Weekly Reading Assignment 1 - Intro to Thelogy - Caputo lessons 1-6 notes and questions

Structure: 

1. A significant quote: Cite one passage from the assigned reading and briefly explain why it stuck out to you.
2. A pressing question: Formulate one thoughtful question about the reading. What is the question that you would ask the author if she/he/they were visiting our class? 

Possible Quotes to use:

Lesson 1

• My wager is that others have an analogous story to tell, whatever their beginnings may be. Beginnings are embedded deep in our bowels, our bones, our very being. The end is in the beginning, not as a destiny or deterministic fate, but as a set of possibilities whose outcomes can come as a surprise. Beginnings are like a keyboard on which we are invited to pick out a tune. (pg xi)
•  to talk you out of thinking of God as a Supreme Being (theism), who I claim does not exist, and to think instead of God as the “ground of being” (panentheism), which is a better bet. (pg xi)
• This is an interesting concept; panthiesm is monism - similarly to what I call "spirit" or Otto calls the numen.
• But if I were now asked “Who is God?,” safely out of the reach of my priests and nuns, I would say that God—that one, the God a lot of us grew up with, not just Catholics or Christians; the one that is out there in general circulation; the star of stage and screen; the Supreme Being, who sees all, knows all, can do all, who is watching every move we make and is coming to get us if we do not behave ourselves and to whom we turn when things take a turn for the worse—does not exist. The most important thing we can say about God is that that God, God, does not exist (pg 4) & A lot of the time the people who are really listening to the Spirit do not believe in God at all and are allergic to the word religion (pg 13).
• how then would you explain when someone has a direct experience with a god? To see them? Feel them? Hear them? Is this proposing that the true answer to what is really out there - is an athiestic "spiritual but not religious" outlook? "The Universe" as opposed to "God"? Why can it not be both?
• The problem is not precisely theism but doctrinaire theism, a theism that closes itself off to what is really going on in theism, and the same thing goes for doctrinaire atheism or doctrinaire anything. Radical is opposed to doctrinaire as open is to closed, as ecstatic is to static. Happily, we do not have to choose between raging Christian nationalists and sneering rationalists who reduce religion to poison. The one is a gas-filled room, the other a lit match. What I am proposing—a genuinely radical theology—is neither. Without it, I do not think religion has a future, or even deserves to have one, and reason will reduce itself to something less than it really is (ph 14).
• We were told that Jesus picked Peter to be the rock-solid foundation upon which he would build his church (Matt. 16:18)But I agree with the scholars who say that is the later Church putting words in his mouth and authorizing itself. That is the founder being founded by the followers after the fact. (pg 9)
• This is a very good point. How can we trust that a holy text that has been translated more than once (running the risk of a game of telephon) can be believed? How can we trust that man, in his selfishness and need for control, did not corrupt the very scriptures that many take to heart? In my anthropology undergraduate we explored the purpose of religion in society; while it did exist to comfort people and answer hard questions about the unknown, the primary purpose (according to that class) was to be a means of control and power over the people. We can see this happening in our everyday lives, both in a micro and macro level. These teachings that have such strong influence stem from words written by men that claim to be written from God/Spirit/The Divine; yet how can we trust them to be honest and true to the original - knowing that kings have manipulated and cut out parts specifically for self gain? Why should there be trust in "the church" to not have the same human drives as mortal kings in shaping how scritures are to be interpreted? These are questions I posed growing up in the christian church that never recieved satisfactory answers (at least not from people who supported the bible as an objective work of non-fiction). So if religion/the teaching of scripture/the word of God has "fallen into the wrong hands" (pg 14) - how can we in good faith continue to teach from it as truth?

