The Monstrosity of Christ

Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank debate the relative merits of Christian thinking in the present. The whole of the western philosophical and theological literature is furniture to be flung in the brawl, but Hegel is the mainstay, with a fair bit of GK Chesterton, reference to Aquinas and a surprising (to me) amount of Meister Eckhardt. And of course, Zizek does favor his Lacan.  I've read veeeeeery little of this background, so my apologies to Zizek, Milbank and you, reader, if this account of the book is terribly mangled and unreliable.

Creston Davis edits and introduces, pointing out that the important value of a Theos is all the clearer at this present moment when Capitalism's boasts, crowing and relentless dissolving power threaten to render humanity an undifferentiated, minimised, impoverished ocean, so that the owners of capital can be the most differentiated, maximised and enriched islands they can be.

The perspective of a transcendent good once allowed Europe to bear the conditions that allowed the enlightenment - a background idea of equality, of truth, of transcendent good and human dignity greater than the good of the body - ideas that powered the Reformation as a "Re" formation, because they were there all along in the new testament.  This book asks a modern philosopher and a continental theologian about the place of that transcendent good, 'knowing' what we know now.  (The knowing is in inverted commas because the epistemological foundation for a lot of this philosophy is that someone argued it, and a community of like-minded people found it a good and useful framework - there is no proving a psychoanalytic theory except every instance of its use which seems to bear good fruit.  All knowledge is a risk, but this knowledge is grounded in human reason as currently practiced, not the behaviour of the universe, as currently experienced.)

Zizek's position - Holy Saturday.
Zizek's position has been described as Holy Saturday.  The death of Christ was not sequeled by a resurrection, but it does make for the death of God in the lives of believers and makes them inheritors of his estate - by dying on a cross as the god of the universe, Jesus for all time destroyed the bigness of the Lacanian Big Other, disrupting it into a proportional, balanced relationship with regular-sized Others.  The freedom from condemnation for the past, the knowledge of liberty in the present, the hope of ongoing radically free subjectivity into the future are found in an atheist Christianity. God is dead and remains dead, but that forces us to construct the church/community so He can 'live' in us and in our love for one another.  Zizek is really very respectful of Christian teaching - he just doesn't think its factually founded.

Milbank's position - Paradox.
John Milbank argues as a Theologian for the vital importance of maintaining a respect for the paradoxes of existence in a theistic world.  I have read less of his stuff and his writing is denser so I will struggle to represent him adequately.  But take for example God's relationship to the creation - that he created, sustains, and regulates it, and yet it is definitively not 'Him', but rather his Creation.  We observe a world so full of trouble that people refuse to believe in God; but for Christians, much of the trouble is attributable to God, or to his absence because he cannot look on sin. Milbank is arguing (as best I can make out) that the sustained paradox of the good/evil world is the truth and there is no resolving it further: that God is present and absent (almost?) simultaneously.  He argues that this paradox logic allows the real existence of the triune God as an ontological necessity and a factical agent.  Or something...

My take-homes.

1. Zizek's position is the more Hegelian, and interestingly compatible (through Hegel's evolution of mind philosophy as I understand it) with the Singularity, the possibility of a weakly God-like being (to borrow from Charles Stross's Accelerando and Eschaton novels) fulfilling in a local, materialist way, the promise of Christ's death - the Kingdom of Heaven breaking in.
2. This thought is one I've entertained that grew in reading this book, but which is not really in it.  The absence of evidence for God's existence, always a huge obstacle for unbelievers, is explained in Genesis.  Christians do themselves no favours by pretending that God is at work in the world for the benefit of all people everywhere. Only in Christ is that true. His work in the world is de-personalised.  He sends rain on the just and unjust alike, but also earthquakes. The wrath of God is revealed as he gives people over. (Romans)  * **
3. Believing in God is more complicated than you realise.  You are probably doing it wrong. Lots of logic problems arise when you try to formalise God's relation to himself and everything else.  Some of them may come from early theology importing a lot of Greek theoretics into their readings of the bible (e.g. God's 'simplicity'), but if you're going to tell the story of gospel into our society, you have to be able to give a reasonable systematic account.
4. The continental philosophers aren't kidding around with this theological turn.  They have done a lot of reading.
5. I need to read more Hegel and others.

* Of course, the worst of everything is that we never help each other. Imagine that instead of making war for the thousands of years from the kingdoms before Sumer, people had worked on getting along and making sure that they had enough to share and sharing it. Modern medicine is a project of maybe 500 years.  Admittedly there were a lot more people living in those five hundred years than ever lived before, but still.  Many of the hundreds of thousands who die in a tsunami or earthquake affecting poor countries die because no one with the ability has the will to provide them with warning systems and safety measures.

** This may be heretical.  I'm not sure. It seems true to me.