The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?

The rediscovery of the Apostle Paul by atheistic or agnostic European philosophers is one of the most striking developments in recent philosophy – and certainly one of keen interest to the church. These philosophers view Paul as having a revolutionary understanding of authority and politics. Bringing together Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and Creston Davis, who has been a student of both, this book reflects on Paul’s new moment in secular philosophy. In a debate format, Žižek brings Marxist and post-Marxist ideas into a discussion with Milbank about the influence of Paul. The book also includes a contribution from Catherine Pickstock.

I’ve engaged a bit of this “rediscovery” in Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, which may be engaged by Milbank in chapter 8 of Paul’s New Moment, entitled “Thinking Backwards, Again! Badiou and the Death of Philosophy.” I look forward to possibly reading this one, though Žižek and Milbank’s sparring previously proved a bit tiresome. Adam Kotsko, author of Žižek and Theology has written of Žižek (and then Milbank) some thoughts I’m tempted agree with:

What I do find important is that very bizarre thing that seems to have happened in Christ and in his wake. People who help me, directly or indirectly, to think about that wierd (sic) happening in new or more rigorous ways inspire gratitude in me. People who do not inspire boredom and frustration in me – or in the case of Milbank, both. I think that’s probably a more helpful way of divvying things up, if we must so divvy.

Notice also Baker’s description, which is searching for a different audience, it seems:

Are there moments in Christian history when non-Christians in some ways understand Christianity better than Christians? The church fathers and mothers often did especially acute theology because they could remember well what it meant to inhabit non-Christian philosophies and religions. The Hindu Ghandi saw and acted on something in Christ’s witness that many confessing Christians overlooked. Today, some leading secular thinkers have turned to a surprising source: the Apostle Paul. The rediscovery of Paul by atheistic or agnostic European philosophers is one of the most striking developments in recent philosophy – and certainly one of keen interest to the church.

Bringing together Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, and Creston Davis, who has been a student of both, this book reflects on Paul’s new moment in secular philosophy. In a debate format, Zizek brings Marxist and post-Marxist ideas into a discussion with Milbank about the influence of Paul. The book also includes a contribution from Catherine Pickstock.

Paul’s New Moment will be of interest to theologians, philosophers, cultural critics, and literary scholars.

A helpful biblical example can be found in Acts 2, where Luke tells us that God’s Spirit fell on

Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs.” (Acts 2.9-11)

Andrew F. Walls, in his essay Evangelical and Ecumenical: The Rise and Fall of the Early Church Model, argues that diversity was the norm in the first-century church:

Cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith. Two diverse systems of Christian living – one might almost say two parallel Christianities – existed side by side in a single church.” (Evangelical, Ecumenical, and Anabaptist Missiologies in Conversation, 33)

Thus, pluralism as such should not be condemned outright, since both Jews and Gentiles shared faith in Jesus, but expressed that faith in divergent ways.

In his book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Lesslie Newbigin offers a helpful distinction between cultural and religious pluralism, the latter of which he defines as

the belief that the differences between the religions are not a matter of truth and falsehood, but of different perceptions of the one truth; that to speak of religious beliefs as true or false is admissible.

(In an attempt to simplify the concepts presented here, I have opted to retain use of the word pluralism instead of relativism, though the latter would, at times, be preferable. This is largely due to it’s use – and definition – by Lesslie Newbigin.)

He concludes, in pluralistic societies, “[r]eligious belief is a private matter.” (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 14) The effect of modern pluralism is, of course, a result of similar thinking to what was previously addressed in postmodernism, coupled with a highly individualized Western society. Even more troubling is how postmodern, atheistic cultural theorists use biblical revelation to argue for an increased secularism, including Alain Badiou, who after quoting Galatians 3.28, goes on to state “how appropriate, for we who will unproblematically replace God by this or that truth.” (Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 9) Badiou’s rendering reads, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female”, purposely leaving out any reference to ‘in Christ.’” (9)

Similar to our previous venture into the idols of modernity, there are idols of postmodern secularism as well. Lesslie Newbigin, in his essay Evangelism in the Context of Secularization, puts it bluntly:

In the end, the society we have is not a secular society but a pagan society, a society in which men and women are giving their allegiance to no-gods… The “secular” society is not a neutral area into which we can project the Christian message. It is an area already occupied by other gods. (Mission Legacies, 48)

Of course, it would be entirely naïve or plainly ignorant to assert that such “no-gods” of money, power, and sex are not, in some sense, worshiped by those a part of Christian community. At the same time, however, we should recognize their response to the call of God on their lives is, at least in part, a commitment to kill off these idols as much as possible, as they seek to follow Jesus – whether or not they are entirely successful in doing so.

