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Interrogative
On two significant points, I am sympathetic to John Caputo. First, I agree that at the heart of true religion we find love. Love is a rather rarer flower than the ubiquity of the word suggests and, allied to it, the passion for (not just declaration in favor of) justice is also both important and rare. It is certainly right to give the notions of love and justice overwhelming importance in the construction of an idea of vera religio. As a way in to the second area of sympathy, we recall a dictum of Leibniz to the effect that people are right in what they affirm and wrong in what they reject. Leibniz was a severe logician and understood better than practically anyone the obvious truth, namely, that some affirmations entail rejections. But is the sentiment not vacuous taken out of any context? Over the years, I have found it patient of surprisingly wide application. Before stating my sympathy, let me note, in the spirit of Leibniz, that my difficulty with John Caputo's essay On Religion lies less in what is affirmed than in what is rejected.4
What is rejected? Inter alia and especially, the following notion of revelation:
It is always possible—in fact, you can bet on it—that someone might fold their hands and piously looking up to heaven tell us that we must take the bull by the horns and face up to the fact that God's special revelation at just one time and place to just one people in just one language is all part of a Great Divine Mystery, that God's ways are not our ways. Excuse me? There is nothing divine or mysterious about that (although there is a great deal of bull). It sounds much more like our ways, not God's, our own very unmysterious and human all too human ethnocentrism and egocentrism, our own nationalism and narcissism, our own sexism, racism, and self-love writ large, in short, a gross human weakness that is being passed off as a Great Divine Attribute. The nerve of some people! The exclusivist claim that almighty God has been exclusively revealed to a particular people, at a particular time, in a particular place and language, is at the root of a good deal of the violence that religion perpetrates in the name of God.5
Before taking issue with this, I note the second area of sympathy: I agree that damage has been and can be done by exclusivist claims. Living in Northern Ireland while reading the story of religious controversies since the 16th and 17th centuries, for example, should impress that on anyone, if we need it impressed on us. Nevertheless, I want to look afresh at the notion of revelation Caputo rejects here. A kind of dogmatism is, of course, involved in the rejection. To summarize the tale with sweeping crudity: when the Academic skeptics of old affirmed that nothing could be known, Pyrrho and his skeptical epigones detected a dogmatic limit to their skepticism, for were they not claiming to know that nothing can be known? So let us instead take skepticism to the extreme: we can not know if anything can be known or not. This whole antique scene advertises the difficulty of avoiding dogmatism. If I say that I do not know if anything can be known, this is a remark about myself and not about whether anything can be known. But if I say that no one can know whether or not anything can be known, this is as dogmatic a piece of skepticism as we find among the Academics. Dogmatism is hard to shake off.
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