Our guest for this session, Jack Caputo, discusses the future of religion, is it the “end of religion?” Please read the introduction below for a primer on our conversation.
Excerpt from an Essay by Jack Caputo
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis on April 9, 1945, described the possibility of a “religionless Christianity.” In modernity, he said, we have come to realize that “everything gets along fine without God.” “The world has come of age,” and humankind has attained its “adulthood.”
As humankind becomes more and more, God becomes less and less, like the last fading smile of the Cheshire cat.
Julian Huxley
This puts religion in the position of defending itself. Furthermore, it tries to return humankind to its pre-modern adolescent dependence where it can exploit human weakness. Against this, Bonhoeffer’s proposal is, “Before God and with him we live without God.” Where Bonhoeffer spoke of “religionless” Christianity, and Bultmann of “demythologizing” it, Tillich criticized its “supernaturalism.” Together they laid the foundation of radical theology. They demystified religion and treated it as finite, fallible human articulation of the mystery of our lives.
Radical Theology
Taking these groundbreaking insights as his point of departure, Jack Caputo offers an analysis of the future of “religion.” Additionally, of its uneasy relationship to “radical theology.” For Jack, the two are not antagonists – once theology is deprived of its supernaturalist illusions, radical theology is not viewed as proposing another, competing religion trying to replace the confessional traditions. The confessional religious bodies are the only ones that “exist,” under the concrete historical conditions of space and time. While radical theology is their inner disturbance, an inner restlessness, reminding them of the unconditional from which they spring. Without radical theology, the confessional traditions would reify, rigidify, mystify. Also, without the confessional traditions, radical theology would be deprived of one of its most familiar and accessible expressions. It will need to find other opportunities to make itself felt, like art.
The question is whether that in fact is what is taking place. As religion makes itself increasingly unbelievable, more and more the shelter of the undereducated and reactionary. The point of deconstruction is to give things a future, and question is whether “religion” has a future, or even deserves to have a future, or maybe it is time to move on.
April 9, 2022 Second Saturday Conversation Recording
Jack has provided the above description of our exploration for April 9. We encourage you to read it. More than once. It provides a pocket size guide to “radical theology.” Jack urges us to pay attention to our restless hearts. And to the restless heart of Christianity. Second Saturday Conversation does both as well. Below is a partial recording of the session, a full recording is coming soon.
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