Lesson 2

• The first, whom I am going to call the bridge-builders, think we must build a bridge from the world to God and hope that the world can provide enough support to hold up the bridge. The second, whom I am going to call the ground-diggers, think that we do not have to build a bridge because God is the very ground on which we already stand, but that we have to do a little digging (thinking) to see that. The bridge-builders are taking Acts 17 as a construction site while the ground-diggers treat it as an archeological site. The bridge-builders think the ground-diggers are digging themselves into a hole because God is on high. The ground-diggers think the bridge-builders are building a bridge to nowhere, for God is already here; they take themselves to be unearthing hidden treasures, on the bet that, if you dig deep enough, you will hit theological soil (pg16). 
• I am Genuinley curious where you would place those that fall in between/stand in both veins of thought? That God/Spirit/The Divine is both a sentient force that takes we give personified form to and the very essence that creates life all around. From what I can gather (and I may be totally misunderstanding) both Theologians he brings up directly after this quote  - Aquias and Augustine - do in fact dabble in both digging and building. Must one be one or the other? He follows this by saying "If we have to “find God,” and we do, that is not because God is an “alien being”  but because we are alienated from God and do not realize that God is that in which we already live and move and have our being. The bridge-builders think we have to find some way to attain the truth. The ground-diggers think we are already in the truth, that God is truth, and that the task is to unearth its truth." I think I am struggling with the whole this vs that; personification vs monism, a sentient force vs universal truth; I don't think I can properly grasp how they are mutually exclusive. Is he saying they are mutually exclusive or am I misunderstanding him? Or is he saying that "God" is the same as Rudolph Otto's "Numen" and that how it is experienced is irrelevant (for this disucssion), but the nature of it is in what is being questioned? If that is the case, then how can one be considered more correct or accurate than another - or is he going beyond the individual experience and only looking at the borader picture? To which I would follow up and ask that how can one only focus on the forrest and not the trees in this sort of thinking, as a connection with the divine is very individualistic? 
• Spoke with my professor - I will reword this but this is the winner. I'll still include my notes from the reading and any following questions I have just to have them. 
• The Unconditional Is More Primordial than God. Here is where you have to bear with me and not be scared off by a bit of academic language. To sort this out, Tillich says that God is unconditional, but the unconditional is not God. That is an enigma in need of an explanation, and there is one. The unconditional is the condition of everything else, but nothing is the condition of it. It is that than which we cannot think (epistemology), and we cannot want (axiology), and there cannot be (ontology) anything prior. So, the next question is, where is the unconditional to be found? Tillich’s answer is that God is unconditional, which is how God is God, but the unconditional itself cannot be identified with or restricted to God
• I get what hes saying... The unconditional is like the Numen. It predates the notion of "God" and thus cannot be limited to it. 
• Only a Symbol. The next step is this. If we say in theology that God is the unconditional, then we are saying “God” is a symbol, a figure, in which the unconditional is mediated, imaginatively constructed. Unprethinkability does not mean we cannot think about the unconditional, but that our thinking of it will always take place in symbols that mediate it to us. Then the task will be not to find a way get beyond the symbols—for that would leave us bereft of any access at all—but to come up with symbols worthy of the unconditional and to avoid unworthy ones.
• See I agree with him but I am unsure if he views the "symbols" as any lesser than the unconditional itself. Are WE symbols of the unconditional? We are no more or less alive in our existence than the gods. 
• We use the power of our imagination to construct images, analogies, similes, symbols, metaphors, and personifications, to tell stories, to compose song and dance— but (as you can tell by now, but is a really big word in radical theology) all this comes in response tosomething prior to us, something primordial, more elemental, by which we have been seized, something that has us before we have it. Remember, the unconditional is the prius, the prior, the a priori. Of course we project. We compose dance and songs, but our songs are less of our own composition than they are the music the world is playing on us. The world supplies the music, for which we supply the words. Projection is the projection of the other in me , by which I have been previously taken hold. (pg 24)

Lesson 3

• I remember growing up thinking that pantheism— what I thought was pantheism—was just crazy. Everything is God. The world is God.... Pantheism does not mean that the broken lawn mower in the garage is God, or that boozy old Uncle Harry is God. It means that things have a depth dimension, that they express the power of being, which is divine, that everything ( pan ) does, all creatures great and small, just so long as we are paying attention , and for the religious sensibility it is that depth dimension which is divine ( theios ). (pg33&34)
• yes. exactly. and this version of "God" is not a being, its a force. A force that makes up the gods. 
• it does not take long before physicists who do not “believe in God” begin musing over the “mystery” of the cosmos, as in mysterium tremendum et fascinans , the famous description of the mystery we call God proposed by Rudolf Otto (1869–1937). That does not mean that radical theology is rocket science, but it does mean that rocket science is theological. (35)
• religion can be found anywhere —just as Paul said to the Athenians—in a sunflower or a soup kitchen, in science or a work of art, or even in an old hat....Religion in this sense is not a particular part of the culture, Tillich said; it is the depth dimension in any part of the culture you choose (37)
• I get what he is saying. With Pantheism he is speaking my language... but I still do not know why it has to be one or the other. why can they not coincide? 

