On Being Clear About Faith

I wish to thank Stephen Williams for his thoughtful and articulate response to On Religion. He raises questions that go to the heart of what I was proposing, and I am grateful for the opportunity to respond. When he writes that the point of my work is to argue that religion provides “a messianic space” that gives our search for justice “its deep dimension, power and, perhaps, meaning,” he expresses sensitively what I am trying to do. He and I are agreed that love and justice go to the core of religion and about the danger of religious exclusivism. But he is worried that I have dogmatically made it impossible for there to be a “clear revelation,” by which I think he means one that is clearly true to the exclusion of others. So he argues for an exclusively true revelation—the Judeo-Christian one—but without exclusivism, without pride and arrogance. That prompts a suggestion concerning the conditions under which a just and loving God might reveal Godself truly in just one time and place. Still, we cannot expect that even that revelation would be “universally clear,” because human beings are as prone to flee the light as to seek it.

I begin with the point about “dogmatic skepticism,” namely, claiming definitely to know that we cannot know certain things: “John Caputo says that no one can know whether or of what kind God may be.” The emphasis falls on the “no one”: you or I might be skeptical about knowing this, but to claim to know that no one can know it is dogmatic. If “knowing” whether or what God may be means that valid philosophical arguments to this end have been or will be forthcoming, then I am guilty. But, like almost all philosophers from Kant to the present, religious and nonreligious, I have perfectly “good reasons,” principled ones, for arguing that attempts to sail that far beyond experience by way of speculative argumentation inevitably run amuck, which also explains why these arguments enjoy acceptance only among people of faith. I would not call this view “dogmatic” except in the technical sense that I hold it to be true, which I do.

I am left to put my faith in certain well-worn words, like love and justice and perhaps faith itself, in what they promise, and in texts that say that God is impartial, and that God is love and whoever loves is of God.

I would put a different emphasis on this sentence: “no one can know whether or of what kind God may be.” I argue that our understanding of God is guided by faith, not knowledge in a “standard form epistemological sense.” (I will clarify in a bit why I use this phrase.) But I make a living promoting the religious side of “postmodernism.” On Religion is a (slightly popularized) argument that the days of dogmatic metaphysical theism and atheism are over (see especially chapter 2) and that postmodern means post-secular. So my delimitation of our knowledge of God comes by way of making room for faith. I make everything turn on the “love of God” and on determining just what that love could mean.

Williams continues: “But let us consider what that implies. Let us assume, ad hominem, the intelligibility of the traditional Judeo-Christian notion of God.” I accept this assumption. The text continues, but with my italics added: “On Caputo’s account of things, no one is justified in claiming to know that such a being exists.” I agree.

Williams concludes: “That means that there is no clear revelation of or by such a being. For if there had been such a revelation, someone, somewhere might be justified in claiming to know that such a being exists. No one is so justified; therefore there has been no such revelation.”

I deny the implication. From the fact that we cannot know God’s existence I conclude the very opposite, viz., that clear—for me, vivacious and vigorous—religious revelations are just about the only way somebody, somewhere can come around to holding that God exists. From the reality of such a revelation I conclude that someone would be justified, not in knowing but in having faith that such a being exists. Many people, in many places, are so justified and therefore there are many revelations, each with a characteristic clarity cut to fit its time and place. I so much support the idea of revelation that I prefer more rather than fewer revelations. The main way most people come to God, come to affirm their belief in God, is through revelation, through one religious revelation or another, through settling themselves inside one religious tradition or another and letting it shape their lives.

