The title of this book is a spin on the popular ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ movement, a movement that Caputo has little time for. It’s not that simple – what is the specifically Jesus like thing that we are called to do? To start to find out we need to deconstruct. For Caputo deconstruction is not about destruction, but rather reformation and reconfiguring, which he allies to metanoia, the New Testament term for undergoing a fundamental change of heart. His underlying thesis is that at the heart of the gospel is an impossibility, which is also possible
So what would Jesus deconstruct? He would deconstruct a great deal of what people do in his name, whether it is to do with gun control or immigration or arguments about sexuality. He would certainly deconstruct the church, which Caputo views as a provisional construction pointing to the permanent Kingdom of God.
He takes Derrida’s famous statement that ‘outside the text there is nothing’, and believes that what Derrida means is that there is nothing outside the context of a text, i.e. the different and previous readings of the text. And that text is capable of being understood differently by different communities and different readers at different times, in other times and other places. This means that we never arrive at just one final ‘correct’ interpretation, but we may arrive at one that is ‘right’ for these times. It also, by implication, allows the Bible to be interpreted afresh for new situations. It sees the Bible not a ‘timeless archetype’ rather as a historic prototype, able to be reinterpreted.
Faith is profoundly a risk. It is most obviously expressed in difficult and impossible situations rather than in easy situations in which we know we are right. That is not faith, it is certainty. The truth of faith is that we do not know where our call will lead us, and that the important part of the call is a journey which is a source of endless novelty and discovery. He uses the analogy of marriage:
“…When you get married, you are saying ‘I do’ not only to who this person is, or who you think this person is, but to whomever or whatever this person is going to become, which is unknown and unforeseen to both of you. That is a risk… but the risk is constitutive of the vow or the commitment. It is the faith these two people have in each other that we admire, the willingness to go forward, even though the way is not certain, that leads us to describe it as beautiful.” (p45)
I found his discussion of examples in Chapter 3 very helpful, particularly the idea of a gift as an impossible thing. If a gift is given freely, there will almost inevitably be an obligation felt by the recipient, and so it becomes a circle of exchange, the recipient wants to give something back, or feels powerless because they cannot give anything back. This negates the idea of a freely given gift. However, he stresses strongly that this impossibility should never mean that we do not give. This gift might be hospitality (cf Jesus’ telling us not to invite our friends, because they will invite us back, rather we should invite the outcasts in Luke 14). Yet we should not hold back from hospitality.
The gift might be forgiveness. The paradox is that this is freely offered to us by Jesus, and we would agree that it is a gift, that the offering of it is not dependent on us fulfilling conditions (such as we are sorry, we repent, we try to mend our ways, we do penance). Yes, these things are important, but they come after the free gift of forgiveness. Now if this is a free gift it has serious implications for atonement theory, particularly those which involve the payment of a debt. If there is a ‘price’ of forgiveness’ then it is not a free gift and is indeed at odds with the most explicit parable about forgiveness, the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Jesus embodies this idea of a free gift of forgiveness in praying for forgiveness for the soldiers at the cross. This love, the love that is the key to the kingdom of God, is to love those who do not love you, forgive those who do not ask. It is a love without measure, a love that is shown to us in the cross, in the weakness of God.
So how do we do this? For Caputo, the task is firstly a hermeneutic one, guided by the principles shown to us in Jesus – the principle of love, of justice, of standing against hypocrisy, standing up for the outcast. And what are the hermeneutic principles? To view the Bible not as something which can be simply be directly and decontexually copied and pasted in the present. It is not a literal picture to hold up against the present like a mechanical template but the voice of a living Spirit whose inner force is to be brought to bear in a loving and living dialogue with the circumstances of the present. Then we take the risk of faith and live and love – the gospel is not a set of doctrines but a way of life. The text needs to be translated into ‘works of love’. We work for the kingdom of God not the advancement of the institution of the church. And that institution needs a willingness to reinvent itself, to go ahead in impossible situations. It means wrestling with hard issues like pacifism, patriarchy, issues of life and sexuality, not being content with proof texting and easy answers.
“But what, then, is the kingdom of God? Where is it found? It is found every time an offence is forgiven, every time a stranger is made welcome, every time an enemy is embraced, every time the least among us is lifted up, every time the law is made to serve justice, every time a prophetic voice is raised against injustice, every time the law and the prophets are summed up by love.” (p138)
This is an excellent book, standing firmly against the populist view of post modernism that it is negative, that it has no regard for truth and anything goes. This is a call to difficult, radical discipleship, which struggles with the realities of life and works for the Kingdom of God.
