3. Žižek, Atonement Theory, and Pentecostal Theology after Metaphysics

Theology speaks the truth of its own idiom and it is hard for it to speak outside itself. Theology has taken different almost archetypally distinguished shapes across the span of Christian history and Žižek talks about this in the paper of his that I want to discuss. He gives a sense of the shape of theology in the past, but not now or in the future. But what of theology in the third millennium?  In the first Millennium theology was the discourse of bearded men, and in Orthodoxy this remains the case.  The second Millennium was the millennium of the unbearded man, of the Son, the Church, Catholicism and its progeny, Protestantism.  What if all this were to change drastically asks Julia Kristeva? [1]  And she already stands in the change that she is part of.  Will the theology to come get beyond the male preserve and become interdependent upon the feminine genius? [2]  There are post-theological ideas already right through Kierkegaard in the 1840s, as in Nietzsche and Heidegger, only they had no feminine genius. Is it as Hegel predicted then, that theology as a discourse by his day is really dead? Have we, as Hegel supposed, entered an age of philosophy beyond theology – of theoretical theology paralleling theoretical psychoanalysis, in which Žižek is the best known name?  If so, it is largely because theology has not kept pace with the intellectual unfolding of the human spirit.[3]

Theology as a language unto itself (e.g. dogmatics or systematics) is suffering the fate of Latin, it is a beautiful, honorable, but dead language.[4] It can be learnt, but if you want to reach people in the street, if you want, more importantly for academia, to reach the culture, to enter into the intellectual climate and language of the culture, then theology is as useless as Greek and Latin because you cannot say what you need to say.  You have to expect everyone to speak your language, which they will not. This is the underlying presupposition of this article, which is about the atonement. I want to unpack this old theological conundrum in the language of freedom and thought, which is philosophical.  So I will be philosophizing about theology and this is necessary because there is no other way to say it.

Slavoj Žižek is the most famous philosopher in the Anglophone world today.  He is also a punchy cultural critic.  As a Lacanian he often refers to the unconscious. Perhaps his unconscious is that God is using him.  God uses atheists as much as anyone else surely. God is using this atheist to speak to the theologians and to upset the theological apple-carts of neatly stacked ready produce.  Žižek is as theologically literate as the best theologians.  In his essay “Only a Suffering God can Save Us”,[5] which is a quotation from Dietrich Bonhoeffer he writes: “as Hegel pointed out, what dies on the cross is not only the terrestrial-finite representative of God, but God himself, the very transcendent God of beyond.”[6]

In his interview with Jack Miles at Los Angeles public library (April 24th 2012),[7] Žižek has just cited G. K. Chesterton, his favorite “theologist”, as he calls him, on God’s perplexity at his own creation. According to Žižek this perplexity leads to a “withdrawal” - tsim tsum in Jewish tradition, so not an alien idea to Jewish theology at least, although Žižek does not refer to this tradition. The withdrawal of God, he says, culminates in the death of Christ and for Žižek (and Chesterton) this whole doctrine of God (that culminates in the death of God) stands in stark contrast to pagan justice and corresponding notions of deity, based on an order of things and corresponding order of self-understanding that legitimates them. The hidden inference here is that theology is more pagan than Christian because Christianity has historically and repeatedly tried to found itself on an order of justice and society, such as feudalism, or more recently the bourgeois order which completely domesticated God to a Sunday duty which demands you turn out in your “Sunday best.” But this is not what Jesus meant. Let us quote Zizek here, and be warned, this quotation has an impromptu spoken feel to it:

 

What dies on the cross, for me?  Not a messenger of God!  It is not that God is up there (pointing to the ceiling) he sends his son because we screwed things up, we need rescuing…  what dies on the cross, as Hegel says, is the God of the beyond Himself [the transcendent Deity/Father]. It is precisely God as that transcendent power that somehow secretly pulls the strings [traditional omnipotence ] …This I think is the secret of Christianity…that God no longer can be conceived as ‘we are in sht and no longer know what is going on but there is this old guy up there who secretly pulls the strings…’ and so on and so on. This God abdicates.  Something tremendous happens in Christianity because, remember, after the death of Christ we do not get back to the Father, what we get is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the egalitarian community bound by love. You know what Christ says when he is asked if you will recognize if he is here, ‘when there is love between the two of you, I am there’, it is the immanence of an emancipatory collective. This is the deepest insight of even the good conservative theologies, like ? [muffled aside to Jack Miles] definitely not a Communist! [lol], said, something very profound, he said, the deepest lesson of Christianity is not we can trust God, but God cannot do anything without us: God has to trust us.   So for me, again, this is a tremendously important message of freedom. Again, as my beloved Chesterton said… in all other religions you have atheists, people who don’t believe in God, only in Christianity – and this is his reading of those words, eli eli lama sabbactani (My God, My God why have you forsaken me?) – and for him this is crucial: God Himself becomes an atheist!  And this is so tremendously important, for me.  I think far from that fashionable idea (you know all that Aquarian bllsh*t) that Christianity is over and we are entering a new era). Yes we are entering a new era, but I don’t like this new era, it is neo-paganism and so on, I claim that today, precisely, we should stick to this tremendous explosive impact we are still not ready to confront of what Christianity is truly telling us, which is why I like to say paradoxically that to be an atheist (but don’t be afraid, not in the Richard Dawkins/ Christopher Hitchens sense) but this authentic atheism, in the sense of experiencing the radical absence of any transcendent guarantee… you have to go through Christianity…. Only through the Christian experience can you reach the abyss of what I call atheism. [8]  

