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The European Reception of John D.
Caputo's Thought: Radicalizing

Theology Martin Koci
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The European Reception
of John D. Caputo’s
Thought
The European Reception
of John D. Caputo’s
Thought
Radicalizing Theology
Edited by
Joeri Schrijvers and Martin Koci
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Contents
Acknowledgmentsix
John D. Caputo’s Radical Theology in Europe: An Introduction 1

PART I: RADICAL THEOLOGY AND POLITICS 17

1 Radical Theology as Political Theology: Exploring
the Fragments of God’s Weak Power 19
Calvin D. Ullrich
Response to Ullrich 40
John D. Caputo
2 A Radical Fidelity: John D. Caputo and the Future of
Religion 45
Marie Chabbert
Response to Chabbert 67
John D. Caputo
3 Is It Radical Enough?: The Ethical Call of Caputo’s
Theopoetics to Stick to the Difficulty of Life in Light
of Black Lives Matter 73
Enrieke Damen
Response to Damen 90
John D. Caputo
v
vi Contents
PART II: RADICAL THEOLOGY AND THE TRAGIC

VERSUS HOPE AND LOVE 93
4 The Foolish Call of Love 95
George Pattison
Response to Pattison 108
John D. Caputo
5 From Kenosis to Kenoma: The Enigma of a Place in
Derrida and Caputo 113
Agata Bielik-Robson
Response to Bielik-Robson 131
John D. Caputo
6 A Post-Belief Europe and the Offer of John Caputo 139
Maria Francesca French and Barry Taylor
Response to French and Taylor 148
John D. Caputo
PART III: RADICAL THEOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY 153

7 The Call and the Cross in Caputo and Bultmann 155
Rick Benjamins
Response to Benjamins 169
John D. Caputo
8 Caputo and the Unidentifiability of God 175
Christophe Chalamet
Response to Chalamet 191
John D. Caputo
9 God—the Opportunity for Continued Discontent 199
Jan-Olav Henriksen
Response to Henriksen 212
John D. Caputo
PART IV: RADICAL THEOLOGY WITHIN THEOLOGY

AND PHILOSOPHY 215
10 Radical Theology’s Place within Theology 217
Justin Sands
Response to Sands 232
John D. Caputo
Contents vii
11 Keeping Weakness Weak to Make It Strong: Caputo’s

Theopoetics of Event 237
Erik Meganck
Response to Meganck 257
John D. Caputo
12 Hospitality in Action: A Question for Practical Theology? 261
Pascale Renaud-Grosbras
Response to Renaud-Grosbras 270
John D. Caputo
13 Care and Decay: A Phenomenology of the Queer Body
(with Constant Reference to the HIV-Positive Flesh) 275
Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere
Response to Cassidy-Deketelaere 292
John D. Caputo
Index 299
About the Editors and Contributors 303
Acknowledgments
Writing a book is always a challenge. Editing the book is a double chal-

lenge. We, the editors, must thank all the contributors for making our work
relatively easy. It was a pleasure to work on this project with such a group of
distinguished and brilliant people. Thanks must go to the publishing team of
Lexington Books, their patience, helpfulness, advice, and hard work.
Each chapter submitted to this volume underwent peer-review process on
the level of editors and the anthology as the whole on the level of the pub-
lisher. John D. Caputo was a part of the editorial and peer-review process too
as he agreed to comment and give a thorough response to each accepted chap-
ter to this volume. We, the editors, would like to thank Jack for being very
much involved in the preparation of this volume. Hence, we hope that this
book will read not only as a scholarly engagement with the work of Caputo
but also as an ongoing dialogue with one of the most prominent philosophers/
theologians of our time.
The work on this book was generously supported by the Austrian Science
Fund (FWF) as a partial result of the project “Revenge of the Sacred:
Phenomenology and the Ends of Christianity in Europe” [P 31919].
ix
John D. Caputo’s Radical
Theology in Europe
An Introduction
WEAK AND RADICAL THEOLOGY:

CAPUTO IN EUROPE
John D. Caputo has recently proposed, after years of philosophical work in

the wake of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, his own version of a radical
theology. Since this “coming out as a theologian,” a number of books have
appeared that develop this radical theology: The Weakness of God: A The-
ology of the Event (2006), The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps
(2013), The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (2015), and Cross
and Cosmos: A Theology of the Difficult Glory (2019), being the main points
of reference. We are now all awaiting for the volume to come later this year,
which seeks to relate this radical or weak theology to the philosophical pro-
tagonists of our day: Specters of God: An Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagina-
tion (2022). Caputo’s radical theology is said to focus less on rigid dogmatic
formulas of traditional religion and focuses, rather, on ethical themes such
as hospitality and openness to the stranger. Caputo’s work has gathered a
significant amount of followers in the United States, where he is one of the
main theologians today. This volume proposes to evaluate this new form of
religion from out of the various religious and theological backgrounds from
Europe’s main countries. Is only a rather secular mind-set able to welcome
Caputo’s thinking or does it, rather, sit well with more traditional stance
toward religion? The aim of this volume is to gather Catholic and Protes-
tant voices around Caputo’s work to evaluate the match with the European
context.
To this end, we have invited scholars from all over Europe to reflect on
their respective religious backgrounds and their relation with Caputo’s form
of radical theology and so add to the European reception of Caputo’s radical
1
2 Joeri Schrijvers and Martin Koci
theology. This introduction will present a short survey of the previous hospi-
talities to Caputo’s work, for this reception of Caputo’s work in Europe has
been going on for quite some time: one of the first events, in this regard, must
have been the Dutch translation of his On Religion in 2002. This probably
was some sort of package deal with the publisher from the United Kingdom,
Routledge, since all the other works in this series Thinking in Action, a series
confronting major cultural phenomena such as the internet, film, and so on,
were translated to Dutch as well.1 It is not until 2007 that serious academic
reception took place. Here we, the editors, need to tip our hat to Lieven
Boeve who was leading a then vibrant research community at the University
of Leuven. In the academic year 2007–2008 a lot of leading scholars within
the field of continental philosophy of religion and philosophical theology in
the continental tradition came to Belgium to present their work to students.
All of these authors were first introduced by young doctoral scholars. John
D. Caputo was one of the scholars who presented his work to the Leuven stu-
dents, as did for instance Kevin Hart and Graham Ward. Out of these events
grew the book Between Philosophy and Theology: Contemporary Interpreta-
tions of Christianity (2010).2 It is perhaps no exaggeration that the idea for
the present volume germinated there and then. At least three of the “students”
present there have since published monographs that discuss Caputo’s radical
theology. There is the work of us two editors3 but above all the monograph
by the late Štefan Štofaník, still one of the most personal confrontations with
Caputo’s theology to date, that needs to be mentioned.4 Around the same time
Justin Sands’ monograph on Merold Westphal was published. Sands was
part of said research group and his Reasoning from Faith likewise contains
a chapter on Westphal’s debates with Caputo and, as most of us were asking
those days, on the presence, still, of some sort of ontotheology and metaphys-
ics in Caputo’s works.5 All of us were present that weary day in March 2008
that Caputo took the stage in Leuven and made the statement that “nobody
trusts theology.”6 We the editors still recall the impact that sentence had on a
bunch of young theologians—there must have been ten of them at a certain
time—seeking their way within the academic field. Here was Caputo saying
that no one trusts theology and, on top of that, that “there is good reason” for
this disbelief in these so-called masters of belief. There is a gap, of course,
between this academic reception and what the reception of radical theology
might mean for religious communities. In this regard, when it comes to the
European reception in a broader sense, it is good to know that this gap has
been filled in, in the Low Countries at least, with the recent translation of
his fascinating Hoping against Hope (2015), one more attempt of Caputo to
escape the strict academic boundaries.7 The translation reached a second print
soon and led to interviews with Caputo in major Dutch newspapers. Finally,
we should acknowledge that the concept of “radical theology” is quickly
John D. Caputo’s Radical Theology in Europe 3
gaining terrain in the Netherlands, to which the European Radical Theology

Network may testify. Out of these networks, engineered by Wouter Nieuwen-
huizen and Josef Gustafsson, the participation of Barry Taylor, who focuses
on Caputo’s radical theology in an increasingly secular Europe, specifically
in the present volume grew.8 Apart from this, introduction to radical theology,
focusing both on the work of Caputo and of Žižek, has recently appeared.9
In this volume, however, Enrieke Damen and Rick Benjamins focus on
Caputo’s relation to the Black Lives Matters movement in Europe and on the
Protestant theological background of Holland, respectively.
Translations of Caputo’s steps on theological terrain in French have
equally been slow. Pascal Renaud-Grosbras, one of the contributors to this
volume, will relate the events leading up to her translations of some chapters
of The Insistence of God, two of which were presented in the journal issue
she and Elian Cuvillier edited about Caputo’s theology.10 It seems that the
French-speaking parts of Europe were first introduced to Caputo’s theology
through a conference organized in Switzerland, in May 2013, on the topic of
“The Wisdom and the Foolishness of God,” to which Caputo contributed by
giving the key-note address. The importance of this event cannot be under-
estimated as it led to two journal issues focusing on Caputo’s oeuvre and to
the eventual publication of the French translation of The Weakness of God.11
France, however, often suffices for the French: it is no wonder, then, that
the theological domain established around Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel
Falque, for instance, never really engaged with Caputo’s work, Caputo’s
critique of Marion notwithstanding.12 In Norway, reception of Caputo’s
work crystallizes in a few journal articles13 and Jan-Olav Henriksen’s con-
tribution to this volume will no doubt be important to make Caputo’s work
more known in the North of Europe. Calvin Ullrich focuses in this volume
on Caputo’s reception in Germany through discussing and criticizing the
contributions to workshop resulting in the publication of a volume of essays
called Gottes schwache Macht. Alternativen zur Rede von Gottes Allmacht
und Ohnmacht in 2017.14 As far as we know the Spanish-speaking world has
been served by the translation of The Weakness of God, in 2014 already, by
Raul Zagarra.15 Considering that this translation opened up Caputo’s work in
the Latin Americas more generally, we have not incorporated any Spanish
authors in this volume.
No European, however, is an island. Here too the reception of Caputo’s
work echoes what happens in the English-speaking world. Two events here
perhaps need to be mentioned. On the one hand, there was the debate between
John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek in The Monstrosity of Christ in which the
latter criticized Caputo for not allowing the event to properly incarnate in a
name and so missing out on the materialism that, for Žižek, is the only way
forward after metaphysics.16 The critique triggered Caputo enough to respond
with a chapter in his own The Insistence of God stating clearly that Žižek’s
reading was based more on a “misunderstanding” than anything else.17 If,
for Žižek, Caputo is not materialist enough and if for Žižek just any talk of
God will somehow sometimes smuggle in an antimaterial instance to back
up contingent materiality, then Caputo’s take on contingency is more of a
hauntological flavor. There is no other matter than the matter here happening
before us and the only materialism Caputo then allows is the “materialism
of Martha,” responsible as it is for what might be happening, for the very
materialization of events, not knowing whether or not it will do these events
justice.18 This dialogue between Milbank and Žižek showed rather that at
the time the theological landscape in the United Kingdom was dominated by
Radical Orthodoxy, the theological movement that sprang up in the wake of
Milbank’s works. Domination, however, is not a word Caputo likes to use
and the reception of his radical theology in the United Kingdom remained
scarce. We hope that Marie Chabbert’s contribution to this volume might help
to turn the tide and Calvin Ullrich’s chapter, by pointing to a material turn in
Caputo’s recent work, adds to Caputo’s response to Žižek.
On the other hand, there is a second publication that looms over the
European reception of Caputo’s radical theology, namely the publication
of Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister’s landmark Reexamining Decon-
struction.19 Many of the contributions in this volume comport themselves to
this high point in the reception of Caputo’s radical theology. On one point,
however, Simmons and Minister seem to follow Žižek’s critique: whereas
Žižek deplored the fact that Caputo was not materialist enough, Simmons and
Minister critique Caputo for being too little of a materialist. The difference is
small but significant: for Žižek not one historical contingency could properly
be conceived by Caputo (except through supposedly having recourse to a God
of the events), for Simmons and Minister the very presence of these historical
contingencies is not sufficiently taken into account by Caputo. The worry,
in this second case, is that the extant, material “religions with religion” are
not being valorized properly by Caputo and his “religion without religion” is
but a postmodern rephrasing of a Kantian noumenon once again forgetting
the very concrete phenomena in which we breathe and with which we live,
especially those of determinate religion. Simmons and Minister’s critiques
voiced a suspicion that a great many, perhaps, at the time had over and
against works, and our readers will see the contributions in this volume come
back to this criticism time and again. We will see Renaud-Grosbras echo this
suspicion from within practical theology: if not one religious practice can
be understood as the religious practice, how then can we be certain that our
religious practice is in fact a good practice?
The unity of the European response we gather here will then soon shine
forth. Two “trends,” as it were come to mind immediately: whereas earlier
work on Caputo tended to focus indeed on the Kantian heritage of his weak
and radical theology, in which his “religion without religion” was but a dou-
blet, a religion within the limits of a weakened reason, of traditional religion,
the chapters in this volume focus more on the positive contribution this weak
theology can give to forms of traditional religion. Could it be that the Europe-
ans gathered here, who have all witnessed in their own way the demise of tra-
ditional religion look to Caputo to strengthen their religious contexts again?
A second concomitant trend is the shift from “weak” theology to “radi-
cal” theology. We have slowly seen emerging a theology in its own right in
Caputo’s work: from a somewhat hesitant weak theology, which perhaps was
indeed too reliant and contaminated by the forms of traditional religion which
it sought to deconstruct, to a full-fledged radical theology which is, in this
volume, being interrogated about its relation and contribution to everything
that classical theology held dear: the incarnation, our salvation, our prayers,
and so on. This volume, then, seeks to advance this move from “religion
without religion,” as a somewhat second-order discourse to a radical theology
that aids theology on its very own terms. The debates surrounding weak the-
ology’s supposed mere inversion of metaphysical and traditional statement,
where the omnipotent God for instance would be simply substituted with a
“weak” God, make up for quite some chapters in this volume. Yet Caputo’s
turn to a “radical” theology deserves our attention too. In The Folly of God,
for instance, Caputo noticed that his is a radical theology, a theology that is
not interested in the question of God per se, that has deeper interests even
than God. Its only interest, and this is why it is close to thinking in a more
philosophical and perhaps even Heideggerian sense, is in raising radical ques-
tions and in so prolonging the art of questioning.20 Quite some chapters in this
volume will then trace this shift—this realization rather—in Caputo’s work.
All of the chapters receive a response by Caputo in which he enters into
dialogue with the questions arising from out of the European context. These
responses are, quite rightly, configured as addresses, if not greetings, and we
only hope that Caputo finds his greetings returned in the chapters we here
offer in praise of his work.
RADICAL THEOLOGY AND POLITICS
Calvin Ullrich’s chapter, “Radical Theology as Political Theology: Exploring

