A Perspective on Natural Theology From Continental Philosophy

Russell Re Manning

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter sets out a distinctive perspective on natural theology that is informed by a
more synthetic account of the general tendencies of continental philosophy. It first
discusses definitions of natural theology and pistic theology; Heidegger's refusal of a
natural theological voice; the relation of natural theology to recent developments in
political theology; and natural theology as heir to the Platonic defence of theonomous
morality. The chapter then examines a perspective on natural theology informed by the
work of two influential American continental philosopher/theologians, John D. Caputo
and Mark C. Taylor.
Keywords: natural theology, continental philosophy, John D. Caputo, Mark C. Taylor,
postic theology, Heidegger, political theology

Continental philosophy is perhaps best defined as a style of philosophical thought

associated with developments in modern, that is to say post-Kantian, philosophy that
emphasize the interpretation of experience over against the analysis of language,
characteristic of so-called analytical philosophy. Whilst rooted in the various
nineteenth- century reactions to the Kantian restriction of philosophy to critique, the
continental tradition as such is generally identified with those twentieth-century
philosophical developments that do not form part of the analytical school's distinctive
embrace of the linguistic turn and consequent limitation of the philosophical task to
logical and conceptual analysis. Predominantly German, French, and American,
continental philosophy is standardly agreed to include such broad philosophical
movements as phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, critical theory, post-
structuralism, postmodernism, and, the newest arrival, so-called 'speculative realism'.
The Turn to Religion and the Avoidance of Natural Theology in Continental
Philosophy
One helpful way of characterizing continental philosophy is to describe it as a tradition
of thought responding to the Kantian prioritizing of the transcendental subject as an
autonomous self-positing agent (Goodchild 2002). In contrast to Kant's naive
confidence in the capacity of the transcendental subject to reason free from imposed
conditions, on the basis of pure, natural, human ratio, limited only by itself, the central
thinkers of the continental tradition insist upon the external limitations upon thought.
Thus, unlike the analytical tradition, continental thinkers prioritize synthesis over
analysis, and seek to avoid the arrogation of a particular set of philosophical
assumptions to an alleged universality. Already with Hegel, self-consciousness was
located within the temporal flow of history, inseparably bound up with—and
unavoidably determined by—its historicalness. In the lines of thought that trace
through continental post-Kantian developments, a series of similar locations are
identified and foregrounded, including nature, language, tradition, culture, and gender.
More recently, religion itself has been added to this list. Thus, 'continental philosophy
of religion'—unlike its analytical counterpart—is predominantly interested in what
Goodchild identifies as 'the "outer" components of religion—its traditions, worship,
liturgy, narratives, and practices' (Goodchild 2002: 15).
One of the results of this is that whereas analytical philosophy of religion has
been (and remains) predominantly concerned with topics within traditional natural
theology (most centrally, of course, the question of the capacity of the unaided human
mind to find out truths about God), continental philosophy of religion is occupied with
the particularities of religion itself, thus presenting something of a block to any interest
in natural theology within continental philosophy.
A further barrier to an engagement with natural theology from the perspective
of continental philosophy is to be found in the particular style of thinking that the
tradition adopts. Whereas the analytical tradition primarily apes the methods, concerns,
and specialisms of the natural sciences, the continental strand tends to a closer
engagement with the arts and humanities, to the extent that it is often difficult to
characterize many writings in continental philosophy as specifically philosophical, as
opposed to literary; a tendency that routinely provokes accusations of a lack of rigour
and clarity from the analytics (Trakakis 2007). More particularly, in spite of many recent
efforts to develop so- called 'continental philosophy of religion', the departmentalized
disciplinary segmentation so beloved of analytics is very hard to impose upon
continental philosophy. Hence, it can be difficult to separate out those elements of
continental philosophy that engage issues in natural theology from those elements that
