God as immanent transcendence in Mark C. Taylor and John D. Caputo

This article aims at describing and evaluating Mark C. Taylor's and John D. Caputo's ideas about God as immanent transcendence. In the first part, the article provides a basic typology of immanent transcendence; the second and third parts present Taylor's and Caputo's philosophies of religion. It is shown that the two authors emphasize two different aspects of immanent transcendence which strongly affect their understandings of God. In Taylor, God is described in terms of imagination, while Caputo refers to God as an event. In the final section, the article then, for heuristic purposes, introduces a distinction between “pagan,” “Judaic,” and “Christian” interpretations of God as immanent transcendence, and argues that Taylor's God of imagination is more “pagan” than “Christian” and that Caputo's God of the event exemplifies a “messianic Judaism.” Here the article offers a few critical remarks as it attempts to develop an outline of a more “Christian” understanding of immanent transcendence.