In this conversation piece, Žižek takes atheism out of the Kantian antinomy with theism (where it is still locked in the media debates of Dawkins et. al.). Having removed atheism from the antinomies with theism Žižek makes it synonymous with genuine Christian spirituality (critically opposed now to paganistic Christian or neo-pagan New Age spirituality).  Just to clarify terms a moment here.  Theism is the belief in God as a being and is opposed (in the Dawkins/Hitchens sense) to atheists and atheism that says there is no such thing.  Logically (and theologically) as Kant showed, these are just reverse sides of one another that presuppose one another and one cannot be said with credence without the possibility of its opposite being equally credibly said.  The atheism of Žižek (and I am imputing this) is more like non-idolotry, more akin to the Biblical self-definition of God “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh” (Ex. 13:4) best translated as “I Will Be What I Will Be”, meaning, “my nature will become evident from my actions.”[9] This has nothing to do in believing in a being called God (theism), hence atheism (in Žižek’s sense).  God does not present Himself theistically, but atheistically, and this is a lesson the Israelites find hard to learn, always wishing to return to the gods of the nations (deities) – and so do Christians yesterday and today, and they have, theology is the testimony. [10]  This flight from God to theism we are calling “paganism”.

Now this thought, that it is only through Christianity (I would add Judaism) that one reaches this authentic atheist position is totally beyond the idiom of theology that is theistic, that is often disparagingly referred to in philosophy as “ontotheology” i.e. God reduced to a being, which amounts to merely an intellectualized version of the ancient Israelites fleeing to the gods of the nations, to a deity-god.  That is at the methodological level, but there is also the content of what Žižek says here and the evaluation of it from a Pentecostal perspective, because Pentecostals, although they do not know it, are the only Christians on the planet today who can evaluate these statements of Žižek non-reductively and use them as a spur to their meditative thinking.  Also, if theology is more pagan than Christian, and Žižek is hardly the first to say this, it would not be able to see round its own corner, as it were and see itself this way, as the language of which theology is comprised is exactly where the fault lies, so it can only be seen from ‘outside’ and remedied from there, that is to say, within the greater freedom and scope of philosophy as the wisdom/love discourse.  But this is a dangerous idea for theologians and it is no surprise that theologians repulse Žižek, in the main, with a defensive (guilty?) vehemence.  We may suspect there is more to this rejection than meets the eye, more than the fact that Žižek is wrong!

In the essay Žižek does not go through different Pauline and later theological accounts of atonement.  However, the conventional accounts wrap inside what he does say. He goes on: “[what the theological reading] misses is the ultimate lesson to be learned from the divine incarnation: the finite existence of mortal humans is the only site of the Spirit,”[11] that is the first thing, and secondly, that “after the crucifixion, the death of the incarnated God, the universal God returns as the spirit of the community of believers.”[12]  This return is not as a belief, as Protestants would have it, it is not predicated on faith alone or scripture alone, it is a real presence, and the distinctly Pentecostal Christian is the subject of the experience of this real presence.  The experience of the real presence of the spirit shares something with Catholicism (and to a lesser extent with Orthodoxy), but not merely as a static Real Presence before which the pious bow and scrape, pagan-like,  and is symbolically enough sealed in a wooden box and locked behind the altar in old stone churches, but spirit as an unloosed power.  This is what Pentecostalism is the realization of.  The power of the spirit is real, actual, outside the church as a building symbolizing a sacral order of the old way of life of Europe and colonial power. 

