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75 TWO Faith Seeking Understanding StephenMinister onstruct a theology, and you will have a theology. Deconstruct a theology, and you will also have a theology. Whether you construct a theology or deconstruct a theology, you will have a theology either way. Construct an ethics, and you will have an ethics. Deconstruct an ethics, and you will also have an ethics. Whether you construct an ethics or deconstruct an ethics, you will have an ethics either way. This is the quintessence of all John Caputo ’s religious writings. Though Kierkegaard’s young aesthete may have been overly cynical about the significance of our choices in life, I would like to suggest that Caputo is overly optimistic in thinking that his deconstructive approach to religion, his theology without theology and an฀ethics without ethics, offers us a genuine either/or with the strong theologies and ethical theories he criticizes. To be sure, Caputo’s theology and religious ethics differ from orthodox theologies and ethics, but I think these differences are simply theological and ethical differences and not a matter of departing from theology or ethics as such. My goal herein is not to refute or reject Caputo’s religious work. In fact, I like his account of religion very much. As I read his work, I find myself saying, “Oui, oui! Amen!” precisely because I agree with most of his theology and his religious ethics. My point is to confess that this is what his work is. Not “almost” a theology, not a “theology without theology,” but theology straight up.1 Such an admission need not be bad news, since this admission frees us to theologize and theorize about ethics, articulating our views on God and justice, without the encumbrance of having to take back in one breath, what we uttered in the previous one. This need not lead to the demise of C 76 Stephen Minister critical thought and conversation, but simply seeks to find a balance between the need for deconstruction and the need for determinate belief, a need that Caputo undoubtedly recognizes. When it comes to religion, none of us knows for sure what we are talking about. I happily concur with Caputo on this point. Religion is a faith-based enterprise and so the theologizing and ethical theorizing that come out of it cannot claim to be indubitable knowledge. To my mind, this calls us not only to a Derridean deconstruction of religion, but also to theological and ethical argumentation, stating our positions and giving reasons for them, which Derrida himself confesses is absent from his work.2 After all, we all have theological and ethical positions, which is to say that our lives and actions express beliefs about God and ethical values. Since ours is always a life lived with others, we ought to be honest about these beliefs and values, be willing to articulate them to others, and be open to others ’ responses, both critical and constructive. This is not a strategy for going beyond faith, but simply a return to Anselm’s task, the task (as Johannes Climacus would say) for a whole lifetime: faith seeking understanding. This essay will consider some of the contours of this task. I begin with Caputo’s writings on religion, which I think are at work on this task, though I am unsure whether Caputo would put it that way himself . In the first two sections, I suggest that Caputo’s theology without theology and an-ethics without ethics comprise theological and ethical positions of the same sort that he wants to distance himself from. I also suggest that his reluctance to clearly, rigorously lay out his positions and the arguments for them, renders his deep insights less helpful than they could be. My goal here is simply to indicate some points where I see tension or ambiguity that seems to me to be unnecessary. In response to these criticisms, the third and final section of the paper reconsiders the relationship between reason and revelation, arguing that revelation (the event) calls us to reason, albeit a sort of reason different from what modern philosophy or even premoderns like Anselm had in mind. Here certain themes from the work of Alain Badiou, Emmanuel Levinas, and Chantal Mouffe are introduced to help us think through this relationship. My goal in bringing in these thinkers is not to reject Caputo’s project, since his project is one I largely endorse, but instead to clarify and so strengthen certain points within that project...

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