The Bible is you

A radically existentialist rereading of the entire Bible for Easter weekend

Manifesto

Caputo, in The Insistence of God, calls for a new species of theologians — “theologians of the ‘perhaps,’ a new society of friends of a dangerous ‘perhaps.’” Not the old theologian — the one who stands behind the pulpit and points upward, who reads the Bible as if God wrote it in stone and handed it down from the sky. Not the theologian who tells you what to believe and guards the doctrine. The new species is something else entirely. A Christian Übermensch, so to speak. Someone who inherits everything that came before — the whole crisis of faith, the death of God, the collapse of certainty — and doesn’t flinch. Someone who reads the wreckage and still finds something worth saying. We don’t know who this person is going to be yet. We don’t know what they’ll look like or where they’ll come from.

And to be clear: this is not a call for a return to the old, or a resurrection of the dead. If Nietzsche says “God is dead”, then so be it. We are not concerned with plugging the tomb or protecting or saving the dead. The buried deity does not need our protection. As Kierkegaard put it, to defend Christianity is always to discredit it. “He who defends it has never believed in it. If he believes, then the enthusiasm of faith is not defense, no, it is attack and victory.” We are not here to defend. We call for a renewal in the terms of the new — what comes to us where we are, what meets us in the present. What follows is attack, not defense. And so, inspired by this charge and Caputo’s call for the new theologian, what follows is a radical re-read of the Bible in the new terms, written in conversation with Kierkegaard, Tillich, Caputo, Derrida, and others.

Genesis to Revelation is not the Word of God. It might be perfectly heretical to say. It is the Word of every single human being. The Reformation gave us sola scriptura — Scripture alone. Kierkegaard already pushed this further: the Bible, the Word, is not something you read at a distance, as if about somebody else, or the world at large. The Bible is addressed to you. You read every single scripture as if it addresses you. He makes this vivid in For Self-Examination through the prophet Nathan. King David — the greatest king of Israel, the one who slew Goliath, the man after God’s own heart — sees Bathsheba bathing from his rooftop and wants her. She is married to Uriah, one of David’s most loyal soldiers, fighting on the front lines of David’s own war. David takes her anyway. And when Bathsheba falls pregnant, David tries to cover it up — he calls Uriah home from battle, hoping he’ll sleep with his wife and assume the child is his. But Uriah refuses to go home. He sleeps at the palace gate instead, out of loyalty to his fellow soldiers still fighting. So David sends him back to the front and orders his commander to place Uriah at the point where the fighting is fiercest, and then withdraw from him. Uriah dies. David takes Bathsheba as his wife.

And then Nathan comes to David and tells him a story: a rich man with many flocks steals the only lamb of a poor man — a lamb the poor man had raised like a daughter. David is furious. “That man deserves to die!” And Nathan says: “Thou art the man.” Thou art the man. Not someone else. Not the rich man in the story. Thou art the man. That’s the point Kierkegaard makes about the reading of the Bible. You are always tempted to read it as a scholar, as an observer, learning about someone else’s life, extracting wisdom at a safe distance. You read the story of the rich man and the lamb and you’re outraged, just like David was. But you’re not reading about someone else. Thou art the man. The Bible is not some external wisdom, it’s a mirror. And this is how, as Kierkegaard says, all of Scripture is to be read. But to radicalise it further: it’s not just that the Bible addresses you, the way Nathan addressed David. It’s that it is you. The Word becomes a life, your life. Not sola scriptura, but scriptura viva — Scripture alive. Every character — every protagonist and antagonist — is literally an element of you, a page of you. David is you. Uriah is you. Nathan is you. The lamb is you. Every chapter in the Book of Life is a series of events of life itself playing out. The beginning to the end of the Word, the beginning to the end of life itself.