engage political and aesthetic concerns. This is not necessarily because continentals are
any more systematic than their analytical colleagues; more often it is grounded in the
characteristic indirection of continental philosophy that precisely aims to undermine
the straight linear pretensions of the modern Kantian project of pure reason.
Nonetheless, notwithstanding these justified cautions, it is clear that continental
thought is vitally marked by an engagement with issues that are essential to natural
theology, albeit more ambiguously than its analytical counterpart. The pervasiveness of
theological concerns within continental philosophy both justifies and complicates an
account of the perspectives on natural theology from the continental tradition. On the
one hand, the central features of natural theology, as normally conceived, seem to be
strikingly absent from the writings of continental philosophers. There is, for instance,
very little in the way of consideration of the canonical arguments for the existence of
God, nor is there much sustained engagement with claims for or against the ability of
the natural sciences to disclose the divine. Indeed, if anything, the continental
philosophers seem to share with their continental theological colleagues an insistence
upon an either/or assessment of the relation between philosophy and theology: either
a secular philosophy concerned with the interpretation of human experience or a
positive theology occupied with the specifics (or positum) of a particular religious
tradition. Just as Karl Barth's 'Nein!' set the scene for the relative neglect of natural
theology amongst continental theologians, so too Martin Heidegger's call for the
separation of phenomenology from theology it seems has set the agenda of the
continental philosophers' reluctance to engage, explicitly at least, in philosophical
natural theology. Perhaps the most striking example of this philosophical laicite is the
recent anxiety over the so-called 'religious turn' within French phenomenology, in
particular in the form of the avowedly theological phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion.
However, as so often with continental philosophy, all is not as it seems on the surface.
Notwithstanding the 'official' separation of philosophy and theology, continental
thinkers are deeply concerned with and engaged in fundamental issues in natural
theology. The preoccupations of continental philosophy are those of natural theology:
guestions of order, intelligibility, and dependence; of sovereignty, ultimacy, and
unconditionality; of alterity and moral imperative; of anxiety and hope; and of the
paradoxes and ambiguities of a rational mysteriousness at the centre of human life and
experience. True, the continental tradition has no place for the highly technical
arguments of analytical perfect-being natural theology, but its leading figures—from
Husserl and Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre, Arendt and Adorno, Gadamer and
Habermas, Foucault and Derrida, Ricoeur and Levinas, Deleuze and Badiou, Kristeva
and Irigaray, Nancy and Marion, Caputo and Taylor, through to Meillassoux and
Zizek— have all contributed to the development of a distinctive and provocative
perspective on natural theology.
In what follows, I am not, however, primarily interested in what these
philosophers themselves have to say about natural theology—they say very little
explicitly on the subject but are far more interested in religion. Instead I will set out a
distinctive perspective on natural theology that is informed by a more synthetic account
of the general tendencies of continental philosophy. I will take my lead from a perhaps
unexpected source to consider a continental perspective on natural theology via what
the American sociologist Peter Berger calls 'signals of transcendence'. Whilst not
presented explicitly as a work in natural theology, in his suggestive 1969 book A
Rumour of Angels Berger identifies five aspects of human experience that move, as he
puts it, 'inductive faith' to make statements about God. Berger's list, which he
acknowledges is personal and open to further supplementation, names the following
five natural phenomena as open to pointing beyond themselves to a suggestion of
transcendence: order, play, hope, damnation, and humour. For Berger, attention to
these signals of transcendence, understood as 'prototypical human gestures' proper to
'ordinary everyday awareness' (Berger 1969: 70) enables the rediscovery of the
supernatural as a possibility for theological thought capable of 'overcoming the triviality'
(119) of a situation marked by a divisive either/or of the secular vs the religious. In this
chapter, I aim to follow Berger and to present an account of an alternative perspective
on natural theology from continental philosophy as a discourse for those, in George
Steiner's terms 'who lack or reject any formal creed' (Steiner 1989: 218).

