Curtis A. Bronzan

In this post, I continue arguing for the deconstruction of the church (previously here and here).

In a public debate with anthropologist René Girard, Gianni Vattimo summed up his philosophical project, stating, “[e]verything depends on an effort to be faithful to the basic purpose of Heidegger’s philosophy, even against Heidegger himself.” (Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith, 83) Indeed, Vattimo has sought to extend Heidegger’s writing by elucidating the dissolution of metaphysical pensiero forte in favor of what he terms weak thought.

This necessarily includes Heidegger’s Verwindung, explicated well by Thomas Guarino: “[t]he task is one of healing, which is also a kind of twisting and even deformation, because modernity must be disciplined and rethought in our own epoch and culture.” (Vattimo and Theology, 7) In his public debate, Vattimo likewise asserts, “The overcoming of metaphysics – which in Heidegger’s view, as readers probably know, can only be Verwindung, and acceptance-distortion – will prepare a new way of conceiving Being that might also reopen the possibility for religious experience…” (CTWF, 82)

Such an ‘acceptance-distortion’ adopted by Vattimo functions as a corollary to our project here, namely how to appropriate Jesus’ first-century temple action to twenty-first century ecclesiology. As we will see, such healing, twisting, and deforming truly ‘depends on an effort to be faithful to the basic purpose’ of Jesus’ countercultural, counter-temple mission.

As aforementioned, Vattimo’s project continues the thought of Heidegger and Nietzsche, the latter of whom marked the demise of modernity with his famous – and largely misunderstood – phrase “God is dead.”  Guarino notes, “it is Nietzsche’s manifesto “God is dead” that marks the real passage from modernity.” (VT, 6) Metaphysics, it has been argued, sought to enforce an extrinsic, final norm, restricting human freedom, putting an end to the discussion of humanity’s becoming in history, jeopardizing the liberty of human self-creation and ending the continuing conversation of historical consciousness. (VT, 39)

While the majority of Christian history has rejoiced in such strong foundational principles, Vattimo argues it is rather the demise of metaphysics that is the true fulfillment of the Christian message. In After the Death of God, Vattimo asserts, “Christianity is a stimulus, a message that sets in motion a tradition of thought that will eventually realize its freedom from metaphysics.” (After the Death of God, 35) Thus, instead of mourning this loss of truth, all Christians should rejoice in this fulfillment of the Christian message, which seeks to demolish and replace strong constructs. From the outset, then, we can see an apt comparison with Jesus’ temple proclamation, if we simply substitute the metaphysical structures for the first-century physical structure: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” (John 2.19)

This postmodern mindset has elsewhere been explicated as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv) Indeed, as Guarino asserts, “[i]n the postmodern age, we must live with endless contingencies rather than with secure and available foundations.” (VT, 7) While this sentiment may trouble many in the Christian West, Vattimo asserts that this is a positive development, as it keeps us from using God as a first principle, as if the Divine Being can be asserted as an uninterpreted reality. (See, in particular, Vattimo and Theology, 11)  Is this not, then, congruent with Jesus’ quotation of Isaiah 56.7 immediately following His prophetic temple action, wherein the structure points to the Divine rather than defining it? Indeed, the temple structure was meant to be “a house of prayer for all nations.” We are now in a position to further explicate the contribution of Vattimo’s “weak thought.”

The shift from metaphysics to weak thought is explicated well by a dialogue between Richard Rorty, Gianni Vattimo, and Santiago Zabala, in The Future of Religion. At the outset, Zabala identifies the metaphysical tradition as “dominated by the thought that there is something nonhuman that human beings should try to live up to – a thought that today finds its most plausible expression in the scientific conception of culture.” (The Future of Religion, 55-56) In response, Rorty summarizes weak thought in a highly Vattimian vein:

Cutting oneself of from the metaphysical Logos is pretty much the same thing as ceasing to look for power and instead being content with charity. The gradual movement within Christianity in recent centuries in the direction of the social ideals of the Enlightenment is a sign of the gradual weakening of the worship of God as power and its gradual replacement with the worship of God as love. (FR, 55-56)

