What can we still believe about "God"? Reflections after Antonio Negri, The Labor of Job:

Perhaps the most radical book in the ancient Hebrew canon (since being united in a single collection, known as "the Bible"), the book of Job does demolish the idea of theodicy, of God as a power over Being as a totality and which justifies all events. The challenge for 'believers' is whether the concept of God itself can survive this demolition. But the God of theodicy (1) is linked to, and ultimately dependent upon secular authorities constituted as absolute, and (2) retains links to paganism that the legendary origins of Judaism mean to break with. Maimonides's negative theology lends itself to the latter (and the refusal of the former) as does his claim that much of ancient Judaism was a compromise with paganism designed to help wean people gradually from it. Abraham argued with God (and won), setting a paradigm that has found various repetitions, including the famous Talmudic story in which rabbinical interpreters reject as inappropriate the voice of God asserting a claim to his will. The divine in Judaism, of course, inseparable from ideas of the good; it may or may not have power of everything, but it cannot be a force for evil (except maybe as a mediation of the good). But if evil sometimes does triumph, and the power of the good in nature and history has no guarantee, then the divine must be separated from power. God is not an absolute power, and does not control nature. This means we can still be committed to the good, but without guarantees, as it is contingent. That may make life tragic. What religion needs above all, with or without 'God', is the ability of man to be committed to the good. Why should anything else be needed? Religion can tell us how to do this, and so how to live good lives. It can no more guarantee happiness than it can justify some project of domination, nationalist or otherwise. It can motivate hope. It is not a certainty, because not a knowledge, and not a knowledge, because it is not a power (at least in the sense of dominating, perhaps not of making and being able to do something, or potentiality). It may be a desire. We can call it love. Love would not exist if the good were guaranteed. Nor would justice; it only exists if injustice is also possible. This does not seem to me such a scandal. That injustice sometimes triumphs is. So is death itself. But that people die does not prevent them from living. It may even be part of what makes it possible. After all, most everything has its opposite. The idea of God does not trouble me, but that of empire does. Most religious people believe in a divine empire. Theirs, then, is the scandal. In Europe, the modern idea of revolution involved that also. Ni Dieu ni maître: we need honor neither a worldly nor divine monarchy. This was the challenge of modern thought, of Nietzsche and Heidegger, of the Holocaust, and of the maturity of the Western mind.