Lineage of interpretation

There have been innovations through history in the way we see the Bible that have led it to here. Pre-Christian philosophy began with substance — what is the stuff of reality? The pre-Socratics asked: is it water, fire, atoms? Everything was about what’s out there. And fair enough, that’s where you start. Then when Christianity began spreading like wildfire, the crown of that thinking was, naturally, transcendental: God as the ultimate substance beyond everything, the unmoved mover. Aquinas and the scholastics built the whole medieval world on this — the great chain of being, everything referring back to a God who sits above and outside of it all. Then Descartes — the great doubter — turned the starting point inward: I think, therefore I am. Suddenly the subject, not the cosmos, is where we begin. And once you open that door, you can’t close it. Kant brought it to a head with his ‘Copernican revolution’: instead of assuming that our knowledge must conform to objects, he asked whether objects, as they appear to us, conform to the structures of our knowing. And that humbling opened up a new question — not what is the substance of reality, but how does reality appear to us from within our finitude? Hegel took it further: spirit realises itself through the march of history, not from above it. And then Deleuze — the philosopher of pure immanence — who flatly rejects transcendence altogether. There is no outside. Everything is surface, fold, becoming. No hidden God behind the curtain. Whether you agree with him or not, the trajectory is clear.

And this is exactly where Caputo’s call for the new species of theologians comes to the fore. We do not read the Bible as a pre-Socratic figure would, looking for the divine substance out there. Not as Aquinas would, pointing to the God above. We read the Bible as read through Kierkegaard, Deleuze, Derrida, and everything that followed. So we’ve gone from looking at God and the Bible as claims of beings beyond history, outside of time, on the eternal plane — to looking at it as something active within time, just as how we are. From outside time to inside time. God is not the sovereign patriarch in the sky anymore. Gone are the days where he revealed himself by striking lightning from heaven. He becomes the Spectre. He’s that which haunts everything about being and all the events of life itself. A kind of Christian ghost story, after all — God is also named as the Holy Ghost. This is what Caputo describes in The Weakness of God as going from “strong theology” to “weak theology”, wherein, power is not privileged, as much as the latent possibility of the unforeseeable event — wherein God reckons as the Spectre behind all the activity of history.

And biblical hermeneutics — the way we interpret and read Scripture — went through the same journey. In the dominant premodern imagination, Scripture was treated as revelation from above. The Word was God and God was the Word. Everything with reference to the Word as transcendent power. Creation ex nihilo and all those glorious manifestations of awesome power that theologians have been addicted to for centuries. The Bible was read as if dictated from above — a transcendent document pointing to a transcendent God. But that’s suspicious today. It’s not something we quite trust anymore, especially with the advent of science, historical criticism, modern technics, and the ability for humans to create on a god-like scale. And so the Bible becomes not the seat of transcendent power but a spectral series of unforeseeable events playing out in an almost Hegelian complete swing of history — the Geist, the spirit, pervading the whole progression from beginning to end. So, if Genesis to Revelation is the Book of Life, literally speaking — the Word of every single human being — then let’s start at the beginning.

Adam

From darkness, the first words bring about the birth of light. Then, the world in parts — until Adam, Eve, up to the inevitable fall. Traditional theology — the Augustinian line that runs through most of Catholic and Reformed thought — treats Adam as categorically different from us. Adam’s sin was a unique event, a singular rupture, and we merely inherit the bad fortune of guilt. But Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Anxiety, says no. Adam is not absolutely different to us. He is the first instantiation of being — the first, but not different in kind. He sinned in the same way every human being sins. We can’t think of Adam as different, and if we do, we risk misinterpreting the point of Genesis entirely — because then the fall becomes someone else’s problem, and we are back to reading the Bible as if it’s about someone else.

But here is where I would radicalise it further: Adam is not only one of us. We are literally Adams. The Genesis of the Book of Life is the genesis of our lives. When we are born, that is Genesis. We are Adams. Every newborn enters the world the way Adam entered Eden — in a state of original unity — where there is no boundary between self and world, no “I” and “not-I,” just undifferentiated wholeness. Lacan showed where it breaks — the mirror stage, where the child first recognises itself as a separate being, and the entrance into language seals the split. You become a subject, which means you become divided. And Kristeva named what was there before it broke: the semiotic khora — the pre-symbolic, pre-linguistic space of drives, rhythms, and tones. The maternal space before language fragments you. That’s the Adamic space. That’s Genesis.

