a theology that abandons the mode of claiming and gives itself over to a prior being-claimed. Weak theology does not pretend to the exact determination of a well-formed proposition; it is not about proposing propositions but about being exposed to something prepro- positional. Nonetheless, weak theology has a rigor of its own, practicing a deeper discipline that is not to be confused with conceptual or mathematical precision. By rigor I mean—and here I am following the lead of Heidegger—adhering strictly to the demands of the matter to be thought and spoken, adhering not to an ―object‖ constituted by a proposition, but to the things themselves, die Sache selbst, the matters of deepest concern, which cannot be reduced to the precision of propositions or to the exactness of mathematics. It is a false rigor to demand that everything be exact, that everything be determined by propositions, that everything submit to the requirements of objectifying thinking, or that everything be formulated in mathematical terms. That would be like demanding that impressionist painters draw clearer lines. There is nothing rigorous about treating non-objectifiable matters in objectifying terms. To be sure, thematiczation, mathematicization and objectification have their place, but there are other matters in which these methods are too ―strong,‖ too ham-fisted, too heavy-handed. They are too gross and rough-hewn a way to approach the matters to be thought in our primordial preconceptual contact with the world, a world that comes to words in the Scriptures and in the forms of life and modes of being-in-the-world which the Scriptures call the ―kingdom of God.‖
That is why the Scriptures themselves systematically eschew the discourse of objectification and conceptualization. Even when they use numbers they do not mean anything numerical. When the disciples ask Jesus how many times they must forgive and Jesus responds seventy time times seven, Jesus is not calculating (Matt 18:22). He does not mean four hundred and ninety; he means endlessly, that there is no limit to the demand we are under to forgive. The Scriptures do not speak about the kingdom of God as an external object of discourse; they speak from out of the experience of the kingdom, which is not without but within. They speak in the non-objectifiable terms of the parable and paradox in order to draw us in to the form of life for which they call. There is no better example of this ―weak‖ modality than the preaching of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Jesus does not talk about himself but about his father; and he does not talk about his father but about his father‘s ―kingdom;‖ and he does not talk about his father‘s kingdom but about mustard seeds, leavened bread, buried treasures, little children, and banquets at which the invited guests do not show up. He speaks in parables and paradox, not in a logical but a para-logical mode, which is the mode that most rigorously adheres to the dynamics of the kingdom, to its shocking reversals and unexpected demands.
Jesus is the poet par excellence of the kingdom, of God‘s coming rule.
The rigor proper to this discourse is to maintain itself in a mode that is indirect, discreet, and oblique, evocative and provocative, analogical and paralogical, parabolical and hyperbolical, metaphoric and metonymic, a modality that is proper to the call by which we are addressed, to the event by which we are overtaken. Its rigor is not to propose but to sustain an exposure to the inbreaking of something, I know not what, something that lays hold of us before we can grasp it, that claims us before we can make claims about it. The discipline of this discourse is to maintain itself in an elemental contact with the world, to sustain itself in a non-coercive modality that allows the world to come to words. Its weakness requires the supreme effort of restraint and reserve, to be of a more pliant and supple nature, cut to fit the contours of the matter of concern, able to hold itself in a non-dogmatic, open-ended, reformable, pliable, refoldable modality. The strength of this weakness is to resolutely resist every attempt to give its experience of the world canonical, creedal, definitive, fixed, formulaic expression. Its rigor is to stay in play with the call that is at play in what addresses us and overtakes us, in which the logical is attenuated into the paralogical, in which—and here I come to the point—the logical in the theo-logical is displaced by the poetic. By the poetic I do not mean only verse and poetry in the narrower sense, precious as these may be. I mean a primal poiesis, the formative discourse that assists at the birth of the event of the call like a midwife. I mean an elemental giving-form that takes place in and as the call—the call of the event, the event of the call—that takes the shape of words.
In short, by a weak theology, I mean less a theo-logic than a theo-poetics, a theology in which the ―-logic‖ has been displaced by a poetics, and by a poetics I mean a constellation of non-discursive, metaphoric and metonymic resources aimed at evoking the provocation of the kingdom of God, at allowing the call that is taking place in the name of God to come to words. The poetic is not an ornament or decoration draped over a pre-constituted object. The poetic is the very birth of God, the natal event in which the name (of) ―God‖ comes to words, the heart of a more primordial logos now transformed from claiming into being-claimed.
The rigor of weak theology is to maintain itself strictly in the element of a theopoetics. Poetry is the rigor of weak theology, its discipline, its asceticism, its strictest hewing of the word to the matter to be thought. Seen thus, the permanent, structural temptation of strong theology is to succumb to the lure of objectifying thinking, to become the prize sought by the orthodox, to contract itself into a creedal formula that separates the upright from the divergent. Strong theology is too much tempted to police the subject matter of theology, to subject it to the rule of propositions and proofs; it is too much given to persuade and dissuade and hence to suppress dissidence and difference, as if those who decline to be part of the rule of logos are ―willful,‖ as if they ―choose‖ (haeresis) to differ—as opposed to having been chosen by difference, singled out and held in exposure to the coming of what it cannot see coming!
The task of weak theology is to sustain the exposure of theology to the primal event by which it is called into words in the first place. So when Luis Cruz- Villalobos entitles his book Theological Poetry, when he sets about to bring the theological matter to poetic word, he is not engaged in a work of ornamentation. He has struck the deepest root and touched the most ancient nerve of theology, which is that theology is poetry before it is doctrine; that is world-creation before it is creed; that it is poiesis before it is hardened over into a logic; that it breathes the words of life and death, of suffering and joy, before it allows its words to succumb to the formularies of orthodoxy and its canons. Theology is song before it is the stuff of a summa or of the councils. That is why the New Testament describes itself not as istoria, a sober historical record of the past, an accurate representation of the facts of the matter, but as euvangelion, a glad message, good news proclaimed to the poor and the imprisoned, a proclamation of the year of the jubilee. A gospel is not a predicative discourse but a promissory one. The year of the jubilee is the fiftieth year, the year that follows seven times seven, where everything is forgiven and we start out all over again. Fifty is not a number to be counted, a calendar date to be calculated, but a hope, a prayer, a dream, a messianic expectation, a marker of what is to-come, a symbol of a promise, and the Scriptures are its song.
The figure of Jesus in the New Testament is the figure of the archi-poet of the kingdom of God, a teller of parables about mustard seeds and buried treasures and prodigal sons, all bent on imagining the future of the coming of the kingdom, of the way it will be when God rules, not human greed and violence. Jesus is a poet who poetizes the Kingdom, who imagines what it would be like to live otherwise, in a time in which the grip of the world as we know it is broken. Jesus imagines the world differently, divinely, when retribution is displaced by forgiveness, violence and oppression by mercy to the least among us, and war is upended by weak force of peace.
In theopoetics, the name of this book, the very idea of ―theological poetry,‖ is a magnificent tautology, a saying of the same in which something other—tout autre—something startling, something inbreaking, breaks in upon the business as usual of the world and calls upon theology to recall its ancient task of imagining the world otherwise.”
DR. JOHN D. CAPUTO
Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus Syracuse University
David R. Cook Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Villanova University