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The Monstrosity of Christ

Posted October 4th, 2009 by camfree

Here’s a link to a new book - The Monstrosity of Christ - by a couple of contemporary theologians/philosophers: John Milbank, - the founder of Radical Orthodoxy and Salvoj Zizek the 'Elvis of cultural theory' who short circuits German Idealism and Lacanian psychoanalysis...

These guys are also debating a key IL theme: the future of Christianity. In a nutshell, the militant atheist Zizek argues that he’s really the more orthodox theologian in affirming the Absolute paradox of Christ (the Incarnation as a radical singularity, or rupture) – while the traditional Catholic Milbank actually looks like a pagan heretic by invoking a non-dual interweaving of things in and out of the mist (universality, reconciliation).

 

It's also worth a read because it speaks directly to the core questions about the interpretation of Christ that surround many of the discussions and debates here over the last few weeks.
 
Anyway, after catching up on all the recent posts here on Integral/Christianity related questions, there probably two things I’ve learned:
 
1)       We cannot revise and update Christian doctrine for an Integral Age by ironing out much of what challenges us by its paradoxical strangeness, difficulty or offensiveness.
 
 
2)       But nor can we treat Christian doctrine with undifferentiated credulity and use it as a clincher for our arguments.
 
That is, the Christian faith is not a knockdown argument, but an invitation to Love – and we're simply never going to get to the point where someone is going to say 'Here is the proof and any fool can see that that's how we should approach reality'.
 
That is, to have faith is to acknowledge there is indeed no way for our beliefs to ever be unambiguously confirmed - its the "substance of things unseen", etc... and yet one is still responsible and answerable to that which has been introduced into our world unexpectedly, shockingly, and bafflingly, even if one wonders if one can ever do it justice.
 
But as far as I can tell, the fruitful interface of the Integral model and Christianity centres on their mutual recognition of paradox (as a skilful means)  in the path of authentic transformation.
 
From the Christian side of the street, we have not only the paradoxical shock of the teachings of Jesus himself (the lost are saved, and the saved are lost) and the scandal/offense of the Cross... but also the traditional understanding of the Abolute Paradox - as German theologian Paul Tillich puts it:
 
“Final revelation liberates reason from the conflict between absolutism and relativism by appearing in the form of the New Being which is manifest in Jesus as the Christ... which unites the conflicting poles of existential reason... The paradox is the reality to which the contradicting form points; it is the surprising, miraculous, and ecstatic way in which the universal mystery of being is manifest in time and space… "
 
So where Gospel story is about a concrete event which on the level of rationality must be expressed in paradoxical terms, from the Integral side of the street, Integral Life CEO Robb Smith puts it:
 
“The ultimate expression of an integral life is the comfort one finds with this irresolvable paradox, finding oneself constantly drawn towards two dichotomous ends of a spectrum. An integral life resolves the paradox the only way a paradox can ever be resolved - by surrendering to it fully as it is, accepting that this tension will always be there, and that it is natural, acceptable, and even wonderfully awesome.”


So there are fruitful grounds for a convergence here between the ultimate expression of an Integral Life and the original scandal of the Christian Gospel... And it’s one that can also recognize “morphic resonances” or “Kosmic grooves” between Christianity and all the great traditions while much of jettisoning their mythic (pre-modern) and metaphysical (modern) baggage...
 
Integral Life and Christian Paradox – it is here that perhaps the Integral framework can do justice to the breadth and depth and scale of the Mystery of God in Christ... A language of paradox is not uttered to avoid or mystify problems, but to stop ourselves making things easy by pretending that some awkward or odd feature of our perception isn’t really there... We speak in paradoxes because we have to speak in a way that keeps a question alive...
 
And maybe that’s why the story of Jesus is unlike any other (I say this as a Christian believer) in that it holds together, inseparably, that creative tension, the paradoxical two-fold vision of the mystical excess of divine gift and the unspeakable horror of human self-deceit and fear.
 
I mean, the light of the world (God in Jesus) is not a comfortable clearing-up of problems and smoothing out of our difficulties and upsets... Rather it brings a kind of vertigo, it makes me a stranger to myself, to everything I have ever taken for granted... For in the light and love of God in Christ we are  interrupted, turned inside out, put into question at our deepest level...
 
All serious spiritual practice should be a discipline designed to keep us in Christ to some degree - i.e. on this creative edge of experience at the edge-of-chaos - where I and my world, my regularities and securities, are always being made provisional in the crucible of divine creative darkness, the breaking in on us of what is wholly un-masterable – whether in sickness, ecstasy, madness, inspration, speechlessness, revelation, death, love - whatever makes the world new and makes me strange to myself... this is the tremendous and fascinating vision of God's own self in “the heart of flesh” and without it we are taming the an Integral/Christian vision to the scope of what we can cope with... pretending that our language has caught up, and that we no longer need paradoxes to speak of it...
 
Cameron