The Fall

Indeed, the fall happens. But the fall is not a one-time historical event. Adam and Eve are not the villains of history to be blamed for all eternity. Everyone repeats the same original sin. Kierkegaard, again in The Concept of Anxiety, shows us how. In innocence — in Eden — Adam is given the task of naming every animal. Every name is a choice. The whole world is open, unnamed, and God says: you name it. That is the exercise of freedom within innocence. But innocence already contains within it the possibility of freedom, and that possibility generates anxiety — what Kierkegaard calls the “dizziness of freedom”. It’s like standing at the edge of a cliff: no one is pushing you, but you feel the vertigo of realising you could jump. And the serpent’s temptation is essentially: there is even more freedom than you think. “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The fruit is the dizziness reaching its tipping point. And being slides into it — almost innocently.

The serpent speaks to Eve conversationally, as if he belongs. Eve sees the fruit is good for food, pleasing to the eye, desirable for gaining wisdom. She takes it. She gives some to Adam, who is with her. He eats. It’s quiet, mundane, and almost completely innocent. Not the dramatic ‘crime scene’ Christians tend to make of it. The fall is something being slides into almost superficially. The fruit, the eyes opened — “and they knew that they were naked, and they were ashamed.” The traumatic beginning of self-consciousness. The traumatic beginning of shame. Kicked out from Eden — kicked out from the semiotic khora, from the Adamic unity — and into the world as it is. And the fall is not behind us. Every person reproduces their own fall — their own awakening to self-consciousness, their own exile from the unity they started in. The past protracts forward into the life of every individual, repeating as a kind of origin story that never stops originating. It all happens in the past-present — the fall is always happening now.

What happens after the fall? Death gains ground. The first thing that happens outside Eden is the first murder — Cain kills Abel. Brother kills brother. Then it escalates: Lamech boasts of killing a man for merely wounding him. The Nephilim appear, corruption spreads, until every inclination of the human heart is only evil continually. Fast forward many generations — the Flood comes. Noah represents the remnants of innocence after the Flood. Noah walks out into a world where the covenant comes with a rainbow, which is a promise, but a promise after total destruction. Innocence is dead. And after the great reset, the remnants look outward at the world as it is given. (In parallel, the earliest instantiations had the richest treasure trove of life ahead of them — Methuselah lived to over nine hundred years, and most others lived up to around the same lifespan, but gradually there was a sharp decrease to 120 years. Sure, one could owe the sharp decrease in lifespan to environmental degeneration or bad genetics. I take it as phenomenological — death taking ground is what comes naturally with the death of innocence.)

The Search

After the death of innocence, what comes is bondage. The Israelites end up in Egypt, enslaved — the condition of being in the world after the fall. You’re alive, but you’re not free, and you don’t know who you are. Exodus is the first great act of the search: liberation, then forty years wandering in the wilderness looking for the promised land. Manna from heaven, day to day, no permanence. The golden calf. Complaints. Wanting to go back to Egypt. Pure immediacy — living hand to mouth, moment to moment, with no horizon beyond the next meal and the next complaint. This is the aesthetic stage, and this is where Kierkegaard’s stages of life’s way come into the picture: the world of being in the moment, seeking pleasure, the world of The Seducer’s Diary. The aesthetic is erotic — in the sense of pure, unmediated desire for what is right in front of you. And Song of Songs is the obvious biblical reservoir for this — desire that exceeds sexuality and becomes metaphysical longing: ‘I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not.’ That’s Israel. That’s the aesthetic stage. The conquest of Canaan. The spectacle of judges and kings — chosen and fallen, one after another. Solomon at the apex: seven hundred wives, three hundred concubines, legendary wealth, the temple built and overlaid in gold. The longing is real but the object keeps receding. One journeys from one kingdom to another, always serving something or someone, always seeking but not finding. (Per Bob Dylan, “it may be the Devil, it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.”)

