For Christian faith God is known only as that which happens: not as a being or as a thing, but as an event. The ‘I am’ to Moses; the ‘It is the Lord who speaks’ to the prophets; the ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ to the apostles; the rabbi eating fish with his friends by the lake shore; the eucharistic celebration of the gathered community. Here, the event of God is the fact that ‘something happens’ after which nothing is the same again. The event disrupts our world, interrupts our narratives, dislodges our stories – the tales we tell without thinking. It is the ‘it happens’ rather than the ‘what happens’ that constitutes the eventhood of the event. Here it is God who happens; and in this happening a universe is given, a site for the beginning of a story.

That God is not a thing – not a being or even Being itself – is the knowledge lost and found in the history of modernity. It was lost when God became all too comprehensible, an object of the speculative intelligence, grasped by reason. It was found again, when the God of the rationalists died, proving unnecessary for the needs of modern man, who could order the world, conceptually and practically, without need of deity. The weakening of modernity does not return us to the reasonable God of the philosophers, but it does allow us to think again the radical incomprehensibility of God's event.

The idea of God's event has a history like any other. It does not convey divine alterity of itself, but only as deployed in response to certain conceptualities, and then only poorly.