Natural Theology and Pistic Theology

The first essential move in this discussion of natural theology from the perspective of
continental philosophy is definitively to reject the definition of natural theology that has
become normative within analytical philosophy with its determinative contrast between
natural and revealed. To define natural theology with William Lane Craig and J. P.
Moreland as 'that branch of theology that seeks to provide warrant for God's existence
apart from the resources of authoritative propositional revelation' (Craig and Moreland
2009: ix) is immediately to adopt and endorse a perspective that is radically alien to
continental philosophy. Far from drawing a confident distinction between autonomous
human reason (the domain of natural theology) and heteronomously imposed
revelation, the continental tradition instead emphasizes the porousness of this central
binary opposition, the acceptance of which has been so characteristic of the progress
of religion in modernity. In their admittedly very different ways, continental
philosophers from Hegel to Derrida (with Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger as crucial
intermediaries) have affirmed the unavoidable interdependence of the natural and the
revealed. Radicalizing the Kantian insight into the aporia of the rationalist/empiricist
either/or, Husserl's phenomenological procedure of epoche, for example, far from the
ideal of scientific detachment so beloved of the analytics, brings the interpenetration of
nature and revelation to the very centre of the philosophical enterprise itself. To
characterize phenomenology as a 'response to the given' that remains open to all
intuitions is to mark a move beyond the static polarity of nature and revelation as two
alternative sources of order and is to affirm instead the radical indeterminacy of
subjective experience—of the subject as neither a fully self-determined agency nor a
merely passive recipient. In short, from a continental perspective the lazy contrast
between natural and revealed theology simply cannot stand.
In the place of the failed opposition between natural and revealed theology, by
taking a perspective on natural theology from continental philosophy an alternative
contrast presents itself; namely between natural and faithful, or pistic, theologies. The
guiding thought here is that what natural theology lacks is not so much revelation but
faith. From a continental perspective, then, natural theology is not so much a human
theology (of the 'bottom-up' kind so derided by its Barthian critics), but a faithless
theology. It is, to put it another way, the theology of disappointment; the theology that
has thrown off all religious (and secular) certainties in disgust. For such a natural
theology, recalling the earliest explorations in natural theology in ancient Greece, God
has become 'a problem for thought' (Jaeger 1947: 4). It is important to stress that by
setting up natural theology against pistic theology, I do not intend simply to reiterate
the Kantian dichotomy between faith and reason of the Preface to the Critique of
Practical Reason. Just as much as I wish to reject the analytical philosophical definition
of natural theology as the attempt to prove the existence of God through the application
of human reason alone, so too am I keen to avoid simply reframing natural theology as
the sceptical naturalization of religion that generates the contemporary disciplines of
the allegedly value-free scientific study of religion. Here the centrality of the important
distinction between natural theology and natural religion becomes crucial. To talk of
natural religion is to attempt to discern within the various positive religious traditions
beliefs and practices that are universal, and hence natural. In effect, it is a reductionist
and fundamentalist enterprise of excavating the 'essence of religion' from the surface
detritus of human history and culture. Natural religion is thus ahistorical and acultural
and aims at nothing other than the subjugation of unnatural religious traditions to its
timeless abstractions (an ambition that still haunts even the most rigorously postmodern
forms of comparative religious studies).