All followers of Jesus are called not only to do so personally, but also to seek to encourage others toward this end as well. As John H. Westerhoff asserts,

Christianity is a way of life. Therefore, from the beginning it has been the responsibility of all baptized Christians to proclaim the gospel in word and deed.” (The Study of Evangelism, 239)

This way of life requires a continual reorientation toward the person of Christ, instead of baptizing Christian truth for atheistic, politically correct rhetoric, as seen by Badiou above.

In his article on W.A. Visser ’t Hooft, Newbigin asserts,

[e]vangelism needs a measure of religious freedom and therefore religious pluralism, or at least religious plurality, while the Christian missionary must proclaim the total lordship of Jesus over all of life. Its raison d’être is to being all men and women to Christ. (Mission Legacies, 120)

In is necessary, then, for Christians to be those who scatter into the world, proclaiming Jesus as the Lord of Life, and yet, a word should also be said regarding the role of such people also to gather in worship. The pluralist society, of course, is known for its multiplicity of options, which affects everything we do, even down to how we order a cup of coffee. And yet, for those who have scattered, it is integral to their discipleship that they also gather, that they might see:

This way of life is a consequence of faith, best understood as perception. Christian faith is a particular way of perceiving life and our lives. It manifests itself in believing and thinking, in trusting and loving, in worshiping and obeying, but fundamentally it is a way of “seeing.” (The Study of Evangelism, 239)

Note also, Lesslie Newbigin: “[t]he first evangelism in the New Testament… is, strictly speaking, news, and it requires an immediate response in action. There is immediate excitement. People flock to hear.” (The Study of Evangelism, )

Thus, in a highly individualized, pluralistic culture, our role is to not only scatter, but to gather, to see the world through a missiological lens, by which we can recognize the presence of the God who is at work in a plurality of places. Though previously alluded to, we must, at this point, say it plainly: though God is at work in a plurality of places, the call of Christ is to accept Him as Lord and Savior, wherever we find ourselves – and to wherever He takes us.

I was reminded of these videos created as a final project for a course last fall with Ryan Bolger – Church in Contemporary Culture – when someone made a comment on them via YouTube. Watching them again is like reading an old paper or listening to an old sermon, remembering where I was at and what I was reading back then.

To understand just how radically political Jesus actually was, we only have to ask why he was crucified. Clearly he was seen as such a major threat to the political powers who governed his land (both the Romans and the ruling Jewish establishment) that they saw only one way to deal with the challenged he presented – to remove that challenge by removing him through political execution. (The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, 307)

In light of His crucifixion, of course, Jesus’ previously triumphant disciples quickly disperse. Commenting upon the section in the Apostle’s Creed which addresses this event, Karl Barth notes that at this point in the Credo, “the word of the believer completely coincides with the word of the unbeliever.” (Credo, 385) While it goes without saying that the three days in which Jesus remained in sheol were not experienced by His disciples as the high point of Christian community, His resurrection from the dead powerfully reinvigorates God’s initial purposes in Creation.

There is a great irony in John 20, where Mary’s assumes Jesus is the gardener, because in one sense, he is! (see Wright, The Challenge of Jesus) Jesus’ pronouncement of judgment on the Temple system, the destruction of His bodily Temple and its resurrection from the dead renews the Creator’s original purpose. It is in this light that Kirk rightly notes

[t]he Church is a ‘fellowship of the resurrection’, an event of the past which anticipates the transformation of all decay and corruption into new life. The Church is like a pin attracted to the magnet of the coming restoration of God’s rule over the whole of life. (What is Mission?, 218)

Following Jesus’ resurrection, of course, Jesus renews the call to “go” and “bless” through The Great Commission. After his ascension, God sends the third person of the Trinity, His Spirit “upon the whole community and upon each one of the members of that community. The Spirit creates koinonia, community with a purpose, to call all things to conversion and reconciliation in Jesus Christ.” (The Good News of the Kingdom, 135) This Spirit of koinonia is evident especially throughout the book of Acts, where it empowers Jesus’ disciples to continue His healing ministry.

