Theopoetry or Theopoetics?

Introduction: Theopoetics, Theopoetry, and the Death of God

In what may be the most compelling opening sentence of contemporary fiction, Donald Barthelme, in his short‐story “On Angels,” wrote: “The death of God left the angels in a strange position.”¹ To be sure! And one might have thought that the so‐called “death of God” would have also created something of an awkwardness for contemporary theology and theologians. But this seems not to have been the case, if one can judge by the trajectory of the movement that has been referred to as theopoetics. At least it seems not to have been the case for all theopoeticians. A quick glance at a website dedicated to theopoetics (http://theopoetics.net) makes the point that for some thinkers identifying themselves with a theopoetics perspective the “death of God” is not at issue while for others it is very much at issue.

The names associated with theopoetics on the Theopoetics.net website prior to 1995 (Rubem Alves, Stanley Hopper, David Miller, Amos Wilder), as well as those associated with theopoetics after 1995 (John Caputo, Thomas Dailey, Jason Derr, Roland Faber, Matt Guynn, Scott Holland, Jean Janzen, L. B. C. Keefe‐Perry, Catherine Keller, Melanie May, Travis Poling), by no means make up a uniform group.² Radically different discourses, it would seem, parade under the name and aegis of the term “theopoetics.” There are doubtless many ways to distinguish the thinking and writing of these various scholars of religion, but one way is to place them in relation to the “death of God” that Barthelme’s angels find understandably awkward. For some theopoeticians, the phrase “death of God” seems unimportant and not awkward, and for others the “death of God” is crucial, even if awkward, to the significance of “theopoetics.”

This issue of the continuing importance of the “death of God” in religious studies and theology, after its earlier announcement in the 1960s, has recently emerged in reviews of three books by celebrated authors: Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir by Thomas J. J. Altizer, After the Death of God by John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, and After God by Mark C. Taylor.³ In her review, Lissa McCullough carefully distinguishes perspectives on the “death of God” represented by these books’ authors. For Caputo, it is the “ongoing work of the critique of idols,” i.e., the death of finite human views of the infinite divine. For Altizer, the “death of God” is a real death, a final and irrevocable transformation of God. For Taylor, the matter is dialectical and complex, neither a positing of something positive as it is for Caputo nor the positing of something unambiguously negative as it is for Altizer. For Vattimo it is Christendom that has failed (i.e., died) in its lack of charity and love.⁴ These differences matter because they imply different functions for the word “after” in two of the books’ titles, as Jeffrey Kosky has noted in his review. For example, for Vattimo, and presumably also for Altizer and Taylor, “after the death of God” means “living on in the wake of God,” whereas for Caputo “after the death of God” means “we can put the death of God behind us and be nourished anew by the name of ‘God.’”⁵

These thinkers do have something in common, according to McCullough. They all may be viewed as “apologists for the vocation of straying toward an infinite nothing, or erring ‘after God,’ or waiting for the Messiah who never comes, or loving one’s neighbor in the void as the only alternative to the bad faith of arbitrarily declared absolutes.”⁶ But the significant difference is that Caputo, according to Kosky, thinks that “postmodernism is and should be done with the death of God.”⁷ Whereas Altizer, on the other hand, according to McCullough, believes that “we live in an era when it is thinkable to discuss a ‘religion’ without rituals and beliefs, a ‘faith’ purged of religion, a ‘theology’ without God, and an atheism that is ‘an expression of faith itself.’”⁸

The term “theopoetics” will have a different function depending on which...