Lesson 4

• Their proof is simple: without a Supreme Being, there is no one to whom we can pray, and, if there is no prayer, there is no religion in any serious sense, just the show, just the semblance (43)
• Depends on your definition of prayer. My definition is petitioning Spirit for something, communicating with it - usually in the form of talking to the gods, but also in witchcraft, in song, in dance, in art and poetry. Prayer is an offering of your energy and emotions. You don't have to be a theist to give an offering of your emotions. 
• But neutral also sounds horrible because it makes God sound like an impersonal “it,” which is less than a person, whereas for theists God is ultrapersonal and in Christianity, three times over, although Buddhists would have no trouble with it (“it”). So this puts the Abrahamicbiblical tradition in a bit of a bind. We lack a proper pronoun for God who is neither he nor she nor it . Once again, blame the bridge-builders.
• Once again.... he loses me. I start agreeing and then he says some BS like this. It does not have to be mutually exclusive.... it can be it, he, she, all.....
• Praying is not trying to get something but letting it get us, letting go of what is preventing it from getting us, leaving ourselves exposed. Praying does not mean drawing attention to what we want to have. Praying is paying attention to what already has us. (51)
• I really like this actually. 

Lesson 5.... ugh. 

• Just so, religion is not merely a matter of individual acts of piety directed at particular religious objects—representations of which were all over our house when I was growing up. That is religiosity, not what Hegel and Schelling meant by religion. Nor is it a list of do’s and don’ts ultimately issuing from on high. That is pietism, not religion. The myths and symbols of religion are not meant as representations of entities in the real but invisible world. That is superstition, not religion. From the point of view of the individual, these imaginative figures of art and religion are expressions—in word and song, image and narrative— of our elemental bond with the ground of our being, of our consciousness of unity with God. (pg 69)
• In this sense.... I am superstitious, not religious. 
• One way to sum all this up is simply to say that, in radical theology, the invidious distinction between supernatural faith and natural reason is demystified by being replaced by the more peaceful distinction between the poetic and the prosaic . That breaks the grip of supernaturalism without falling into naturalism. Revelation happens as a poetics, a theopoetics, which resonates with the depths, preconsciously, preconceptually, prepropositionally, in song and story and symbols, not in syllogisms. Art, religion, and philosophy (the realm of absolute Spirit)—that means a poetic, a theopoetic, and a careful hermeneutic, and we need them all. They are all stages of the same thing, three different formations of one and the same Spirit, the same content taking shape in three different forms.(pg 75-76)
• To an extent I agree here.

Lesson 6

• By calling pre-Christian religion “mythological,” they obscured its revelatory power, and by calling Christian religion “Revelation,” they obscured its mythological status. (88)
• interesting. I am actually finding myself agreeing with him in this chapter
• Hegel rankorders art, religion, and philosophy, the sensuousness of art at the bottom, the conceptual thinking of philosophy at the top, religion in the middle, more conceptual than art, more sensuous than philosophy, mediating between them.(90)
• I will fight this man. 
• Religion is a sensuous symbol for which we lack the supersensuous concept, a figure we cannot finally figure out, which thought cannot ultimately transcend. This does not leave us without a clue; it leaves with only clues, hints, symbols, icons, traces, fingers pointing at the moon and the stars, wondering what is what, affirming an existence whose essence ever eludes us...It does not leave us without a prayer; it leaves us with only prayers. It does not leaves us lost for words but only lost for a Final Word... What remains are the stories , endlessly reinterpreted, endlessly recontextualized, endlessly reverberating with the power of being in ways which leave us not speechless but unable to say what is going on in any final way, not silencing but multiplying our discourses, forcing us to move back and forth between the prosaic and the poetic in search of an interpretation.(91&92)
• As Tillich said, the only nonsymbolic thing we can say about the unconditional is that everything we say about the unconditional is a symbol.(93)
• Finally something I can say that I 100% agree with. 
• We seek the unconditional, Novalis said, but everywhere we turn, we run into conditions. (93)