John Caputo, “like his ‘hero’ St. Augustine, finds himself disturbed and perturbed by the question, ‘What do I love when I love my God?’,” readingreligion.org explains. Except that, in On Religion, the American philosopher of religion amends the “what” to a “how”: “For love is a how, not a what,” he argues. “And so is God.”
The blog continues: “[T]he love of God is something to do. […] [It is] testified to, enacted, performed. ‘God’—that is not only a name, but an injunction….” In its scrutiny of Caputo, Oxford Biographies puts it this way: “God ‘insists’ as a…summons for human beings to realize the impossible demands of the kingdom of God here on earth.” Human experience, Caputo writes, “comes alive…only when we are pushed to the limit of the possible, to the edge of the impossible….”
“The impossible is,” he insists, “the stuff of which religion is made.” And with God, “everything is possible, even the impossible. That is what we mean by God. The impossible, if I may be so bold, is…part of God’s job description.”
Caputo, readingreligion.org declares, “writes with his blood, with a perturbo-charged insistence that wrenches the reader out of comfort and complacency.”
On Religion
By John Caputo
Routledge, 2001