In this way – even in the words of Rorty – we see Vattimo’s primary philosophical insight and its connection with Christian faith. Vattimo goes so far as to state “postmodern nihilism (the end of metanarratives) is the truth of Christianity. Which is to say that Christianity’s truth appears to be the dissolution of the (metaphysical) truth concept itself.” (51) Though his detractors have questioned whether the Torinese is more influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger than by the Christian Scriptures here, Vattimo would argue that the weakening of metaphysical thought is entirely congruent with the incarnation.  Vattimo defends himself thusly:

Lyotard and other theoreticians of postmodernism have neither noticed nor stated… that Nietzsche and Heidegger speak not only from within the modern process of dissolution of metanarratives but above all from within the biblical tradition. It is not so very absurd to assert that the death of God announced by Nietzsche is, in many ways, the death of Christ on the cross told by the Gospels.” (FR, 46)

He notes especially the kenotic hymn in Philippians 2.6-8, which asserts that in taking on human flesh, Jesus

being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death –
even death on a cross!

For the purposes of our project, then, we can extend this theory to include not only the event of the incarnation itself but, more precisely, the incarnation as it relates to Jesus’ death. While the Apostle Paul is quick to note the sacrificial death of Jesus, his writings never engage the historical reason behind his death, namely, the temple act. Therefore, we must ‘deconstruct’ Paul, recognizing that Jesus’ ‘obedient… death on a cross’ was the result of His justified judgment of the temple’s sacrificial system. In so doing, we are better prepared to accept the fullness of Vattimo’s insight, that “kenosis serves as a cipher or symbol of the essential message of the Gospel which is ‘love’ and ‘charity’ toward the other, especially charitable tolerance toward other interpretive ‘styles.’” (VT, 116)

Indeed, the kenosis of Jesus, especially regarding the love and charity He sought to extend through Israel’s central institution, is the essential message of the Gospel. See also Eugenio Trias:

In the course of all this, a symbolizing form or figure emerges that is conditioned in its turn by a determinate foundation: the matrix of the entire symbolic process. This matrix or matter provides physical support for the symbol. To present itself as a symbolic form or figure it must, of course, be formed or transformed. (Religion, 104)

This weakening of metaphysical structures in postmodern culture reveals that “[w]e live… in a world without a center, a Babel-like plurality, with an irreducible number of different Weltanschauungen.” (VT, 26) Again, while many Christians would mourn this as a loss, Vattimo rejoices in such pluralism, as he asserts in After Christianity: “our task is to build consensus in dialogue, without making any claims for absolute truth.” (After Christianity, 5) Again, we simply ask, is this not similar to the perspective offered by Jesus, following the destruction of the temple? Instead of a ‘den of robbers’, Jesus asserts that the temple is to be ‘a house of prayer for all nations’. Would this not be the center of ‘Babel-like plurality’?

Instead of asserting the preeminence of doctrinal truth claims, then, Vattimo sees the mission of the church as one that exercises caritas in the midst of pluralism. Guarino argues that for Vattimo, “secularization is the legitimate fruit of religious charity because it opens society to every point of view, thereby rejecting an aggressive religiosity that degenerates into fundamentalist ideology, seeking to exclude those viewpoints not conforming to the ‘prevailing wisdom.’” (VT, 20)

Instead of a violent ecclesiology then – which he might define as “an act of imposition on the other and her liberty”, (CTWF, 45) we are invited to see the fulfillment of Christian faith in and through the charity offered to our ‘other.’ Thus, such metaphysical claims were never meant to be characteristic of Christianity, since it “has its own form of rationality and justification; its truth warrants and criteria are to be found in the Christian community itself, not in universal standards that are imported and imposed from elsewhere.” (VT, 81) Though outside of our central text, the Gospels hold similar equations between exercising faith and the other, with Jesus even equating Himself with those in need: “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25.40)

As we have seen, Vattimo’s twenty-first century philosophical insights regarding the dissolution of metaphysics are applicable to Jesus’ first-century symbolic temple action. His insights regarding the need to perform a Verwindung could be compared to Derrida’s deconstructive efforts, each of which can lead us as we seek to reform the church. We further have seen the need for ecclesiology to renounce the strong structures of modernity, instead accepting the fluidity of postmetaphysical thought. If so, we can reaffirm our commitment to caritas, living into our divine calling, which could profoundly effect our postmodern culture. As Vattimo asserts, “our only chance for human survival rests in the Christian commandment of charity.” (FR, 54)

In this post, I continue looking at the deconstruction of the church by engaging with René Girard, who, being trained as an anthropologist and historian, has written extensively upon the inherent violent nature of cultural systems by thoroughly examining literature as well as engaging the founding myths of civilization(s). He is known for articulating the connection between sacrificial violence and religious systems, developing the theory of mimetic desire, and describing the scapegoat mechanism – three concepts intimately intertwined.

