Another post inspired by Slavjo Žižek. Žižek is fond of telling the anecdote in which there is a plane crash and two people end up being washed ashore on an isolated desert island. The first person to the shore is a part time student and general layabout. The other is none other than Catherine Zeta Jones. After a few days one thing leads to another and they end up sleeping together. Afterwards the man turns to Catherine and says, “that was wonderful, but please would you do me a favour?”

“What do you want?” she replies

“Well I would love you to put on these clothes of mine, draw a mustache on your face and then meet me down at the beach in ten minutes. Please, it would mean a lot to me”

Reluctantly Catherine agreed and, when ready, went down to the beach.

“Ah, great to see you mate”, said the student when he saw her approach from the trees, “You’ll never guess who I just slept with!”

With this anecdote Žižek draws out our natural tendency to seek out a third that would legitimate our actions. It is not enough for us to simply do something, we want to do it before another, we want another to see it, to know about it, to give it meaning. This (Big) other can take many forms but, of course, the main name given to this other is ‘God’.

The above anecdote can help us understand why Voltaire famously declared that if God did not exist we would have to invent God. For he understood at an intuitive level that we find it very hard to, for example, contemplate the beauty of a painting or love another, without postulating an idea/being that would somehow fill this act with eternal significance.

At first this type of thinking would seem to be destructive to traditions such as Judaism and Christianity. For, at the very least, it would place belief in God in a rather suspicious light. And rightly so, as so much belief seems to exist primarily so that people can give their grounded activity some cosmic meaning (here I include various forms of atheism and humanism as we do not need too look far to find notions such as Destiny, Historical Necessity and Fate beneath the surface).

Yet there is a sense in which the Christian tradition subverts the above logic and acts as a site of resistance to this other-worldly strategy. For here we find that God is often presented as the one who refuses to take this throne that we fashion. God refuses to be named, God refuses to be colonised, God refuses to be implicated in our attempts to legitimate our conflicts (of course there are other elements of the tradition that are in tension with this, however I would argue that these are not true to the kernel of Christianity).

The result is that Christianity can actually be embraced as deeply worldly (which is, of course, the opposite of how it popularly perceived). Namely it becomes a privileged place for ones full immersion in the world. Christianity is revealed as a materialist faith insomuch as it situates us firmly in the material world. Every time we attempt to construct a divine third that would de-world our actions the Christian narrative resists, refuses and repels. Christianity, at its most radical, undermines Voltaire’s God. Asking us to embrace the beauty of art, the wonder of love, the suffering of the world and its moments of joy without supplement. By denying God a place in this way we are thus encouraged to find God reflected in every place. It is by giving water to the thirsty, by closing down torture sites, by speaking against horrors like Guantanamo Bay that one affirms the God of Christianity.

Is this not how we are to approach Ernst Bloch’s claim that only a Christian can be a good atheist, or Žižek’s argument that Christianity is materialist?

The God who acts as the Big Other does not exist. This is no threat to Christianity in the least, indeed it is itself a Christian insight. God, as presented in Bible, is to be found as we embrace the world in all its suffering and joy.

I went to see the film Wall-e a few nights ago and was interested in its visual exploration concerning the nature of human fulfilment. The story, as most of you know, begins from the premise that humans have left the Earth because it has become uninhabitable due to the pollution and refuse that has resulted from our insatiable desire to consume. Human have opted to temporarily live in a huge spaceship called “axiom” until the earth is habitable again. They originally intended to leave for only 5 years but, when the film begins, they are in their 700th year. Before leaving the Earth the humans left an army of robots charged with the task to clean the mess up however, over the years, all but one of these robots (the hero) have broken down.

