Case Turns

[ ] Caputo’s work has noble goals but his mechanism, including the
methods espoused by the AFF move the even the Christian church away
from its work for justice. This functionally turns your case; your vague calls
for unconditional love and for reinterpreting God as a ‘weak force’ run
counter to Caputo’s goals and your ability to improve anyone’s condition.

PETER GOODWINHELTZEL / Spring Summer 2006 / Journal for Cultural and Religious
Theory / http://www.jcrt.org/archives/07.2/heltzel.pdf / Review of “The Weakness of God” /
(Assistant Professor of Theology at New York Theological Seminary)

By not thinking about God as a sovereign power or metaphysical

force, but instead as a weak force that presents an unconditional
claim upon us, Caputo hopes to provide the kingdom of God with
theological resources to subvert the sovereign aspirations of nation-
states, global economic systems and religions that often legitimate
their power projects “in the name of God.” Caputo’s argument rests on the
assumption that if theological content is strong or thick this necessarily leads to militancy and violence in the world.
Thus, the theological answer to gratuitous suffering is to construct a weak theology that is better able to promote
peace and justice. However, a God of transcendent love and justice who is defiantly opposed to sin and suffering
provides a better theological basis for the earthly struggle for peace, justice and love.
However, the
Caputo transforms theology into a more pure, a more formal, and more abstract theology.
problem is that as one moves away from the concreteness of the
incarnation, Pentecost, and the authority of the church and
scriptures, one moves away from some of the most important
resources that the church has to work for justice in the world, the
doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the church. Thinking
about the church as communion of love and justice that reflects, in a
certain sense, the love and justice of God’s nature as Trinity
provides a more communitarian way of thinking about the Christian
life than following a vague call from a ‘God’ who is an indeterminate
weak force.
 Solvency
[ ] Caputo’s work rests on a strict monotheism which prevents any real
engagement with other Christian religions and also with non-Christian
religions. This close-mindedness prevents any access to a pluralism of
thought or religion that might be able to counter the harms the AFF cites.

PETER GOODWINHELTZEL / Spring Summer 2006 / Journal for Cultural and Religious
Theory / http://www.jcrt.org/archives/07.2/heltzel.pdf / Review of “The Weakness of God” /
(Assistant Professor of Theology at New York Theological Seminary)

Ironically, Caputo’s theology of weakness moves toward a non-dogmatic Unitarian universalism. Every human feels
an unconditional call from a weak force with many names, including God. The structure of this unconditional claim is
by nature universal. Many ecumenical forms of Christianity think that God does call humanity through the very
structures of creation accessed through experience and rationality. This call is indeed “weak,” but is rendered vivid
Caputo’s theological
in Christological and pneumatological terms according to confessional location.
strategy is to aggressively move beyond confessional differences
and orthodoxies through developing a vague, theological
universalism based on his own radically hermeneutical
phenomenology. While Caputo’s theology is Christocentric and
Pauline, he does not continue this logic toward a more robust
Trinitarianism. His radical monotheism prevents a deep engagement
with the real theological difference that exists between different
Christian communions, as well as the particular “theological”
positions of other religious traditions. If Caputo develops the
Trinitarian nature of God in the future he will have important
resources for addressing the problem of religious pluralism in an
age of global violence and empire.
With a liturgical cadence of conversation, prayer and then silence, The Weakness of God reads like the pensive
meditations of a devoted monk, full of reverence, love and imagination. Whether God is strong or weak or both,
theologians, weak and strong, can and should join together in the struggle for love and justice. God has called. The
Kingdom has called. Caputo has heard the call and his theology is an embodiment of the event of justice. In this
way he honors his father, mother and friend(s). If only we can too.
 Caputo Indicts

[ ] Caputo’s work is theological and not philosophical. Reject this work as

unfalsifiable and unsupported.

Catherine KELLER / 1 JAN 2007 / Cross Currents / http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0199-6310482_ITM

Review of “The Weakness of God” / Association for Religion and Intellectual Life
(Dr. Keller has taught at the Theological School of Drew University since 1986, where as Prof of Constructive Theology she teaches
courses in systematic, process, ecological, postcolonial and feminist styles of theology. She is the author of From a Broken Web:
Separation, Sexism and Self (Beacon:86) and Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Beacon:96).)
I will ask if it is the theopolitics of power that pushes Caputo over the edge of philosophy, into a biblical theology: power as divine
omnipotence, as ecclesial hierarchy, as messianic imperialism. But the very phrase biblical theology would only be a quaintly
familiar harbor for a hermeneutical event, where, in his language, something unknown is stirring. "Something that doth suffer a sea
change/to something rich and strange."
Yet I do not want to claim that Caputo is doing something discontinuous with his own voluminous hermeneutics, radical and then
more radical. His work has never not been theological in its questions and its
companions, its Kierkegaard and its Eckhart; his dialog with Derrida stimulated some of serious kibbutzing with theology,
indeed with Abraham, Paul and Jesus. Nonetheless there is a shift. I had read him before as a
subversively theological philosopher; now, as a subversively philosophical
theologian. Subversion may entail conversion. Here what he had called a
"devilish hermeneutics" gives way to a what he admits is a scriptural
hermeneutic--to what he calls the "poetics of the impossible." Is this a deradicalization? Or a most
radical hermeneutics--in the root sense which might still sound like an aporetic impossibility: that of a deepening of poststructuralism?