Girard argues that only the Judeo-Christian Scriptures give us the possibility of denying such violent, culturally inherited impulses. In Girard and Theology, Michael Kirwan states, “Jesus’ ferocious attack on Israel’s religious leaders is really an assault on a religious system which preserves its authority and integrity at the expense of sacrificial victims.” (GT, 83)

Thus, Girard is a necessary thinker for seeking to fashion a postmodern ecclesiology in light of Jesus destruction of the temple.

Mimetic theory builds on the insights of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who asserted that subjects desire what others possess, in defiance of the tenth commandment! Girard, however, postulates that our desires are even more rudimentary: specifically that we desire what we see others desiring. He stated in an interview that

the root of all conflict is… ‘competition’, mimetic rivalry between persons, countries, cultures. Competition is the desire to imitate the other in order to obtain the same thing he or she has, by violence if need be… Human relations are essentially relations of imitation, of rivalry. (GT, 22-23)

Could we not extend his statement to include even religious communities seeking to increase their attendance? Whenever difficulty arises in a given society, this mimesis leads to violence. To understand why this is so, we must turn our attention toward another of Girard’s theories, the scapegoat mechanism.

In his book The Scapegoat, Girard sets out by engaging with Guillaume de Machaut, a French poet in the mid-fourteenth century, who authored Judgment of the King of Navarre. In it, Guillaume describes what we now refer to as the Black Plague, which he wrongly believes was caused by Jews who purposely poisoned the town’s drinking water. Using this historical event – and more importantly Machaut’s explication of it – allows Girard to explicate how the Jews were scapegoated:

Ultimately, the persecutors always convince themselves that a small number of people, or even a single individual, despite his relative weakness, is extremely harmful to the whole of society. The stereotypical accusation justifies and facilitates this belief by ostensibly acting the role of mediator. (TS, 15)

An obvious corollary is evident in the Gospel accounts. Notice even in Mark, most likely the earliest account, that asserts,

the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have Pilate release Barabbas instead.
“What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked them.
“Crucify him!” they shouted.
“Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate.
But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”
Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified. (Mark 15.11-15)

Within this account we can easily recognize both the scapegoat mechanism applied to Jesus, as one who is presented by Pilate as an innocent victim, as well as mimetic desire, with the chief priests ‘stirring up the crowd’ to release Barabbas instead.

His reading of the Gospel accounts, especially through the lens of myth, leads Girard to continually argue for the victimization and innocence of Jesus. While ultimately, of course, this is undeniable, the way in which Girard does so betrays a historical understanding of Jesus’ temple action and its ramifications.

In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard states, “the Gospels are aware of what they are doing. They not only tell the truth about victims unjustly condemned, but they know they are telling it, and they know that in speaking the truth they are taking again the path of the Hebrew Bible.” (127) By reading the Gospel accounts as primarily literary texts, Girard fails to properly integrate the historical event that undergirds them. Thus, we must further deconstruct Girard’s deconstruction!

Again, without seeking to assert that Jesus’ crucifixion was somehow justified, notice Mark’s explanatory comment following the symbolic temple action and Jesus’ ‘teaching’: “The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.” (Mark 11.18) While the evangelist has revealed that the ‘chief priests and teachers of the law’ have been seeking to kill Jesus since the early chapters of Mark, it is this quotation that leads directly to the crucifixion.

Thus, Kirwan’s interpretation, that “Jesus symbolically completes his mission to Israel through the cleansing of the Temple, but instead of preaching resentful vengeance he moves towards a loving self-offering as an act of atonement for the collective force of human sin”, (GT, 38) is reversed. Indeed, it is the other way around: Jesus’ loving self-offering leads Him to symbolically complete his mission to Israel through the destruction of the Temple. Of course, as the fulfillment of the promised Messiah, Jesus’ judgment upon the temple system was entirely justified.

