In my last post I coined the term “faitheism” which, if I do say so myself, is quite clever. The combining of concepts that at first glance appear contradictory is a pretty Christian thing to do (at least if the union of divinity and humanity in the person of Christ has anything to say about it).
But what does it mean?
To unpack this I will continue to draw from John Caputo and his book, In Search of Radical Theology. In the ongoing debate about religion, he says, we have the naturalists on one side and the supernaturalists on the other (Caputo calls them the Big Strong Men of Reason and the Big Strong Men of Theology). The former insist that the latter are hopelessly backward and superstitious, and the latter dig their heels and say, “Yeah well at least we’re not a bunch of nihilists” (which, as The Dude taught us, must be exhausting).
The problem for Caputo is that these opposing factions are just two sides of the same coin:
The two sides share the same presuppositions. “-Isms” aplenty, a war of “-isms,” two sides of the same coin, competing versions of the same thing, two varieties of the same real-ism. Each side competes for the high ground of Presence, of what is really real. One has God on its side; the other has the material universe, two very Big Deals. One looks up unctuously to Heaven; the other squints through its telescopes at the heavens.
(To put this in terms that those familiar with my work will understand, both the secular materialist and the traditional Christian are engaging in strong theology, not weak. The two sides of the coin are different, but the coin itself is an imperial coin. This is Empire, not Exile.)
Caputo suggests that the source of the bickering goes all the way back to the residual “soft Gnosticism” and “Christian Neoplatonism” of St. Augustine’s City of God, with its “indigestible two-worlds dualism.” The real problem occurs when we “transform purely spectral phenomena into pure spiritual entities”:
By thus confusing the Kingdom of God with a metaphysical realm beyond space and time, it turned the call for the Kingdom into an economic chase here on earth after celestial rewards in the hereafter, where we are assured we will flit about in maintenance-free bodies doing God-knows-what for all eternity. That dualism deserves all the abuse, suspicion, and incredulity it gets.
This idea of God as deus ex machina is, to invoke Bonhoeffer, something concerning which we should absolutely be atheists (in fact, we should be atheists as many times over as there are idolatrous gods who present themselves as genies in a bottle who will scratch all our itches and give us purpose-driven lives now and pie in the sky when we die).
For Caputo, faith is not intellectual assent to various dogmatic propositions, but instead is the heart’s response to the haunting specter (or if you prefer, the Holy Ghost) who calls us to mercy and compassion — not in order to earn the Kingdom later but to bring it about now, albeit in a way that is ever to-come.
I’ll dig deeper into Caputo’s discomfort in a later article, but to summarize what we have seen thus far I’ll simply say that the juxtaposition of faith and atheism — like light with darkness, death with life, or divinity with humanity — taps into something profound, a truly Christian instinct that I fear we, with all our latent fundamentalism, tend to miss or reject outright.
For those who find the term “faitheism” to be too confusing or ironic, I would suggest that the Incarnation opened the door to irony long ago. And what’s more, the God-Man died for crying out loud. Isn’t that ironic, don’tcha think?
