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).