But what am I, per the Book of Life, really searching for? I’m in the process of finding the true self that I lost in the fall, the Adamic unity, the semiotic khora. What Tillich calls the “ground of being”. Not a God up there, not a figure or a person in the sky — but the “depth” dimension of reality itself, the ground underneath everything. You think you’re searching for pleasure or power or wisdom, but what you’re really searching for is what you’ve lost of yourself. Your “ultimate concern”, as Tillich puts it. And the Old Testament mirrors this exactly: amidst the arc of heroics, villainy, and anti-heroics — there emerges moments of profound introspectiveness. Psalms. Lamentations. Ecclesiastes. Always trying to find something that can ground us. Always trying to ground ourselves in our being. As in Ecclesiastes: ‘He has put eternity in their heart, yet so that man cannot find out the work that God does from the beginning to the end.’ The stretch toward wholeness is there — eternity is in us — but we cannot master it. We feel the pull of gravity but can’t name the origin or destination. This realisation is how the aesthetic stage of immediacy starts failing. The motor starts sputtering, short-circuiting. After Solomon, the kingdom splits — Israel and Judah. Two kingdoms where there was one, and neither holds. One king to another, one war to another. A lot of destruction ensues. Impermanence gains ground. Anxiety turns into pessimism, which is what Nietzsche might describe (in my words), as an ‘early onset nihilism’.

The Crisis

And then the age of kings and judges turns to the age of prophets. When the throne fails — when anointed rulers and military victories and territorial expansion all sputter out — there is no longer the spectacle of conquest and riches. The prophet no longer rules by spectacle or office, they speak from an alien place irreducible to institutional power. And what they speak is judgment and promise simultaneously: this is how bad it is, and here is what’s coming. And it is bad. Ezekiel is shown a valley of dry bones — “Son of man, can these bones live?” The temple, symbol of divine providence, is destroyed. Nehemiah comes to rebuild it, before it is destroyed again. Everything becomes more impermanent, more despairing. The Babylonian exile — the people uprooted, displaced, identity shattered.

This is what Kierkegaard writes of in The Sickness Unto Death. Despair, for Kierkegaard, is a structural condition: the self is a “relation that relates itself to itself”, and when that relation goes wrong — when the self can’t align with itself — that’s despair. And the worst form of despair is not knowing you’re in despair. The self has lost itself and doesn’t even know it’s lost. Israel at this point is going through the motions of temple worship, but the temple is empty. The form is there but the ground is gone. Dante, at the midpoint of his life, finds himself in the same place: “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.” Virgil takes him downward through the circles of Inferno — past the gate that reads “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” The ground of being is nowhere to be seen. One could even risk the claim: Nietzsche’s Letzter Mensch, the Last Man, has already come. Not someone prophesied for the future. He is in the Old Testament, recorded thousands of years ago — and yet it was not a historical event — for thou art the man. The Last Man repeats in every one of us.

But the crisis is always absolved by the promise. Isaiah comes and prophesies: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.” The Messiah is prophesied — not yet here, always to come. This is Derrida’s à-venir — the to-come that is never present, never guaranteed, and yet insists with enough force to keep hope alive amid the ruins. Caputo’s dangerous perhaps is already at work here: the event that has not yet arrived, whose possibility keeps the whole movement from collapsing into nothing. The promise does not resolve the crisis. It is not mere fantasy. It is what Deleuze would call the “virtual” — something real but not yet actual. The Messiah is not yet here in actuality, but the promise is already real in virtuality. Israel lives inside a virtual future.

And then, the intertestamental silence: roughly four hundred years where God goes quiet. The Spectre stops haunting. Nothing.

