John D. Caputo Quotes on God

John D. Caputo’s The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (1997), The Weakness of God (2006), and The Insistence of God (2013) give contemporary continental philosophy of religion its most influential project of weak theology. The central thesis is that the God of metaphysical theology — the omnipotent being whose existence the natural-theological tradition undertook to demonstrate — must be displaced by the event that stirs within the name of God: the call to justice, hospitality, and unconditional love that “insists” without “existing” in the strong metaphysical sense, and that the deconstructive resources of Derrida’s late work supply the principal philosophical materials for articulating this weak theology. The framework, drawing on Derrida, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and the radical-orthodox theological tradition Caputo has helped reorient, shaped contemporary continental philosophy of religion through Caputo’s many students and the broader engagement between deconstruction and theology.