I pray to God to rid me of God, to make me free of God

"If someone maintains, as just about everyone in the mainstream theistic tradition maintains, that God is the Supreme Being, the highest being, then the proper theological response is to deny it. To such a concept [of God as that kind of object] and to such attempts atheism is the right religious and theological reply.

Whatever we call it, the future of theology lies in getting past this idea of God as the highest being and, since we cannot get higher, since classical "high" theology claims the high ground, the very highest, we have to dig deeper, down to the roots. Radical theology starts by bidding adieu to God. This is not weakening "God," but letting the Supreme Being of strong theology weaken into something more truly God-like.

Garden variety theists and atheists are both arguing about whether there is or there is not a Supreme Being.

Atheists attempt to disprove or prove the existence of the same half-blasphemous and mythological concept of God as the theologians are bending their efforts to prove.

The New Atheists in particular are trying to break down a door that is already wide open in radical theology, so if you lead a charge like that you will end up flat on your face.

Similarly, even agnostics are simply withholding judgment on the existence of this Supreme Being.

Instead, we should look to the mystics, like Meister Eckhart, who famously remarked that he prays to God to rid him of God, to make him free of God.

God, or what is going on in the name of God, is that from which finite things arise and into which they return, and so God is the inexhaustible womb of all things, to employ a more feminine and less patriarchal figure.

I think saying that God and high theology are to be understood as poems will solve a lot of problems

I propose the best interests of theology are served if theology recognizes that it is in fact, more properly speaking, a "theopoetics," and ultimately, at the end of the day, a theopoetics of the kingdom of God.

If you are wanting in poetic soul you have no business wanting to do theology."

[excerpted from John Caputo's The Folly of God]