the Fragments of God’s Weak Power,” seeks to show how Caputo’s theology
is not a prolongation of the formalism of a Kantian sublime but rather opens
onto a materialist politics. Ullrich aims to do this by briefly recalling Capu-
to’s reception in Germany in most often hermeneutical theological circles
and recent rather secular philosophies. Whereas the first seeks to retain more
than just the “name of God” by clinging onto God’s omnipotence, the second
tends to see in Caputo just an inversion of power where weakness now is the
ultimate name of God. Over and against these German responses, Ullrich pro-
poses to see a political theology at work in Caputo’s theology more straight-
forwardly: its messianic import is nowhere else than in a material engagement
in the world. Caputo’s truth is a truth in the making, a “doing God” which
binds God’s insistence to us and us to God. In conclusion, Ullrich urges
Caputo to take one more step and move to a “cosmological reduction,” which
at long last might shed the remains of an all too humanist tradition.
Marie Chabbert’s chapter, “A Radical Fidelity: John D. Caputo and the
Future of Religion,” focuses on who counts as faithful, who is in and who
is out that is, so complicating the Christian response to the event of the call,
central to Caputo’s radical theology. Hers is an account that stresses, not the
identification of who counts as a Christian, as other chapters in the volume
do, but rather to describe the responsibility of the theologian, radical or not,
to take on the role of whistle-blower: theology is to be interrupted as soon
as it becomes too self-assured and too certain when it comes to the question
who counts as a Christian and who does not. Chabbert so seeks to portray the
active contribution of Caputo’s theology to the formation and prolongation
of Christian institution: Caputo, for Chabbert, is in the business of saving
religion. Of particular note in Chabbert’s chapter is her sketch of the rela-
tion between Derrida and Caputo, which today in the literature has perhaps
somewhat been understudied. For Derrida, the uncertainty regarding God lies
in our act of naming God rather than in a supposed existence of such God as
a proper referent. This is why atheism and theism, the one denying, the other
affirming a particular naming of God, share the same troubles. Yet where
this leads Derrida to a sort of indifference and to have some anxiety about
which institution or tradition to subscribe to, and about how to do this, Caputo
engages precisely a deconstructive practice from within religious institutions.
Whereas Derrida was destined to remain “an outsider,” Caputo tries his very
best to become Christian, to be part of the tradition while remaining critical
about its practices, in short, to take the risk of naming God. Chabbert clearly
shows how for Caputo “theology” has a more strict meaning than it did for
Derrida, that a radical theology flows from Derrida’s deconstruction that Der-
rida, perhaps, did not foresee. On this score, Chabbert concludes, Caputo’s
project of a radical theology is closer to Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstruction of
Christianity than it is to Derrida’s disengaged deconstruction.
More than the other chapters in this volume, perhaps, Damen’s chapter, “Is
It Radical Enough? The Ethical Call of Caputo’s Theopoetics to Stick to the
Difficulty of Life in Light of Black Lives Matter,” underscores the continuity
of Caputo’s recent radical theology with his earlier work. Damen in effect
intimates that Caputo’s theopoetics of the cross is a variation of the (earlier)
radical hermeneutics he had proposed. Caputo’s theopoetics of the cross,

for Damen, is to be regarded not in the light of the dialectical victory in and
through the resurrection but rather as a victory in defeat, as a radical siding
with the victim. Caputo’s theopoetics, then, goes to the very roots of theol-
ogy, to vulnerability of our lives, and the questions this poses. For Damen,
this radical theology of the cross is inherently political and she makes a case
for the ability of Caputo’s theopoetics to side with the victims of racial injus-
tices, such as decried by the Black Lives Matter movement. For this, she here
stages an intriguing dialogue between the work of Caputo and the womanist
theologian Kelly Brown Douglas.
RADICAL THEOLOGY AND THE TRAGIC

VERSUS HOPE AND LOVE
George Pattison discusses “The Foolish Call of Love” in Caputo’s works. In

an intriguing meditation, he relates Caputo’s account of the Folly of God to
the narrative imaginations of such foolish rulings in Shakespeare’s character
of Poor Tom in his King Lear and Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin in The Idiot.
The question Pattison poses to Caputo is what exactly these two figures might
mean for our understanding of divine foolishness. In Shakespeare, Pattison
finds an account that is close to Levinas’ later statements of the widow, the
orphan, and the stranger being our masters. True mastery would then lie in an
utter defenselessness. If Shakespeare so hints at our commiserating together
on our account of being all “unaccommodated men,” Pattison turns to Dosto-
evsky to broach the question of salvation, by a reading of Dostoevsky’s Idiot
as one of his allegories of Christ. It is here that the question of love surfaces
as a “way” that trumps death—despite death even. This sheer possibility of
living otherwise is what Pattison brings to, and finds in, Caputo’s œuvre.
Yet this remarkable chapter ends with what seems a justified inquiry when it
comes to the praise of the folly of love in Caputo’s theology: why does the
tragedy of the human condition in his work remain so scarcely audible?
Agatha Bielik-Robson’s chapter, “From Kenosis to Kenoma: The Enigma
of a Place in Derrida and Caputo,” revisits a debate that could be observed in
the literature for a little while now: are not the inversions of Caputo, simply
substituting a weak God for a former strong God, playing the same old game
on the same old playing ground but just in other terms? Can one not, instead
of this inversion of metaphysical statements, find another, different way to
proceed after metaphysics and move aside these terms that belong to a clas-
sical theism nonetheless? Bielik-Robson defends not the kenosis of faith, a
faith forever weakening, one finds in Caputo (but where weakness itself thus
always runs the risk of being yet one more spectacle of power) but rather a
Marrano “religion without religion” she traces back to Derrida. Derrida was
on the lookout for a God in retreat, for the tsimtsum one finds in the mysti-
cism of Isaac Luria, from out of a kenomatic place that itself is not that easily
circumscribed as divine or as the simple inversion of weaker and stronger
gods. From this place, nonetheless, Bielik-Robson launches a question to
Caputo’s radical theology: can it really move beyond the, however subtle,
inversions of the constructions of the “palace theologians” it so tirelessly
seems to deconstruct?
Maria Francesca French and Barry Taylor’s chapter, “A Post-Belief
Europe and the Offer of John Caputo,” goes to the heart of this volume:
what has Caputo’s radical theology to offer to Europe where, in general, the
religious way of life is in decline? These authors speak of a re-enchantment
of sorts, of a hope for something far more than the religious institutions have
offered to satisfy the religious hunger. For this, the religious imagination has
one again to be fed, and it is this exactly that John D. Caputo offers to us all.
By liberating faith from the constraints of religious belief, French and Taylor
argue Caputo reveals the “viable alternatives” to a seeking religious imagina-
tion. This radical theology, however, does not occur ex-nihilo: it starts with
the remains, the remnants, and the residue of Christianity in Europe. For this
reason, too, Caputo’s haunto-theology should be applauded—it deals with
our past, with our determinate religions but from within a “dynamic of free-
dom” that welcomes what is new and to come.
RADICAL THEOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY
Rick Benjamins, “The Call and the Cross in Caputo and Bultmann,” places
Caputo’s radical theology in relation to the theology of the so-called Amster-
dam School of the Dutch theologians Klaas Henrikse, Frans Breukelman, and
Harry M. Kuitert. As many authors in this volume, Benjamins pays attention
to the affirmative gesture in Caputo’s radical theology, which, perhaps more
than Derrida’s deconstruction, seeks to move beyond an always unsettling
operation. Benjamins in effect argues that our mundane reality, for Caputo,
can give place to the event so implicitly shifting the attention from its call to
the world which complies precisely to this call. Caputo’s turn to the mate-
rial world (in its turn exemplified by his increasing Auseinandersetzung with
Hegel) is evident by his sense for this finite world of ours, and that we are part
and parcel of a cosmos destined to fade away. What sense, then, Benjamins
asks, has an event that is “always to come,” in such a finite world? Everything
hinges here, Benjamins argues on the status of the cross: is it a “nihilism of
grace,” poured out for nothing and without why, as Caputo has argued or
is, perhaps, more at stake here? For the latter, Benjamins brings Caputo’s
thought into contact with that of Rudolf Bultmann who put the essence of
Christian existence precisely in the realization that one is called rather in the
identification (or not) of the call. Would it be not more important for Chris-
tians today to act as Christians because of their response to the cross rather
than it is to respond somewhat agnostically to a call that literally would come
from God knows where?
Christophe Chalamet’s chapter, “Caputo and the Unidentifiability of God,”
focuses likewise on a question arising from within the Christian tradition.
Here the issue is again the identifiability of God, not so much from out of
the Christian response to the call but rather from out of the doctrine of the
incarnation, as God’s consent to become identifiable. It might not be, Chal-
amet argues, up to us to make God happen in the world. Rather, the Christian
teaching states that God happened to the world. Following the lead of the
tradition, this would save Caputo from putting such a heavy burden, and
responsibility, on the human (and in each case all too human) response to the
call of the divine. With this line of thought, Chalamet nonetheless approaches
questions that pop up in many contributions of this volume: is Caputo’s
shift from an ontology to an ethics or to a theopoetics not underestimating
the essence of Christian theology? A God that would show up in being, that
would be the very life of being, Chalamet argues, would ease the overburden-
ing of the human response to God somewhat and so make room for a “dance”
between the human and the divine.
Jan-Olav Henriksen’s chapter, “God—The Opportunity for Continued
Discontent,” looks for the affirmative and constructive character of Caputo’s
radical theology rather than focusing on its deconstructive nature. Is not
Caputo communicating, Henriksen asks, a specific experience of God or
perhaps even delineating the conditions for such an experience to occur?
For this, Henriksen turns to Caputo’s account of the practice of prayer. In
prayer, specific understandings crystallize and take form within the world.
Prayer, on Caputo’s reading, is not an automated response commandeered
by a religious police but, in its very variety and multitude of ways, attention
to the world, in which God is to take place. Prayers, like events, prepare the
ground for something new. They pray exactly for something new in what
happens. In this way, Henriksen intriguingly argues, prayers exemplify what
one can call the quasi-transcendental operation of the event in Caputo: events
are constitutive of the new, but are only found in what is constituted which
so serves as their transcendental clue. The transcendental and the subjective
desire for something external, something that is forever outside of its reach.
This interplay between the subjective and the external, for Henriksen, is
evident also in Caputo’s thinking of God. No philosophical (or theological
for that matter) project can ever comprehend God. Caputo here approaches,
Henriksen shows, the classical thought of a deus semper major. But such a
negation, or deconstruction, of all ideas and images of positive religion actu-

ally mediates and contributes to the experience of God Caputo is trying to
communicate. Henriksen so shows the positive role “religion” plays, and has
to play, in any and all “religion without religion,” a point which is in effect
too easily forgotten.
RADICAL THEOLOGY WITHIN

THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY
Justin Sands’ chapter, “Radical Theology’s Place within Theology,” focuses

on some philosophical and methodological questions about “reception”: how
is Caputo’s work to be received in theology? If it does not want to identify
as neither “fundamental theology” nor “liberation theology,” and not even as
“contextual theology,” just what is it then? Sands argues for a transition, if
not progress, in Caputo from a “weak theology” to precisely a “radical theol-
ogy.” This would be, first, a theology that locates how our religious beliefs
develop by always rupturing from within, and, second, from this rupturing
takes precisely its activist posture. Sands then lays bare this radical theology
by noting three fundamental principles in Caputo’s theology. A Protestant
Principle forces this theology always to reconsider, or to reform; a Jewish
Principle imposes its law to always deconstruct. Caputo adds, however, for
Sands a third Catholic Principle: even if revelation in Jesus Christ is to be
considered as final, exhaustive and, perhaps, exhausted, the reception of
this revelation in our very lives is always still proceeding and so very much
alive. These three principles make for the fact that radical theology turns into
a theopoetics: this theopoetics answers to the directive of the revelation to
make it happen as a way of life. In this way, radical theology is a corrective
to the discipline of systematic theology: it seeks to preserve the spirit of what
stirs theology to begin with, the life and practices of faith. To conclude, Sands
hints at a community of these “theopoets,” as it were a thought of community
that in Caputo’s work somewhat seems underexposed: it takes two to do
justice to someone and something, as it always goes from me to you or from
you to me.
Erik Meganck’s chapter, “Keeping Weakness Weak to Make It Strong:
Caputo’s Theopoetics of Event,” explores Caputo’s relation to what one might
call his predecessor in “weak thinking,” Gianni Vattimo. The chapter opens
by remarking that whereas Caputo mentions Vattimo quite often, the latter
does not mention Caputo’s weak theology at all. Secularization, for Vattimo,
is the last and latest heir to Christianity. Yet whereas Vattimo subscribes, for
the most part, to the Heideggerian “ontologization” of this history, it strikes
Meganck that Caputo’s theopoetics moves into the opposite direction, namely
of an almost anti-ontology of the event. Caputo so distances himself more and

