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Recently from Slavoj Zizek: THE POPE IS DEAD, ANTI-CHRIST IS ALIVE AND KICKING
I'm curious what the actual (theistic) Christians here think of Zizek's "Christian atheism" and his conception of Christian love.
I don't expect Christians today to be lining up to join the local Communist Party. It is my view that, more often than not, actually-existing communist movements have been little more than a thin veneer of respectability over the ambitions of power-hungry sociopaths. But isn't there still a kernel of truth here? Isn't there something, as was articulated in last week's discussion, "quasi-communist" about Christianity? Is not the doctrinal communist ideal -- the universal fraternity of man, sacrifice for those who are in need, "the last shall be first" -- ultimately just an expression of universal Christian love? Should Christians not view communists as fellow travelers who are correct about certain fundamental principles, but misguided on method?
There is a certain basic paradox that presents itself when one begins to interrogate the concept of love: do you love me for who I am, substantially, in essentia, or do you love me for my qualities and properties? You say that you love me because I'm smart, because I'm funny, because I'm beautiful; but suppose that I were not smart, nor funny, nor beautiful. Would you still love me then?
Either horn of the dilemma presents an issue. If your love for your beloved is contingent on them possessing some particular quality, then you are liable to the charge that you don't really love the person: what you really love is that quality. You are a lover of intelligence, or humor, or beauty, but not of that particular person. But if you say that you would continue to love the person regardless of any qualities they possess whatsoever, even if they were stripped of all qualities and left only as a "bare particular", then it would seem that your choice is entirely arbitrary and without justification; for what could be motivating your choice if it is made in the absence of all qualities? And a baseless arbitrary choice cannot constitute love either. The conclusion we draw is that, if there is such a thing as "love" at all, it belongs to the domain of the unsayable.
Thus Zizek suggests that true love should be "cold" rather than "sentimental". Powerful sentiments suggest that one is fixated too strongly on the secondary qualities of the object, rather than the obligation of love proper. Love is seen to have an almost Kantian character: the bloom of pleasure is a stain on the perfect austerity of duty. Christ is then interpreted as the formal condition of possibility that both binds us to this duty and makes its realization conceivable; Christ must not be "made into a direct object of love who can compete with other objects", for otherwise "things can go terribly wrong". (In particular, it opens the door to transactional thinking; if He Himself told you that all of humanity was saved, but you alone were damned; would you still love him? Would you still love him even if he wasn't living up to "his end of the bargain"? An authentic conception of Christian love has to confront this possibility.)
Speaking just to the specific question of how one understand’s Christian love, I tend to take Brand’s stance on it.
God’s love is infinitely more than our human conception of love, and it is bundled up together with his righteousness and wrath and holiness. The same God who says “Love one another as I have loved thee,” is perfectly, rightly capable of wiping out peoples and places. Failure to grasp this is how you wind up with “Love wins” and “Hate has no home here” churches that would never tell anyone they are living in specific sin. But it is clear from Scripture that whatever else God is, he is not what is conceived of in the modern understanding of “God is love.”
I make the argument that when Christianity, taken as a whole, was most adherent to God’s commands and intentions, is also the time it was riding high in the world in terms of temporal power. It was the time when it had made itself strong enough to resist outside conquest and to, from that base of operations, eventually evangelize the world, however imperfectly. At that time it was confident in itself, assertive, and had not yet fully fallen under the sway of the “The only thing that matters is love” heresy.
Similarly, the interpretation of agape gives the pre-arranged conclusion away from the beginning. Agape isn’t just for comrades in the cause, it is meant, in varying degrees, for everyone.
In theory, I should have agape for Slavoj Zizek, just like I should for a fellow parishioner. It has nothing to do with comrades in the Communist or cause-oriented sense and I would argue demonstrates Zizek’s extremely weak understanding of or an intentional misrepresentation of the concept in order to bolster an otherwise weak argument.
At least some of those churches condemn sin, but merely disagree with you about whether certain things are sinful (e. g. whatever happens in Pete and Chasten Buttigieg's bedroom).
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Therefore Scripture is wrong, as should be expected from texts written by flawed mortal men.
or the modern understanding of "God is Love" is wrong, as should be expected from an understanding unquestionably built by flawed mortal men.
Perhaps. If God exists, it think it's more plausible for humans' moral instincts (telling them that mass murder is wrong) to have remained in tune with the truth of God and the Good, while Hebrew myths about a bloodthirsty, wrathful deity arose for the same reasons that a hundred similar ones did in many cultures; than for the moral instinct to be wrong, and those particular tales about a bloodthirsty deity happening to be correct.
This is not a human moral instinct. Humans are quite comfortable with mass murder. That's why we've done it repeatedly (that, and it's a very good strategy).
(I suppose we can argue about whether or not something is a "human moral instinct" if it's not shared by all humans. And it is true that some humans are uncomfortable with mass murder. But the fact remains that mass murder is a very typical human behavior.)
Having a moral instinct ≠ being reliably bound by it at all times. Indeed, the most common manifestation of the moral instinct is feeling guilty after doing something that one knew, deep down, to be wrong. (Case in point, I think a majority of mass murderers in human history had a conscience, it was just drowned out by other concerns and they did the wrong thing anyway.)
Seems more parsimonious to believe that humans as a general rule actually have few-to-no moral qualms about mass murder as long as it fits into what you might call a mammalian herd strategy.
This is not saying that humans have no moral instincts simply because moral taboos are sometimes violated but rather than the moral taboos about mass murder apply only weakly if at all to group enemies.
However, I probably should back up a bit here - I've been using "mass murder" very much in the context of group warfare which is very different from mass murder in a serial killer sense, but the latter is much closer to the actual meaning of the word "murder." If your position is that Genghis Khan doesn't count as a mass murderer but Hitler does, my position is at least closer to yours than I conceived.
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