​Chapter 25. The Final Appeal

The road has been walked to its end. What sat at the head of the world proved a dependent residue and no source; salvation proved the handing of a will to it; the remainder split into what disperses and what holds itself; and a will walked out of an order that claimed there was no outside. What is left to examine is what remains of theology once all of this is conceded — and the striking fact is that theology has been moving to that same ground on its own.

Classical theology set a God who exists of himself, needs nothing, and gives being to everything else; the perfections were the point, and dependence of any kind was what the doctrine could not allow at the top. Process thought gave up the first perfection: its God really receives the world, is enriched and changed by what creatures do, and is therefore no longer self-sufficient — though he remains a power, luring the world forward, the strongest of agents if no longer the only one. Weak theology gives up the rest. It strips the might, the lordship, the metaphysical sovereignty, and at the farthest edge even existence, and calls what remains by the name of God without apology. Taken together, these moves lead away from the strong God until the weakest form nearly coincides with the dependent center described here.

The name of God, for Caputo, harbors an event — a call, a promise — and the call is all there is: God does not exist but insists, a weak force without armies, without being or any power to bring about what it calls for. Whether anything comes of the call depends entirely on the ones it reaches; the insistence acquires existence only in a human response, or not at all. He is not describing a will that froze — his God was never a someone who could have stayed free. What he supplies is the terminal theological image of the result: nothing remains at the center that can act for itself.

Vattimo reaches the same place. Kenosis is no single act of humility performed by a strong God who keeps his strength backstage; the incarnation opens a history in which the sacred sheds its violence and the strong structures of metaphysics weaken age by age, God dissolving into secularization, interpretation, and caritas — a transcendent sovereign spent into the world he entered, his descent one long disappearance. Caputo's God never had power; Vattimo's God poured it out and did not take it back. Both reach the terminus: a God of whom nothing is left but what others do in his name.

Weak theology, then, does not dispute the dependence. It finds the same condition from inside and revalues it. The absence of power becomes nonviolence; the inability to accomplish anything becomes trust in the human; the dependence on a response is love; the dissolution of the sovereign is kenosis; and the fact that God persists only through human action implies the believer's responsibility. But the inference at the bottom is never made, for it cannot be: from the fact that God can no longer compel, it does not follow that God’s dependence has become a gift. The loss of the power to dominate says nothing about the nature of the demand that remains. What weak theology performs is a final change of sign: because the event has no existence without a response, the human will is made responsible for bringing it about. The believer answers a helpless call, and the call's dependence on an answer is presented as the ground of that responsibility.

And this is where the appeal meets the one it was always aimed at. A strong God commands the human act; a weak God asks to be enacted. The form of pressure changes, but the claim upon the human will remains. What weak theology has done is remove the last cover from the transaction. If God has no power to compel, no existence apart from the response, and no completed act of his own, then what confronts a will is an appeal that can be declined. The refusal is no longer rebellion against an almighty reality, as the theology has withdrawn that description; it is the non-performance of an event that does not occur without another's will.

A living will can leave God's call unrealized — the possibility the whole arrangement was built to keep hidden.