The book is driven by the root theological question: God. Its pivotal question is this: what event, irreducible to any name, is harbored
by the name of God? He reminds us that the "name God may be the incognito of the event, as surely as the event may be the
incognito of God." For while he has long deconstructed the high modernisms of the death of God, refuting Taylor's claim that
deconstruction is the hermeneutics of the death of God, there is no weakening of the radicality of deconstruction and its
deconstruction of authority and its authors: "the death of the author the death of God, is the narrow gate through which we reach the
kingdom of God. God is not the authority who enforces the kingdom of God." [116] But this is the very stuff of radical theology,
theology that in its refusal of the worship of power goes to the root of its own imaginary: "The name of God is possessed, not of
ontological foundations, institutional support, a large bank account, Swiss guards, a television network or ecclesiastical authority, but
only of phenomenological appeal or solicitation." That solicitation, that call, is akin to the lure or divine eros of process theology. It
becomes audible only when the din of diverse theological dominologies, with their church and state bully pulpits, dies down: in a
certain vibrant apophasis: what he calls "the silent promptings of God's divinely subversive call." [299]
So I wonder if it is the prominence of scriptural interpretation in Weakness that pushes it over the line into theology? In fact the
book performs massively more scriptural hermeneutics than most theology
properly so called. It is organizes its question about God in terms of scripture--by
way of a Pauline argument for weakness, through a friendly reading of the Gen 1
creation from chaos as a means of deconstructing classical omnipotence; and
then several chapters arranged around gospel stories. This scriptural density is apparent not just in
the iterations and cadences of biblical metaphor characteristic of much Christian theology, but in the writer's willingness to dwell in
specific biblical stories; to hang out in them, elaborating, interrogating, explicating them and implicating himself in the narratives. As
in the iconoclastic literary strategies of poststructuralist biblical scholars like Moore or Yvonne Sherwood, a jaunty irreverence may
reengages many of us more surely in these overly familiar texts than can an authoritative solemnity. But there is
nonetheless a reverence at play in this reading, which renders it theology and not
just deconstructive hermeneutics. For the call is no joke: "for these texts are solicitations that call for a response, appeals coming from I
know not where about a way to be, a style of existence, about a poetic possibility that we are invited to transform into existential actuality." [117]

Caputo Indicts

[ ] Caputo’s work is grossly oversimplified and ignorant of relevant

theological and other sources.

David Newheiser / 2007 / International Journal of Systematic Theology / p.105-108 /

(PhD Candidate in Theology at University of Chicago Divinity School)
http://dnewheiser.googlepages.com/DavidNewheiser-ReviewofJohnDCaputo.pdf

I believe that Caputo is right to resist attempts to locate and determine the divine, but his
anxiety that
'strong theologies...are the only theologies that "exist"' (WG, p. 9) grossly
oversimplifies the complexity of Christian tradition. Caputo says that 'these texts are
solicitations that call for a response, appeals coming from I know not where' (WG, p. 117), but he
repeatedly violates the alterity of this call by rejecting elements of his sources
which conflict with his position. Some might conclude that Caputo has selectively forced the
texts in question into a predetermined frame, and this would be unfortunate, for his reading of the biblical
texts is subtle and frequently illuminating. However, by maintaining a simplistic elitism
whereby 'the select circle of sacred anarchists' (WG, p. 183) is opposed to (supposedly
mainstream) 'strong theology,' Caputo cuts himself off from many sources which
would support and enrich his project.
 Case Turns
[ ] The Affirmative has worked themselves into an impossible trap with
respect to power. Caputo and the AFF appeal for powerlessness as an
enabling force for justice but their very plea implies a politics requiring
power. They appeal to your power, to the power of the ballot, and more
broadly to a power to change and improve things. These appeals to power
are natural and productive, but they are fundamentally at odds with Caputo’s
work and the AFF’s plea. This means that you should vote negative; reject
powerlessness and acknowledge that there are alternate and good forms of
power, power that can generate positive change and justice. A negative
vote is a vote for your own empowerment.