more from Vattimo. With Rorty, one needs to take an “ironic distance” from
facts and names and the order of being in its entirety. Meganck closes his
chapter by probing, like Sands before him, what precisely the status of this
weak thinking in Caputo is if it does not entertain an ontology. Yet it is, for
Meganck, neither an ethics nor a theology in the sense proper. Rather, Mega-
nck applauds Caputo’s move toward a theopoetics as one more hermeneutical
attempt to make sense of the event of world.
Pascal Renaud-Grosbras’ chapter, “Hospitality in Action: A Question for
Practical Theology?” thinks along with Caputo’s call to be hospitable to call
of the unconditional, to responsibly respond to the event and form practices
that can, and are able to, this event and this call. She therefore traces the
fine line that earlier critiques of Caputo, such as Žižek’s, had already noted:
the line between the name and the event. Is any practice at all suited to host
this event? If all the democracies, for instances, are haunted from within by
a democracy to come how are we to discriminate between good and bad
democracies or even between less good and less bad democracies. Grosbras
asks this question from within a specific, determinate Christian practice: can
Christians ever be hospitable enough to the Christian God? If indeed there
is a gap between the Gospel and Christian practices, how are we to conceive
of better practices? Are not these practices in some way a shield for the
immense responsibility that Caputo’s work lays on the human endeavor to
be religious—a question that also surfaces in Chalamet’s chapter. With this
stress on the importance of certain determinate practices, Grosbras is sure to
aid in Caputo’s quest for “the becoming-radical of confessional theology.”21
Finally, Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere’s “Care and Decay: A Phenomenol-
ogy of the Queer Body (with Constant Reference to the HIV-Positive Flesh)”
returns to Caputo’s early work to consider what happened to Caputo’s promise
to give us his account of the flesh in the volumes that were announced right
after the publication of The Weakness of God. Cassidy-Deketelaere traces
Caputo’s account of the flesh as precisely an experience of suffering, the fail-
ure as it were of the body to be phenomenology’s body proper. Fascinatingly,
Cassidy-Deketelaere discovers one of Caputo’s favorite examples perhaps
throughout his career, that of “people with AIDS.” Cassidy-Deketelaere then
shows us a lingering Sartrean dimension in Caputo’s antiphenomenology of
the flesh, for the flesh of the sick person here appears as repulsive and disgust-
ing more than anything else. Cassidy-Deketelaere turns to Hervé Guibert’s
description of what happens to the AIDS-ridden body, who, suffering from
the disease himself, described his own body “as being taken over by that of an
older man.” Yet in these accounts, and similar ones, one finds another dimen-
sion that is missing in Caputo’s account of the body and of flesh. Whereas
Caputo, once again perhaps indebted to Sartre perhaps, describes the sick man
and woman in his or her isolation, Cassidy-Deketelaere wants our attention for
the communities of care that arise around the sick. The loss of humanity that
Caputo detects in the experience of illness is nonetheless accompanied by the
response of others who might so intimate a shared sense of vulnerability. In his
conclusion, Cassidy-Deketelaere points to the work of Emmanuel Falque as
someone who has taken up the question of the sick body in precisely this way.
With these thirteen chapters, and replies of Caputo, we hope to add to, and
so continue, the reception of Caputo’s work in Europe and, perhaps to offer
a small contribution, who knows, to the radicalization of theology as well.
NOTES
1. The series contained works by Slavoj Žižek, Simon Critchley, Richard Kear-
ney and Hubert Dreyfus among others and was widely available in the Low countries.
See John D. Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001) and the translation
Religie, translated by Arend Smidse (London: Uitgeverij Routledge, 2002).
2. Lieven Boeve and Christophe Brabant (eds.), Between Philosophy and Theol-
ogy: Contemporary Interpretations of Christianity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
3. See Martin Koci, Thinking Faith After Christianity: A Theological Reading
of Jan Patočka’s Phenomenological Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2020),
93–117, esp. 107–111 and Joeri Schrijvers, Between Faith and Belief: Toward A
Contemporary Phenomenology of Religious Life (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016),
133–222.
4. Štefan Štofaník, The Adventure of Weak Theology: Reading the Work of John
D. Caputo through Biographies and Events (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018).
5. See Justin Sands, Reasoning From Faith. Fundamental Theology in Merold
Westphal’s Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2018), 203–224 and
“After Onto-Theology: What Lies beyond ‘The End of Everything’,” Religions 8
(2017), 98 and more recently his “Confessional Discourses, Radical Traditions: On
John Caputo and the Theological Turn,” Open Theology 8 (2022), 38–49.
6. John D. Caputo, “The Sense of God. A Theology of the Event with Special
Reference to Christianity,” in Between Philosophy and Theology, op. cit. 27–41, 27.
7. John D. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). Translated, in Dutch, as Hopeloos hoopvol. Beli-
jdenissen van een postmoderne pelgrim, translated by Irene Paridaans (Middelburg:
Skandalon, 2017).
8. See http://ertn.eu/.
9. See Rikko Voorberg, Gerko Tempelman and Bram Kalkman (eds.), Onzeker
weten: Een inleiding in de radicale theologie (Utrecht: KokBoekencentrum Uit-
gevers, 2022).
10. See the issue entitled “Faiblesse de Dieu et deconstruction de la théologie,”
Études Théologiques et réligieuses 90 (2015), 313–464 which contains an original
essay by Caputo on “L’audace de Dieu. Prolégomènes sur une théologie faible,”
317–338. The first chapter of (what would become) The Insistence of God was
partially translated by Corinne Laidet in Les Temps modernes 669–670 (2012),

274–288.
11. Apart from the issue in Études Théologiques et réligieuses, the francophone
Swiss journal Revue de théologie et de philosophie 148 (2016), 505–531 published,
after an introduction by Christophe Chalamet who is contributing to this volume
too, Caputo’s key-note as “La faiblesse de Dieu: une théologie radicale à partir de
Paul,” 507–531. The French translation of The Weakness of God then appeared as
La faiblesse de Dieu. Une Théologie de l’événement, translated by John E. Jackson
(Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2016). The proceedings of said conference were published
in French as well as in English, see Hans-Christophe Askani and Christophe Chal-
amet (eds.), The Wisdom and Foolishness of God. First Corinthians 1-2 in Theologi-
cal Exploration (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015) and, with the same editors, La
sagesse et la folie de Dieu (Genéve: Labor et Fides, 2017). The latter volume repro-
duces Caputo’s key-note, adding a separate discussion, the former volume offers an
essay by Caputo, entitled “The Weakness of God: A Radical Theology of the Cross,”
21–66.
12. Most notably in his “Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in Der-
rida and Marion,” in God, the Gift and Postmodernism, edited by John D. Caputo and
Michael Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999), 185–223. This essay was later
translated in French, in a journal issue of Philosophie 78 (2003), 3–93 dedicated to
Marion’s work.
13. See Knut Alfsvåg, “The Commandment of Love in Kierkegaard and Caputo,”
Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 56 (2014),
473–488; Sasja Stopa, “Seeking Refuge in God against God: The Hidden God in
Lutheran Theology and the Postmodern Weakening of God,” Open Theology 4
(2018), 658–674 and, by Jan-Olav Henriksen, “Thematizing Otherness: On Ways of
Conceptualizing Transcendence and God in Recent Philosophy of Religion,” Studia
theologica: Nordic Journal of Theology 64 (2010), 153–176.
14. See Rebekka A. Klein and Friederike Rass (eds.), Gottes schwache Macht:
Alternativen zur Rede von Gottes Allmacht und Ohnmacht (Leipzig: Evangelische
Verlagsanstalt, 2017).
15. See La debilidad de Dios: Une teología del acontecimiento, translated by Raúl
Zegarra (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2014).
16. Creston Davis (ed.), The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cam-
bridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 256–261.
17. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2013), 136–164, 150.
18. Caputo, The Insistence of God, 163.
19. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister (eds.), Reexamining Deconstruction
and Determinate Religion (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 2012).
20. John D. Caputo, The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Salem,
OR: Polebridge Press, 2016), 1 and 19.
21. Caputo, Insistence of God, 61.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alfsvåg, Knut. “The Commandment of Love in Kierkegaard and Caputo.” Neue

Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 56 (2014), 473–488.
Askani, Christophe, and Christophe Chalamet, Eds. La sagesse et la folie de Dieu.
Genéve: Labor et Fides, 2017.
Askani, Christophe, and Christophe Chalamet, Eds. The Wisdom and Foolishness
of God: First Corinthians 1-2 in Theological Exploration. Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 2015.
Boeve, Lieven, and Christophe Brabant, Eds. Between Philosophy and Theology:
Contemporary Interpretations of Christianity. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
Caputo, John D. Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim. Min-
neapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. Dutch translation: Hopeloos hoopvol: Belijdenissen
van een postmoderne pelgrim. Translated by Irene Paridaans. Middelburg: Skan-
dalon, 2017.
Caputo, John D. “Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in Derrida and
Marion.” In God, the Gift and Postmodernism, edited by John D. Caputo and
Michael Scanlon, 185–223. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999.
Caputo, John D. “L’audace de Dieu. Prolégomènes sur une théologie faible.” Études
Théologiques et réligieuses 90 (2015), 317–338.
Caputo, John D. On Religion. London: Routledge, 2001. Dutch translation: Religie.
Translated by Arend Smidse. London: Uitgeverij Routledge, 2002.
Caputo, John D. The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional. Salem, OR:
Polebridge Press, 2016.
Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God. A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2013.
Caputo, John D. “The Sense of God. A Theology of the Event with Special Reference
to Christianity.” In Between Philosophy and Theology, edited by L. Boeve and C.
Brabant, op. cit. 27–41.
Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2006. French translation: La faiblesse de Dieu. Une
Théologie de l’événement. Translated by John E. Jackson. Geneva: Labor et Fides,
2016. Spanish translation: La debilidad de Dios: Une teología del acontecimiento.
Translated by Raúl Zegarra. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2014.
Chalamet, Christophe. “La faiblesse de Dieu: une théologie radicale à partir de Paul.”
Revue de théologie et de philosophie 148 (2016), 507–531.
Davis, Creston, Ed. The Monstrosity of Christ. Paradox or Dialectic? Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2009.
Henriksen, Jan-Olav. “Thematizing Otherness: On Ways of Conceptualizing Tran-
scendence and God in Recent Philosophy of Religion.” Studia theologica: Nordic
Journal of Theology 64 (2010), 153–176.
Klein, Rebekka A., and Friederike Rass, Eds. Gottes schwache Macht. Alternativen
zur Rede von Gottes Allmacht und Ohnmacht. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlag-
sanstalt, 2017.
Koci, Martin. Thinking Faith After Christianity: A Theological Reading of Jan

Patočka’s Phenomenological Philosophy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2020.
Sands, Justin. “After Onto-Theology: What Lies beyond ‘The End of Everything’.”
Religions 8 (2017), 98.
Sands, Justin. “Confessional Discourses, Radical Traditions: On John Caputo and the
Theological Turn.” Open Theology 8 (2022), 38–49.
Sands, Justin. Reasoning From Faith: Fundamental Theology in Merold Westphal’s
Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2018.
Simmons, Aaron and Stephen Minister, Eds. Reexamining Deconstruction and Deter-
minate Religion. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 2012.
Schrijvers, Joeri. Between Faith and Belief: Toward A Contemporary Phenomenol-
ogy of Religious Life. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016.
Štofaník, Štefan. The Adventure of Weak Theology: Reading the Work of John D.
Caputo through Biographies and Events. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018.
Stopa, Sasja. “Seeking Refuge in God against God: The Hidden God in Lutheran The-
ology and the Postmodern Weakening of God.” Open Theology 4 (2018), 658–674.
Voorberg, Rikko, Gerko Tempelman and Bram Kalkman, Eds. Onzeker weten: Een
inleiding in de radicale theologie. Utrecht: KokBoekencentrum Uitgevers, 2022.
Part I
RADICAL THEOLOGY
AND POLITICS
Chapter 1
Radical Theology as Political Theology

Exploring the Fragments of
God’s Weak Power
Calvin D. Ullrich
The task of this chapter will be to reflect on the “fragmentary” reception of

Caputo’s weak theology in Europe, specifically Germany, but also neces-
sarily due to the eventiveness of its fragmentary nature, without geographic
limitations: thinking its shattering in different directions in search not of a
comprehensive totality but for the positive openings it has created. Indeed,
following the language of David Tracy, I would characterize Caputo’s
work as a “frag-event” (fragmentary event) which negatively shatters and
positively discloses a future-orientated hope, suggesting an approach to the
“weakness of God”—God’s self-fragmentation—as a kind of political theol-
ogy.1 Thus, what follows will be an exploration of God’s weak power pre-
sented as a collection of four brief fragments: (1) in the first fragment I begin
with several speculative gestures for what I consider as the narrow reception
of Caputo in the German theological context. (2) This is followed by an
exceptional occasion where weak theology has been directly discussed and
engaged. Here a recent volume of essays entitled, Gottes schwache Macht
(2017),2 offers a series of perspectives critically attuned to the question of
power in post-metaphysical descriptions of the doctrine of God according
to notions of “weakness,” “event,” “negation,” and “absence,” while also
probing whether this sequence of consonant terms can fruitfully be deployed
within Christian theology. Reference is made to two contributions of Martin
Hailer and Alexander Maßmann as a foil to develop my own interpretation
of Caputo’s political theology. (3) At the heart of this interpretation pursued
in the third fragment is that Caputo’s ontological topology of transcen-
dence—the event/the messianic—does not intend to court the abstraction of
a postmodern Kantian sublime,3 where the presentation of the messianic is
19
20 Calvin D. Ullrich
a formalist happening which knocks us over in sheer unexpectedness, but

rather that it commences an opening for freedom coherent with a material-
ist politics. The latter, however, is something of a latent occurrence within
Caputo’s oeuvre and undergoes a conceptual transformation in the works that
follow The Weakness of God (2006).4 (4) In the short concluding fragment
within this re-articulated schema, I momentarily connect with the notion of
the “cosmological reduction,” to locate new sites for the fragments of God’s
weak power in new materialism, philosophy of science, and affect theory.
FRAGMENT 1: SPECULATIONS
There are possibly several reasons for the limited reception of John D. Capu-
to’s “weak theology” in Germany.5 A few speculative gestures, therefore, are
worthwhile to furnish some context. For starters, even if it has become passé
to speak of the citational insularity of some corridors in German academic
theology, one should not ignore the fact that theology (and philosophy) finds
its element in a so-called language of origin, which is to say that the effect
of there being to date, quite remarkably, no German renditions available yet
of Caputo’s theological works is probably not as insignificant as one might
expect.6 Not unrelated, is the matter historical accident, wherein weak or
radical theology is at its genesis a thoroughly American (and British) phe-
nomenon, to which Caputo himself is something of a relative latecomer.7
One cannot trace all the lines of thought here, but if we were to retroactively
situate weak or radical theology in the trajectory of the death-of-God move-
ment of the 1960s, then this was mostly a marginal fad inspired predomi-
nantly by Paul Tillich and his American reception (Thomas Altizer, Gabriel
Vahanian, William Hamilton). Caputo has articulated his own connection to
Tillich more recently,8 but his influence on radical theology is more properly
situated in continuity with the American postmodern theology of the 1970s
and 1980s—the first to bring Derrida into conversation with theology (Carl
Raschke, Mark C. Taylor, Charles Winquist). The relation between religion
and other European philosophers operating predominantly within the French
phenomenological tradition (Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc
Marion), again, typically an Anglo-American fascination, culminated in the
Villanova Conferences organized by Caputo throughout the 1990s, also the
time when he published his influential Prayers and Tears (1997). The coun-
ter-reception of this so-called “theological turn in phenomenology” in the
German-speaking world is certainly underway, but the presence of Caputo in
these discussions is not central.9
Thirdly, it is also the case that there are those traditions in German theol-
ogy which have already addressed at least one fundamental problematic of
Radical Theology as Political Theology 21
a “postmodern theology,” namely, metaphysics. Here the gleaned insights

from hermeneutic phenomenology are developed into a hermeneutical
theology in the Bultmannian lineage after Martin Luther and Karl Barth
and its wake in the works of Ernst Fuchs, Gerhard Ebeling, and Eberhard
Jüngel.10 Sharing with weak theology in several antipathies toward meta-
physics—memorably captured by Jüngel’s dictum that “God’s being is in
becoming”11—hermeneutical theology like weak theology rejects thinking
of God as timeless being or an ahistorical entity; it refuses the metaphys-
ics of systems over particularity and context and situates human speaking
about God in the temporalization of language that opposes objectification.12
The relationship between weak theology and hermeneutical theology may
indeed present fresh intellectual explorations according to the apparent
contiguity of these points, but stark differences do persist. Recognizably
distinctive is that in opposition to an event of unique historicity by which
human beings are constituted in the “ever-coming, every-encountering
God,”13 weak theology brackets the identity of this encountering event,
deploying the “name” of God as only one of several possibilities. This may
be why Ingolf Dalferth’s neo-Barthian revivification of this hermeneutical
tradition in his own Radical Theology makes a concerted effort to distin-
guish Caputo’s approach as a “deepening . . . of a secular perspective”14
from one that addresses everything in the light of the presence of God and
within the horizon of reorientation from “nonfaith or unfaith (unbelief) to
faith (belief).”15
Finally, and in connection with this hermeneutic tradition but perhaps
in closer step with weak theology, is the basic rejection of an omnipotent,
all-powerful, and ultimately apathetic God, which resounded throughout the
writing of the “new” German political theologians of the 1970s. With Karl
Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer again in the background, a certain theistic con-
ception was already being displaced by the notion of God emerging primarily
from the relations of the Trinity and subsequently qualified by a theology of
the cross, making way for a powerless (weak) God that exists in the midst
of suffering and injustice.16 More could be said of the influence of the new
political theologians and their impact on later liberation, feminist, black, and
eco-theology, and especially the productive tension forged with death-of-God
theology and today’s radical theology more broadly, but the emphasis here
usually falls outside of the German context, particularly in the Americas and
the global south.17 It should also be noted in this regard, that while political
issues are not fixed to a particular context, the radical or weak theology that
has become most prevalent in North America is also situated in, and partially
responsive to, a very specific set of cultural conditions—alt-right politics,
racism, evangelicalism, mass consumerism, etc.—the likes of which are
simply not seen to the same extent in Western Europe (broadly speaking).18
Whatever weight is given to these speculations, it remains the case that

