Category: god is dead

Inwardness or Inwardism?

I have quite enjoyed following Jeremy Ridenour’s blog.  I find his contributions reflect a clarity and charity (sorry those were the two best words I could think of) that is seldom found in this nook of the blogosphere.  In his final comment on a recent engagement with Adam Kotsko’s The Politic’s of Redemption a thought has continued to linger in my mind.

He concludes his post,

Comments: On a personal note, yesterday I taught Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity in Sunday school at my mainline church. The class seemed to take quite nicely to his critique of Barth and Bonhoeffer’s idea of a suffering God. However, most were quite uncomfortable with the idea of abandoning piety and a personal relationship with God. I think Bonhoeffer’s critique is Lutheran in character because he worries that this turn inward is a false start. Luther continued to emphasize that Christ is found on the cross not inside the heart of the individual believer. If Bonoheffer’s ultimate aim is to promote a Christianity that is solely focused on living in this world, then we have to come to terms with the fact that inwardness is an obstacle to being in communion with one another. It breeds narcissism and self-righteousness. Encountering God on the cross requires that the body of Christ tear down the crosses society has erected to serve the disenfranchised. God can only be found in the midst of suffering because God in Christ has let Godself be pushed out of the world onto the cross.

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A little Q&A

Question: Why did Jesus die and what did Jesus’ death accomplish?
Answer: Jesus died for our sins and his death paid the penalty for our sins.

The answer comes before the question is even finished.  In fact certain readings of Isaiah would have the answer come before the question.  Is there a particularly Good Friday answer to this question.  Shouldn’t the answer be intimately bound with Good Friday?

If I stay with the text (John was our reading this year) the sequence goes as follows.  Why did Jesus die?  Because he was killed.  What did Jesus’ death accomplish?  Nothing.   So we sit with futility of death.  The God of king and priest is dead because the one and only king and priest is crucified.  By definition then Good Friday sits with atheism and anarchism.  Good Friday sits with the knowledge that the nature of religion and empire is death.

But if you would like something other than death to sit with  and there must be something more than death because the disciples continued to live in the days between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  If you would like some words to come alongside the words of the dead and forsaken God then listen to Jesus again from the cross.  Listen to him before his final words.  He turns to his mother, the woman who gave him birth.  Jesus looks at her and then motions to his disciple standing by her and says, “Here is your son.”  And then he looks at his disciple and motions to his mother saying, “Here is your mother.”  And with these words a community is called.  A community based not on lineage, culture, tradition, status or interests.  This community is called by all who will gather and acknowledge that the gods of this world are dead and the gods of some heaven reserved for the privileged are dead.  So what will live on?  Where will life be found?  Today all we are offered are the words to turn and see our mother, our father, our sons and our daughters among those gathered at the site of death; the site too often created by religion and empire that work to exclude the undesirable.  Jesus has called a people to gather beyond the illusion of religion and beyond the power of empire; to gather in death where we must ask ourselves if love too has died.  And if love has not died . . .  then we must love.  But few of us find that place on our own so must begin by seeking the lost who have been thrust there.  Why did Jesus die?  Maybe first we need to ask another question.  Where did Jesus die?

Job and the thunderstorm in Kierkegaard’s Repetition

Well I just caught up with my (rough) Kierkegaard reading schedule having finished Fear and Trembling and Repetition.  Both were re-reads and I found Repetition a much more illuminating re-read.  I think Fear and Trembling has had so much press that despite how arresting it can be it may need another form in order to achieve ‘repetition’ which leads me to Repetition.

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Have You Seen This Dead God?

Lately it seems I cannot turn around without coming across the dead God.  I have been reading Zizek again and instead of simply being playfully amused by his counter-intuitive insights I have begun to see more clearly his hegelian reading of the Trinity.  God empties himself into Jesus and is split, de-centered from himself.  And dies.  The God of ‘beyond’ which can and does ground every ideology is emptied and the space of struggle, the Holy Spirit, is opened in this death.  Traditional theology will tend to keep God the Father above and beyond pulling the strings and maintaining order.  It is precisely that God that must be emptied into Jesus die for the purpose of salvation.

Man is eccentric with regard to God, but God himself is eccentric with regard to his own ground, the abyss of Godhead. . . . Christ’s death on the Cross thus means that we should immediately ditch the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology – Christ’s death on the Cross is the death of this God, it repeats Job’s stance, it refuses any ‘deeper meaning’ that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes. – The Monstrosity of Christ

I also recently finished reading Ronald Osborn’s Anarchy and Apocalypse.  This is a relatively conservative appeal to the biblical resources of non-violence set within particular contemporary settings.  However, here the dead God surfaces in the form of post-holocaust Jewish thought, namely that of Elie Wiesel.  Wiesel sees God as the young child hung from his neck, dying and almost dead.  This becomes the straightforward,

ethical as well as a religious imperative: if we are to remain human we must refuse passivity, ease, complacency, and fight for the justice which God, in His captivity, in the time of His banishment, cannot bestow. – Anarchy and Apocalypse

And all the reminded me of an old post I wrote reflecting on Kierkegaard’s test for true love which is to love someone dead.  The dead is the absolute relationship.  If the relationship of love changes it must be because of you, the variable element (no blaming the dead for not understanding you).  To love one dead is love a non-being.

In order properly to test whether or not love is faithful, one eliminates everything whereby the object could in some way aid him in being faithful.  But all this is absent in the relationship to one who is dead, one who is not an actual object.  If love still abides, it is most faithful. – Works of Love

What is going on here?  Will a decade, more or less, pass after which we will look back at these silly caricatures of theology?  Or are these accounts already reflections and indictments of an already over-caricatured and debased theology and ecclesiology?  I would like to call this theme humanist in its apparent rejection of God but that does quite do it justice.  Death is something other than human or perhaps fully human; something that modern humanism (as I have encountered it) does quite seem to grasp.  Also these accounts remain in many ways thoroughly theological.  They are dealing with the dead God not with God as an illusion.  It is this possible realism in theology that I find intriguing and potentially attractive.

And for your listening pleasure he is Gash’s 1986 God is Dead