In his book In Search of Radical Theology, John Caputo offers a unique theodicy to address the fact that the Kingdom of God has not arrived (a theodicy is literally a “defense of God,” usually in response to the so-called problem of evil). There are a couple ways of dealing with this disappointing fact, the first Caputo calls the “Docetic way,” and the second he labels the “Catholic way.”
(By way of reminder, Docetism was one of the earliest heresies that the imperial church identified — it came from the Greek word δοκέω, which means “to seem.” The heresy, then, involved insisting that while Jesus of Nazareth was indeed divine, he was not a real man but only seemed to be.)
The “Docetic way,” therefore, says that the coming kingdom does not belong to this earthly and corporeal sphere at all — it’s not measured in “calendar time” but instead belongs to the ephemeral and shadowy sphere known as “eternity.” The kingdom is not a form of life but a form of afterlife:
“[According to] the Docetic way… transient time and corruptible flesh will be wiped away. The kingdom of God is volatilized into a kingdom of heavenly, incorruptible, docetic bodies flitting about in a timeless eternity doing God knows what.”
Caputo concludes that “to such mythology, the best religious and theological response is atheism.”
The “Catholic way,” insists Caputo, seeks to “remain faithful to the carnality and materiality, to the temporality and historicality of the kingdom; to mustard seeds not metaphysics.” In other words, consistent with its sacramental and incarnational view of, well, everything, the Catholic way refuses to be bothered by flesh, blood, or humanity. He continues:
“In the Catholic way, the challenge of the God whose ikon was Yeshua, who announces good news for the poor and the coming of the year of the Jubilee, has to do not with predicting the future but with offering us a promise. The year of the Jubilee belongs neither to the timelessness of eternity nor to the chronological time of the calendar but to the theopoetic time of a promise.”
The “promise” of the kingdom, then, demands faith. But this faith should not be distorted into what Caputo calls a “modernist creedal belief” that turns Christianity into a mere assertion of various dogmas and non-negotiable propositions. That’s Empire, not Exile.
“Then Protestants pound their Bible, and popes decree infallibly. Then the kingdom of God recedes. Then Yeshua weeps over Jerusalem.”
No, the faith with which we confront the absence of the kingdom is one that rests (and boasts) in the foolish and weak nature of the God who promised it. The kingdom of God, from this standpoint of Exile, promises neither a life-hack nor a secret path to success. It’s not about four spiritual laws, five smooth stones to slay your Goliaths, or seven habits of highly effective people. Rather, the kingdom disrupts us by means of what Richard Kearney calls “micro-eschatologies,” those subtle and almost imperceptible in-breakings of grace:
“The year of the Jubilee is temporal not eternal, and its temporality is neither that of calendar time nor of apocalyptic time that triumphantly crushes evil. The kingdom of God arrives not by transcending time but letting the shoots of grace spring up in the crevices of time. [The kingdom is a promise] issued not from a Super-being but from the bowels of the earth.”
If the proper theological response to a heavenly kingdom promised by the Super-being of docetic and disembodied spirituality is atheism, as Caputo insists, but if we are nevertheless to work faithfully to see this world disturbed and disrupted by the ironic, weak, and foolish kingdom described in the Sermon on the Mount, then perhaps a new label is needed to capture the dynamic of this exilic posture?
For what it’s worth, I cast my vote for “faitheism.”