Understanding Seeking Faith

To talk instead of natural theology over against pistic theology is, to repeat, not to insist
upon an 'Athens-and-Jerusalem' opposition between faith and reason, but is rather to
reject another standardized definition of natural theology, namely that of the Anselmian
position of ‘fides quaerens intellectum’. On this Anselmian view the false antipathy
between nature and revelation is resisted in favour of a synthetic approach in which
'blind faith' is illuminated by the divinely inspired work of natural human reason. Of
course, we must be careful to resist the distinctly un-Anselmian interpretations of his
motto in much contemporary analytical natural theology by recognizing that Anselm
hardly aims for clarity but rather a mystical vision of God. As he celebrates in his
distinctly Platonic contemplative prayer:
How far you are from me who have come so close to you.
How remote you are from my sight.
While I am thus present in your sight.
Everywhere you are entirely present.
And I cannot see you.
In you I move and have my being.
And I cannot come to you.
You are within me and around me.
And I have no experience of you. [Proslogion 540-8]
 What is clear, however, is that Anselm's contemplative exercise in the Proslogion
is as far from natural theology as is Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics. God's withdrawl
to 'that light inaccessible' (Proslogion 524) of his majesty may be difficult for Anselm
to understand, but it can hardly be thought of as a discovery of his natural theologizing.
Instead, this approach is decisively marked by the incorporation of reason into faith.
Anselm is explicit here—there is no way for him to come to God, indeed he cannot
even have an experience of God. Instead, as a truly pistic theologian, it is by faith, not
sight, that he proceeds.
To present natural theology as the theology of the faithless is, then, clearly to
locate it otherwise than the Anselmian conception of faith seeking understanding.
Indeed, there is a temptation to reverse the formula: natural theology as 'understanding
seeking faith'. Such a reversal is almost right: it certainly captures the dynamism of such
an interpretation of natural theology and yet it is far from clear that the direction of
movement in such a natural theology is always or indeed primarily towards faith. Far
from an enterprise that aims at the overcoming of doubt in the achievement of religious
certainty, natural theology considered from the perspective of continental philosophy
instead seems to be far more content to remain 'en route', always on the way but never
arriving at its conclusion. Of course, as the example of Anselm makes clear, natural
theology is hardly alone in its sense of its own incompleteness, but whereas pistic
theology's caution stems from a conviction of the incomprehensible excess of the divine
to finite fallen human minds, the natural theological iconoclasm against fulfilment is
grounded in its radical reluctance wholly to accept any conception of ultimacy as final.
It is this commitment-phobia that is most strikingly definitive of natural theology
viewed from the perspective of continental philosophy, and we might venture, it is
precisely this that makes the enterprise so alluring.
Importantly, of course, such agnosia applies equally to both religious and secular
forms of faith and differs markedly from both genuine philosophical scepticism and the
superficial agnosticism of indecision. Natural theology, as presented here, does not
attempt to defeat faith any more than it seeks to bolster it. Natural theology is rather an
'unfaithing' theology; a theology that enacts a gesture of refusal against faith by taking
nothing for granted, including the autonomous authority of reason itself. This anomic
theology is at once then a theology of betrayal that perpetually thwarts its own ambitions
and a theology of hope akin to a therapeutic turning towards the future from out of the
disenchantment of the past.
 Such a perspective on natural theology identifies it as primarily concerned with
wagers on transcendence that embrace the uncertain mix of a faithlessness that refuses
both the grounded security of acceptance and the ungrounded commitment of a
pledged troth. Distanced from a faith in both the self-sufficiency of reason and the
Kierkegaardian leap of absurdity such a stance is constitutionally suspicious and
distrustful of all forms of foundational theology viewing the theological enterprise
instead as a radically uncertain and yet unavoidable venture. It is this that Paul Tillich
describes as 'absolute faith': the courage to be as rooted in the God above God, a state
that Tillich describes as: On the boundary of man's possibilities. It is this boundary.
Therefore, it is both the courage of despair and the courage in and above every courage.
It is not a place where one can live; it is without the safety of words and concepts, it is
without a name, a church, a cult, a theology. But it is moving in the depth of all of them.
[Tillich 1952: 188-9]
In sum, if pistic theology can be defined as characterized by faith understood as
a 'response to the call of an infinite demand' (Critchley 2012)—be that the revelation of
an un-pre-thinkable God or the un-get-roundable requirements of reason—then natural
theology can by contrast be defined as characterized by faithlessness understood as a
invitation to respond to an infinite opportunity to venture beyond the given towards an
unencompassable ultimacy.