One comes to God, one comes to faith in God, one comes to adopt a religious point of view, by settling into a historical community of faith, a religious form of life. But there are multiple religious forms of life, each with its own unique “clarity”—each is a vigorous, persuasive and living tradition (although for me the deepest things always retain a rich ambiguity). The mistake is to think that one of them is exclusively true, which is no more convincing to me than saying one culture or one language is exclusively true. So when Williams proposes that one may doubt there is one exclusive revelation either because there is no God to do the revealing, or because God is unable to do such a thing or because God just doesn’t want to, then I would say, given these options, that God does not want to because it would buy God too much trouble with his other constituencies. St. Paul spent his life struggling with this. First God (who is impartial) made the Jews his people of choice, but then he sent Jesus, whose grace trumps the law, so what is going on? I think Paul’s best solution is in Romans 9-11 when he says that God is not defeated, that everyone and everything (ta panta) are saved, but please don’t ask him how. O how rich and unsearchable the ways of God. The healthiest religious forms of life from my point of view always figure out some way to say things like this, sometimes just slipping it in (hoping it will not grab too much attention from the conservative donors). They find a way of building a kind of wormhole to the other faiths that say things like being circumcised or uncircumcised make no difference, or whoever loves is born of God, or other generous and expansive things like that.1

At their best, these forms of life nourish the life of faith while also encouraging the reflective clarification of faith (they have and seek “intelligibility,” fides quaerens intellectum), but they are not exclusively true as to the “determinate” particulars of their narratives, which do not translate into “knowledge” in the standard form epistemological sense.

Why? My argument is that a determinate religious revelation—a set of framing beliefs sustained by faith—however clear, constitutes a revelation just in case you actually have faith that something is being revealed to begin with. You have to believe (that is, see only in part or through a glass darkly, [1 Cor. 13:8-12] that is, not so clearly in the epistemological sense) that it is a revelation in order to count the particulars of what it says as clearly revealed. What is revealed to the faithful is a revelation only in function of their faith that this is a divine revelation. The items revealed are the fruit of a tree of faith. What we see (however clearly) is a function of what we do not see clearly, but only darkly. That means that a religious revelation should be distinguished from a revelation in a standard form epistemological sense, where we see more straightforwardly (more clearly). For example, under the headline “Deep Throat Revealed” the May 31, 2005 Washington Post reported that Mark Felt had revealed that he was indeed Deep Throat, the secret contact who supplied the crucial clues in the Watergate case. When all the principals involved in the case confirmed that Felt was the man, that was a clear revelation in the standard form epistemological sense. That was a matter of making public information that had previously been concealed, thereby causing the rest of us to pass from ignorance to knowledge about the matter in question. We came to know what we did not previously know. Many people had suspected Felt but they did not know. Now they do.2

But the same thing cannot be said to happen when Islam teaches that it was from the Dome of the Rock of that Muhammad ascended into heaven, or when Luke “reports” (Barth) a conversation between an angel named Gabriel and the maid Miriam of Nazareth about the virgin birth of Jesus, or when Joseph Smith reveals that he received the Book of Mormon (along with the glasses needed to translate it into English) from an angel named Moroni, or when a Lakota Indian shaman reveals that Inyan, the Rock, is the first in existence and the grandfather of all things, and Maka, the Earth, is next in existence and the grandmother of all things.3 The only people who think that anything was “revealed” clearly to them by these narratives are the ones who live within and embrace these religious traditions. If they did not previously have such a religious faith, then they now believe something that they did not previously believe. But they do not come to “know” anything more than they did before, not in a standard form epistemological sense.

Now I do not regard this as bad news for religion and revelation but as a way to keep them honest (clear—about themselves). I argue against confusing religious faith, or revelation, or religious witness (testimony), with knowledge.4 I am furthermore arguing that the slippery slope from religious faith to knowledge in the standard form epistemological sense is dangerous and it will make it difficult to avoid the exclusivism that both Stephen Williams and I reject. When people forget that distinction, when they do not keep uppermost the coefficient of “faith” (seen in part, darkly) that is attached to revelation, they are—on their best days—led to look with a certain benign tolerance or civility upon those who do not share their faith, or to describe them as “anonymous” members of their own faith, or even think to themselves that such people are not inclined to seek the light. My guess would be that we have no good reasons to doubt that the odds for seeking the light and fleeing the light are about the same for religious believers and for people who believe other things, that the distribution of good faith and bad faith among both groups is about the same. But on their very worst days, and this is the side of religious revelation that gets all the headlines, when they forget this distinction, they might be induced to slam an airplane into the side of a tall building, or to torture or imprison people who do not share their faith-now-become-knowledge. So I spend some time in On Religion in trying to talk people off the edge of that slope, in not making that leap from faith to knowledge.