But did not theology in the first millennium deal with the doctrine of God over centuries and come up with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity?  Does not Žižek merely reiterate one of the old heresies, modal monarchialism or patripassianism or Marcionism? Well let us have a brief look at this.  The answer I will give in advance is no, the reason being that the ancient heresies had no sense (that we have after Hegel) of the historicality (Geschichte) of consciousness.  Their thought belongs like art without perspective to a static order that leads (using the painting analogy) the eye up and down the page, but not back into it.  This is the difference between us and them (including the Scholastics, who were much later but in this sense were continuous with the first millennium). The break comes with the Renaissance. No accident either that the Renaissance was when perspective was discovered in the West. The world of perspective is one that situates the subject.  When I look into the depth of a painting (e.g. Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Mantegna c. 1490)[13] I experience myself as the painting centers me before the foot of Christ’s bed where his dead body is laid out. In the 15th century this was an earth-shattering experience.  The world without perspective is precisely not like this. It is a world that does not include me in particular, it is that pagan world Žižek refers to in the interview as the world of some quasi-objective order where everyone has their ‘place’, it is the world of the divine right of aristocracy – religious and secular, symbolized by pope and emperor in the West, an impersonal world in which political party, class, caste or clan is the chief category instead of the individual person in particular who we have to go through authentic Christian experience to find – authentic referring to atheistic in Žižek’s sense explained above, the non-idolatrous sense of God whereby we will who “I Will Be” when the time comes, in action, not as some mental datum, fact of “revelation”.   The Revelation is precisely in the not-knowing now who “I Will Be”.[14]

Although monarchialism emphasized the unity of God (hence the name) and especially the deity of God, in Christianity the reverse tendency of it was to modalize the component parts. According to the documents in Bettenson, it was the heresy associated with Sabellius and repudiated by Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis in 375.[15] The Sabellians who were rife in Rome, taught that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were three names of one substance, the way body, soul and spirit pertain to one man, or light heat and the orb itself pertain to the sun. In modal monarchialism, the son merely represents the Father. But Žižek is saying that on the cross Jesus is abandoned by the deity God.

Patripassianism was a form of monarchialism that Tertullian chastised.  It says the Father himself died on the cross, but Žižek is saying the Father forsook the one who did die on the cross and who suffering thus, saves us; not by his stripes like the Mel Gibson movie suggests. This is the view that our sins are expiated by violence and that the punishment we deserve Christ took instead. This is Christ as Hercules the pagan Son of God, the Hollywood version full of Tarantinoesque “realistic” violence.  

The second century heresy of Marcion was a view that gained ground in Rome.  It took the Gospel - that is to say what it knew of the teaching of Jesus and Paul - apart from the synagogue Scriptures. We must recall in this context that the New Testament did not come into existence as such until after the Council of Constantinople in 382 and the canon of Jewish Scriptures still later. Although early Christianity recognized the Jewish Scriptures in the inspired  (Septuagint) Greek translation (2nd cent. BCE) as canonical, the rabbis did not recognize this translation, and at the end of the 2nd century the Mishnah shows continued debate over the status of some books of Ketuvim.  The text of Jewish Bible (the masoretic text as it is known) was not finalized until very late in the first millennium and this was the text Luther translated five or six hundred years later.  So the history is not what people normally assume if they have not studied it. But there does seem to be on the face of it some affinity between Žižek’s atonement theory and Marcionism.  However, despite the continuity affirmed by Christian orthodoxy between the deity God of the Jewish Scriptures and the Father Jesus refers us to, the discontinuity, the break away from Judaism, and the counting of the calendar from Jesus does indicate a discontinuity, so I would see Žižek as coming from this sense of reason in history, as Hegel put it, not a dabbling such as Marcion did in the question of which texts were authentic for the followers of Jesus in a situation in which the answer to this question was highly uncertain and problematic.

The point we take from Žižek is that on the cross of Christianity God as deity died.  After the cross we do not go back to the Father in the deity God sense, but forward to the Holy Spirit. It is a new age. This is not to say, either, that the Church Fathers in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity tried to reconstitute the deity God. The Trinity is formed in the abeyance of a deity God. Nevertheless, the pagan idea and to some extent, the Old Testament idea, that God is watching us from a distance, returned to haunt us, not for the first time in Bette Midler’s chart-topping song. We get this haunting also in the typical and persistent Christian ideas of election and pre-destination as well as the classical attributes common to all the old denominations of God’s simplicity, infinite mercy, omnipotence and omniscience and so on. The repressed returns, from Žižek’s point of view, and paganism enters into theology despite Christianity (the cross).  The point from Žižek is that God as deity died on the cross and the Holy Spirit was delivered into the hearts and well-being of humankind instead, by the power of which the world would be remade. We might add then as a note to this that the Church Fathers used the Jewish Bible as an “Old Testament” to give some background perspective to this revelation and truth, not because they had a deist sensibility, because they did not.  The Old Testament as Scripture was not a return to the deity God but a way of learning and appreciating how the plan that came true with Christ was outworked, and with the view to keeping the plan (for the Kingdom come) in sight and on task. It was spiritual and practical.