“weak theology” has not received much of a hearing in Germany. Why, then,
respond to this solicitation in the first place? I would like to suggest that
because of this apparent absence one should note the exceptional instances
where weak theology has come into focus from a German perspective and,
consequently, since they raise specific thematic concerns, these exceptions
have the favorable quality of amplifying Caputo’s theological inventiveness
in a particular way: that is to say, in this chapter—as the following fragments
hope to show—precisely as a resource for political theology and to a more
experimental degree, as an affective matrix which plays closer attention to the
animality of the religious body, dovetailing with recent discussions in new
materialism, philosophy of science, and affect theory.
FRAGMENT 2: GOD’S WEAK POWER
A research workshop held at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg

in 2016 culminating with the publication Gottes Schawche Macht. Alter-
nativen zur Rede von Gottes Allmacht und Ohnmacht offers the reader a
wider engagement with the panorama of “weak” thinking in the German
theological context. The familiar names of the new Paulinism emerge in the
contributor’s discussions:19 Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Gianni Vattimo,
and John Caputo, as well as their French antecedents, Emmanuel Levinas,
Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. In the editors’ introduction, Rebekka
Klein and Friederike Rass account for the powerful theological critiques of
omnipotence in modern times from the likes of Barth and Bonhoeffer; how-
ever, the question that motivates the volume is whether and to what extent
these apparently recent secular philosophies can positively connect with, or
should be rejected by, Christian theology. For Klein and Rass, if classical
Christian theism offers a portrait of omnipotence (Allmacht) and its theo-
logical critique centers around God’s co-suffering or impotence (Ohnmacht),
then they present God’s weak power (schwache Macht) as a figure of “the
third.”20 What is crucial to this tertium quid is that the concept of power must
itself undergo a transformation; for despite the relativizing claim that God’s
power disenchants the powers of this world and thus liberates the oppressed,
this sovereign power can still be understood as the ontological grounding of
reality and thus “metaphysical” or “onto-theo-logical” in the sense in which
Heidegger described in Identity and Difference.21 The philosophical-theolog-
ical questioning of God’s power, therefore, opens onto the various possibili-
ties for political theology after the death of God—that is, instead of a politics
of dialectic, one turns to subversion, deconstruction, process, and absence to
think anew the political meaning of the event of God’s withdrawal.22 Several
of the essays, then, while not directly invoking political theology, interrogate
the meaning of God’s power as it relates to God’s being beyond the structure
of causality, that is, causa sui or Ursache.
Martin Hailer’s contribution “Ein Ruf zur Sache,” for example, points to
two “marginal” discussions from the tradition: on the one hand, “process
thought,” which replaces substance ontology for God’s weak power as a cre-
ative entanglement with the world, and on the other, instances from German
Idealism, particularly Schelling, for whom, contra-Hegel, there is a moment
of becoming in God that is foreign to Godself, preserving the freedom of the
new.23 Secondly, Hailer counterposes a Schleiermachian liberal theology that
conceptualizes God’s power as a “continual phenomenon” in the “natural
context” of the world, to a Barthian conception, later systematized by Jüngel,
of God’s weak power that combines its eventful surprising character and
covenantal faithfulness. For Hailer, what is preserved by Barth and Jüngel,
over and against models of causality, is a more accurate rendering of real-
ity not discovered as a seamless process but orientated toward openness and
to the events of the possible. Nevertheless, for him there is a hard bifurca-
tion between reality and possibility in the Barthian-Jüngel heritage which
relegates the third-way option: “What remains unthought, is that a state of
reality could contain within itself potencies of possibility.”24 It is at this point
that Caputo’s weak theology is invoked alongside the “weak thinking” of his
erstwhile collaborator, Gianni Vattimo. Unlike Vattimo, for whom the self-
abasement of God in kenosis culminates in the humanizing process of secular
modernity, Caputo’s interpretation of God’s weak power wants to maintain
the immanent transcendence of the tout autre.25 With a critical eye to this
wholly other, Vattimo’s “weak thinking” which accompanies the Christian
telos of secularization refuses the need for these philosophies of transcen-
dence, since they are purportedly akin to a “tragic and apocalyptic Christian-
ity”26 which devalues the present with their obsessional turn toward the Other.
Caputo’s hermeneutic corrective, as Hailer rightly states in response to
Vattimo—and this will be central for our discussion in fragment three—is to
say that the event is not a rupture from “without,” but instead events “appear
in the ordinary course of the world without, however, being absorbed into
it.”27 Here the ontological determination of events for Caputo always occurs
within the world but without being absorbed into it, since any description the
world gives to the event would be exceeded by the event. Hailer follows this
with two important formulations which are instructive for our purposes: first
the evental giving is like a secularized grace or a “grace without God,” and
secondly, this inner-worldly grace, he says, “could be called a natural theol-
ogy of events.”28 In both cases, Hailer is referring to Caputo in discussion
about the precise character of the event, the former inflected by Alain Badiou
(“laicitized grace”) and on the other by Gilles Deleuze (“grace is all”), who
is closer to Derrida for Caputo.29 Keeping this tension in mind between the
event as an exceptional occurrence on the one hand, and the event as that
which is “waiting everywhere and in everything”30 on the other, let us turn
to the essay by Alexander Maßmann, replaying this tension through an index
that more visibly asks after the political implications of God’s weak power.
Maßmann’s, “Macht und Ohnmacht in John Caputos Gottesbild,” polemi-
cally asserts that Caputo’s weak power of God falls prey to what he calls a
“reformist tragedy” (reformistischen Tragik), that is, in its struggle to over-
come the injustices of the world, this concept of “weakness,” on the one hand,
might confound the dominating power of a God entangled in the structures of
political legitimation, but that on the other, “weakness” inevitably slides into
a “powerlessness,” and thus finds itself tragically lost in day-to-day politics,
compromised, and re-legitimizing the inequalities of those very structures.31
How so? For Maßmann the issue is a properly a political one; for God’s weak
power must come to have an “effective” political outcome in the present, and
for him, this is a question of how one interprets Caputo’s depiction of the
anarchy of the spirit. After reporting on Caputo’s disillusionment with the
totality claims of metaphysical theology and its concomitant authoritarian
religion, Maßmann summarizes Caputo’s weak theology as the synthesis of
the Jesus traditions of the Synoptics and philosophical Paulinism (already
referred to above). Through the hyperbolic sayings of Jesus and the folly of
the cross that upends the logic of the world, God becomes the possibility of
the world’s deconstruction—its corresponding orders, privileges, and strong
theologies are all revealed as contingencies.
However, the weak power of the event, or God’s Hier(an)archie, is for
Maßmann nothing more than an agitating coefficient for existing conditions;
it does not aim at fundamentally altering the system itself.32 Maßmann is
right to point out that Caputo does not intend to revert to a new system of
political anarchy which would simply invert the power differential, but he is
wrong to assume, as he says, that this produces a peculiar conservatism.33 My
contention is that Maßmann’s reading of Weakness of God is paradigmatic of
a larger semantic confusion between the language of weakness and event—
where the latter is construed as an abstract essence, a power-less ideality—
and therefore an ineffectual resource on the plane of ontic political forces.34
Instead, I would propose not only that “the event” in Caputo’s weak theology
does have material political consequences, but that this outcome is only pos-
sible precisely because Caputo’s understanding of the event of the Kingdom
of God—what he calls the “Sacred Anarchy”—is of an order not beyond
immanence and force, but of a new poetic practice that redescribes these
terms just as it asks us to engage reality in virtue of them. In other words,
Maßmann fails to grasp the specific character of the tertium quid—that is,
between the duality of domination and powerlessness, where the “weakness”
of God encountered in the event of God’s withdrawal is experienced not as a

“monstrous” sublime but as an urgent solicitation for action.
The intimation of God’s weakness as paralysis is confirmed and made
more explicit when Maßmann appears to take Caputo’s theopoetical reading
of the Sermon on the Mount literally. While nonetheless affirming a “tone
of irony” he says that Caputo asks us to “remain passive” (passiv bleiben)35
as we hope for the event of God—not worrying about canceling our debtors’
debts and abandoning provision for one’s own security, for only then do
we remain open to the event. Since this “mad economics”36 is stricto sensu
impossible, we are left with our quotidian worries just as we are not to worry
about the worries of the future. What frustrates Maßmann about the “poet-
ics of the impossible” is that its abstraction resides in Caputo’s inability to
demonstrate conclusively that reality is transformed. Because the impossible
can never “reach us,” Caputo ends up with a compromise that must affirm the
essential goodness of present arrangements no matter how miserable life is.
The slippage according to Maßmann, is that Caputo is trafficking in a kind of
dualism which runs throughout Weakness of God, between activity/passivity,
strength/weakness—rendering any activity here in the present meaningless.
Maßmann writes: “This is also related to the fact that Caputo reduces the
guiding distinction of his book to a binary. Strength is the ability to physically
effect something in the world according to one’s own desire, and weakness is
the inability.”37 The focus and ultimate reduction of Caputo’s weak theology
to a division between opposing forces of power misses some of the funda-
mental aporetic tensions of deconstruction (“passive decision,” “responsible
irresponsibility,” “gift without givenness,” etc.)38 which is difficult to recon-
cile with Caputo’s carefully argued earlier work,39 and ignores the texture
of the (quasi-)phenomenological intensity and passion of experience he is
attempting to articulate.40 For Caputo, this texture is articulated as “[t]he full
intensity of experience, the fullest passion, [which] is attained only in extre-
mis, only when a power . . . is pushed to its limits.”41 Indeed, when power
reaches its limit and “breaks,” it opens onto a weakness which is a power of
a different sort—an immobilization of power by which “movement is mobi-
lized” and carried out in “the sphere of praxis and the pragmatic order.”42
Hailer and Maßmann’s reflections on God’s weak power both recognize
that the reduction of classical theism to the event or silent call of God is not
a reformulation of this power into a new entitative force, but they are nev-
ertheless left unsatisfied with its material clarification for the possibilities of
temporal change. Hailer, in fact, concludes by preferring Giorgio Agamben’s
approach for its realized eschatological (“seized chronos”)43 perspective:
“Agamben thus primarily thematizes the receiver side of the call, while
Caputo focuses his attention on the ontological implications of the sender
side.”44 Agamben’s influential The Time That Remains (2000), which is
interested in living in the form of the Messiah, is regarded by Hailer as closer

to Caputo’s position insofar as a decentered subject is addressed by the weak
call. However, if Caputo’s emphasis falls on the “sender side” (Senderseite),
then Agamben’s “receiver side” (Empfängerseite) is, for Hailer, more attuned
to the unrepresentable but nevertheless experienceable kairotic messianic
time—a time that remains—not completely removed from normal time but
not identical with it. In the case of Maßmann, on the other hand, the final
analysis for him is that the weakness of God is found in the social dimension
of the proclamation of the Christ-event, which does not eliminate difference
into a new universality, but preserves both Jews and Greeks in their specific-
ity just as they participate plurally in the unity of the Spirit.45 Maßmann’s
appeal to the Corinthian vision of plurality-in-unity where the criterion for
honoring the weak and outcast always persists supposedly offers an alterna-
tive to Caputo’s Hier(an)archie where the event in its unknowability could
destroy what is worth preserving.46 Responding to Hailer and Maßmann’s
readings within the wider context of the issues raised above, I would like to
offer my own interpretation of Caputo’s political theology of the messianic,
which pays special attention to the this-worldly emancipatory potential of
God’s weak power.
FRAGMENT 3: POLITICAL
THEOLOGY OF THE MESSIANIC
Caputo’s weak theology has a certain proximity to the prophetic spirit of the
“new” political theology already alluded to, though distinguished from it in
important ways.47 On my reading, weak theology is political theology,48 and
can be understood as an innovation of the predicate of omnipotence which
is critically opposed to a philosophical theism as well as to an inversion that
inscribes the renunciation of power as the very being of God. The weakness
of God in weak theology cannot amount to this kind of aestheticization of
suffering, tragically sublimated into the self-comprehending movement of
the absolute—as Johann Baptist Metz argued forcefully against Jürgen Molt-
mann49—but rather, it accommodates what I would call Caputo’s own politi-
cal theology of the messianic.50 God’s self-fragmentation in the crucifixion
is not the impotent counterpoise to the omnipotence of God, neither does it
refer to the heroic moment of love that finally denies suffering in a sudden
apocalyptic event nor is it a pure co-suffering (mit-leiden) ultimately failing
the test of theodicy. A political theology of the messianic is a fundamental
reorientation or reduction of the concept of power (sovereignty) as well
as of the ontological grounding of reality itself that is given its discursive
shape in a philosophical-theological anarchism (sacred anarchy) emerging
from within/as theological communities of responsivity. Before expanding

on some of these claims, I want to begin by returning in more detail to the
semantic confusion referred to earlier—that is, the reduction of weakness/
the event to an opposing force—because it attends to the implications of the
(mis-)readings repeated by the likes of Hailer and Maßmann and is, in part,
also behind Caputo’s shifting semantic regimes that occur later in The Insis-
tence of God (and again in Cross and Cosmos).
In the intervening years following The Weakness of God, several volumes
and critical essays appeared attempting to make sense of Caputo’s move
from a continental philosophy of religion to his quasi-theology. Capturing the
mood and merging with the concerns of Hailer and Maßmann, the collection
titled, Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion (2012), gave
common voice to a line of criticism which argued broadly that Caputo’s weak
theology or “religion without religion” was too focused on an ahistorical
and indeterminate religion at the expense of determinate historical forms.51
We are unable to replay these arguments here in full or Caputo’s capacious
response,52 but briefly put, these critics were left uneasy about the status
of “material’ religion within such a “thin” concept of a theology of event.
Stephen Minister, for example, writes, “[m]y primary concern is not that
‘religion without religion’ is a bad idea, but that Caputo’s ‘religion without
religion’ seems to emphasize the ‘without’ more than the ‘religion’.”53
In registering and responding to these anxieties Caputo concedes, how-
ever obliquely, that “these commentators have been misled by the whimsy
with which I say certain things.”54 This pertains in my reading to Caputo’s
“second-order discourse” of theopoetics, which is misconstrued as offering
a detached religious reflection at the expense of the content upon which it
draws. Behind these assertions Caputo suspects that theopoetics is being
treated as a set of propositional claims about religious truth; of being inter-
ested in the “what” instead of the category of the “how” of religious truth
which gets itself articulated in several “ways”—the way in which the world
worlds (à la Heidegger). Readers of Caputo will recognize in these concerns
the much-discussed foi and croyances distinction developed by Derrida in the
“Faith and Knowledge” essay and an important feature already in Caputo’s
Prayers and Tears.55 In fact, it was in the context of the latter that this ques-
tion of the “with” and “without” in a “religion without religion” was first
raised and responded to, and so it is curious circumstance that it resurfaces
again in the theological register of The Weakness of God.56
But here we should also draw attention to the messianic–messianism distinc-
tion, because it is precisely at this point in Prayers and Tears where Caputo
announces the one “criticism, if it is one, of Derrida,”57 and the place we can cite
as a response to the one criticism of Caputo in the Weakness of God, if it is one.
In short, Caputo believes that the distinction between the various determinate
messianisms and a pure messianic in general doesn’t hold up on Derrida’s own