Next, in addition to being dangerous, I am also arguing that thinking about religious traditions and religious revelations as making epistemic claims to be exclusively true, hence as providing us with “knowledge” in a standard form epistemological sense, just does not put their best foot forward. So when Williams switches from the interrogative to the suggestive, he proffers a kind of four-step cur deus homo? that the Incarnation was a fairly felicitous way for God to negotiate the straits imposed by an exclusive revelation. My favorite part of this account is the conclusion, when he offers a little apology that this should not be viewed as offering a remedy for a divine predicament and that in the end this portrait is not worthy of God. I agree. Even fair-minded suggestions like this to minimize the damage of holding to an exclusive revelation of the truth suggest only that we are following the wrong scent and not thinking rightly about revelation, which ought not to catch us up in such a conundrum.

What then are religious revelations ultimately about? They are centrally made up of important religious narratives that shape the lives of the faithful in that tradition; they are formative not informative. They don’t reveal (or “report”) secret bits of information to us—like the identity of Deep Throat—about the transactions of angels but they imaginatively embody a form of life. Religious narratives are told and retold, chanted and danced in liturgies, meditated upon and depicted in art, taken to heart, interiorized and ultimately translated into existence, into a way of living, which is where they have their payoff. Mormon religious life, like Christian life, consists in energetic works of love and nonviolence, even as Lakota life moves within a zone of absolute respect drawn around the natural world from which we high-tech polluters, über-consumers, and urban sprawlers have a great deal to learn.

Are they true? Yes. But we are thinking about their “truth” in the wrong way if we take them as supplying clear knowledge in a representational theory of truth. Their truth—and this is what I think vera religio comes down to—comes in the way of the fruitfulness of the form of life to which they give rise, which they both shape and embody. Their truth comes in the way of a living truth, a truth that we should make happen in our lives, just the way music does not exist in a score but in the playing.

In the sphere of religious truth, it makes perfect sense to say “I am the way, the truth and the life.” It would make no sense for Aristotle, Euclid, or Einstein to say that, but it makes perfect sense to have Jesus say it. For the life of Jesus—behold the birds of the air, Father, forgive them, blessed are the peacemakers, and all the rest—is paradigmatic of the way you do things in this form of life, otherwise you are deceiving yourself and others if you say you are a follower of Jesus. Jesus provides a clearly powerful and powerfully clear embodiment of what we mean by God.

Now it is in this sense that these narratives do indeed supply a certain “knowledge,” an understanding, not in the standard form epistemological and representational sense of reporting information about conversations with angels and other supernatural events that merely mortal historians of the 1st century could never have uncovered, but in the sense of “knowing-how” and “understanding-as.” They provide those who inhabit these narratives with a way to think about and view things, instructing them in a certain art of life, attuning them to the rhythms of birth and death, joy and sorrow, from just that distinctive point of view.5

This view of religious truth also leads me to conclude that the theism/atheism cut is not the deep divide in human affairs, since lots of people lead lives of energetic love and peacemaking (the Kingdom of God) but are not Christian or religious in the conventional sense (“religion without religion”), while lots of card-carrying Christians or religious people lead scandalously unevangelical and irreligious lives precisely in the name of religion. True religion is a matter of truly making something happen in your life, not signing on to certain propositions or acquiring knowledge not otherwise available to human beings.