Most notably for our study, of course, are episodes that involve the Temple, like the one found in Acts 3, where Luke sets the stage thusly: “One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer – at three in the afternoon.” (Acts 3.1) We should note, therefore, that even in light of Jesus’ proclamation of the destruction of the Temple, His disciples were drawn to it centripetally to continue their religious activity. This activity, however, did not preclude them from both healing in the Temple and proclaiming the good news of Jesus, even when it resulted in their immediate arrest. Furthermore, Peter’s message interestingly connects their interaction as well as Jesus crucifixion and resurrection to the story of Abram.

In his message following this healing, Peter not only connects what the people have just witnessed to the story of Jesus but to Abraham. He does this at the beginning of his word (‘The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus’ [v.13]), and then again at the end (‘You are the heirs of the prophets and of the covenant God made with your fathers. He said to Abraham, ‘Through your offspring all peoples on earth will be blessed.’… [Acts 3.25]). (The Mission of God, 246)

In Acts 8, conversely, the Temple is presented as a precursor, when an Ethiopian eunuch fulfills Isaiah 56.7 being introduced to Jesus not in the holy place but on his journey home through an encounter with Philip. Another interesting text is found in Acts 15, where James brings together two seemingly opposing ideas, namely the eschatological restoration of God’s “fallen tent” alongside the inclusion of Gentile nations. It is due to the implications of passages like these that we begin to find fault with Karl Barth’s assertion that the ecclesia is both the people of God as well as “the place where an assembly has been held, and is to be held again and again.” (Credo, 137)

These texts from Acts reach their highpoint, however, in Paul’s speech at the Areopagus, found in chapter 17. He asserts, rather boldly,

[t]he God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. (Acts 17.24-25)

Harvie Conn helpfully explicates the implications of Paul’s statement when he notes

Jehovah was no local urban deity; his territorial claims were bounded not by one ethnic city but by “the heavens and the earth”. (sic) In the eschatological shadow of the urban heavens and earth soon to come, the church proclaimed itself as the true city and its “city-zenship” in Christ, the cosmic beneficient “tyrant”/kurios of the city. (The Good News of the Kingdom, 99)

This, of course, reminds us of Solomon’s assertion, that God could not be held captive even in the highest heavens. Furthermore, though speaking to a thoroughly “pagan” (though “quite religious”) audience Paul’s statement questions the role of the Temple itself, a question many are asking regarding church attendance still today. Before addressing this question – and its missiological implications for postmodern ministry – we must first briefly address two passages that powerfully reorient our understanding of the Temple.

We could cautiously assume that Paul’s further deliberation regarding the nature of the Temple revealed even deeper theological and missiological implications. Though the terminology dates back at least to Jesus – and possibly even to the Creation narratives – Paul’s letter to the Ephesians most powerfully states how we are now to understand the Temple. Indeed, in light of the revelation and indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit, Paul can powerfully assert

you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. (Ephesians 2.19-22)

Note also the implications of 1st Peter 2.4-10:

As you come to him, the living Stone – rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him – you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For in Scripture it says:

“See, I lay a stone in Zion,
a chosen and precious cornerstone,
and the one who trusts in him
will never be put to shame.”
Now to you who believe, this stone is precious.
But to those who do not believe,
“The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone,” and,
“A stone that causes men to stumble
and a rock that makes them fall.” They stumble because they disobey the message – which is also what they were destined for. But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Even Gentiles have become

“nothing less than… part of the very temple of God. They may have been physically excluded from the inner parts of the temple in Jerusalem, as Gentiles, but spiritually they now constitute the dwelling place of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit.” (The Mission of God, 340)

In postmodern engagement with Christian tradition, texts like these provide the foundation by which philosophers argue that the Judeo-Christian tradition is to be credited for the demise of the sacred into secular. (see, for instance, After the Death of God, After Christianity and Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism) This dangerous type of thinking, in turn, has encouraged contemporary culture to increasingly withdraw from church involvement. This need not be the case. Indeed, what we see in these texts is not so much the dissolution of sacred into secular as much as the sacred being known in and through the secular, or more specifically, through those who have been called according to the purposes of God.