Heidegger's Refusal of a Natural Theological Voice

It is no accident that the period of crisis following Germany's catastrophic defeat in the
First World War continues to play such a central role in both continental philosophy
and theology and it is to this period that we must look to locate the origins of the
continental philosophical refusal of natural theology and its definitive embrace of
theological pisticism. Theological analysis of the drawn-out crisis of the Weimar
Republic and its collapse into the barbarism of the Third Reich has rightly emphasized
Karl Barth's violent rejection of the legitimacy of any form of natural theology.
However, less remarked upon is its philosophical parallel in Heidegger's 1927-8 lecture
'Phenomenology and Theology' (Caputo 2002).
Heidegger does not address the question of natural theology explicitly; his
concern is to delineate respectively: (i) the positive character of theology; (ii) the
scientific character of theology; and (iii) the relation of philosophy, as a positive science,
to philosophy. Heidegger's discussion of theology (his 'final adieu' in Caputo's terms) is
dominated by the notion of faith, which he specifies in its 'proper existentiell meaning'
as rebirth, that is as: the mode of existence that specifies a factical Dasein's Christianness
as a particular form of destiny. Faith is the believing-understanding mode of existing in
the history revealed, i.e., occurring, with the Crucified. [53]
Theology, accordingly, is the positive science of faith, that is to say that theology
is the historical, systematic, and practical cultivation of this 'believing-understanding
mode of existing’, or faithfulness (54-7). Whilst Heidegger denies that 'faithless science'
can prove or disprove faith—nontheological science simply 'shatters against' faith—he
nonetheless insists on the role of philosophy in discerning the pre-Christian
fundamental ontology of Dasein. Here, for example, he claims that whilst 'sin' is
'manifest only in faith', 'guilt' is 'an original ontological determination of the existence
of Dasein' (58).
Thus Heidegger asserts the prior purity of a faithless philosophy; echoing
Nietzsche's horror at the pollution of philosophy by 'the theologians' blood', he declares
that 'faith, as a specific possibility of existence, is in its innermost core the mortal enemy
of the form of existence that is an essential part of philosophy' (60).
The result is clear: the strict separation of Jerusalem from Athens, the faithful
theology from the faithless philosophy, that makes sense of the simultaneous
philosophical discomfort at the thought of a 'turn to religion' and fascination with its
own religious other. But what of the possibility of a faithless theology? For all the
apparently critical heretical approaches to religion in recent continental philosophy—
for example Jean-Luc Nancy's attempts at the 'deconstruction of Christianity' and
Frangois Laruelle's 'non-Christianity' (Nancy 2008; Laruelle 2010)—a genuinely
faithless theological alternative remains remarkably under-explored.

Political Theology
A good illustration of what such a natural theology conceived from the perspective of
continental philosophy might look like in practice can be given by exploring the relation
of such a natural theology to recent developments in one of the most hotly contested
areas of contemporary continental philosophical engagements with religion, namely
political theology. One of the more notable features of recent continental philosophical
writings about religion has been the renewed interest in what Simon Critchley calls the
'triangulation' of religion, politics, and violence. From Agamben to Zizek (including
Derrida and Habermas), continental philosophers are acutely engaged with a new
situation for thinking, characterized primarily no longer by the theoretical ontological
concerns about the occlusion of Being within a metaphysics of ontotheology, but rather
with the practical political concerns about the possibility of living in a 'time of terror'
(Borradori 2003). In response to the events of 9/11 and the subsequent 'war on terror',
continental philosophers have turned their attention to religion and to the failures of
the liberal project of secularization that promised to put an end to the history of
violence in the triumph of democratic capitalism.
Unsurprisingly, continental philosophers have generally responded to the
challenges of thinking in a situation marked by the resurgence of 'religiously justified
violence [as] the means to a political end' (Critchley 2012: 8) by refusing the liberal
modern either/or of secularism or theism, turning instead to explore the murky
interrelations between the political and the theological, including igniting a striking
revival of interest in Carl Schmitt's 1922 Political Theology, with its (in)famous thesis
on sovereignty as enabled by and dependent upon the suspension of (natural) law in
the decision for a state of exception. Whilst the political lessons that recent continental
philosophers draw from Schmitt's analysis are widely divergent, they are united by a
common acceptance of the underlying theo-logic of Schmitt's theory, namely that
true/effective power relies upon an unnatural breakthrough of an external heteronomy.
As such, political theology stands in antithesis to natural theology: political theology
reveals the fideistic voluntarism of the various competing and fundamentally
ungroundable 'decisions-for' that characterize the political economy Once again it is
faith that lies at the heart of the continental philosophical engagement with religion,
such that the possibility of a natural theology is overlooked or dismissively identified
with the pretentions of a discredited liberalism.
In contrast to the pistic political theologies of recent continental philosophies, a
faithless natural theology would emphasize images of transparency and continuity, in
which the weakness of non-coercive non-manipulative communication (Habermas)
provides an antidote to the excess of faith that provokes and sustains violent
sovereignty and the equally violent reactions to it. To a certain extent there are clear
continuities here with the post-secular critiques of the failed modern secularization
project, but with the radicalized insistence that the secular itself undergo a process of
secularization, in which the liberal faith in the secular is disenchanted. From the
perspective of natural theology, the post-secular that emerges is thus far from the
triumph of a religious alterative, but a genuinely post-pistic situation in which the
political possibilities of natural theology become apparent. By obviating the
exceptionalist prerequisites for political authority, such a natural theology offers an
alternative vision of a theonomous consensus, transparent to the ultimate reality that
truly, albeit abysmally, grounds finite human sovereignty.