That is why Derrida’s notion of a pure and indeterminate “messianic” faith is so important to me. This Derridean faith is not one more confessional faith (or “determinate messianism”), Derrida’s personal entry in the competition of confessions which Derrida promotes. Derrida is not recommending that we resign our present confessional affiliations and sign on to a new faith. Rather, he is attaching a certain coefficient of epistemic instability to the determinate confessional faiths in the name of faith itself. It is his way of visiting upon the “faithful” in the particular confessions a reminder that if they were born at another time and another place they would very likely claim to “know” something quite different based upon a quite different “revelation.” Derrida’s pure messianic faith does not undo the confessional faiths or concrete revelations; it just reminds them that faith is faith, not knowledge. His faith is a “confession”—one that in my view has even more teeth in it than Augustine’s—that we do not know in any deep way who we are, or who God is, or what is what, quaestio mihi factus sum. But, secondly, like Augustine’s beautiful confessions, Derrida’s confession comes as a word of encouragement (viens, oui, oui) for our neighbors (since God already knows everything that Augustine could ever cough up) to confess in the sense of profess, confiteor, to have faith, to put one’s faith in something, even if I do not know exactly what, even it I do not know what. Je ne sais pas; il faut croire.

I confess, I do not know in some deep way who I am or what lies before me, although of course, like the next chap, I have certain (deconstructible) ideas about these matters. As often as I visit the local cemetery, I cannot quite make out what the dead are saying to me, what they who have passed this mortal threshold now know, if they know anything at all. They will not pass along their secrets, intervene in my disputes, tell me who is right and wrong, or add anything to what they have already said or done or written. So I am left to put my faith in certain well-worn words, like love and justice and perhaps faith itself, in what they promise, and in texts that say that God is impartial, and that God is love and whoever loves is of God.

As a final note, Stephen Williams protests that after all “There may well be some decidable things around here,” he suggests that Derrida’s notion of “undecidability” leaves us unable to decide anything. But for Derrida, undecidability is the condition of possibility of genuine decision. The opposite of “undecidability” is not a decision but decidability, that is, programmability or formalizability (Derrida has taken this word from Gödel), so that if things were “decidable” a computer program could do the job for us. You wouldn’t need good judgment, just good software. The first really strong account of what Derrida means by undecidability is Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, the power to discern what to do in the shifting tides of singular circumstances where hard and fast rules don’t hold up. Undecidability requires a kind of “meta-phronesis” cut to fit our more cosmopolitan “postmodern” situation, where we nowadays have trouble coming up with even the general schemata that Aristotle thought were supplied by the local polis and its phronimos. Without undecidability, our lives would be routinized, run on automatic pilot, relieved of the stress and strain of decision-making.

But above all, without undecidability, we would be bereft of faith. For faith is faith just in virtue of the fact that we do not in some deep way know what is what and that we must accordingly put our faith in certain promises, in certain hopes and dreams, praying and weeping that they come true, all the while confessing that there are many ways to dream, many forms of life, many determinate religious traditions. I agree that undecidability is an unnerving magister in the art of life, but it is a salutary one, because undecidability keeps us honest (lucid, “clear”). Undecidability functions like a great equalizer, as if it were God’s impartiality here on earth. It does not undermine our decisions but ensures that we decide free from the illusion that we have been hard wired up to being itself or given some privileged access to the really real or that, lifted above the fray by the hook of faith, we have been given some “knowledge,” of which, we regret to say, others less fortunate than us have been deprived.

John D. Caputo is Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Humanities at Syracuse University. Among his most recent books are The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indiana Univ. Press) and Philosophy and Theology (Abingdon).

1. That is a good example of an “auto-deconstruction”: the way something that tends predominantly to draw itself into a closed circle also, circumspectly, breaches the circle, and opens itself to the outside. The most menacing structures are the least auto-deconstructive; the most fruitful structures are the most auto-deconstructive.

2. In saying this I am not renouncing “hermeneutics.” I reject the idea of presupposition-free uninterpreted facts of the matter. I am just saying that knowledge in the standard form epistemological sense proceeds from publicly shared and inter-subjectively confirmable interpretive presuppositions while religious revelations do not.

4. I have only so much faith in the distinction between faith and knowledge, because my deeper aim, based on my views about hermeneutics, which I do not have time to develop here, is to weaken that distinction and to distinguish between the different sorts of faith that are constitutive of knowledge in the standard form epistemological sense and faith in the narrow sense of religious faith.

5. These traditions cultivate penetrating insights into things—like forgiveness—that arise from adopting a particular religious point of view, not because they are vehicles of supernatural disclosure, but because they engender periti, experts, people deeply practiced and experienced in their form of life.