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The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

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In 2006, Professor Jack Caputo rocked the domains of philosophy and ontotheology with his essay, The Experience of God and the Axiology of the Impossible. "To have an experience is to have a taste for adventure, for venturing and risk, which is the meaning of the root 'peira'. Thus to be a real empiricist means not to sniff along the ground of experience like a hound dog, but to search for opportunities, even perilous ones, like piracy (all of which have the same etymology)."

Caputo's explication of the distinction between phronesis, and the audacity of confidence and trust in God known as "faith" is truly a privateer's enterprise on the high seas of Reason. It is, to put it bluntly, to engage the spiritual enterprise of Pauline discipline on its own court, on its terms. No one, having read it, is ever the same; and I suspect most will silently slink away at the gauntlet Caputo throws down, in much the same way as the Scribes and Pharisees when faced with proposition, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."

At a Kantian level the experience of the impossible sought here is comparable, as one writer observed, in another context, to be a fish and undergo an Archimedean realization that water is wet.