Pauper God

John D. Caputo: "Luis Cruz-Villalobos sets about to bring the theological matter to poetic word, he is not engaged in a work of ornamentation. He has struck the deepest root and touched the most ancient nerve of theology, which is that theology is poetry before it is doctrine; that is world-creation before it is creed; that it is poiesis before it is hardened over into a logic; that it breathes the words of life and death, of suffering and joy, before it allows its words to succumb to the formulaies of orthodoxy and its canons. Theology is song before it is the stuff of a summa or of the councils. That is why the New Testament describes itself not as istoria, a sober historical record of the past, an accurate representation of the facts of the matter, but as euvangelion, a glad message, good news proclaimed to the poor and the imprisoned, a proclamation of the year of the jubilee. A gospel is not a predicative discourse but a promissory one. The year of the jubilee is the fiftieth year, the year that follows seven times seven, where everything is forgiven and we start out all over again. Fifty is not a number to be counted, a calendar date to be calculated, but a hope, a prayer, a dream, a messianic expectation, a marker of what is to-come, a symbol of a promise, and the Scriptures are its song."