Contrary to the charge leveled against deconstruction, Girard’s theory vehemently relinquishes any emphasis on lack. Kirwan asserts,

mimetic theory renounces any kind of ‘pact with the negative’ which makes the sinfulness and need of the human beings the controlling factor in the narrative. The reality is the other way around: we only have a sense of the mess because Christ has been raised from the dead. (GT, 68)

It is striking, then, that both he and Girard include few of the historical implications of Jesus’ counter-temple movement, which need not be confined to the symbolic event that induces the temple authorities at the end of the synoptics, but could also be implied throughout Jesus’ continual mission to extend the Kingdom outside Israel’s central institution. To his credit, Girard does find great significance in Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 118:22; “The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone”, which is found in each of the synoptic Gospels, Acts, and 1st Peter. Kirwan notes, “‘The stone the builders rejected’ means that the fate of the scapegoated victim has become the great hermeneutical principle, enabling us to decode all such instances of persecution.” (GT, 84)

Though he does not engage specifically with Jesus destruction of the temple, we can recognize the importance of Girard’s thinking for our thesis. Indeed, Girard’s insight to the nature of religious systems and their violent foundations helps us recognize the possible implication of Jesus’ death, were we to fully recognize it in the way Girard reveals. And while we may not go so far as to assert that “no religious culture or institution has done a demonstratively better job of ‘deconstructing’ sacred violence than Christianity”, (GT, 123) we could agree that this ought to be the case. Indeed, Girard’s theory does present “a petite idée of infinite applicability, rather than yet another totalizing system”, (GT, 134) especially in light of our project here.

Jesus’ destructive temple action functions as the fulfillment of His counter-cultural, counter-temple movement which sought to emphatically extend the good news of the Kingdom to the other, in which Girard’s theory does assist. Engaging with Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Kirwan explains: “There is no change in ‘me’ without change in my relation to the other; nor is there any change in ‘me’ unless it is initiated by the other.” (GT, 51) This insight is perhaps most helpful, as it pertains specifically to Jesus’ proclamation, that the temple was to be “a house of prayer for all nations”, (Mark 11.17) necessarily implying engagement with the other – and the Other.

Got Kester Brewin’s new book Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures in the post today. Looks like the box had something of a difficult time en route from the UK, but the books inside are in good condition.

I can’t wait to get into it, but need to finish up some writing first (on Rene Girard, Jacques Derrida, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Gianni Vattimo). I’ll try to post some of that here.

After a couple nights of tossing and turning, I slept in for quite a while this morning. A little after 10am, I pulled myself out of bed, took the dog for a walk, grabbed some coffee, and set out for a lunch meeting in Pasadena.

I had a great lunch meeting with Barry Taylor, one of the professors with whom I’ve been studying toward my ThM, in the Fuller cafeteria. The food was palatable, the conversation brilliant (in the British sense of the term).

After picking up a few books at the bookstore (three as gifts, two for me), I headed off to mall near Hollywood to purchase a gift certificate for a friend. While there, I took a break from driving and dug into Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue (between Gianni Vattimo and René Girard – two authors that were a part of the lunchtime conversation, though I purchased the book just today).

Here’s some excerpts from the introduction:

This book… offers two voices in the contemporary intellectual debate that are engaged not in separating the two camps but in uniting them, on the basis of an intuition already partially elaborated by Max Weber, implicitly suggested and described by Eric Auerbach in Mimesis, and more recently argued by Marcel Gauchet, to the effect that secularization – and hence laicism – is, in substance, produced by Christianity. In other words, Christianity is the religion of the exit from religion, and democracy, the free market, civil rights, individual freedoms, and laicism have all been, if not precisely invented in the absolute sense, “facilitated” in their development and expression by the Christian cultures. Even Richard Rorty, a philosopher allergic to the religious, has recently conceded this – though without attempting an explanation of the historical reasons. (2)

In his polemic against Christianity, Nietzsche was able to discern the real anthropological kernel of religion: its sacrificial and victimizing origins. (6)