The idea of humans leaving Earth and going to live in the heavens can be seen to mimic the notion of heaven that is found in the popular imagination. The spacecraft is represented as a place where all ones needs are met, a place where there is no pain or suffering or tension or conflict and no-one has a job to do (except the captain whose job is largely a symbolic one). In short it is a place of perpetual peace, harmony and relaxation. While we can presume that people still grow old and die the film does not show any old people (or, of course, death) – everyone appears to be around the same age (apart from some brief scenes of babies) and so we get the impression of a place of equilibrium, a place without old age or death. On the spacecraft people’s needs are instantly satisfied. Desires for particular foods and fashion etc. are all met in an instant and (in homage to Silent Running) it is always a perfect 72 degrees.

However, it turns out that this “heavenly” existence is actually a type of mundane, melancholic hell. No one walks anymore (they all use hovercrafts to move), everyone is overweight, and humanity is portrayed (via the photos of different captains) of slowing devolving into what one can only imagine to be a fatty, inactive blob. This dystopia is not however enforced on people (as in films like Equilibrium), it is what human beings have chosen, what they want, or at least what they think they want. They do not hate it any more than they love it, they have rather entered into a type of undead existence, not unlike a cryogenic state, in which they are not dead and yet not really alive.

Once the film has shown us how this first (“heavenly”) attempt at salvation and fulfilment has failed it charts humanities return to Earth and, more than this, of humanities return to the earth itself, to the ground, the soil. Here, as humans slowly turn from their reliance on technology and desire for instant gratification, they begin to experience joy and wonder again. This is symbolised in their desire to return to growing food rather than instantly getting it in the form of an artificially flavoured smoothy (as they did before).

This is not however a romantic scene in which the director paints the rural life as one of true peace and tranquility over and against the false peace and satisfaction of their heavenly existence. This is to miss the point – their heavenly existence did offer peace and tranquility in a direct, unmediated way (not some false version of these) and was, for this very reason, the true enemy of existence. Instead, by forsaking this direct (horrifying) engagement with peace and tranquility, and instead living up to the fact that life involves a host of tensions and difficulties to overcome, a more substantive life was rediscovered.

Here we see a glimpse of Nietzsche’s point that heaven (in the popular sense) would be a living death, a mummified existence. Whereas truly embracing the fluctuations, fragility and tensions of life, supremely difficult as this is, brings with it a true joy and exuberance.

Here, in a Derridian fashion, the obstacle is the very opening to that which it blocks. By returning to the very thing that they thought was the obstacle to their fulfilment they indirectly find fulfilment (a fulfilment without fulfilment, an impossible fulfilment). While their previous direct attempt to find fulfilment (to make it present in its fullness) led to nothing but a type of living death.

So what do we learn? Perhaps we are reminded of the old Christian insight that heaven is the impossible that we indirectly glimpse only when we renounce it and put ourselves to the task of utterly offering ourselves to the world. Of unreservedly embracing worldliness in Bonhoeffer’s sense. In his Letters and Papers from Prison he writes,

“This is what I mean by worldliness – taking life in one’s stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness. It is in such a life that we throw ourselves into the arms of God and participate in his sufferings in the world and watch with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metonoia and that is what makes a man and a Christian”

So there seems to be energy around Bonhoeffer still (even if it is just to say that we should move on from Bonhoeffer). Instead of continuing the ever-growing comment section of the last post I thought I would write some thoughts in a new post. This means that people don’t need to read 40 comments before writing something. Before I make my main point I will however say that I am surprised at myself for returning to Bonhoeffer, for if you asked me a few weeks ago what I thought of his later writings I would have likely said that I thought they were mere fragments of thought done to death in the 60’s and that other thinkers have done the work that Bonhoeffer signaled and hinted at (thus rendering the letters of interest only for their historical value). And while part of me still thinks that might be true another part of me thinks of him in the same way that I think about Feuerbach, i.e. as an important transitional thinker. In particular Bonhoeffer opened up a way of thinking (or at least expressed it) that was not exhausted in the Radical Theology of the 60’s but which is a prophetic utterance concerning a much more virulent strain of theology that is vibrant and historically significant (what I am about to say relates to the great comment by Ian below – BTW I think Moot is a wonderful example of a community exploring this stuff).