Catherine KELLER / 1 JAN 2007 / Cross Currents / http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0199-6310482_ITM

Review of “The Weakness of God” / Association for Religion and Intellectual Life
(Dr. Keller has taught at the Theological School of Drew University since 1986, where as Prof of Constructive Theology she teaches
courses in systematic, process, ecological, postcolonial and feminist styles of theology. She is the author of From a Broken Web:
Separation, Sexism and Self (Beacon:86) and Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Beacon:96).)
While I find myself happily berthing in the metaphor of event harbors, that of weakness--the
weakness of God, of
theology, of hermeneutics--leaves me at sea. I understand that the weakness-
metaphor harbors for Caputo a theological event, an event in whose importance I am a true believer:
that of the deconstruction of the divine omnipotence in favor--not of a no god, a dead god, but of a possibly better one--a more
believable, more worthy, indeed more biblically and existentially resonant divinity. But
"weak" by what measure?
According to the measure of strength understood as dominance, as the power to
subjugate, to subject, even to produce ex nihilo the subjects of one's kingdom?
Calvin offers the most consistently strong God, blowing out of the water all the compromises of medieval split-level causality, of
divine permission, and early modern deism: God as the foreordaining omnipotence without whose express will no raindrop falls; and
who therefore has consistently double predestined us already to choose God or sin. Strong theology takes a strong stomach. Such
divine superpower exercises an all controlling, preemptive providence, which some of us think legitimates the sole global
superpower and its indispensable Christendom. Certainly by the standard of dominance, any God who is either imaginable or
morally worth imagining, will be weak. Caputo's Pauline tour de force, his divine strength made perfect in weakness, offers
passionate witness to the lie--yes, really, untruth--of omnipotence.
If power means power-over, then God is either weak or plain nonexistent by the
standards of dominance. That root problem of theodicy has never been driven by abstract doctrinal questions but by
the suffering of every Job, the passion of every God-forsaken one: or ones forsaken by a strong theology. But in our own
writing, teaching, activism, don't we seek to exercise power, and as much of it as
possible? Power as influence--the in-fluency of our fluid relations? Feminist theology can
hardly embrace a weak theology for ourselves (though we might not mind it if you guys do). In order to grow our
public strength we have followed the call and the image of an alternative power, a
power that does not lord it over, a power of empowerment, akin to a radical
democracy, the democracy to come. And my own Whiteheadian patrilineage of the God who is the poet of the
universe, the fellow sufferer who understands--does not intend to lessen God's power but to convert it: God's will translates into the
divine eros of the universe, luring each event--to happen. Of course the theological authorities always and not without reasons
accuse both feminism and process theologies of weakening the Lord. We reply: God is neither omnipotent nor impotent but-inviting.
[Perhaps process theology goes over the edge into a kataphatic confidence that I must translate (with Roland Faber's help) into an
apophatically tinged theopoetics.] But contextually speaking, process theology lets me teach seminarians whom we maybe don't
want to send into their fragile old-line Christian settings to preach the weakness of God. At
any rate don't we weep
and pray not for weakness but for alternative power--not a God who will do our
work for us [though a holy housewife might be nice for a change] but for the inspiration to resist the
theopolitics of violation, to insist upon a shared power of transformation? This
divinity and its creaturely actualizations would counter the love of power with the
power of love. Certainly the most vulnerable of powers. Between divine weakness
and the divine lure, I recognize a certain "divine undecidability."

Case Turns

[ ] Caputo’s work fails to recognize the relevance of power and his

argument’s inherent appeal to power. These contradictions make his
position untenable. The AFF appeals to powerlessness only affirm that you
can and should exercise power at times, in this case by voting negative.

David Newheiser / 2007 / International Journal of Systematic Theology / p.105-108 /

(PhD Candidate in Theology at University of Chicago Divinity School)
http://dnewheiser.googlepages.com/DavidNewheiser-ReviewofJohnDCaputo.pdf

For instance, although Caputo complains that even the most negative Christian mysticism still asserts
profound strength, his own approach would require the reflexive negativity evident in the admission of
Dionysius the Areopagite (for one) that even his own discourse is subject to negation. Against
'mainstream theology,' Caputo claims that 'the more [theology] talks about
weakness, the more we can be sure it has power up its sleeve' (WG, p. 8), and yet
he seems not to notice the contradictory strength of his own 'weak theology.' In
claiming that 'the abstention that constitutes the diminished state of my theology...represents not a loss
but a gain' (WG, p. 9), Caputo reasserts the worldly economy he elsewhere rejects - in
fact, he ought to acknowledge that the gift and the event elude his discussion as
well. Not only is this a point wellmade in Christian mysticism, a more robust self-
abnegation would encourage deeper engagement with tradition in the realization
that simplistic antagonisms are simply untenable.

[ ] Caputo’s project rejects agency and ignores the roles we can all have in
violence and in reducing violence. Reject this apathy and the AFF’s insistence
that you are powerless.
Denise J. Mcpherson / 1/18/ 2007 / Amazon.com / Customer Reviews

Caputo's
This is a beautifully written book. In light of the current global situation, this book will be welcome to some. Yet
project has severe limitations. In terms of substance, 'theology of the event' amounts to deconstruction adorned
with alot of god talk. Caputo, let alone Derrida, provides no way of talking about 'sin', that
rather unpopular word that implicates us all in the problem of violence. Waxing
poetic about the world and the powerless can amount to bad faith when one
rejects a framework for thinking agency, and especially if one doesn't emphasize
the contingency of violence. Given Derrida's Nietzschean insistence on the
neccesity of violence, taken with Caputo's uncritical fidelity to Derrida, it is clear
that Caputo creates unsolvable problems for his position, especially if it claims to be Christian.
“The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event”, Jack D. Caputo, Anglican
Theological Review,
Fall 2006. Book Review.