“Christian Atheism” covers a lot of fascinating ground and this is just an attempt to explain what Žižek means by Christian atheism. He distinguishes Christianity as an emancipatory event, describing it as a decentring of the One-God, separating God-the-Father from Christ.
Sean Sheehan
His theological starting point is the Fall, the descent into sin occasioned by transgression in the Garden of Eden, identifying the expulsion from Eden as the entrance into freedom.
What begins in Eden ends on Calvary. The sundering of Eve and Adam from the idyll finds a redoubling in Christ’s existential call, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me’ (Matthew 27.46, Mark 15.34). The expulsion from Eden created a split between God and humans and the cry on Calvary creates a split within God himself.
In his destitution Christ becomes human and his anguished acknowledgement of solitude and self-disbelief amounts to the separation of God from himself: “Only in Christianity does God not believe in himself” says Źižek. God is alienated from himself and what dies on the Cross is the figure of a transcendent God
What is born as the Holy Spirit is a collective of Christian believers, an entity enshrining fidelity to something beyond the utilitarian. Eve and Adam leave Eden and encounter freedom, as do all humans when, after the death of God on the Cross, there is no longer any support in an onto-theological big Other.
The liberatory potential of Christianity is fulfilled when the resurrection of Christ is represented as the collective spirit that survives the death of the body.
“Where two or three are gathered in my name, I will be there” (Matthew 18.20): the message in Christ’s words to his disciples is not seen as affirming the Holy Spirit’s presence within the Trinity or, in humanist parlance, as a visitation of the eternal human spirit. Žižek finds its political incarnation in the folk song “Joe Hill”, the immortal factor being not the reifying of some sense of a lost nirvana but the solidarity within a community of believers that obstinately and actively defies circumstances working against it. What is being evoked here is not the blind faith of dogmatism but the intertie of theory and practice that brings something about through believers’ commitment to a Cause.
Non-theists may think that this Christian atheism is highly interesting and pleasingly provocative but ultimately unnecessary when a materialist denial of God should suffice. Žižek himself poses this question – “is it even worth spending time on religion, flogging a dead horse?” – and answers it by asserting the enduring value of Christian atheism as the foundation for effective material change: ‘the atheist subject engages itself in a (political, artistic, etc.) project, “believes” in it, without any guarantee”. It is more effective to disarm religion by undermining it from within, drawing out its atheist value to remove the notion of divinity. It is not, à la negative theology, that God is ineffable and cannot be positively categorised but “that the experience of the divine is, at its most elementary, a negative experience” (IV: 286) and only on this basis can a materialist ethics develop.
“Christian atheism: how to be a real materialist”, by Slavoj Žižek, is published by Bloomsbury.
(Photos: Pixabay)
.jpg)