Interestingly, Bonhoeffer does not attack religion as such. However he reflects that in the 20th century (though he sees it beginning in the 17th century) religion has become possible for less and less people because it has been problematical. Not because it has changed but because human beings have entered into a different epoch (my words not his, he talks of “man come of age”). In this new historical situation a religious expression of Christianity places God at the edges of human life as the Deus ex machina. Why? Because religion, for Bonhoeffer, is the belief in a metaphysical absolute from which everything hangs (onto-theology), and as human knowledge increases the more things in our existence do not require this metaphysical explanation. Religion is now exposed as advocating a God of the gaps. In addition to this the God of religion is only for those who feel a need to ask the metaphysical question, “Why”, and in a ‘world come of age”, this question is asked by fewer and fewer (a Nietzschian point par exellence). Indeed Bonhoeffer attacks with great passion those believers who would use the idea of death and illness to get people back to that metaphysical question (and even implicates existentialism and psychoanalysis in the same insidious project – which I would, of course, take issue with).

Bonhoeffer’s great insight in LPP as far as I can see, was to dimly perceive that, while religion was a predominant guise for Christianity throughout history this did not need to be the case – that Christianity could affirm all its central tenants without religion as he defined it (God could be affirmed without metaphysics – again he was not saying that this was ontologically better but rather was becoming historically nessesary). He saw religion as having served its time well, but which had finally reached its twilight.

This is interesting to me because I think it allows us to understand Fundamentalism in a different way. Namely, as an impotent reaction to the loss of religion. The attempt to place it back in the centre. Fundamentalism can thus be seen as the very evidence of the growing redundancy of religion. It is the violent kickback against the continual loss of ground that religion has had to concede in recent years. But for Bonhoeffer there is a way beyond an anemic religious Christianity that places God at the edge and a violent fundamentalism which impotently seeks to place religion in the centre and this is what he was hinting at. It has been left to others to explore what this alternative is (but for Bonhoeffer it was deeply Christocentric and exhibited itself in an unwavering concern for the world – just to relate to the important question that Lori asked).

I have recently been re-reading the later Bonhoeffer to help with my current writing and have been staggered by the insight contained in many of his letters from prison. Because he was writing under difficult conditions and only begining to formulate his thoughts on ‘religionless Christianity’ his writing is often fragmented, frustratingly embryonic and wed too tightly with his previous perspectives. However it feels, while reading these letters, that we are witnessing a metamorphosis taking place before our very eyes. It is as if we are glimpsing the very moment when a caterpillar begins to reconstitute itself in the process of becoming a butterfly. Yet, as we know, before the transformation was complete his life was snuffed out.

His letters are clearly marked by a serious reading of Nietzsche and can thus be seen as one of the early theological attempts to reflect on what faith looks like after ‘the death of God’. In these letters he imagines a church radically transformed, one which rethinks, at a core (ontological) level, its purpose and expression.

I am sticking my neck out here, but I believe that we are beginning to witness the development of dynamic faith collectives which Bonhoeffer would have recognised as concrete manifestations of his lonely prison thoughts (though there are fewer of these groups than one might imagine – for instance I do not include the vast swarm of neo-evangelical, crypto-evangelistic communities which so often cloud the horizon). While ikon, the group of which I am a part, is not in any way perfect I see it as a key experiment in this new movement (others include Aldea in Tuscon and The Garden in Brighton).

Anyway, here is a quote from Bonhoeffer (which I might use as the opening quote in the book I am currently working on),

“And we cannot be honest unless we recognise that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur [even if there were no God]. And this is just what we do recognise – before God! God himself compels us to recognise it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8.17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering”.

I would recommend John Caputo’s wonderful book, The Weakness of God to see an example of how this can be fleshed out.