The nexus between religion and violence, which appears so striking to us today, comes about not because religions are intrinsically violent but rather because religion is above all a mode of knowledge about mankind’s violence and the ways of keeping it in check, about the “homeopathic” use of violence in order to control violence (from which derives Girard’s interpretation of the apparently cryptic passage in the Gospels about “Satan casting out Satan.”) (7)

For Girard, the Christian gospel (or, if one prefers, the New Testament) was the hermeneutic key that made it possible, in history, to reinterpret both mythology and the Hebrew Scriptures (or the Old Testament) as the gradual emergence into historical awareness of the violent and persecutory matrix of the social and cultural order, and to interpret the sacrifice of Christ as the moment of rupture of the equilibrium that had kept the symbolic-religious mechanism on which the archaic societies were based stable, recurring, and mythical. (8)

…Christianity is not a “religion” in the strict sense but a principle that destructures all the archaic religions and must temporarily clothe itself as an institutional “religion,” too, so as to be able to enter into dialogue with the historicity of religions. Like a Trojan horse, it penetrates the age-old citadel of the mentalities instituted by the natural religions and empties it from inside, adopting the language and symbolism of the religions but completely reversing their meaning, demystifying all the violence on which the walls of the citadel of the sacred had been erected. (8)

Vattimo the “progressive” tries to drag Girard the “conservative” onto his own terrain, asking him to accept all the theoretical consequences implicit in his own analysis of Christianity as the religion that reveals the victimizing foundation of human culture; that destructures all the natural religions from within, steering them toward their own disappearance; that heralds the deconstruction of all the rigid structures imposed by history: state or ecclesiastical apparatuses, authoritarian notions about truth and nature, and so on. (14)

The problem is that today, with the dissolution of any solid philosophical, political, ethical, or religious foundation, its place is taken by the caricatural version called fundamentalism, which, in fact, recuperates all the persecutory forms typical of the sacred. (18)

Can you tell I’m excited about this book?

Grades were due for the fall quarter at Fuller today, which means that after a couple busy weeks of grading 50+ final papers, I’m now able to return to some of my own research interests. I won’t begin actually writing my ThM thesis until this summer (after a required integration course in the spring), though this quarter I have the opportunity for another directed study with Barry Taylor, a professor who has significantly shaped my thinking in past courses as well as a previous directed study.

The first section of my ThM thesis will specifically examine Jesus’ action in the temple through detailed exegetical work. From there, however, I’m not exactly sure how best to proceed in arguing for a (post)modern de(con)struction of (our) temples that remain faithful to Jesus’ prophetic action.

As such, this quarter I’ll be examining the theological impact of a few different thinkers, some of whom I’m somewhat familiar with (Derrida, Vattimo, and Girard) and others of whom I’m not (Nietzsche, Rorty, and Foucault). Creating the reading list was rather difficult, especially considering T&T Clark’s recent “_____ and Theology” series as well as Baker’s Church and Postmodern Culture series. Ultimately, however, I’m excited about how it ended up – and am looking forward to conversations with Barry regarding the subject matter.

I’ve been meaning to see Gran Torino for a while now, though not out of a desire to actually see the film – instead just to see what all the hype was about. Clint Eastwood has never been too convincing an actor for me; his whole persona is in the same category as Schwarzenegger’s “I’ll be back” schtick.

As far as I’m concerned, Gran Torino continues that tradition, and includes others into it as well. For all the rave reviews the film has recieved, the acting was terrible. The story line, however, was fairly good – and made up for where the acting fell short.

A number of juxtapositions occur throughout the film, including the main character being called by his first name by nearly everyone he wishes would call him Mr. Kowalski. This somewhat recalls the symbolic nature of one’s name being changed following a “conversion” of sorts.

The town’s young priest is included in those who cannot seem to give him enough respect, and struggles to help him become a part of the church. Walt Kowalski’s neighbors, however, continually embrace him in tangible representations of love, despite his continually apparent – and rather flagrant – racism.

Gran Torino presents Mr. Kowalski as someone who had taken life in a time of war, but ultimately lays down his life in an effort to end the cycle of violence in his neighborhood, in order to “set others free.” René Girard (and, for that matter, John Howard Yoder) would be proud of Gran Torino’s concept of sacrifice, as one of Wally’s final lines is

I finish things.