Those words of Jesus, “My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me,” are recorded in the Gospel in Aramaic. It is thought Jesus used them.[16] The words, “It is finished,” or “It is accomplished,” his very last words, are usually taken as a triumphant cry of accomplishment, so Jesus did not die in dereliction, but in triumph at having done the Father’s will. But this returns us to a pagan reading of man the plaything of the deity God. If you think about it the hero Jesus image of him doing theology while dying on the cross and deducing from his considerations that “it is finished” is as unlikely as the Jesus of the crucifix, where he floats nonchalantly fixed, rather un-tortured and religious-looking (so Dali). The very last words are theologically true for a certain theology, are less likely to be historically true than the words of dereliction. But it is in the self-interest of theology and the Biblical commentary that all rests on theological presuppositions not to think this. And I checked, it does not think it.[17]

The traditional theological reliance on words put in Jesus’ mouth for him, even as he expired on the cross, speaks for Žižek’s interpretation, as more raw, more real, than the theological overlay of the first millennium, which may be theologically profound in its own way, but along pre-set lines.  

“My God, my God why have you forsaken me,” shows the Lord’s Prayer did not work, understood as addressed to a deity, which is how the Church traditionally takes it (but this is not the only interpretation).  When the prayer is addressed to a deity God, metaphorically the good father, who will lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from evil, the impression given is that God is “up against it” as if temptation and evil are the control factors.  The Gospel narrative shows Jesus succumbs to “temptation” and “evil” i.e. to the realm of the Tempter in the sense of being overpowered by evil and put to death.  Another story has Jesus express this pending sense of doom when on the road to Caesarea Philippi he tells Peter he must go to Jerusalem, and rebukes Peter when he starts to contest this inevitability.  Paul also has the same sense of destiny with respect of going to Jerusalem. Jesus, like Paul is true to an intuitive sense of a much greater plan (God’s plan, the masterplan) being outworked through this life.  

This is more clearly seen from another point of view, which supplements it. The “messianic secret” theology dates back to William Wrede in 1901.[18] This theology has all manner of variations on Wrede’s original hypothesis. Even if one is not to hold the hypothesis, what has to be true surely, is the characters in the stories (Jesus, the disciples) have real psychological depth and Jesus would have had secrets and so would the disciples and there is much more that the text does not tell us than it does, and often we forget that, we imagine revelation is all on the surface in the words, not in the silences of Jesus, what he does not say, which in any relationship is always the more important. This insight is the strength of Wrede’s argument even if the argument itself is wrong. In the most general sense the gist of the messianic secret hypothesis is the notion that Jesus wanted to keep his mission secret, for it could be easily misunderstood and hijacked by others, which makes sense in any culture and any time of history.  However, from this perspective on the atonement that Žižek opens up, Jesus only half-knows the secret if there is one, or if there is not, he only half-knows what it means to be a Messiah and this half-knowledge is critical for the way things turn out.  So Jesus still relies on God (shown in his teaching of how to pray) and while he knows he has the destiny of the Messiah or Christ, he does not know the whole secret: he can guess that he may have to die, as he tells Peter, like the suffering servant, but what he does not know is that the deity of the Sadducees and Pharisees – of the religious authorities-  has to die.  In this sense, God withholds the secret from him until “it is finished.” The “it is finished” then refers to Jesus’ full realization of the secret (or his “mission”), that God dies right here now with him “for the sins of the world.”  The secret Jesus did not know is that no deity God is going to help him when it came to facing up to the violence of man (sin).  Jesus expects something from the Heavenly Father but gets no response, he is handed over, the power seems to be with those faceless men manipulating Judas, not the deity God and it as if (in this logic) the deity God knew this all along.  However, Jesus subsequent to all this will help out his followers (unlike the deity God who died on the cross) because through Jesus the Spirit comes, and this is Jesus’ confidence and hope too, that the Paraclete will come (John 14: 26 and 15: 26).  Jesus says: “It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.” (John 16:7). Before his death, then, Jesus is clear that the Kingdom is going to be that of the Paraclete, the Comforter.  Already, the Comforter is at work after the death of Jesus in the comfort of the resurrection appearances.  The Kingdom come cannot be about Jesus who is mortal insofar as he is incarnate, but the Holy Spirit that is immortal, invisible, God-wise, as the resurrection appearances are first to bear witness.  This power of the Spirit, the power of the truth of the cross, is the power that conquers the grave and that Paul recognizes lodges in the heart of the one who calls on the name of Jesus as the name most closely associated with the Spirit, [19] a far cry from the pagan theurgy and prayer to deity Gods.

