The Weakness of "God"

These days I don't see any descriptive power in the word "God" - that is, I don't think it means anything, and when it does, it means something that doesn't make much sense to me. When people use the word "God" they usually mean something that is both (1) the ultimate cause of every physical thing and (2) the absolute form of moral correctness. Why the cause of everything and the sum of moral principles have to be referenced in one single breath, and how they even can be referenced in one single breath, is beyond me.

Modern theology is often in the business of explaining away God to the point that He/She/It/Them/We cannot be thought of as the conventional sum of (1) + (2). Luther and Calvin mangled (2) to the point that morality was thought of as simply God's preferences. Deism, and its cousin Unitarianism, emphasized (2) to the demotion of (1).

Contemporary, chic theology today does the same thing to a greater degree. On one side of contemporary theology, God is described as "the Ground of all Being" - a phrase which triggers within me the question "so what?". A God reduced all the way to (1) and nothing else doesn't give me any indication of how I should behave, what kinds of relationships I should have, or how I should cultivate my own character. Or at least, I don't see how it does.

On the other side of contemporary theology is Caputo's weak God. This can be thought of as a kind of (2) without any (1). I should mention, that It is a very special kind of (2). In The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, he writes:

God, the event harbored by the name of God, is present at the crucifixion, as the power of the powerlessness of Jesus, in and as the protest against the injustice that rises up from the cross, in and as the words of forgiveness, not a deferred power that will be visited upon one’s enemies at a later time. God is in attendance as the weak force of the call that cries out from Calvary and calls across the epochs, that cries out from every corpse created by every cruel and unjust power.

(Yes, I copied this from Wikipedia. All Hail Wikipedia!)

To my utter confusion, I hear the same people in the same service use these two kinds of God concepts which to me look like total opposites. They'll preach a sermon in which they use the name "God" purely as a moral claim. Then they'll pray in the name of "The Creator, The Sustainer, and The Redeemer" - as if a pure moral claim would then go ahead and enforce itself.

The weak God is a nice idea to flirt with, but the 3-letter G-word has such a history of referring to both (1) and (2) that even the hippest of religious leaders are going to use it in both the contexts of Might and Right. The 3-letter G-word is really an open invitation for everyone to conflate power and morality. And so, I think the kind of religion that will come about in the New Reformation (if we're worthy enough to have it) will be one where the word "God" is conspicuously absent.