…

The Messiah

And then — after four hundred years of nothing — the dangerous perhaps, what Caputo calls the perhaps, suddenly makes itself known. The promise ceases to be only promised and becomes flesh. And the scene is so unforeseeable that it is comical. The Messiah arrives not in kingly robes, but as a baby in a feeding trough in Bethlehem — a poor peasant town. This is how the absolute event shows up, defying all our expectations. Israel had been trying to save itself — through judges, kings, prophets — and every spectacular attempt at self-rescue had sputtered out. Everything from the outside, everything from the world of the immediate, had failed. And then God doesn’t send another judge or king. God comes himself. From the bottom. Not a revolution from above, but an insurrection from below — the ground of being exploding onto the scene from the inside out. This is Tillich’s “ground of being” and Caputo’s “event” merging into one: the separation between man and God, or being and its ground, is reckoned with through the unforeseeable event.

And the reckoning is not something abstract — it works itself out in every sphere of life. The Sermon on the Mount overturns every assumption about power, blessing, and righteousness. The miracles address bodily disease, but always reveal that it is the spiritual disease that stirs at the root. The blind see, the lame walk, the dead are raised — but the real work is deeper. The event is working itself out from the inside. As Jesus said, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst.’ This is what the psalmist had been longing for all along: ‘As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.’ The whole search — from the fall through the judges through the exile — was this panting, this thirst. And the ground of being, the water — or, if I may, the fount of being — which had gone missing through the whole arc, is suddenly present. (This is what Kierkegaard was writing toward all along in The Sickness Unto Death. The despair — the structural condition of the self that could not align with itself — is a necessary precondition for salvation. There is no Easter without Good Friday. Christ is the salvation event that simultaneously reckons with despair when it is complete.)

The key term for this reckoning is what Christ says to Nicodemus. “You must be born again.” And Nicodemus — a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jews, a man of the law — is bewildered. “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb?” He does not understand. What Christ is saying is that the beginning of the New Testament — the realisation of the perhaps, and the arrival of the event — is the beginning of the second part of life. You do not go back to the womb. You do not return to Eden, to the semiotic khora, to the Adamic unity. You are born again — from above, from within, from the ground of being itself. And Nicodemus, in his disbelief — thou art the man. We are all Nicodemus. We cannot fathom how the self can be remade. And yet the salvation event always completes itself and becomes true — regardless of whether Nicodemus understands it now, he will understand it in time, and then retroactively realise he is reborn. This is how the person is fundamentally transformed — one is reborn as if by an insurrection from within and without, and the rebirth is only realised when it is complete.

The cost of the insurrection is as radical as its impact — it is total. The Messiah is nailed on the cross. And here René Girard becomes indispensable. Girard’s thesis, across Violence and the Sacred and The Scapegoat, is that every human community resolves its internal violence by projecting it onto a single victim — the scapegoat. The victim bears the collective guilt and is sacrificed so the community can be at peace with itself. And this is not merely sociological — it is existential: every part of ourselves that we had lost, every fragment of the split subject, every sin, every piece of the self that was lost in the fall — we need someone to place our burdens upon. If we were to bear our own guilt, it would be unbearable. “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you” — and that is meant literally, not metaphorically. Christ is the lamb — the ultimate scapegoat for every part of ourselves that we do not have reconciled to ourselves. We nail him to the cross. Every single moment we are placing our burdens on him (which is why the Messiah comes not only for the Jews, but does the work for us all, in a sweeping reckoning of all past and all future). The cross absorbs it all — our iniquities transposed onto that single image. ‘There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.’ The whole creation had been groaning — ‘the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now’ — and the cross is where the groaning is finally heard.

Now, Christ dies, like all humankind — but as the Romans began to think Christ was another martyr, another impermanent figure in the long line of Jewish judges and kings and prophets who came and fell, just as nihilism closes its grip and the promise seems to die on the cross along with him — Christ resurrects. And even then, doubting Thomas, who saw the risen Christ with his own eyes, could not believe it. He needed to touch the wounds. “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, I will not believe.” This is spoken of Thomas — but thou art the man. We are all Thomas. We see the ground of being standing in front of us and we still doubt. And yet Christ doesn’t condemn the doubt. He says: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Stop doubting and believe.” The resurrection is the refusal of nihilism. Not an argument against it — Kierkegaard would remind us that God does not need our arguments — but a sheer event that overturns it. The sin of man was nailed upon the cross, but the promise of his salvation did not die there and then. It came back with a new body, a new being. Christ does not return as a ghost, or a memory, or a martyred ideal. He eats fish on the beach with his disciples. He is bodily, material, present. And in doing so he proves the promise is still in play — that the ground of being is not subject to the same impermanence that swallowed the judges and kings before him. Every prior figure came with a promise and the promise died with them. Christ came with a promise and the promise resurrects with him.

