James K.A. Smith, “Faith, Hope, and Hegel. An Engagement with John D. Caputo’s Specters of God,” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 81, no. 3 (2025): 909–32, https://doi.org/10.17990/RPF/2025_81_3_0909.
| Item Type | Journal Article |
|---|---|
| Author | James K.A. Smith |
| Abstract | This essay offers a poetic–philosophical reply to John D. Caputo’s theopoetics in Specters of God. It reads Caputo’s prolific apophatic discourse as performative: a riot of metaphors that resists idolatrous capture by sheltering the unconditional in linguistic excess. The study reconstructs the Eckhart–Schelling–Tillich–Hegel lineage and challenges Caputo’s “decapitation” of Hegel. Against both the “scarecrow” and the “headless” Hegel, it retrieves a radical Hegel from within Hegel: (1) “what is rational is actual” (Wirklichkeit) functions as a hermeneutic for grasping the historical present rather than sanctifying the status quo; (2) Vernunft, as distinct from Verstand, names dialectical, materially situated thinking that discloses contradiction without underwriting theodicy; and (3) “absolute knowing” is an open, reflexive modality of historical self-recognition, not a system’s closure. On this basis, reason appears as emancipatory—Hegel’s “rose in the cross of the present”—reducing alienation and expanding agency. The concluding section interrogates the normativity of radical apophatics: by what criteria are judgments made, and what determinate content remains when determinations dissolve into “the unconditional”? The essay cautions that a deracinated “religion without religion” risks abstraction and quietism. A theopoetics adequate to the future of philosophy of religion should preserve the concrete universal, hold fast to historical particularity, and empower practice—lest elegy displace liberation. |
| Date | 2025 |
| Language | English |
| Rights | © 2025 by Aletheia - Associação Científica e Cultural |
| Volume | 81 |
| Pages | 909-932 |
| Publication | Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia |
| DOI | 10.17990/RPF/2025_81_3_0909 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Journal Abbr | RPF |
| ISSN | 0870-5283 ; 2183-461X |
| Date Added | 10/29/2025, 9:29:47 PM |
| Modified | 10/30/2025, 5:30:28 PM |
Adorno, Theodor W. Hegel: Three Studies. Translated by Sherry Weber Nicholson. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993.
Baldwin, James. No Name in the Street. New York: The Dial Press, 1972.
Caputo, John D. Specters of God: An Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022.
Caputo, John D. The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional. Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016.
Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God: A Theology of the Perhaps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020.
Desmond, William. Being and the Between. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995.
Caputo, John D. Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness: An Essay on Origins. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
Caputo, John D. Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003.
Dorrien, Gary. In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2020.
Dussel, Enrique. The Theological Metaphors of Marx. Translated by Camilo Pérez-Bustillo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024.
Gante, Markus. “Hegel’s Theory of Absolute Spirit: Reflexive Practices in Hegel’s Social Philosophy.” European Journal of Philosophy (2025). https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70015
Habermas, Jürgen. “Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialism: Schelling’s Idea of a Contraction of God and Its Consequences for the Philosophy of History.” Translated by Nick Midgley and Judith Norman. In The New Schelling, edited by Judith Norman and Alastair Welchman, 43–89. London: Continuum, 2004.
Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol. 1. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W. Wood. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Vol. 1: Manuscript of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822–3. Edited and translated by Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011.
Hegel, G. W. F. “Who Thinks Abstractly?” In Hegel: Texts and Commentary, edited by Walter Kaufmann, 113–18. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966.
Hegel, G. W. F. The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy. Translated by H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977.
Jameson, Frederic. The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit. London: Verso, 2017.
Kaminsky, Ilya. Deaf Republic. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2019.
Longuenesse, Béatrice. Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics. Translated by Nicole J. Simek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Marion, Jean-Luc. “Quelques règles en l’histoire de la philosophie.” Les Études philosophiques no. 4 (Octobre–Décembre 1999): 495–510.
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées and Other Writings. Translated by Honor Levi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Roberts, William Clare. Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Schuringa, Christoph. A Social History of Analytic Philosophy. London: Verso, 2025.
Smith, James K. A. Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026.
Smith, James K. A. The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2021.
Smith, James K. A. “Between Augustine and Hegel: History as a Smuggler of the Spirit.” In Augustin d’Hippone: Pont entre les cultures, carrefour entre les mondes. Regards croisés en zone francophone et au-delà. Actes des IVe journées augustiniennes de Carthage. “Actes de colloques et journées d’étude,” no. 30 (2024).
Somers-Hall, Henry. “Escaping the Dialectic: Kantian Echoes in Derrida and Merleau-Ponty.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 46 (2025): 151–77.
Taylor, Bryce A. “Sparrows.” Image 110 (Fall 2021): 126.
West, Cornel, ed. The Radical King. Boston: Beacon Press, 2015.