terms, and that there is a Kantian trap that Derrida has stepped into. The difficulty
lies in the fact that the possibility of the messianic and the particular messianisms
are treated as distinct “entities” and thus mimic the entire problematic of the
particular-universal/fact-essence polarity. Despite the complications of Derrida’s
language, Caputo asserts that on Derrida’s own terms the “messianic in general”
is not a regulative ideal toward which we asymptotically move—that is, we can
never “live” or “dwell” in that which is to come, if that means the avoidance of
our present conditions. The messianic, then, should rather be interpreted in the
positive sense as an “affirmation of and engagement in the world,” and even
though it is desert-like it “enjoys a great deal of the life of the historical messian-
isms, of their historical hope, of their religious affirmation of something to come,
a great deal of the energy of engagement.”58
In a political theology of the messianic, therefore, Caputo explicitly takes
into account that any serious temporal structure of the messianic cannot be
effectively based on a messianic purity, a “true” messianic in general or a
sublime alterity, for that would strictly have the “form of absolute inhospi-
tality, of uninhabitability.”59 In the language of the “Faith and Knowledge”
essay, religion without religion is not simply a postmodern Kantian revision,
akin to a “religion within the limits of reason alone,” which stands opposed
to any determinate hopes made available through the revelation of Christian
faith. On the contrary, Caputo is unambiguous about the way to get beyond
the Heideggerian distinction between “revelation” and “revealability,”
encapsulated in “Faith and Knowledge” by the notion of foi. Foi is that kind
of archi-faith that if left by itself (a pure messianic indeterminacy) remains
empty, and so should be comprehended “hauntologically” as that which dis-
turbs the determinate faiths (croyances).
Many are of course uncomfortable with the ambiguity of this Derridean
paleonym, and just as the rhetorical effect of Prayers and Tears seems to
have emphasized the “without” at the expense of the “with”—contrary to
a closer reading—the same criticism, if it is one, could be said of the rhe-
torical effect of the whimsical language of theopoetics in The Weakness of
God, what one could call Caputo’s own “residual Kantianism.”60 So it is that
whether the “mad economy” of God’s weakness or the “sender-side” of the
event, the question of the hope that the Kingdom of God brings for the present
remains unanswered for Caputo’s critics. Thus, to clarify the contours of a
political theology of the messianic, we must press further into the fragments:
of “sacred anarchy,” the theopoetics which accompanies it, and the series of
conceptual innovations and external developments that follow The Weak-
ness of God. For while the centrality ascribed to the “without” (ohne warum,
sans) in Caputo’s corpus is unmistakable, the corresponding implications for
human responsibility and action appear ambiguous.
If the theistic connotation of sovereignty and power associated with the

name of God are reduced to the weak or silent call of the “event,” then it fol-
lows that the kingdom over which a God without sovereignty reigns can no
longer follow an “archic paradigm” (monarchical, hierarchical, or eternal).61
In its place must be a kingdom that denies and replaces all principles of con-
trol and expressions of arkhé for an alternative an-archic kingdom of the king-
dom-less. This “Kingdom of différance”62 is not the simple anarchic opposite
of a kingdom with sovereign rulership—one of disorder and chaos—but as
an-archic or a sacred anarchy, it now takes on a positive political meaning. In
this reimagining “God” becomes the dismantling and fragmentary movement
of the archic paradigm where power is not rejected as such but redescribed
as the refusal of the domination and abuse of power. God’s “significance” is
therefore found in a metapolitical dimension of transcendence that is carved
out within immanence. For Caputo, it is in the sayings of Jesus and his death
on the cross where the “frag-events” of the oppressed, their “memory of suf-
fering” as Benjamin would say, are proclaimed to impel unyielding solidarity
and justice. What is needed to expose the disruptive forces within these texts
and frag-events is likewise, not a governing theo-logic, but a theopoetics:
a creative discourse (poieisis) on God, where the call or event is brought
into words but also includes the bringing of these words into reality, that is,
responding with words and deeds—literally doing God, or what we might
now call the intertwining of theopoetics and theopraxis.63 In this way, we are
reconfigured by the exposure to this impossible sacred anarchy just as we
configure the world according to it, we enter a procedure of a different way
of being and interpreting the world, of thinking and creating the genuine (im)
possibility of the world otherwise, within the actual world.
With the emphasis on poiesis, doing God, and theopraxis, a this-worldly
active and transformative venire is added to a political theology of the mes-
sianic, and which is responsive to the criticisms of the Kantianism still linger-
ing after Weakness of God and to the ongoing developments in contemporary
philosophy. This of course all culminates in Caputo’s Insistence of God
(2013) and is evident in several elaborations that constitute what I would call,
with hesitation, Caputo’s “materialist turn,” two moments of which deserve
mention.
(1) In his new “theology of perhaps,” the subtitle of the book, Caputo
builds on Derrida’s formulation of peut-être (may be) to once again draw
us into another “irreducible modality” which is of a different register to the
simple present or future-present.64 The “perhaps” is like the reduction of
the name of God to the event and maintains its messianic futurity, “it may
happen” or it may not. But while its function is the same as the event—the
principle without principle which inspires the “ability to sustain uncertainty
and to venture into the unknown”65—the semantic regime it draws together
“tightens” the tension between the call and response, between a weak force
and human responsibility. This is evident in the new term which replaces the
weakness of God, namely, the “insistence” of God and its chiasmic relation
to “existence.”66 Caputo writes that the structure of God’s insistence, is “not
a double bind but a double binding or mutual intertwining, of God to us and
of us to God, each in need of the other.”67 Indeed, not only does God not exist
but rather God’s insistence is required for the world to exist, for the world is
always already responding to the insistent call: “God’s insistence needs our
existence to make any difference. Our existence needs God’s insistence in
order to have a difference to make.”68
(2) Alongside the accent given to the dynamic relationship between the
event and the response, possibly Caputo’s most surprising conceptual inno-
vation in this “materialist turn” is the move he makes from Kant to Hegel. If
the former inflected his religion without religion and the initial explorations
into weak theology, then the latter—not without a Derridean twist—is the
more radical point of reference for a truly postmodern account of theology
that is concerned with matter.69 Indeed, Hegel is behind all the revolving
excursions with the primary interlocutors of this book. From Malabou (plas-
ticity) to Žižek (dialectic), Milbank (paradox), and Meillassoux (correla-
tion), the issue is persistently the effort to materialize the theopoetics of the
event—to “burn away” the residual Kantianism and to give the “tout autre
character of the call” a representation not from another world beyond, but of
“another worlding of the world.”70 Hegelian Vorstellungen—the representa-
tive “world-picture, [or] world-praxis”71—which mediates the truth of Spirit
in pictoral form before achieving pure self-conscious thought (Begriff), is
not the latent conceptual content of Absolute Spirit, for Caputo, but rather
the revelation of an event of poieisis, which in radical theology is the life-
form or world-disclosure structured by God’s anarchic Kingdom. Theopo-
etics here manifests a potentiality of an event that calls for an impossible
ethical-political alteration of all human sociality, the efficacy of which is
produced and stimulated by this symbolic and imaginative discourse. So far
from creating an exception out of the material realm, or “conserving” hege-
monic interests, this radical form of political theology is designed to empha-
size that all there is is matter, and if theopoetics gives voice to a different
order of signification, then it is up to us to respond—to be the “coming” of
the messiah and to take responsibility for “the rigors and demands of the
à venir.”72 Examples of this political theology of the messianic take shape
precisely in the pluriform practices, rituals, and disciplines of individuals
and communities: whether in the figure of Martha’s attending to the physical
needs of Jesus, or those acts of civil solidarity in the face of the State’s fail-
ure to meet the needs of those most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.73
CONCLUDING FRAGMENT: THE

COSMOLOGICAL REDUCTION
Caputo’s work has made possible the radical reimagining of the nature of
religion and Christian theology and poses a challenge to the hegemonic
political theologies of our time, whether sovereign politics, racial white
supremacy, capitalism, or environmental domination. As indicated above,
despite the nominal reception of Caputo’s “weak theology” in Germany,
similar tensions have followed throughout the positive development (frag-
mentation) of his theological corpus, but with the latter being clarified along
the way in response to the leading voices in (radical) theology as well as to
accommodate the latest philosophical trends. In this I am in agreement with
someone like Clayton Crockett, for whom Caputo’s radical interpretation of
religion will be foundational for the ongoing discussion between theology,
continental philosophy of religion, and movements like new materialism,
environmental studies, and affect theory.74 If I have spoken of this “materi-
alist turn” in Caputo’s thought, however, I do not mean in the strong sense
of a philosophical overhaul, but rather another fragmentary perspective of
“the things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbts) articulated in an idiom (what
Crockett, following Malabou, calls a “motor scheme”) which expresses “the
broadest information of a time period or epoch.”75 Therefore, if the structure
of a political theology in Caputo’s weak theology does not deny the mate-
rial world but speaks to a “natural theology of events”—the exceptional and
accidental occurrences that come to existence—then aren’t we now poised to
ask the tradition which has culminated in the so-called “theological turn” to
shed its humanistic (and masculine) sympathies?76
Caputo’s latest work, in part III of the Insistence of God and again in part
II of Cross and Cosmos, certainly suggest as much.77 In both cases he extends
his notion of theopoetics to what he calls a “cosmo-theo-poetics”—the poetics
of the insistent call of the (material) world. Caputo suggests with reservation
that this notion “could be formulated in terms of a ‘religious materialism’,”78
which means, for a theology which is eminently incarnational, that Jesus as
the “human animal” deconstructs the oppositions between materialism and
idealism, human and nonhuman, subject and object. The “divinanimality”
which we are, to cite Derrida, expands the model of insistence of the tout
autre to the nonliving, to every material thing that lays claim on us. If, in
a theopoetic reduction all ontotheological claims cease, in favor of another
order of being claimed by something we know not what, then, in what we
could now call a “cosmological reduction,” the priority of the human is way-
laid by the forces, intensities, accidents, and incidents of the cosmos which
act upon us and which we are.
In this final fragment I want to suggest that another frag-event of God’s

weak power is to be found in the ongoing and lively discussions concerning
the body, new materialism, and affect theory.79 The latest texts of Caputo’s
go beyond the interlocutors already mentioned by including animated debates
with philosophers of science (Bruno Latour, Michel Serres), eco-theo-femi-
nists (Catherine Keller), and new feminist materialists (Karen Barad). This
family of thinkers is interested in a non-reductive materialism which takes
science seriously by treating our relationship with the world as but one field
of encounters between an infinite series where the world is already interpret-
ing itself.80 Caputo’s innovation is to say that the cosmo-theopoetics of the
cosmological reduction is an insufficient “aestheticism” if it does not take
seriously the thing itself (Sache), which for him is metaphysics; a thinking
after physics—“heeding the new physics.”81 The model for this radical non-
reductive materialism—Caputo goes as far as to name a “weak metaphys-
ics”—is none other than the theologia crucis, which means dealing with the
difficulty (of the cross), not covering over what the new science is telling us.
If theology is fundamentally about reconciliation, reconciling the human and
the nonhuman to God, then this reconciliation is fragmented and without a
desire for a primordial unity. It is an affirmation of an irreducible multiplicity
and novelty for “all things to be made new.”82
NOTES
1. David Tracy, Fragments: The Existential Situation of our Time: Selected

Essays, Volume I (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020), 1–8. Derrida disagreed
with Tracy on his concept of the fragment, in the 1997 meeting of the Villanova
“Religion and Postmodernism” Conference, suggesting it too often implied the mem-
ory of a system or whole. Tracy stressed that he meant the Benjaminian messianic
sense of the fragment, which defies teleological thinking. This is of course the sense
in which I am using it here. See David Tracy, “Fragments: The Spiritual Situation
of our Times” in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), God, the Gift and
Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 170–84.
2. The publication follows an academic workshop convened by Rebekka A. Klein
and Friederike Rass in Halle-Wittenberg in 2017, see Rebekka A. Klein and Friederike
Rass (Hrsg.) Gottes schwache Macht. Alternativen zur Rede von Gottes Allmacht und
Ohnmacht (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017). Klein is an important voice in
the German discussion of weak thinking and its relationship to systematic theology and
political theory. Both Klein and Rass were associated with the University of Zürich
and both former doctoral students of Ingolf Dalferth. See Rebekka Klein’s, Depoten-
zierung der Souveränität. Religion und politische Ideologie bei Claude Lefort, Slavoj
Žižek und Karl Barth (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), and Friederike Rass, Die
Suche nach Wahrheit im Horizont fragmentarischer Existenzialität (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2017). Klein is now Professor of Systematic Theology at the Ruhr-Universität