The Commission

And then he ascends. The embodied salvation — the physical event — departs. And here is the key difference: unlike all the judges and kings of the past, Christ does not leave us alone to languish in impermanence. The embodied event departs, but we are left not so much metabolising the interaction as perpetually wrestling with it — wrestling with it still today. And the Holy Spirit arrives as the spectre of that insurrection — the Hegelian movement of spirit, which brings everything true within the gears — always continuing, always preparing the way for Christ’s return: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever — the Spirit of truth.” Here, the structure of à-venir becomes conscious of itself. Salvation makes known to us the possibility of possibility — that Christ will come back, as long as we hold on to it.

And from here — the Apostles, St. Paul, and the expansion of the kingdom. They remain in sin, separated from their ground (which has now departed), but their activity became inspired by the à-venir. Grounded in hope and the possibility of reconciliation with the ground of being, the apostles take hold of the promise and go out into the world. This is how they endured all manner of suffering — torture, imprisonment, mutilation, martyrdom — not as masochists, but as those grounded by a resurrecting ground that does not give way. The Great Commission: “Go and make disciples of all nations.” In secular terms, we confuse the Commission with divine purpose, mission, meaning — but it’s basically what Kierkegaard describes as “the truth that is the truth for me”. Our subjective truth, as inspired by the salvation event which has taken place within and without. What Kierkegaard calls, in Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, the one thing — the single orientation of the self toward the good, the refusal to be double-minded, to serve two masters. The calling, the mission, the meaning — it’s all the one thing. And for Nietzsche, of a different spirit, it is the will to bring about the Übermensch — as confused as it is powerful. But here is something worth noting: if Nietzsche’s Letzter Mensch, the Last Man, was already fulfilled in the Old Testament — recorded thousands of years before Nietzsche wrote a word — then his Übermensch was already fulfilled in the New. The becoming, the overcoming, the new dawn of man — it is already here, in the coming of the Messiah whose commission he has left behind, and whose work of “revaluation” has been conducted and is continually being conducted.

And so the whole bow of being is trying to reconcile with itself: the first Adam being reconciled with the second Adam, who has left and is to come again to receive us in a new form. We’ve had salvation. But the physicality of salvation has departed. We are left with a promise. We are left with Derrida. The à-venir continues and inspires all our activity. God remains as the Spectre — the Holy Spirit — pervading and permeating every single one of our desires and actions. And this is the only ethic that remains post-salvation, the only mode of ethical being after the transformation: not our own aimless striving, not the revolting against the absurd, but “the purity of heart to will one thing” — to will what the spectral “ground of being” wills through us. This is what the Bible crowns as the Great Commission. And at risk of sounding like a broken record, it is not a Great Commission for the Apostles. Thou art the man. It is yours and my Great Commission. And yet the Commission is not a clean march forward. The insurrection is transformative, but not final. The search doesn’t end — it is reinvented post-salvation, given new life, but the failure is still of the essence. As Paul himself confesses: ‘I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing.’ Even after the resurrection, even after the Spirit comes, the being does not perfectly reconcile or coincide with itself. The old pattern repeats — the fall is still protracting forward. But now it repeats within the promise, not outside it.

