“Philosophy asks unanswerable questions; theology gives unquestionable answers.” According to John Caputo, author of the astonishingly lucid book Philosophy and Theology , the anonymous wag who first coined that sardonic witticism can only have been born in the twentieth century. We know that (rough) date for a fact because, even if we cannot track down its first citation on Lexis-Nexis, we can recognize in ourselves two gut-reaction attitudes, both of which have been handed down to us by the relatively recent past: We are simultaneously suspicious of religious authority (inherited from the so-called Age of Reason), and yet we despair of the deliverances of reason (the legacy of postmodern skepticism). Kant told us that theology must be confined “within the limits of reason alone,” but Nietzsche showed that this boundary-policing reason has failed to deliver on its promises, since its claims are nothing but disguised power plays. So neither philosophy nor theology can avail, it would seem, and all we are left with is the din of unanswerable questions trying to shout down unquestionable answers.
But according to Caputo, that doubly compounded despair only holds true if the two disciplines of philosophy and theology are allowed to go their separate ways. What God hath joined together, he wants to say, let no man put asunder. For its author, the most important word in his book’s title is that tiny, unassuming conjunction and. This thesis is hardly the Rodney King bromide (“Why can’t we all get along?”) that it might sound like at first. For inside these apparently breezy (and often witty) pages, the author provides a vivid and entertaining account of the neuralgic marriage, subsequent separation, and lately the wary rapprochement, between philosophy and theology.