And notice how be lies dead in the middle of the neighborhood.

While Vattimo (following Girard) is right to emphasize the pacifist nature of Jesus’ ministry – and the Incarnation as a whole – Slavoj Žižek’s concept of subjective violence may be helpful here, as he defines it as “a perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things.” (Violence, 2) In other words, though we ought to disregard the shallow insinuation that Jesus’ temple action was an objectively violent, militaristic coup, its prophetic significance cannot be missed.

Jesus’ temple action is his final attempt at perturbing the “normal, peaceful” violence of the first century religious elite in favor of the outcast and downtrodden. Thus, it is not only the Incarnation as the event, but rather – in a Derridean sense – the Event within the Incarnation that provides for the dissolution of the metaphysical God;

The substance of the Christian announcement is not Christ’s revelation of an eternal truth but rather an actual historical event. (After Christianity, 109)

For Vattimo, this “implies the end of an almighty, absolute, eternal God and thus the weakening of God.” (Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, 11, see also AC, 120) As aforementioned, Vattimo sees in Heidegger’s history of Being a parallel between the Incarnation and the weakening of strong structures. Caputo – following Vattimo – notes, [t]he event that shocks the world is not a strong but a weak force.

Underlying, or arching over, all these famous paradoxes, there is, on my hypothesis, a thesis about God, or about the event harbored in the name of God, one that is contrary to the powers that be in theology and the church, a startling thesis found in what Paul calls ‘the weakness of God’… Paul spells out the way this weakness jolts the world: God chose the foolish ones in the world to shame the wise, and what is weak to shame the strong, and what is the low down in the world, the ones who “are not” (ta me onta), to shame the men of ousia, men of substance, the powers that be. (After the Death of God, 62)

This weakness is explicated not only by Paul, but seen throughout the life and ministry of Jesus, exemplified most notably following Jesus’ temple action in his demand that Peter put down his sword. His following question deserves mention: “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26.53, NIV) In this way, Jesus purposely chooses a way of weakness, as opposed to strength, which may well be why his disciples immediately desert him. We can see in this statement Jesus’ revelation not of sacred violence, but on the contrary, what Vattimo would call the “postmetaphysical and postmodern God of the Book.” (After Christianity, 8)

Jesus’ Incarnation of weakness leads necessarily to a reworking of the sacred secular “split.” Vattimo notes

secularization is not a term in contrast with the essence of the [Christian] message, but rather is constitutive of it. Jesus’ incarnation (the kenosis, the self-lowering of God), as an event both salvific and hermeneutical, is already indeed an archetypical occurrence of secularization. (After Christianity, 67)

Vattimo nowhere engages with the implications of Jesus’ ascension to “the right hand of God,” most likely because his project of understanding the Scriptures spiritually need not answer such questions. This, however, would present a present a problem for his more fundamentalist readers (if he has any!) in light of Vattimo’s proposition that the history of the Christian tradition ought to continue such secularization. Vattimo’s discussion of secularization is extremely helpful once we recognize its only limit. He asserts

[t]hough the event of Christianity sets in motion the processes of secularization, we may also find in Scripture a limit to secularization, hence a guide to desacralization – namely that of charity. If you read the gospels or the fathers of the church carefully, at the end, the only virtue left is always that of charity. From Saint Paul we learn… ‘even faith and hope will end at one point or another.’ (After the Death of God, 41)

This reality is indeed seen throughout Jesus’ ministry – and especially in his symbolic temple action – wherein Jesus seeks to extend caritas to those outside of the present community. In our deconstructive reading, then, are Jesus’ followers, then, not encouraged to do the same? The Apostle Paul’s continued encouragement to be a “living sacrifice” must be deconstructed (or recontextualized) in light of why Jesus was killed in the first place. Vattimo’s explication of caritas is, then, another way of explicating this Call to those who have been grasped by the Event (within the event).

Due in part to his engagement with Jacques Lacan, Žižek regularly addresses Freudian psychoanalytic theory. One of the more helpful for our purposes in examining how Žižek could help the church is Freud’s concept of the death drive. Žižek notes

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)?