The End

And then comes Revelation. Revelation is always apocalypting. It has always been polarising because of its mystical tone — difficult, almost impossible to deal with. It never ceases to puzzle religious leaders and theologians of every single age. But why? Because it is spoken in a future-past tense, and the content fits the tense: the unforeseeability of the future, the à-venir, the event to come, can only possibly be rendered in mystical symbolism — the four living creatures, each with six wings, covered with eyes all around, even under their wings, crying “Holy, holy, holy.” It is utterly inconceivable to us in the present day. It only appears as such to us because it is the speech of the future-past — a retroactive prophecy, so to speak. This is to say that the Book of Life is not something that works sequentially — Genesis to Revelation, stage by stage. If Revelation is spoken in the future-past, then it follows that death has been present throughout the whole arc — and in the same way, in a life, death is not a future event but a possibility of possibility that is present throughout (Freud names this the ‘death drive’.) The Book of Life encompasses all the time of our life, and this is where Kierkegaard’s sub specie aeternitatis — the eternal mode — comes into play. The Bible writes from the mode of eternity, where God occupies the whole movement and bends the bow of time from that seat of eternity in which he is absconded. Revelation is the last book but not the last stage; it is the last book only because it speaks from the most distant future (past), it is the prophecy of the unforeseeable cranked up in intensity.

This is also where the death-of-God theologians were right in their own way — when we refuse to acknowledge the dizzying to-come of the afterlife, we say that it’s just the humbling to-come of death. That’s where radical theologians like Peter Rollins move. And Nick Land — who I like to think of as a radical techno-theologian — takes it further still, privileging the event unmistakably in the tone of Revelation. Except Land’s event, the accelerationist’s event, is not one of the afterlife but one of death. The nihil spirit working through us and winning. Not even a humble mortal’s death — that’s Cioran — but a capitalist-cybernetic death, the dissolution of the human into the machine. Same postmodern lineage. Same manic form of the unforeseeable. On the other side stands the afterlife theologian — certain that glory is coming, that the chariots of fire are literal, that the symbols can be decoded into a timetable. The first may safely be called a ‘realist’ (in the true philosophical sense) — he works within the motor and is certain about the motor, but does not inhabit the Kierkegaardian sub specie aeternitatis. The second may safely be called an ‘idealist’ — he tries to match form to content and content to form, but in doing so becomes too certain about the unforeseeable. Both are wrong from the mode of eternity. Revelation is not just an apocalypse that brings about death, nor a rapture that brings about some utopian afterlife. It is the reception of the Second Coming that has been promised — revealing itself from the very end of time as unforeseeable to those of us who are living.

This then is the faultline par excellence: whether what comes after is life or nothing. And here we must be precise about where we stand. If we take Caputo’s perhaps on its own — the openness to the event, the dangerous maybe, without the eternal view — and follow it through, what do we get? If it’s perhaps after perhaps after perhaps after perhaps, arbitrarily — it’s a loop. Caputo without Tillich is the perhaps unmoored from the ground of being, and the perhaps without ground becomes indistinguishable from nihilism. For Caputo, the posture is always yes, perhaps — yes to the openness, yes to the maybe, yes to the event that may or may not come. But eschatology reverses the order. It is not yes, perhaps. It is perhaps, yes. The perhaps trembles — but it trembles toward a yes. A yes that is already prophesied in the future-past: the yes of reconciliation, the yes of the ground of being. This doesn’t mean that the answer is to abandon the risky perhaps for the idealist’s certainty. But what we do need is the eschatological perhaps: the dangerous ‘perhaps, yes’ held within the arc of the eternal view.

This is where I usher in Heidegger from the back door: there is still this overarching metaphysic of Being seeking to realise itself — of “being-toward-death”, which is being-toward-the-faultline. In Tillich’s words, our telos toward the “ground of being”, toward ultimate reconciliation. The movement wants to rest, to reconcile being with its ground — even the Eastern traditions, in their own way, converge on this same point: stillness as the ultimate horizon. We cannot see the destination. We cannot deduce it. But the Book of Life, read sub specie aeternitatis, shows us that the arc bends. And the true power of Revelation is that it does not prophesy like Nietzsche. In this light, Nietzsche’s Übermensch is not an unforeseeable being to-come, but an unforeseeable future-present that has come — a retroactive prophecy from the future. If the Last Man [Letzter Mensch] was already fulfilled in the Old Testament, by Revelation the Übermensch has already come to pass, and all we have to say is perhaps to the accomplished work.

