Responding to the Call of the UnconditionalIn this highly personal and extremely readable book, Jack Caputo (now one of the foremost philosopher-theologians of theopoetics), presents us with a deep and honest reflection of his own journey of faith and doubt.Like much of Caputo's work, 'Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim', deconstructs the image of an all-powerful and controlling God, located in a disembodied platonic stratosphere, in control of (and therefore responsible for) the events of human history. Following in the footsteps of earlier paradigm-shifting works of his such as 'The Weakness of God', and 'The Insistence of God', Caputo invites the reader to question and consider what is it that the name of God harbours? What is the 'event' that happens under the name (and in the name) of God? For Caputo, the name of God harbours a call, a summoning to love in the face of suffering and violence around us, as a way of bringing the insistence of God into existence, in the here and now. The Kingdom of God that Caputo describes is not manifested in military and human strength, but in weakness. God Emmanuel, with us in our broken humanity, suffering and calling us to respond to the weak call of God.For the biblical literalists and those intoxicated with the idea of an all powerful mighty God who will put the world to rights, Caputo's work will be seen as highly polemical. However, it is important to note that Caputo is not simply drawing on post-structuralist continental philosophy for his theological insights, but on a close and rigorous wrestling with biblical texts such as the Sermon on the Mount, the Story of Mary and Martha, and perhaps most significantly: the writings of the Apostle Paul, who was the first to write about power being perfected and made manifest in weakness.What will alarm conservative Christians even more, is that Caputo pulls the rug of eternal guarantees from under our feet. Christianity is not to be lived out as a religion of economic exchange, where those who engage in it are granted eternal rewards. Instead, Christianity is to be embraced as pure gift in the here and now, showing solidarity and compassion with our world not out of any allure of recompense or future reward, but because of the insistent call of the unconditional on us. The unconditional is the insistent call to love.Caputo takes us to the very edge of doubt itself, reminding us that faith and doubt are not lodged in an intractable binary opposition, but are deeply intertwined and inter-dependent. Drawing on Ecclesiastes ('Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity' [Eccles. 1:2]) and French continental philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, Caputo engages honestly with the reality that the 'sun is expanding', and will explode in 'four or five billion years' (p.6). Thinking through the implications of what this will mean, Caputo foregrounds Lyotard's concept of the 'posthuman or inhuman' (p.7). He writes:'Lyotard goes very far with this idea. We cannot even say that at that point things will be "dehumanised", he points out, because that would require a survivor, a human witness left behind to lament the devastation. There will be no humans around to feel dehumanised, just the posthuman or inhuman' (p.7).So where does this leave us? For Caputo, our response to the call of the unconditional is to give the gift without expecting a return, for this, surely, is what pure giving is about. If we give with the expectation that we will receive back, then we are (in a sense) no different to the stock exchange. Caputo wants to rid us of our tendency to embrace capitalistic forms of Christianity, and instead invites us to live as those in the service of others, like Martha in the gospel of Luke, who shows hospitality. He writes: 'In economic life, everything has a why and every investment is expected to have a return. But the gift is given without regard to such considerations; the gift is given with nothing up our sleeve, unconditionally, without why' (p.34).The Kingdom of God is therefore not about a metaphysical promise of an afterlife, but about the immanent now, the acts of love and service which are done in our world, understood as pure gift. This is nothing short of a Copernican revolution in theological terms: the eternal survival of the human is not guaranteed. Such an anthropomorphic idea of human life is debunked by what we know in cosmological terms. But this does not entail the end of hope, or indeed the call to love, which brings healing to our damaged and fragile human planet and exploited ecosystem, for:'Hope hovers over us like a ghost whispering in our ears impossible things, waking us with a start in the night. Hope is a spirit, the aspiration, the very respiration of God's spirit, of God's insistence, which groans to exist. Hope dares to say "come", dares to pray "come", to what it cannot see coming. Hope is hope in the promise of the world, inscribed on the surface of matter in a distant corner of the universe, in a rose that blossoms unseen, blossoming because it blossoms, without why' (p.199).Hoping Against Hope is a profound meditation on what it means to respond to the call of the unconditional, to the insistent promptings in the name of God to weep and pray for our world, and so for it to be transformed by love, with no expectation of recompense or reward, but as pure gift.