Bochum, where this thematic interest remains on the agenda. See more recently,
Rebekka A. Klein and Dominik Finkelde, In Need of a Master: Politics, Theology, and
Radical Democracy (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021).
3. See David B. Johnson, “The Postmodern Sublime: Presentation and Its Lim-
its,” in Timothy M. Costelloe, The Sublime From Antiquity to the Present (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 118–31.
4. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2006)
5. This intuitive claim refers only to Caputo’s “theological’ work, but even a
search in popular German academic journals, like Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische
Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, bear few results, and in almost all cases only
oblique references to Caputo are made by German-speaking authors.
6. A translation of Caputo’s The Folly of God, however, is scheduled for pub-
lication in 2022. See John D. Caputo, Die Torheit Gottes: Eine radikale Theologie
des Unbedingten, trans. Helena Rimmele and Herbert Rochitz (Mainz: Matthias-
Grünewald, 2022).
7. See Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins, “Background,” in Christopher D.
Rodkey and Jordan E. Miller (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology
(Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 15–32.
8. John D. Caputo, The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Salem,
OR: Polebridge Press, 2016).
9. Here again, the German translation of Dominique Janicaud’s famous text, Le
tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (1991), has appeared more
than two decades later: see Dominique Janicaud, Die theologische Wende der franzö-
sischen Phänomenologie, trans. Marco Gutjahr (Berlin, Wien: Turia & Kant Verlag,
2014).
10. And more recently reiterated by Ingolf Dalferth, Radical Theology: An Essay
on Faith and Theology in the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
2016).
11. Eberhard Jüngel, Gottes Sein ist im Werden. Verantwortliche Rede vom Sein
Gottes bei Karl Barth. Eine Paraphrase (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998).
12. On the relationship between hermeneutical theology and post-metaphysical
thought see, Hartmut von Sass, “Faith and Being: Hermeneutical Theology as Post-
Metaphysical Enterprise,” in Eric Hall and Hartmut von Sass (eds.), Groundless
Gods: The Theological Prospects of Post-Metaphysical Thought (Eugene, OR: Pick-
wick, 2014), 214–41.
13. See Rudolf Bultmann’s Gifford Lectures, History and Eschatology (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), 94–8, here 96.
14. Dalferth, Radical Theology, 175. Emphasis added.
15. Dalferth, Radical Theology, xiii.
16. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation
and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).
17. See for example, Cláudio Carvalhaes’ contribution “Liberation Theology,” in
The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology, 667–76.
18. The reception of weak or radical theology in North American evangelical circles
is an important case study and perhaps points to another reason for the limited traction
of radical theology in the European tradition. To illustrate this, one should recall that
in the broader context of the 1990s, American evangelicalism made an industry out of
vilifying “postmodernism” and so-called “moral relativism,” for which “deconstruc-
tion” was the central term. However, as is often the case, evangelicals who were tired of
denominationalism and “religion” began to reappropriate the term “deconstruction” for
their own purposes (c.f. Brian McLaren, The Church on the Other Side, 1998). In this
new post-evangelical context, the term came to mean a more “purified,” “essential,” and
implicitly antisemitic Christianity. The fact that “radical theology,” and occasionally
Caputo, gets associated with this ultimately colonizing abuse of deconstruction—the
likes of which Derrida would not have recognized—even before his name is associated
with radical theology (his Weakness of God was only published in 2006), is an unfortu-
nate confusion. This goes some way in explaining why Caputo’s popular What Would
Jesus Deconstruct (2007) addresses itself in part to an evangelical audience.
19. See the particularly well-known volume by John D. Caputo and Linda Martin
Alcoff (eds.), St. Paul Among the Philosophers (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2009).
20. Klein and Rass, Gottes schwache Macht, 9.
21. Martin Heidegger, “The Onto-Theological Constitution of Metaphysics,” in
Joan Stambaugh (trans.) Identity and Difference (New York: Harper & Row, 1969),
41–74.
22. Heidegger, “The Onto-Theological,” 14–15.
23. Martin Hailer, “Ein Ruf zur Sache,” in Klein and Rass, Gottes schwache
Macht, 115–16.
24. Hailer, “Ein Ruf zur Sache,” 119.
25. See Caputo’s, “Spectral Hermeneutics” in John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo,
After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press,
2007), 81.
26. See Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999), 83.
27. Hailer, “Ein Ruf zur Sache,” 122.
28. Hailer, “Ein Ruf zur Sache,” 123–24.
29. Caputo, “Spectral Hermeneutics,” 183 fn. 4.
30. Caputo, “Spectral Hermeneutics,” 183 fn. 4.
31. Alexander Maßmann, “John Caputos Gottesbild. Anarchie oder Pluralismus
des Geistes?” in Klein and Rass, Gottes schwache Macht, 73.
32. Maßmann, “John Caputos Gottesbild,” 76.
34. For one example of this misrepresentation see Slavoj Žižek’s “Dialectical
Clarity versus the Misty Conceit of Paradox” in Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, and
Creston Davis (ed.), The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2009), 252–67, and Caputo’s response in John D. Caputo, The Insistence of
God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 147–48.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Zwanzigstes Kapitel.
E s war nur eine momentane Beruhigung, die Sophie Rapp bei