Natural Theology and the Miracle of the Ethical

Moving from the political to the ethical, a similar perspective can be opened up on
natural theology as heir to the Platonic defence of theonomous morality. In the face of
the collapse of the Kantian ethics of universal autonomous submission to the moral
law (Arendt 1963) and the lingering distaste for the calculative (shop keepers')
utilitarianism that dominates the analytical tradition, continental philosophers have
turned once again to religio-theological sources of ethics. One influential option has
been Heidegger's effective refusal of an ethical role for philosophy, endorsing a
Kierkegaardian suspension of the ethical in favour of the religious: after all, only a God
can save us now. However, even those within continental philosophy who have been
most concerned to articulate— and enact—a post-Kantian philosophical morality have
inextricably been drawn to the idea of faith. For Levinas, for example, the unconditional
demand of the face of the other provokes, by means of a minor 'miracle', the
'overthrowing of the natural order': Ethics is ... against nature because it forbids the
murderousness of my natural will to put my own existence first ... [T]he face ... calls for
an ethical conversion or reversal of my nature. [Levinas 1984: 60-1]
As Badiou exposes, Levinas's ethics thus depends on an 'ideal of holiness
contrary to the laws of being' (Levinas 1998: 114) that in effect equates to a voluntarily
accepted 'law of founding alterity' (Badiou 1993: 20). In keeping with the voluntaristic
tendency of continental philosophy's wider investment in pistic theology, the result here
is that Levinas's ethics depends on an arbitrary 'decision-for' that makes him
unequivocally a citizen of Jerusalem and not Athens: In truth, there is no philosophy of
Levinas. It is no longer even a philosophy 'servant' to theology: it is a philosophy (in
the Greek sense of the word) annulled by theology, which moreover is not a theo-logy
(a nomination still too Greek, and which supposes an approach to the divine by way of
the identity and predicates of God), but, precisely, an ethics ... Taken out of its Greek
usage (where ethics is clearly subordinated to the theoretical), and taken in general,
Levinas's ethics is a category of pious discourse. [Badiou 1993: 22-3]
 Similarly the notion of faith is determinative for Deleuze's ethical invocation of
a Spinozan-Leibnizian ethics of the immanence of life. In effect calling for an inverted
anti¬ natural theology, Deleuze insists on the need for faith to restore 'our belief in the
world' against what he diagnoses as an intolerable loss of faith. He writes: Whether we
are Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in
this world. It is a whole transformation of belief. It was already a good turning-point in
philosophy, from Pascal to Nietzsche: to replace the model of knowledge with belief.
But belief replaces knowledge only when it becomes belief in this world, as it is.
[Deleuze 1989: 172]
Two things stand out in this quotation that set a perspective on natural theology
into sharp relief. First, Deleuze's reference to Pascal and Nietzsche (he might equally
have referred to Kierkegaard and Heidegger) places his ethics squarely within the
voluntarist horn of the Euthyphro dilemma, in which the moral force of a conviction
is wholly determined by the power of the free agency of the individual, a position
fundamentally at odds with a natural theology that seeks to discern a telos or lure within
the 'order of things' capable of motivating human behaviour without the need for an
arbitrary decision-for. Secondly, the reductionist naturalism of Deleuze's belief in this
world 'as it is' starkly opposes the very basis of natural theology. Of course, Deleuze is
a long way from scientific naturalists, such as Dawkins and Dennett, but it is
unsurprising that his immanentism leads to a pious naturalism in complete
contradistinction from the heretical naturalism of a natural theology that rejects both
the neo-Darwinian faith in blind evolution and the religious credence in the possibility
of divine intervention (dismissively characterized by Robert Boyle as God's 'after-
games'). For the natural theologian it is precisely the insufficiency of the world 'as it is'
that the turn to nature and life demonstrates and that in turn enables an ethical
orientation towards others without the submission to an autocratic Other, be that God
or Nature. It is in this sense, paradoxically, that such a natural theology is both without
nature and without God (Albertson and King 2009; Meillassoux 2008).

