Impossibility, God, and Religious Experience

Abstract

This essay responds to John Caputo’s suggestion that the experience of the impossible serves as a bridge to the experience of God. While his axiology of the impossible supports a postmodern phenomenology of religious experience, Caputo connects the experience of impossibility to a radically personal theism, interpreting it too closely to a Kierkegaardian and biblical faith that ‘with God, all things are possible’. The current essay argues two things: first, that such an axiom of impossibility can indeed operate outside a narrow ‘loving-father’ theism, and second, that a form of faith that rejects this notion that God simply turns impossibility into possibility better maintains religious faith at a threshold of human manipulation and respects the freedom of Reality; it thereby responds more adequately to a postmodern challenge for authentic religious experience that is grounded in responsibility.