And when we read the Book of Life as a whole, sub specie aeternitatis, the ghost of Wittgenstein returns: “telos“, “teleology”, “purpose”, “meaning”, “movement”, “direction”, “orientation” — it’s all linguistic moot, trembling around the question of where a movement is going, and whether it goes anywhere at all. What all these words are groping toward is this: dialectic cannot be movement for movement’s sake. Even the groping itself implies a direction. That’s what Hegel decisively meant by the “end of history” — and I don’t think his end of history is something to come forever, à-venir forever. Žižek reads Hegel as this perpetual negation without arrival — a dialectic where the end of history is always deferred. But perpetual negation without arrival is indistinguishable from the nihilist loop we’ve already refused. Perhaps Žižek has not read Revelation — or is pre-Revelation. The eschatological perhaps is not perpetual negation. It is not perhaps after perhaps after perhaps with no ground beneath it. It is ‘perhaps to the yes’ — a perhaps that trembles toward the bend and bow from the end. We cannot name the destination. We cannot describe it from this side of the faultline.

And this is where Kafka’s parable of the Messiah becomes indispensable: the Messiah will come not on the last day, but on the day after the last day. Because every time Žižek’s dialectical motor turns, it is not yet the last day. But when the Messiah comes — and you have noticed that he has come, and Žižek himself has noticed that he has come — that is when the Messiah has most truly come. The realisation is always retroactive. What is to come will have always been meant to come. And the Bible already shows us this structure at the first salvation event: on the road to Emmaus, two disciples walk alongside the risen Christ without recognising him. They talk with him, they listen to him, they share the road — and it is only later, in the breaking of the bread, that their eyes are opened and they know who he was. The event was present before it was recognised. Meaning becomes legible retroactively. Revelation becomes embodied after the fact.

And that’s the end of the Book of Life. The whole movement is the swing of an existence through life’s stages to reconcile with itself. The structure of a human life recapitulates the structure of salvation history and salvation future. Caputo’s events live as the unforeseeable moments, but in the scheme of an entire life, they rest as intervals. And here is where I will add to Caputo’s charge: the new breed of theologians must not shy away from eschatology and from the ethic of Revelation, that is, to live the eschatological perhaps. We do not know what comes after the faultline. But we know the movement bends toward reconciliation. This is what the ending of the Book of Life shows us in future-past tense. What, where, why, when, how? — we do not know; this is the truly unforeseeable event — the death that comes that brings about the afterlife, the new day, the new dawn. This is the true reckoning of the unforeseeable. Everything else sits within the dialectic: being trying to reconcile with its ground.

And so we circle back to where we began. The Bible is not merely addressed to you. The Bible is the whole arc of your being, from the first Adamic unity through the fall through to salvation, and then every reconfiguration and back again, going past the stroke of death, just like Christ himself did. Yes! The Bible is not something you read. It is not a historical document. It is not your prophecy, nor is it your biography. It is your Book of Life. The Bible is you — here and now.

Coda

The Bible is an impossibly rich document. If you try and read into everything I’m writing here to figure out how I’m wrong in this or that way or are doing scripture in bad faith, you will most definitely find it. But if you try and read it for what I’m trying to do — as inspired by Caputo’s call for a new species of theologians, giving us a new reading of what has been dormant for hundreds of years — then you would see what it is I’m doing here, and you would most likely have either something to chew on or something to change about it. After all, as Paul writes: “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Sola scriptura is the letter. Scriptura viva is the spirit. Perhaps this is exactly why Caputo calls for a new species of theologians — our great commission has never been to clean the dust off old parchments, but to spread the living Word. This is the task that I have undertaken — to spread the living Word in a manner true for me and, I hope, true for others too. If you look for bad faith in what I am writing, you will find it. If you look for heresy, something to spit out, you will find it. But if you look for aliveness and good faith, I sure hope to — and pray — you will find it too.