Natural Theology without Religion and after God

In what remains of this chapter, I want to turn to a perspective on natural theology
informed by the work of two influential American continental
philosopher/theologians, John D. Caputo and Mark C. Taylor. The thought of both
Caputo and Taylor has been decisively formed by continental philosophy, notably
Derrida's postmodern deconstructionism, but both perhaps have enough of a lingering
influence of the Anglo- American analytical style of philosophy of religion that their
'continental philosophies of religion' are more concerned to advance theoretical
reflection on the existence and nature of God (albeit in very non-traditional ways) than
the general engagement within continental philosophy of religion with the external
phenomena of religion. As such, both are less quick to give up the ambition of classical
natural theology towards a metaphysics of ultimacy, even whilst they firmly reject pre-
Heideggerian metaphysics and celebrate its 'end'. Caputo, for instance, insists that 'we
on the continental side of [the] divine have sworn off' traditional philosophy of religion
and instead have 'taken our stand with the equally traditional objection to the
ontotheological tradition, voiced in a prophetic counter-tradition that stretches from
Paul to Pascal to Luther, and from Kierkegaard to the present, with honorary
headquarters in a Jerusalem that is constitutionally wary of visitors from Athens'
(Caputo 2002: 2). However, whilst there can be no doubting the sincerity of Caputo's
foreswearing of analytical natural theology and his desire to ensure a decent burial for
the 'God of the philosophers', his constructive work 'after the death of God' can
legitimately be characterized as a continental natural 'theology of the event' that 'keeps
its ear close to the heart of the pulse or pulsations of the divine in things' (Caputo and
Vattimo 2009: 49).
Like Taylor, who notes in his 2007 After God that he has 'never left the study of
religion behind but ha[s] always attempted to expand its scope and significance' (xiv)
Caputo is most passionately opposed to the 'great monsters' and 'large overarching
theories that would catch [events] in their sweep, organize them, make them march in
step to some metaphysical tune or other, right or left, theistic or atheistic, idealist or
materialist, realist or anti-realist' (2009: 48-9). For Taylor: The most pressing dangers
we face result from the conflict of competing absolutisms that divide the world between
oppositions that can never be mediated ... In a world where to be is to be connected,
absolutism must give way to relationalism, in which everything is codependent and
coevolves. After God, the divine is not elsewhere but is the emergent creativity that
figures, disfigures and refigures the infinite fabric of life. [Taylor 2007: xvii-xviii]
Neither Caputo nor Taylor explicitly invoke natural theology as descriptive of
their enterprises; indeed both are pretty scathing about what they take natural theology
to be in its traditional forms. However, in their guests for the interstitial thinking of the
divine after God and of religion without religion both are clearly closer to the anti-pistic
kind of natural theological thinking that is emerging in this chapter. Both invoke images
of the 'desert' of theology, loosed from the certainties and particularities of faith, and
the riskiness of the forever erring attempt to venture after the God who comes after.
This is Caputo's amor venturi (51) and Taylor's 'unfigurable edge' (347) in which both
theism and atheism, transcendence and immanence, naturalism and supranaturalism
meet in the paradoxical and rationally mystical concept of 'natural theology'.

