A Radical God: Theopoetics, Phenomenology, and the Future of Religion

Religion is making itself unbelievable―scandal-ridden, antiscientific, authoritarian, and reactionary. Can religion be saved? Is it even worth saving? Can religion be saved not just from its critics but from itself?

John D. Caputo proposes a radical alternative―what he calls “religion’s last stand”―by turning to theopoetics. In the traditional account, theopoetics calls for approaching God poetically because God transcends human language. Caputo contests this view, arguing that in the radical account, God does not precede but is generated by the poetic imagination. Theopoetics is not adorning an already constituted God; it is constituting the very idea of God. A radical God, untethered from theological orthodoxy and confessional rivalries, is neither a real being nor an unreal illusion, neither the object of supernatural belief nor the reject of skeptical disbelief. By adopting a phenomenological suspension of both belief and disbelief, both theism and atheism, both the religious and the secular, Caputo demystifies the distinction between the natural and the supernatural and replaces it with the distinction between the prosaic and the poetic. A daring undertaking in radical theology, this lively and provocative book proposes a startlingly different future for religion.