dem Gatten erreicht hatte. Die Zweifel und das Mißtrauen
setzten sich fest in seiner Seele, nagten an ihm und quälten ihn
unausgesetzt bei Tag und bei Nacht.
Noch öfters stellte der Rechtsanwalt seine Frau zur Rede, fragte
sie in Güte und versuchte durch Strenge die Wahrheit zu ergründen.
Denn er fühlte es, daß Sophie ihn in jener Nacht belogen hatte. Wie
ein Aal war sie ihm entschlüpft und hatte ihn dann schließlich mit
echt weiblicher List besiegt.
Doktor Rapp ahnte es mit Bestimmtheit, daß er hintergangen
worden war. Und dieses Gefühl einer fortwährenden Unsicherheit
reizte ihn, machte ihn unruhig und hart und in einem so hohen Grade
mißtrauisch, daß er jetzt jedem Wort, das Sophie sprach, eine
andere Bedeutung unterlegte.
Er peinigte sie unaufhörlich mit seiner Eifersucht. Verfolgte und
beobachtete sie auf Schritt und Tritt. Sie war jetzt ganz und gar
unfrei geworden. Mußte ihm Rechenschaft ablegen über jeden Weg
und sogar über verdächtige Blicke, die er bemerkt haben wollte. Wie
ein gehetztes Wild, geängstigt und bedrückt ging Sophie herum.
Sie wagte es jetzt nur äußerst selten mehr, Felix Altwirth
aufzusuchen. Und dann waren es jedesmal nur kurze, flüchtige
Besuche in den späten Vormittagsstunden. Sophie hatte Angst vor
dem Gatten. Sie wußte, daß es ihr nur durch die allergrößte Vorsicht
gelingen würde, ihn wieder in seine alte Unbefangenheit
zurückzuversetzen. Noch nie war sie ihm so treu gewesen wie in
dieser Zeit. Treu selbst in ihren Blicken und in ihrem ganzen
Gehaben.
Es war gut für Felix Altwirth, daß er gerade jetzt so vollauf mit
dem Plan der Nationalgalerie beschäftigt war. Das zerstreute ihn,
lenkte ihn ab, und er empfand die Trennung von Sophie nicht in dem
Maße, wie es wohl sonst der Fall gewesen wäre. So fügte er sich
willig in Sophiens Anordnungen und quälte sie nicht mit trüben
Stimmungen. Bei seiner leicht erregbaren Natur wäre das sonst nicht
ohne die heftigsten Verzweiflungsanfälle vorübergegangen.
Sophie hatte Felix von dem veränderten Gemütszustand ihres
Gatten berichten müssen. Sie hatte es ihm sagen müssen, daß nur
die größte Vorsicht imstande wäre, den Verdacht, den Valentin Rapp
nun einmal gegen sie gefaßt hatte, wieder zu mildern.
„Weißt, Felix,“ hatte Sophie gesagt, „wenn du jetzt vernünftig bist
und dich drein fügst, dann wird alles wieder recht. Wirst sehen, es
geht schnell vorbei bei ihm, und dann können wir wieder glücklich
sein und wieder füreinander leben!“ tröstete sie ihn.
„Es ist aber hart, Sophie!“ sprach Felix traurig. „Dich so nahe zu
wissen ...“
„Meinst, mir wird’s leicht?“ frug sie ernst. „Es muß halt sein.
Damit nix herauskommt. Denk’ nur, wenn ...“
„Hast du Angst, Sophie?“ frug Felix besorgt.
Sophie schaute mit unsicheren Blicken auf den Maler. Sie hatte
Angst vor dem Gatten, wollte es Felix aber nicht eingestehen.
„Angst?“ Sie zuckte die Achseln. „Angst grad nit ...“ erwiderte sie
ausweichend. „Aber stell’ dir das Höllenleben vor neben einem
eifersüchtigen Mann! Das wär’ ja für die Dauer nit zum Aushalten.“
Sophie wußte es selber nicht, warum sie Felix ihre Angst nicht
eingestehen mochte. Vielleicht war es im Unterbewußtsein ein
Gefühl, daß sie es verhüten wollte, den Geliebten gegen den Gatten
aufzureizen. Und das wäre sicher der Fall gewesen, wenn Felix eine
Ahnung von dem eigentlichen Sachverhalt gehabt hätte. Auch von
jenem nächtlichen Auftritt mit ihrem Gatten hatte sie Felix kein Wort
erzählt.
So waren einige Wochen vergangen, und Sophie begann
erleichtert aufzuatmen. Sie sah, daß Valentin Rapp ruhiger wurde,
wieder mehr derjenige, der er früher war.
Aber Mißtrauen und Zweifel zerstören die Seele eines Menschen
wie ätzendes Gift. Fressen sich tiefer und tiefer, und der leiseste
Anlaß genügt, die Verheerung, die sie angerichtet haben, offen
zutage treten zu lassen.
So war es mit Valentin Rapp. Er war nur scheinbar ruhig
geworden. Nur zum Schein tat er, als hielte er das für wahr, was
Sophie ihm sagte. In Wirklichkeit aber glaubte er ihr nichts mehr.
Es war ein qualvoller Zustand der vollständigen Zerrüttung und
des seelischen Zwiespaltes, in dem sich Valentin Rapp jetzt befand.
Ein Zustand, der ihn oft für Augenblicke an den Rand des
Wahnsinns brachte. Und in einem solchen Zustand von Wut und
Verzweiflung ging der Rechtsanwalt hin und erstand sich eine Waffe.
Er konnte nicht anders ... er mußte es tun.
Erst dann, als er die Waffe hatte und sie stets bei sich trug, war
er ruhiger geworden. Es war ein kleines blitzendes Ding. Ein Dolch.
Fast zärtlich barg ihn Valentin Rapp in der inneren Brusttasche
seines Rockes.
Es war ihm zur fixen Idee geworden: Nie wieder wollte er sich
von diesem scharfen, glitzernden Ding trennen ... bis er die volle
Gewißheit hatte von der Schuld oder Unschuld seiner Gattin.
War sie schuldig ... dann ... die Waffe war gut und seine Hand
sicher. Mit ihrem Blut sollte Sophie die Schande sühnen, die sie ihm
angetan hatte.
Jene Unterredung, die Valentin Rapp mit dem Patscheider
gehabt hatte, wollte ihm nicht mehr aus dem Kopf. Immer von
neuem mußte er an den widerlichen Ton denken, mit dem Johannes
Patscheider von Sophie gesprochen hatte.
Was konnte es nur sein, das zwischen diesen beiden vorgefallen
war? ... Valentin Rapp erinnerte sich an den unverkennbaren
Abscheu, den Sophie gehabt hatte, als er ihr den Namen dieses
Mannes nannte. Das war ehrlich gewesen. Und trotzdem log sie.
Valentin Rapp fühlte es deutlich, daß sie log.
Er sah es an dem demütigen Blick ihrer Augen, die ihn oft so
angsterfüllt anschauten, als wollten sie ihn um Vergebung bitten.
Warum kam das Weib nicht zu ihm? Warum gestand sie ihm nicht
die Schuld? Warum ...?
Hätte er ihr wirklich verziehen? Er hätte ihr nicht vergeben. Das
gestand sich Valentin Rapp offen ein. Nie ... niemals im Leben ...
hätte er Sophie eine Schändung seines Namens verziehen.
Er liebte dieses Weib rasend ... noch immer ... trotz allem. Er
hatte sie aus der Niedrigkeit zu sich erhoben. Er hatte ihr alles
gegeben, was ein Mann dem Weibe bieten kann. Er hatte ihr freudig
und gern seine Freiheit zu Füßen gelegt. Nur um sie für immer zu
besitzen, hatte er auf eine tatenreiche und erfolggekrönte Laufbahn
verzichtet.
Erst jetzt ... in diesen einsamen, selbstquälerischen Stunden kam
ihm dies alles zum Bewußtsein. Er sah es jetzt erst, wie der stolze
Aufstieg, den er sich als Ziel gesteckt hatte ... langsam ... ganz
langsam, aber stetig ... abwärts gegangen war. Seit den ersten
Jahren seiner Verheiratung waren der Einfluß und das Ansehen, das
Valentin Rapp in der Stadt besaß, allmählich geschwunden. Warum
wohl?
Valentin Rapp dachte nach ... immer mehr und mehr ... Und da er
nachdachte, erinnerte er sich an viele kleine Einzelheiten, denen er
damals, als sie sich ereigneten, keinen Wert beigemessen hatte. Sie
hatten aber trotzdem ihre Bedeutung gehabt. Denn Valentin Rapp
hatte keinen einzigen seiner ehrgeizigen Pläne verwirklicht gesehen.
Der Rechtsanwalt dachte auch an die vielen zarten und unzarten
Mahner, an jene, die ihm die Augen hatten öffnen wollen und denen
er die Tür gewiesen hatte. So glücklich war er in seiner Ehe
gewesen, daß ihn nichts in seinem Glauben an die Treue seines
Weibes hatte erschüttern können. Und ohne die geringste Bitterkeit
hatte er es mit angesehen, wie sein alter Gegner Johannes
Patscheider immer mächtiger geworden war.
Valentin Rapp hatte sich einmal dazu berufen geglaubt, zu den
hervorragendsten politischen Führern des Landes zu zählen. Und
die Leute in Innsbruck hielten ihn nicht nur im hohen Maße dazu
befähigt, sondern sie wußten es auch, daß er würdig und schneidig
wie selten einer die Interessen des Landes hätte vertreten können.
Das war damals gewesen ... vor Jahren, ehe Doktor Rapp die
Sophie Zöttl zur Frau genommen hatte.
Als es einige Jahre später zu den Wahlen kam ... da trat ein
anderer, ein Fremder, an die Stelle, die Valentin Rapp hätte
einnehmen sollen. Der Rechtsanwalt hatte sich bei dieser
Niederlage nicht viel daraus gemacht. Er war eine Kampfnatur und
war überzeugt davon, daß er sich und seine Ideale mit der Zeit doch
noch durchsetzen würde. Und wenn nicht ... dann machte es eben
auch nichts. Die Hauptsache blieb es, daß er als Mensch glücklich
geworden war. So glücklich und zufrieden, wie er es von andern
selten im Leben erfahren hatte. Und all das Glück verdankte er
dieser einen Frau ... die sein alles auf Erden ausmachte.
Valentin Rapp hatte sich nie nach einem Kind gesehnt. Sophie
war ihm alles und ersetzte ihm alles. Und jetzt ... jetzt zermürbte der
nagende Zweifel an ihrer Treue sein Gehirn und brachte ihn dem
Irrsinn nahe.
Hatten jene warnenden Mahner doch recht gehabt? War Sophie
tatsächlich eine Treulose, eine schamlose Ehebrecherin? War sie so
niederträchtig, falsch und gemein, daß sie ihn Jahre hindurch betrog
und belog ... und ihm Liebe heuchelte?
Wie konnte das Weib ein solches Spiel durchführen? War es
überhaupt möglich bei der Ursprünglichkeit ihres Temperamentes,
daß sie ihm Liebe gab, ohne sie zu fühlen? Das konnte nicht sein.
Unmöglich. Sie mußte ihn ja lieben. Gerade sie ... dieses wilde,
triebhafte Weib.
Triebhaft? War sie das wirklich? Ja ... sie war es. Doktor Rapp
hatte ja damals in der ersten Zeit der Ehe selbst Angst bekommen
vor diesem elementaren Ausbruch ihrer Natur. Er glaubte, sie durch
seine Klugheit eingedämmt zu haben. War das Täuschung?
Valentin Rapp fühlte es immer deutlicher, daß es nur einen
einzigen Ausweg gab aus dieser Hölle seiner seelischen Zweifel und
Qualen. Er mußte Gewißheit haben, ob Sophie rein oder sündig war.
Mehr als einmal hatte er ihr eine Falle gestellt. War fortgegangen
und dann unvermutet wieder zurückgekommen. Sie glaubte ihn
verreist, und er schlich heimlich in der Nacht um sein Haus und
lauerte auf den Verrat, den sie nun an ihm begehen würde. Aber
Sophie war standhaft. Sie ahnte die Gefahr und mied sie.
Erst nach mehreren Wochen, als Valentin Rapp sich ruhiger gab,
wurde Sophie kühner.
Es war im Dezember ... die Zeit kurz vor Weihnachten. Valentin
Rapp hatte eine geschäftliche Reise zu machen. Eine Reise nach
Wien. Sophie wußte schon längst von dieser Fahrt und freute sich
auf die Freiheit dieser Tage, wie ein eingesperrter Vogel sich aus
seinem Käfig sehnt.
Sie wußte es, daß es sich um die Vertretung in einem Prozeß
handelte, der einige Tage dauern konnte.
Als der Gatte von ihr Abschied nahm, fragte ihn Sophie im
gleichgültigsten Ton: „Sag’, Mannderl, wie lang bleibst denn aus?“
„Höchstens zwei Tag’. Übermorgen in der Nacht komm’ ich!“
erwiderte Doktor Rapp.
Sophie atmete auf. Zwei Tage ... es war wenig. Aber sie würde
ihre Freiheit genießen!
Der Rechtsanwalt beobachtete seine Frau mit argwöhnischen
Blicken. Er sah, daß sie zu Boden schaute, und er glaubte später in
ihren dunklen Augen einen Schimmer von aufleuchtender Freude zu
bemerken.
Die Falle war also gut. Übermorgen wollte er kommen ... sagte
er. Der Prozeß in Wien war aber erst in zwei Tagen fällig.
Mit großer Zärtlichkeit und Liebe nahm Sophie auf dem Bahnhof
zu Innsbruck Abschied von dem Gatten. Sie sah, wie Valentin Rapp
den direkten Wagen nach Wien bestieg. Und sie winkte ihm mit
ihrem kleinen feinen Spitzentaschentuch so lange nach, bis der
Eilzug ihren Blicken entschwunden war.
Dann lief sie, so schnell sie konnte, hinauf nach Wilten, in die
Wohnung der Altwirths. Alle Abkürzungswege benützte sie, um nur
so rasch als möglich bei dem Geliebten zu sein ...
„Felix ...“
„Ja ... Schatz!“
Sie lagen sich in den Armen und konnten sich kaum fassen vor
Freude.
„Heut’ nacht ... Felix ...“ flüsterte Sophie heiser vor Erregung. Ihr
Herz klopfte zum Zerspringen. So sehr sehnte sie sich nach dem
Geliebten.
„Nach Mitternacht?“ frug Felix leise.
„Um eins. Sei pünktlich!“ ...
Es war eine finstere Nacht. Neumond. Die Sterne glitzerten am
schwarzen Firmament unruhig und unstet. Ab und zu fegte ein
heftiger Windstoß mit ungestümer Gewalt dem einsamen Wanderer
frostige, schneidende Luft ins Gesicht. Den Pelzkragen aufgestülpt
und den weichen, dunklen Hut tief in die Stirn gedrückt, so legte
Valentin Rapp in der kalten Winternacht zu Fuß den Weg von Hall
nach Innsbruck zurück.
In Jenbach schon war der Rechtsanwalt umgekehrt. Hatte den
nächsten Zug nach Innsbruck benützt und war abends in Hall
angekommen. Von dort wanderte er bei Nacht zu Fuß, um von
keinem Bekannten gesehen zu werden.
Doktor Rapp war innerlich ruhig geworden. Fast ohne jede
Aufregung, mit einer Art kühlen Interesses sah er den Stunden
entgegen, die er nun auf seinem einsamen Beobachtungsposten
verbringen würde. Er wußte ... wenn er auch heute nacht und
morgen noch vergebens auf diesem Posten stand, daß er dann
wieder ruhig und zufrieden leben konnte wie bisher.
Diese beiden Nächte sollten ihm die Entscheidung bringen über
sein ferneres Leben. Und sie würden sie auch bringen. Valentin
Rapp fühlte das klar und deutlich. Und deshalb war diese große
Ruhe über ihn gekommen.
Als der Rechtsanwalt durch den Bogen des Bahnviaduktes
schritt, der die nach Mühlau führende Straße überspannt, da hörte er
die Uhren der Türme von Innsbruck elf Uhr schlagen. Eine nach der
andern. Die einen in hellen, kurzen Tönen und die andern in
langsamen, feierlichen Schlägen, als wollten sie den Lauf der Zeit
eindämmen, auf daß er nicht so schnell verrinne.
Elf Uhr ... Es war Zeit ... noch viel Zeit. Doktor Rapp würde noch
lange warten müssen ...
Unwillkürlich schlug der Rechtsanwalt jetzt eine langsamere
Gangart ein. Fast gemächlich ging er den Rest des Weges. Die
Hände auf dem Rücken, als mache er nur zu seinem Vergnügen
einen nächtlichen Spaziergang.
Er achtete nicht auf die eisige Luft, auf den starken Wind, der ihm
schneidend durch die Kleider fuhr. Er ging weiter ... immer gerade
aus ... bis zur Kettenbrücke ...
Viele Hunderte von blitzenden Lichtern erleuchteten die
schlafende Stadt. In dem heftigen Wind schienen sie unruhig zu
flackern, als trieben sie mit den Milliarden glitzernder Sternchen
droben am Nachthimmel ein lustiges Wettspiel.
Auf der Kettenbrücke blieb Doktor Rapp stehen. Es war so still
und ruhig da ... kein Mensch ... kein Laut ... nichts. Fast etwas
Unheimliches lag in dieser Stille und bedrückte den einsamen
Wanderer. Das Dunkel der Nacht lastete schwer auf der Stadt. Trotz
der weißen Schneedecke und den flackernden Lichtern war es dem
Rechtsanwalt, als brütete eine tiefe Traurigkeit über der Stadt. Oder
erschien es ihm nur so ... weil er selber so traurig war ... so
unsagbar traurig ...
Je näher er seinem Hause kam, desto langsamer ging Doktor
Rapp. Und ganz ruhig war er ... ganz ruhig ... Er mußte ja ruhig sein
... ruhig und geduldig ... und warten ... noch lange ... lange Stunden
vielleicht.
Valentin Rapp ging langsam und immer langsamer auf sein Haus
zu. Als er es sah, umschlich er den Garten der Villa, die sein eigen
war, wie ein Dieb. Lauerte und spähte umher ... Er sah nichts. Gar
nichts.
In einem Zimmer des ersten Stockwerkes brannte ein Licht. Es
war das Wohnzimmer. Und droben im Giebel war noch ein Fenster
beleuchtet. Das war am andern Ende des Hauses. Das
Mädchenzimmer. Sonst überall Dunkel.
Im Erdgeschoß des Hauses regte sich nichts. Die Mieter waren
alte Leute und liebten die Nachtruhe.
Einige Male umschlich der Rechtsanwalt sein Haus. Dann gab er
sich einen Schwung, kletterte über den nicht sehr hohen Eisenzaun
des Gartens und ließ sich sachte und lautlos zur Erde gleiten. Er
hatte den Schlüssel des Gittertores bei sich, aber er scheute den
Lärm, den das Öffnen desselben vielleicht verursachen konnte.
Langsam und sorgsam stapfte er durch den Schnee des Gartens
dem kleinen Gartenhäuschen zu. Morgen würden sie die Fußspuren
sehen, dachte er. Vom Gartenhäuschen aus konnte er den Eingang
der Villa genau im Auge behalten, und er sah auch das erleuchtete
Fenster des Wohnzimmers. Konnte beobachten, wie lange Sophie
noch wach war.
Was sie wohl jetzt gerade tat? Vielleicht las sie oder schrieb an
ihn? Einen ihrer kleinen, zärtlichen, stillosen Briefe, die ihm immer so
viel Freude bereitet hatten. Doktor Rapp stellte sich sein Weib vor,
wie sie droben saß, einsam, und an ihn schrieb. Er sah sie, wie sie
mit ernsthaftem Gesicht über dem Papier saß und kritzelte. Sie sah
so drollig ernsthaft aus, wenn sie schrieb. Zog die Stirne kraus und
preßte die Lippen zusammen. Wie ein Kind.
Eine große Sehnsucht nach Sophie überkam den Rechtsanwalt
bei diesen Gedanken. Am liebsten wäre er jetzt zu ihr
hinaufgegangen, um sie bei ihrer einsamen Tätigkeit zu
überraschen. War sie denn einsam? Vielleicht war sie es nicht ...
vielleicht ...
Deshalb war er doch hierher gekommen zu so später Stunde, um
sich Gewißheit zu verschaffen. Und nun fingen die quälenden
Fragen schon wieder an.
Doktor Rapp hatte sich auf eine der hölzernen Gartenbänke
gesetzt, die den Winter über in dem Häuschen untergebracht waren.
Und jetzt wartete er ... wartete ...
Er hörte jeden Stundenschlag der Uhren. Es war immer eine und
dieselbe Turmuhr, die als erste den Verlauf einer Viertelstunde
ankündigte. Dann kamen die andern. Eine nach der andern, in
melodischer, abgestimmter Harmonie.
Wie langsam die Zeit verrann ... endlos ... Und draußen der kalte
Wind in seinen unruhigen Stößen.
Und immer noch das Licht im Wohnzimmer? Warum ging sie
nicht schlafen ... warum?
Und wieder kämpfte die Sehnsucht nach dem Weibe mit dem
lauernden Verdacht.
Wenn sie nun doch unschuldig war?
Wie ein freudiger Schreck durchzuckte es den Mann.
Er würde Wache halten hier unten und dann ... dann ... morgen
... nicht heute ... dann würde er zu ihr kommen als ein Reuiger.
Niederknien würde er sich vor ihr und ihr alles bekennen. Und sie
würde ihn in ihre Arme nehmen, weich und lind, und würde ihn
küssen ... küssen ... wie nur Sophie küssen konnte.
Vom Turm schlug der helle Glockenton halb ein Uhr. Das Licht im
Wohnzimmer erlosch. Gott sei Dank! Valentin Rapp atmete auf. Nun
ging sie schlafen.
Es war alles dunkel im Haus. Kein Laut. Und wieder harrte
Valentin Rapp und sah abwechselnd bald auf die dunklen Fenster
seiner Wohnung und bald auf den Garteneingang hin.
Erwartungsvoll ... dann immer gleichgültiger.
Valentin Rapp fröstelte. Es fiel ihm ein, daß er noch kein Obdach
hatte für die heutige Nacht. Später ... dann würde er nach Pradl
gehen. Da kannte er einen Gastwirt, der verschwiegen war. Der
Rechtsanwalt hatte ihm einmal Gutes tun können. Seither war ihm
der Mann ergeben.
Ein Uhr ...
Horch ... Etwas regte sich ... Der Glockenschlag hatte den
einsamen Mann im Gartenhaus aufgeschreckt. Oder war es ein Laut
gewesen, ein Ton?
Sorgfältig spähte Valentin Rapp durch die Dunkelheit. Es war
ihm, als wäre oben im ersten Stock ein Fenster geöffnet worden. Er
konnte es nicht sehen ... es war zu dunkel.
Aber jetzt ... jetzt hörte er etwas ... Es war keine Täuschung. Von
der Straße her kam der gedämpfte Tritt eines Mannes. Der
hartgefrorene Schnee knirschte leise ... Die Schritte kamen näher
und näher ... Valentin Rapp hielt den Atem an vor erwartungsvoller
Spannung. Er spähte hinaus in die Dunkelheit, in die Richtung,
woher der Schall der Tritte kam.
Der Schein eines Lichtes fiel in den Garten. Plötzlich ...
unvermittelt. Erschreckt sah Valentin Rapp auf.
Da ... da ... er sah es deutlich. Im Rahmen des offenen Fensters
ihres jetzt hell erleuchteten Wohnzimmers stand Sophie und sah in
den Garten hinab. Einen Moment nur. Aber Valentin Rapp war es,
als müßte sie ihn gesehen haben. Unwillkürlich drückte er sich nach
rückwärts noch tiefer in das Innere des Häuschens hinein.
Es war wieder dunkel droben. Die Schritte von der Straße her
kamen näher. Mit dem Aufgebot seiner ganzen Nervenkraft horchte
der Rechtsanwalt. Er hörte, daß der Mann draußen sich jetzt
langsam heranschlich. Er konnte den Fremden nicht sehen ... er
hörte ihn nur, wie er leise und vorsichtig näher kam.
Dann hörte er den Schlüssel ... hörte das Öffnen des Tores und
das Geräusch des wieder zuschnappenden Schlosses.
Und dann wieder die leise schleichenden Tritte und das Öffnen
der Haustür. Sicher und wie selbstverständlich hatte der Fremde
seinen Weg gefunden. Er mußte ihn gut kennen.
Das Fenster im ersten Stock klirrte leise. Sophie hatte es also
wieder zugemacht.
Doktor Rapp konstatierte das alles mit einer Ruhe, über die er
sich selbst wunderte. Nun war er wieder ganz ruhig geworden.
Unheimlich ruhig. Er mußte es ja auch sein. Nun hatte er ja die
Gewißheit ... die Erlösung aus der Qual des Zweifels. Und nun
mußte er handeln ... abwarten, bis die beiden da droben sich
vollkommen sicher fühlten. Er konnte ja jetzt warten ... jetzt noch viel
mehr als zuvor ...
Es war eine heiße Liebesnacht für Felix und Sophie. So heiß und
glühend hatten sie sich beide schon lange nicht mehr geliebt wie
heute.
Wie in einem tollen Rausch verbrachten sie die Zeit.
„Sophie ...“
„Felix ...“
Es war der Ausbruch eines neuen, unendlichen Vergehens
ineinander ...
Und leise durchschlich Valentin Rapp die dunklen Räume seiner
Wohnung ... von Tür zu Tür ...
Er hatte die Schuhe ausgezogen und tastete sich nun sachte und
lautlos vorwärts.
An der Tür des Schlafzimmers machte er halt. Er horchte ... Er
hörte das unterdrückte Flüstern erregter Stimmen.
Valentin Rapp spürte einen wehen, stechenden Schmerz. So
sehr hatte er dieses Weib geliebt ... so ehrlich und warm. Und sie
betrog ihn ... die Dirne!
Das schwere Blut stieg ihm jäh zu Kopf, und ein Zittern und
Beben befiel ihn ... Ruhig ... er mußte ruhig sein ... nur jetzt noch ...
bis er sie getroffen hatte.
Schwer atmete der Mann ... fast keuchend. Und drinnen
schmiegte sich Sophie innig an die Brust des Geliebten ...
umschlang ihn mit ihren weichen Armen und küßte ihn.
„Felix ... lieber ... lieber Felix! Weil ich dich nur wieder hab’ ... dich
... du ...“
Vorsichtig öffnete Valentin Rapp die Tür seines Schlafzimmers ...
Das matte Licht der Ampel mit dem gelben Seidenschirm fiel auf
das Weib, das in den Armen ihres Buhlen lag.
Valentin Rapp schaute nicht auf den Mann. Er sah nur sie ... das
Weib ... die Dirne. Er sah sie in ihrer ganzen Schande. Und mit
geballten Fäusten stürzte er sich auf sie wie ein gereiztes Tier und
züchtigte sie. Ohne ein Wort zu sagen ... jäh und plötzlich riß er sie
aus den Armen ihres Geliebten. Zerrte sie zu Boden und schlug ihr
ins Gesicht. Brutal ...
„Dirne!“ stieß er keuchend hervor. „Jetzt hab’ ich dich!“
Zitternd krümmte sich das Weib unter den Schlägen des Mannes.
Sie fühlte sie nicht. Sie hatte nur eine Angst ... Felix. Nur an ihn
dachte sie ... nicht an sich.
Felix war mit jähem Schreck emporgefahren. Einen Augenblick
starrte er wie betäubt auf den Mann ... Dann sah er, wie Valentin
Rapp in blinder Wut auf das Weib einhieb ... brutal und roh ... Und
jeder Schlag durchzuckte ihn ... peitschte ihn auf und versetzte ihn in
namenlose Wut.
Von rückwärts fiel er dem Rechtsanwalt in den Arm, umkrampfte
ihn mit Macht, um Sophie zu befreien.
„Rette dich ... Sophie ...“ rief er ihr zu. „Schnell ... vorwärts ...“
Aber Sophie rührte sich nicht. Wie betäubt lag sie auf dem
weichen Teppich und hielt die Hände vors Gesicht.
Doktor Rapp befreite sich mit einem kräftigen Ruck und
schleuderte Felix in eine Ecke des Zimmers, daß er zu Boden fiel.
Die Aufregung hatte Valentin Rapp Riesenkräfte verliehen.
„Zuerst kommt sie dran ... dann du ... Bube ...“ schrie er jetzt vor
Wut brüllend.
Jäh schnellte das Weib empor ... von Angst getrieben. Aber nicht
um sich ... sondern um Felix.
„Fort ... fort ... Felix ...“ rief sie ihm mit schriller Stimme zu. „Fort
...“
Doktor Rapp hielt das Weib gepackt. Fest ... an der Kehle ... Die
Zähne knirschten ihm ... dann ...
Sophie sah den Dolch in seiner rechten Hand ... Scharf glitzerte
das Ding ... da ... sie schrie auf.
„Felix ... hilf ... Felix!“ Es war wie ein Todesschrei.
Und dann wand sie sich unter seinem Griff. Kämpfte mit ihm ...
hielt ihm den Arm mit der Kraft der Verzweiflung ... Er durfte nicht
stechen ... sie wollte leben ... leben ...
„Hilf, Felix! Hilf!“ schrie sie verzweifelt.
Felix Altwirth hatte den Mann angefallen, und mit wuchtigem
Schlag hieb er ihm den Dolch aus der Hand. Die Waffe fiel zu
Boden ...
Der Rechtsanwalt ließ von dem Weibe ab ... Jetzt standen sich
die beiden Männer als Todfeinde gegenüber.
Sie kämpften miteinander ... stumm und wortlos ... Sie kämpften
um die Waffe ... Es war ein kurzer, heißer Kampf ... Da ... Felix lag
zu Boden ... er hatte die Waffe ... Der Rechtsanwalt sah es nicht,
daß er zum Stich ausholte.
Valentin Rapp wälzte sich in blinder Wut über seinen Gegner ...
er beugte sich über ihn ... ein Ruck ... Felix drückte den Dolch, den
er fest in der Hand hielt, in die Brust des Mannes ...
„Ah ...!“ Es war ein Stöhnen ... ein unterdrückter Schrei, der sich
dem Munde des Rechtsanwaltes entrang. Die Hand hielt er an die
Brust gepreßt ... die Augen geschlossen ... den Kopf nach hinten.
Dann fiel er mit Gepolter zur Seite. —
Mit vor Entsetzen weit aufgerissenen Augen starrte das Weib auf
ihren Gatten ... sie konnte sich nicht rühren ... kein Glied bewegen ...
Sie sah das Todeszucken des Mannes, und sie hörte sein Röcheln
... Sie hielt den Atem an ... starrte ... wollte schreien ... um Hilfe rufen
... und konnte nicht. Sie sah nur immer hin auf das Opfer, das zu
Boden lag ... Ein Dehnen ... ein Recken ... Dann ... dann war er
ruhig ...
Und nun löste sich die lähmende Spannung in Sophiens
Gliedern. Langsam und lautlos kniete sie sich nieder ... und auf den
Knien kroch sie zu dem Gatten hin ... langsam ... von Angst und
Entsetzen erfüllt ... Sie tastete ihm mit zitternder, fieberheißer Hand
ins Gesicht ... er bewegte sich nicht und hatte die Starre des Todes.
Sachte ließ sich das Weib an der Seite der Leiche nieder und
bettete den Kopf des toten Mannes in ihren Schoß. Und dann weinte
sie ... leise ... fast lautlos ...
In einer Ecke des Zimmers stand Felix. Das Entsetzen über seine
Tat hatte ihn betäubt ... er konnte es noch nicht fassen ... Tot ... Er
hatte den Mann getötet ... ein Mörder ... nun war alles vorbei ...
Eine tiefe, unheimliche Stille herrschte in dem kleinen Raum. Sie
konnten einander nicht in die Augen schauen ... die beiden
Schuldigen ... sie starrten nur immer wie gebannt auf das
wachsbleiche Gesicht des Toten.
Mit sanftem Druck hatte Sophie dem Gatten die Augen
geschlossen ... Sie konnte diesen brechenden Blick nicht mehr
sehen. Es tat ihr so wehe ... wehe ...
Sie hatte ihn lieb gehabt ... die Frau ... ehrlich lieb. Und sie war
ihm dankbar gewesen ... und trotzdem hatte sie ihn betrogen ...
betrogen ... weil sie nicht anders konnte.
Zögernd und scheu näherte sich Felix.
„Sophie ...“ flüsterte er heiser.
Sophie sah zu ihm auf. Ruhig und ohne Vorwurf. Aber ihre
Tränen rannen unaufhörlich über die todbleichen Wangen.
„Ja ... Felix!“ sprach sie mit schluchzender Stimme.
„Nun ist alles aus!“ sagte Felix gebrochen. „Jetzt ... ich werd’
mich stellen müssen.“
„Du?“ Entsetzt starrte ihn das Weib an. „Flieh’!“ stieß sie wild
hervor.
Felix schüttelte den Kopf. „Nein!“ sagte er. „Das nützt nichts. Sie
bekommen mich doch.“
Ein eisiger Schauder durchfuhr den halb entblößten Leib des
Weibes. „Ins Gefängnis ...“ stieß sie hervor. Sie krümmte sich
zitternd und sah mit scheuem Blick auf Felix. „Ins Gefängnis ...“
wiederholte sie.
„Leb’ wohl ... Sophie ...“ sagte Felix tonlos. „Daß das so ein Ende
nehmen muß.“ Er hielt ihr die Hand hin. Unverwandt und mit
angsterfülltem Blick schaute das Weib zu dem Mann empor.
„Warum gehst du ...“ stieß sie hervor. „Bleib’!“
„Es ist besser, wenn ich geh’ ... Sophie. Deinetwegen ...“ fügte er
nach einer kleinen Pause hinzu.
Sophie erhob sich. Dann bettete sie sanft und weich das Haupt
des toten Gatten auf ein Kissen, das sie herbeiholte. Ganz
allmählich gewann sie ihre Fassung wieder. Sie zitterte noch an allen
Gliedern ... aber sie konnte wieder ihre Gedanken sammeln.
Und nun stand sie da in ihrem weißen Nachtgewand und streckte
sich im namenlosen Schmerz. Fest preßte sie die vollen Lippen
aufeinander, die so blaß und blutleer waren wie ihr totenbleiches
Gesicht.
„Felix ...“ Sie sah ihn mit großen, wehen Augen an. „Du weißt,
daß ich dich lieb hab’?“ frug sie.
„Sophie ...“ Jetzt kniete sich Felix vor ihr nieder ... umschlang
ihren Leib mit beiden Armen und preßte seine Lippen auf ihre
Hände.
„Siehst, Felix ...“ fuhr Sophie leise flüsternd fort ... als wollte sie
den Toten nicht aus seiner Ruhe stören ... „Den da hab’ ich auch lieb
g’habt. Sehr lieb ... Aber nit so wie dich ... anders ... Und jetzt ... jetzt
ist er nimmer ... Und du ... du bist auch nimmer ... und alles ... alles
ist meine Schuld ... Ich weiß es ... ohne mir ... wär’s nit so weit
kommen!“ Sie griff sich mit der Hand gegen die Stirn, als müßte sie
sich besinnen. Dann fuhr sie mit flüsternder und bebender Stimme
zu reden fort. „Ich hab’s Elend über euch gebracht ... über dich und
ihn ... und hab’ euch doch gern g’habt ... so gern ...“
Der Ton ihrer Stimme tat Felix so weh, daß er aufschluchzte vor
Leid. Sie fuhr ihm zärtlich über den Kopf und streichelte ihn.
„Ich will’s gutmachen ... Felix ...“ sagte Sophie kaum hörbar. „Ich
bin die Schuldige ... niemand soll’s wissen ... daß du’s getan hast.“
„Sophie ... du ... das geht nicht ... unmöglich. Ich bin’s gewesen,
und ich trag’s auch!“ Mit jähem Schreck war Felix emporgefahren
und sah scheu und verstört auf das Weib, das nun in ruhiger und
gefaßter Haltung vor ihm stand.
Sie hatte den Kopf tief gesenkt und ließ die Arme müde und matt
herabhängen. Wie eine ganz andere ... eine demütige,
ergebungsvolle Frau kam sie dem Mann jetzt vor, und mit
achtungsvoller Ehrfurcht hörte er auf die Worte, die sie leise
flüsternd sprach.
„Nein, Felix ... ich muß es sein ... laß mich ... ich bitt’ dich drum
...“ Sophie faltete die Hände und sah ihn flehend an. „Für mich ist’s
Leben doch aus ... ich mag nimmer sein ... Jetzt nimmer ... jetzt ...
wo alles zu Ende ist und ich so glücklich war.“
„Glaubst du, daß ich noch leben könnte ... daß ...“ stieß er hervor.
„Ja ... du mußt leben ... Felix!“ sagte Sophie fest und beinahe
gebieterisch. „Du mußt arbeiten und für andere leben. Schaff’ und
werd’ groß!“
Leise und ehrerbietig küßte der schuldige Mann die Hand des
sündigen Weibes. Und noch einmal fuhr sie ihm liebkosend über das
tiefgebeugte Haupt. Dann nahm sie seinen Kopf zwischen ihre
beiden Hände, mit derselben mütterlichen Gebärde, wie sie es so oft
getan hatte, neigte sich tief über ihn und küßte ihn lange und innig ...
Es war wie ein letztes, unendliches Versinken ineinander.
Dann riß sie sich gewaltsam von ihm los. „Geh’ ... jetzt ... Felix ...“
bat Sophie leise und wandte sich mit müder Gebärde von ihm ab.
„Geh’ ... es soll dich niemand hier sehen. Kein Mensch soll’s je
erfahren ... daß du’s getan hast. Geh’ ...“ bat sie nochmals, da sie
sah, daß Felix noch zögerte. Aber sie schaute den Mann, der ihr das
Höchste geworden war auf der Welt, mit keinem Blick mehr an. Sie
hatte nicht mehr den Mut dazu.
Lautlos und unhörbar schlich sich Felix von dem Ort seiner Tat.
Schlich hinaus in die Dunkelheit und Stille der Nacht.
Lange noch stand Sophie regungslos in der Mitte des Zimmers
und starrte auf die Tür, durch die Felix gegangen war. Fort ... nun
war er fort ... Sie hatte ihn wohl zum letztenmal gesehen ...
Ein tiefer Seufzer entrang sich der Brust des Weibes. Allein ...
nun war sie allein ... ganz allein ...
Mit unsicheren, ängstlichen Blicken sah sie zu der Leiche hinüber
die am Boden lag. Wie unheimlich es hier war. Ein eisig kalter
Schauer durchfuhr ihre Glieder ... es fror sie ... Es war kalt in dem
Zimmer ... still und kalt ... wie in einer Totengruft.
Mit vorsichtig zögernden Schritten schlich sich Sophie zu der
Stelle hin, wo ihr toter Gatte lag. Ganz nahe kam sie heran ... ganz
nahe ... Und dann kniete sie nieder. Kniete sich zu ihm und fuhr ihm
mit bebender Hand tastend und suchend über den leblosen Körper,
als müßte sie doch noch ein Lebenszeichen in ihm entdecken.
Nichts ... alles still ... alles tot.
Und immer tiefer beugte sie sich über ihn, und ihre Augen
erweiterten sich immer mehr vor Angst ... je länger sie auf den Toten
starrte.

