Eloi, Eloi, Le-ma sa-bach’tha-ni? (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

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A Meditation on the Agony and Ecstasy of Radical Theism

Devasia M Antony
In this brief meditation on ‘radial theism’ the author who teaches Philosophy at Hindu College, University of Delhi, reflects on the
possibility as well as the primordiality of theism in the contemporary Covidised world. This piece was originally written for a conversation
on an online platform of academicians in the University of Delhi. The author can be contacted at devasiamantony@hinducollege.ac.in

Oh, man of faith, where have you been these days? Where is your God, to whom you pray
every day? Has your God deserted you? … These are some of the questions that come up in
one’s mind when the world being confronted with the deadly Covid-19 virus infection is
staring at death and annihilation. For a theist, undoubtedly this seems to be a case of logical
embarrassment much to the glee of many an atheistic secularist.
But for the one who embraces radical theism, I venture to say, this is a grace-filled moment
though dark clouds looming over the sky make the rays of light invisible. Radical theism, as I
would like to call it, unlike domesticated theism and routinized dogmatic religious beliefs, is
open and free like the wind that flows wherever it wills. It attentively wards off the twin
temptations of God being either over-determined or under-determined when applied to the
imagined incommensurable domains of reason and faith. The humility of bipedality of the
human body is analogous to the two-winged soul which has faith and reason as its grammar
of ascent. The structure of domesticated theism and the spectrum of routinized religious
beliefs more often than not succumb to the temptations of ‘turning stones into bread’. It is
unlike Jesus’s temptation narrative where Jesus prophetically wards off the devil by the Word
of God: ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of
God’ bringing into a non-binary umbilical chord both the materiality of the Spirit and the
spirituality of the Body. As Dostoevsky reminds us, the immanent temptation is to get
hyphenated by the shackles of power, possessions and miracles. That is how this intimate
bond caricatures itself into a bondage.
If so, how different is radical theism, one might ask.
The Biblical narrative beckons us to the Divinity of radical theism which to my
understanding is immune to the logic of exclusive predication. This God, as I understand so
dimly now, is not the God-of-the-gaps as some Godmen as well as some secular, atheistic,
scientific thinkers would want me to hold on to. This God is, as Pascal exclaimed, not even
the God of philosophers.
Then what is it?
It is the God of Abraham who teaches me that this broken and bruised world is justified by
faith alone; it is the God of Jacob who wrestles with him all through the night only to bless
him for having prevailed over God and man, it is the God of Moses who reveals ‘I Am That I
Am’ in the burning bush in the wilderness; it is the God of Job to whom Job made this ethical
crucial confession: ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there,
… blessed be the name of the Lord’; it is the God of the Psalmist who prays ‘Even though I
walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for Thou art with me’; it is the
God of Jesus, ABBA, to whom Jesus prays before breathing his last on the Cross: Eloi, Eloi,
le-ma sa-bach’th-ani? (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?) which invites a
disruptively transformative response from God: the RAISING of JESUS from the dead!
That is what the RISEN Jesus assures us: ‘Fear Not, for I am with you always till the end of
time.’
This is apocalyptic radical theism, if not what else can it be!
And such a spiritual vision is at the core of the pluriform spiritual traditions of the world. As
Jesus instructs the woman at the well: ‘God is spirit, and those who worship him must
worship in spirit and truth.’ Beyond the binaries of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, it is
orthopraxis!
This apocalyptic theism is the faith of a religious believer who struggles. As Wittgenstein
says it with laconic brevity: ‘An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost
looks as though he was walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable.
And yet it really is possible to walk on it.’