What is underlying and philosophy can open up beyond theology is the causal logic or pattern, or to use the eastern word that we have become familiar with in English in the age of world religions, karma.  Salvation in plain English is about breaking karmic paths that lead to death.  All life seems to lead to death, but the good news is that it does not have to and in Christ it simply does not.  Žižek’s point about the atonement is that God the deity cannot deliver us from karma. Jesus is forsaken because God is helpless to deliver him from karmic engulfment.  If this deity God were a loving Father as Jesus supposed, how could he have stood by?  Rather, the cosmic fact is that karma, cause and effect, rules: if you rub the authorities the wrong way and get in their face (go to Jerusalem when you know that is “asking for trouble”) God will not intervene but withdraw, as Žižek puts it; hence the abject forsakenness of Jesus on the cross. On the other hand, Jesus knows it is his karma to go to Jerusalem. But the key here, which is a complete reversal, is that Jesus is aware that going to Jerusalem will unloose us from karma.  This unloosing is going to be associated with the unfolding of God’s plan not as the operational plan of a deity God, as it is going to turn out, but as the work of the Spirit in the business of men and women, of building the Kingdom.  But Jesus’ Kingdom is not of this world, because it is not karmically bound. But what does this mean, “not karmically bound”? It means free! It is kingdom of free individuals bound by love (obviously not in its romantic sense) that is karmically free and what breaks the cause-effect nexus is forgiveness.  Jesus’ words of forgiveness from the cross are the inaugural words of the new Kingdom of God.  These great words, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” break Jesus out of the cycle of violence and “the way of the world”, which is a way of karmic paths.  Jesus has already forgiven his cruel murderers, and in these words he is making sure that highest powers of the universe that he knows, the Father God, in his current state of withdrawal, is getting the message and conforming to it.

In the age of the Holy Spirit the Christian belief in the deity God is not Yahweh, it is more like Zeus. And the incarnation of God is more like Hercules, and Jesus’ death on the cross to redeem the world, a Herculean labor. But this is paganism with a Christian mask. Yet this pagan way of thinking is so natural that the figures of superman and of superheroes surface with perfect naturalness in popular culture, because of their truly Protestant origin.  But none of this “hero” mythology is really Christian in the sense of God dying on the cross for the sins of the world: so that we would be able to see the sins of the world!  A deity God or the superhero type of theology of the atonement both screen this seeing, and therefore are on the other side, of sin, rather than freedom.  To save from sin, it must first be revealed and recognized as such and made known.  Sin is revealed by the cross - the very symbol of inhumanity. The raw prevalence of sin, the lengths it is willing to go to as if it had a will of its own (the Tempter in mythology) was such that the Church Fathers called it “original” and spoke of our “fallenness” (for this is not the Jewish interpretation of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve).  The deity God who ordered the deluge in Noah according to the deistic interpretation, falls into the deluge and drowns in the Passion of Jesus. What will save us is not a deity, but as Bonhoeffer said and Žižek reiterates, a suffering God: Jesus, who invests the world with the Holy Spirit, as only such a unique one can.  Certainly, the Holy Spirit precedes Jesus, we see that from Scripture and we know it from Jewish tradition anyhow, but we also see, the Spirit takes a new lease on life after the crucifixion, as shown in the Resurrection appearances, and from that time on the activity of the Holy Spirit as a movement is one that seeks to pour out over all flesh. The Spirit is no longer about a Jewish people, and the work of the Spirit is more than mere  “Judaism for Gentiles”. The contemporary insight in the age of world religions is that underlying our differences of race and religion and creed and clan and what-have-you, we are the same. The whole race and blood thing is myth with culture predicated on it, in Žižek’s language, paganism, because it always has some ruling deity God, some figurehead of the totality, like Stalin, who Žižek refers to in the interview. But Christianity is not ruled by a deity God in this sense – except where internalized paganism dominates.  Something fundamental binds us and the Spirit testifies to this. The “love of God” has not to do with a ruling deity, but a principle of action that is free-flowing, outgoing, has the pull of attraction to it, and which is bound to dispel the illusions that build walls of division, exclusion, race and caste and class of which economic materialist commercial exploitation, as Žižek frequently points out, is in our current time the latest pagan psychic pandemic, pulling us back from the greater control of spiritual values over the world.