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Descriptive
In the letter which produced the famous phrase "religionless Christianity," Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: "The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over."1 We hear the word-weary sigh. Bonhoeffer's sentiments have been the subject of radically contrasting interpretations, but it looks as though, one way or another, prayer and righteous action constitute the inner heart and outward form of his religionless Christianity in a new world come of age.
On Religion
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To its detractors, deconstruction might seem to be the opposite of word-weariness; rather, it is a case of indulgent wordplay. But John Caputo's work has highlighted the messianic longing for that which is to come, for justice, in the work of deconstruction's éminence grise, Jacques Derrida.2 Derrida is the proponent of religion without religion. So Bonhoeffer's religionless Christianity and Derrida's religion without religion are both matters of prayer and righteous action, if I may loosely apply the latter description to Derrida. Looked at from one perspective, what we have here is the alliance of two divorced parties. In the first case, a religion without religion is a religion divorced from determinate beliefs couched in propositions. In getting rid of beliefs and propositions in their familiar associated form, you might think that you are getting rid of religion, but not so, as Schleiermacher, Tillich, and others have long taught us. In the end, and by the time we come to Derrida, religion can stand without a cognitive or propositional apparatus. In the second case—the case of justice—the "virtue" of justice was once grounded in positive religion. But it need not be, and a justice embedded in an indeterminate messianic impulse is a justice separated from its grounds. Nietzsche famously complained about a state of affairs whereby moderns attempted to retain morality, e.g., justice, without belief in God.3 If the marriage should never have happened, it should nonetheless be indissoluble.
What if the divorced parties ally—religion without religion and justice without religion getting together? They do in John Caputo's work On Religion. What is said in this work about justice, about our oppressions and neglects, is fairly standard—a characterization that is not meant pejoratively—but the point about religion obviously receives more elaboration. At the heart of Caputo's enterprise God-language is retained, but "God" signifies nothing determinate in its content. However, the word has a determinate function, which is to keep open the future, the impossible, and thus sustain hope: "The name of God is the name of the ever open question." So we have undecidability: what kind of ground "God" is can not be decided, since we humans are constitutionally a question to ourselves: "No one really knows what they love when they love their God."
In remarking on this proposal, it would be possible to proceed analytically and look into the question of the meaning of "God." We shall not be proceeding along this course. Such a procedure is doubtless both valid and necessary, but there may be some advantage to following a different trail. Obviously one question that arises from Caputo's work is an old one by now, namely, in what way the proposal differs from atheistic humanism. However, Caputo wants us to redefine the religion/atheism boundary if there is one and, as I understand him, acknowledges the possibility that atheistic humanism (if we wish to use that traditional designation) is indeed the order of the day: such a possibility is included in undecidability. He certainly does not want a brand of atheistic humanism that expels the category of morality so as to make cruelty become innocent, as his discussion of Nietzsche and tragic possibility makes clear. As things stand, religion for him, we might say, is a messianic space, directed to which the striving for justice has its deep dimension, power and, perhaps, meaning. What we love when we love is God.
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