I"m putting the finishing touches on a paper that Mark Ohm and I are writing for the Subverting the Norms II conference on postmodern theology (among other cool things, our first chance to see John Caputo), and I'm flummoxed by my inability to find a passage from Kurt Vonnegut.
Anyhow, if I remember correctly, somewhere Kurt Vonnegut says that the moral point of the crucifixion story is that God doesn't get revenge. So you've got this being who has been wronged as badly as anyone could be wronged (his offspring tortured and murdered), and who has the power to crush the perpetrators, but he still forgoes revenge ("Forgive them for they know not what they've done.") And such a being is held to be worthy of the very highest reverence.
From this one can argue that if the moral point is one of forgiveness (and I think it should be read this way), then supernatural talk in the Bible does not create a conservative extension (in the proof theoretic sense) of the non-supernatural part. Rather, God as a fictional character* is actually necessary to deriving the moral truth in the same manner that impossibilities such as frictionless planes are necessary to derive physical truth in physics thought experiments.
All of this may or may not be plausible as a theory of fiction and religious texts. My main concern today is just whether I'm correct in remembering Vonnegut as somewhere interpreting the point of the crucifixion as God's not taking revenge? If not him, anyone else of note?
[*Note: If one attends to apophantic and contemplativeve traditions in all major world religions, then there is another sense in which God is necessarily fictional. Our stories about God are doomed to be caricatures, attempting to say what cannot be said. This is one of the reasons I'm so hyped about seeing Caputo's papers, since I"ve been told that he ties Derrida to the apophantic traditions in a very plausible manner.]
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