In fact, such postmodern Christian thinkers are not radical enough, for in joining together the sacred and secular, they have distanced themselves from the revelation of God through His Living Word, Jesus Christ, and the Written Word, the Holy Scriptures. If we view these passages in light of God’s whole revelation then, the result is not a nihilistic estrangement, but rather a missiological calling.

So the centrifugal mission of the New Testament church had its centripetal theology also: the nations were indeed being gather in – not to Jerusalem or to the physical temple or to national Israel – but to Christ as the center and to the new temple of God that he was building through Christ as a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. (The Mission of God, 524)

Or, put more clearly, “All of us have been drawn into the church catholic so that the church may become increasingly universal. Then we are sent out to make disciples of others.” (Mission on the Way, 113)

For Lacan, creative sublimation and the death drive are strictly correlative: the death drive empties the (sacred) Place, creates the Clearing, the Void, the Frame, which is then filled in the object ‘elevated to the dignity of the Thing’. Here we encounter the third kind of suicide: the ‘suicide’ that defines the death drive, symbolic suicide – not in the sense of ‘not dying really, just symbolically’, but in the moreprecise sense of the erasure of the symbolic network that defines the subject’s identity, of cutting off all the links that anchor the subject in its symbolic substance. (The Fragile Absolute, 27)

This provides a helpful starting point for our engagement with Jesus’ destruction of the temple as the model for de(con)structing the ecclesiological trappings of contemporary culture. Here, Žižek’s engagement with Lacan’s reading of Freud creates a chain of signifiers which seeks contextualize this concept for our present day.

At the same time, however – and to put it in the form of a Žižekian negative question – does not this concept and it’s chain of signifiers point back all the way to the first century Event (which contains it’s own signifier in the Olive Tree)? As with Žižek’s habit of negative questioning – and to the possible horror of orthodox theologians – I too am hoping to translate “one system of meanings into another system of meanings,” (Slavoj Žižek, 4) namely Žižek’s engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis into Christian cultural engagement.

The death drive is further explicated in Žižek’s On Belief, where he more explicitly equates it with Christ and Christian praxis. In engaging with Camus’ “only real philosophical problem,” he notes

We can see why Freud use the term “death drive”: the lesson of psychoanalysis is that humans are not simply alive, but possessed by a strange drive to enjoy life in excess of the ordinary run of things – and “death” stands simply and precisely for the dimension beyond ordinary life. (On Belief, 104)

This, Žižek argues, is exemplified by Jesus’ crucifixion, wherein Jesus does not do our work for us, but instead – as he argues repeatedly – opens up the possibility for us to do the work by which we are able to redeem ourselves (see Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, 101; The Fragile Absolute, 119). In the midst of his continued engagement with Christ, including his betrayal and sacrifice, it is a wonder that Žižek never examines Jesus action in the temple, which, we must recognize, is – historically speaking – the precursor to his crucifixion.

Indeed, the temple Event exemplifies the above quotation, in that Jesus not only seeks to “enjoy life in excess of the ordinary run of things,” but to extend this possibility to all. As Žižek notes in the conclusion of his examination of the death drive, Christ came that we might“have life, and that [we] might have it more abundantly.” (On Belief, 104; John 10.10) It is because of this that Jesus purposely rode into town on a donkey and immediately entered the temple, ultimately self-sabotaging himself in fulfillment of his mission to enact God’s Kingdom and thus acting “against [his] own interests.” (Violence, 87; see also Žižek and Theology, 114)

This concept of death drive functions, for Žižek, as a vanishing mediator, a self-referential negativity. While one of Žižek’s regular philosophical engagements, Alain Badiou, sees with the Truth Event as a radical New Beginning in itself, Žižek has asserts that “a negative gesture of detaching oneself from a given situation… is absolutely necessary is something new is to emerge.” (Žižek and Theology, 79) In this way, he agrees with René Girard, who sees the crucifixion as the inevitable result of the failure of Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God and the necessary sacrifice to end all sacrifices.

While Žižek is reticent – if not altogether silent – to discuss Jesus’ “mission,” we should recognize Jesus’ “self referential negativity” not only in his crucifixion, but his continued ministry of “preaching on the hillside [thus] making himself a target of political and religious elites,” (Žižek and Theology, 154) and the culminating judgment on the temple system. (see The Fragile Absolute, 140)

What could this mean for our temple system(s)?