The European Reception of John D Caputos Thought Radicalizing Theology Martin Koci Full Chapter

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The European Reception of John D.

Caputo's Thought: Radicalizing

86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE

Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN: 978-1-66690-841-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

John D. Caputo’s Radical Theology in Europe: An Introduction 1

PART I: RADICAL THEOLOGY AND POLITICS 17

PART II: RADICAL THEOLOGY AND THE TRAGIC

PART III: RADICAL THEOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY 153

PART IV: RADICAL THEOLOGY WITHIN THEOLOGY

11 Keeping Weakness Weak to Make It Strong: Caputo’s

Writing a book is always a challenge. Editing the book is a double chal-

WEAK AND RADICAL THEOLOGY:

John D. Caputo has recently proposed, after years of philosophical work in

gaining terrain in the Netherlands, to which the European Radical Theology

RADICAL THEOLOGY AND POLITICS

Calvin Ullrich’s chapter, “Radical Theology as Political Theology: Exploring

radical hermeneutics he had proposed. Caputo’s theopoetics of the cross,

RADICAL THEOLOGY AND THE TRAGIC

George Pattison discusses “The Foolish Call of Love” in Caputo’s works. In

RADICAL THEOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY

negation, or deconstruction, of all ideas and images of positive religion actu-

RADICAL THEOLOGY WITHIN

Justin Sands’ chapter, “Radical Theology’s Place within Theology,” focuses

of an almost anti-ontology of the event. Caputo so distances himself more and

partially translated by Corinne Laidet in Les Temps modernes 669–670 (2012),

Alfsvåg, Knut. “The Commandment of Love in Kierkegaard and Caputo.” Neue

Koci, Martin. Thinking Faith After Christianity: A Theological Reading of Jan

Radical Theology as Political Theology

The task of this chapter will be to reflect on the “fragmentary” reception of

a formalist happening which knocks us over in sheer unexpectedness, but

a “postmodern theology,” namely, metaphysics. Here the gleaned insights

Whatever weight is given to these speculations, it remains the case that

FRAGMENT 2: GOD’S WEAK POWER

A research workshop held at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg

of God encountered in the event of God’s withdrawal is experienced not as a

interested in living in the form of the Messiah, is regarded by Hailer as closer

from within/as theological communities of responsivity. Before expanding

messianisms and a pure messianic in general doesn’t hold up on Derrida’s own

If the theistic connotation of sovereignty and power associated with the

CONCLUDING FRAGMENT: THE

In this final fragment I want to suggest that another frag-event of God’s

1. David Tracy, Fragments: The Existential Situation of our Time: Selected

Siebeck, 2017). Klein is now Professor of Systematic Theology at the Ruhr-Universität

E s war nur eine momentane Beruhigung, die Sophie Rapp bei

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