The Mystical Anarchism of Natural Theology

Importantly, such a natural theology is not simply a responsive accommodating
correlationist theology that allows a particular philosophical authority to take up a
normative status for theology Applying an updated version of Michael Buckley's thesis
about early modern natural theology Graham Ward berates Taylor (amongst others) for
simply allowing postmodernism to become 'the anti-metaphysical philosophy theology
can found itself upon' (Ward 1997: xlii); in effect identifying theirs as simply the latest
iteration of the God of the philosophers. Whilst such a charge can indeed be levelled at
contemporary analytical philosophical natural theology and recent liberal natural
theologies of scientifically mediated religious experience, the accusation seems
misplaced when directed at a continental philosophical natural theology that is
definitively marked by a denial of faith and an absence of religious experience. Indeed,
rather than equating such an approach with the God of the philosophers, a better
parallel would seem to be with the mystical theologies of detachment ( Abschiedenheit
) and withdrawal. As Denys Turner emphasizes, such rational mysticism is the polar
opposite of experientialist models of religious thought (Turner 1998). The mystic, like
the continental natural theologian, precisely does not have a religious experience and
leaves behind 'representational' responses to a divine presence in his (or frequently her)
ambition of achieving a union with the God who is 'nothing'. Such mysticism, what
Critchley identifies as 'mystical anarchism', depends precisely on the distancing
characteristic of a natural theology that iconoclastically rejects all images of God, instead
striving to see through the transparency of the natural to its forever inaccessible divine
ground.
Thus this 'ground of being' mystical natural theology stands sharply opposed to
the kind of 'phenomenology of revelation' that characterizes Jean-Luc Marion's
influential attempts to think, philosophically, of the gift as es gibt. In contrast to
Marion's accounts of the iconicity of the divine that saturates phenomena with the
fullness of God's presence without ever descending into idolatry, a continental natural
theology turns to the absence of God, to sites of dereliction and emptiness. It is this
excess of absence, figured and disfigured through auto-destructive non-images of byss
and abyss that recall Boehme and Schelling and that connect natural theology to rational
mysticism. At the same time, the natural theological Bilderverbot most emphatically
necessitates an embrace of the imagination as the privileged faculty of natural
theological sense (Hedley 2008). If the pistic theologian sees by faith and not by sight,
then the natural theologian's vision is by the imagination; that synthetic faculty
(Einbildunskraft ) of the natural and the theological able to 'bod[y] forth/the forms of
things unknown' (A Midsummer Night's Dream V.i. 14-15). Reading the Book of
Nature, such an approach favours allegory and the 'noble lies' of philosophical myth-
making, playfully surpassing absolutist attempts at finality or closure through the
richness of allusion and a hermeneutics of openness. Yet, as Douglas Hedley notes, the
issue is not primarily epistemological, but metaphysical (23). Imaginative natural
theology—rooted in Platonic-Romantic metaphysics—is the antithesis to the anti-
Platonic, anti-Romantic, and above all anti-metaphysical mainstream of continental
philosophy. Yet, as it were, against the grain of continental philosophy's simultaneous
allergy to and fascination with faith, such a natural theology emerges as an alternative
minority report.
Restlessly utopian, passionately uncommitted, and deliberately ambivalent, this
natural theology stands opposed to fideism and pisticism in all their forms—religious
and secular. Post-metaphysical, this natural theology responds to the foundational
critique of ontotheology not by a non- or a-metaphysical withdrawal from speculative
phil-theo-logy but by a retrieval off a participatory metaphysics that denies the either/or
formulations of sacred/secular in an a/theological, a/theistic, supra/naturalism.
Responding to an invitation, a suggestion, a rumour of angels, such an approach is an
unconverted venture, a wager on transcendence in the midst of a tragically antagonistic
battle of competing faiths. This, then, is the natural theology opened up from the
perspective of continental philosophy, for those faithless enough to risk it.

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Russell Re Manning is a Reader and Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Ethics

in the
School of Humanities and Cultural Industries at Bath Spa University