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August 28, 2018
For in destroying the world something fundamental is saved from the flames: namely, our desire for the perfect world.
And so the main problem with these depictions of total destruction is not that they go too far, but that they don’t go far enough.
Today the “Good News” of Christianity operates with much the same logic. It is sold to us as that which can fulfill our desire rather than as that which evokes a transformation in the very way that we desire.
History is overflowing with different portraits depicting the way that Jesus is the answer—Jesus the Marxist, Jesus the Capitalist, Jesus the meek, Jesus the mercenary, Jesus the social reformer, and Jesus the social conserver to name but a few.
Over the ages various Christians have thrown their weight into these discussions, and we might be tempted to do the same. However, this book takes a different path, one that sees all these discussions as dangerous distractions that prevent us from touching upon the truly radical and revolutionary significance of Christ.
For what if we cannot grasp the manner in which Christ is the solution to the problem of our darkness and dissatisfaction precisely because he isn’t the solution?
what if Christ does not fill the empty cup we bring to him but rather smashes it to pieces, bringing freedom, not from our darkness and dissatisfaction, but freedom from our felt need to escape them?
For in the figure of Christ we are confronted with an atomic event that does not destroy the world, but rather obliterates the way in which we exist within the world. In concrete terms, this means that the darkness and dissatisfaction that make their presence felt in our lives are not finally answered by certainty and satisfaction but are rather stripped of their weight and robbed of their sting.
As Jesus once said, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:20–21)
But people from all walks of life seem to experience the same kind of dissatisfaction that we do, even when they have the very things we believe would make our lives whole.
But what we deny with our lips is often found in the very texture of our lives. For instance, someone’s hatred of the wealthy and famous is often little more than a sublimated form of jealousy.
The very thing we say we hate in the other is often the very thing we desire most of all.
For instance, it is not uncommon to find small churches that speak disparagingly about larger communities, claiming that small is better.
This mechanism is something we can see played out every day in school playgrounds across the world. Witness a little boy pulling the hair of a girl in his class—the only person who doesn’t know that he really likes the girl is often the boy himself. What he denies with his words, however, is undermined by his actions.
There is a very simple but vital mechanism that transforms an object from being something we would like to something we believe would make us whole: a prohibition. Whenever something we would like is refused to us in some way, this refusal causes us to want the object even more.
The point is not what actually fills the role of the MacGuffin, but that there is something that has that role, something that people want in some excessive way.
director hints at the MacGuffin’s utterly contingent nature. The entire movie revolves around a mysterious object called the Rabbit’s Foot. All the main players in the movie desperately seek this object, and yet at no point do we ever learn exactly what the Rabbit’s Foot actually is.
It is a nothing that produces everything. It is creatio ex nihilo in action.
just as Hollywood movies generally hide the impotence of what we seek, so our dreams and fantasies do the same—ultimately covering over the fact that what we think will satisfy our souls is really powerless to do so.
We have seen how this nothing at the core of our being causes us to imagine something that might fill it, something that would make us whole. But this belief in something that would finally bring satisfaction is nothing more than a fantasy we create, a fantasy that fuels the obsessive drive we have for books, talks, and people who promise a life of total sexual, emotional, and/or spiritual fulfillment. This Original Sin is the very thing that causes us to falsely think it is not original at all. This sense of gap makes us think that there must have been something before it, an original
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The logic of popular music is profoundly attractive to much of the contemporary church because the charts are full of worship songs created by a multibillion-dollar industry, and while this industry is not interested in holding up the religious idea of God as the ultimate answer, it is very interested in exploiting the human desire to hold something up as the ultimate answer.
The issue is not which came first, sacred worship music or the more secular kind, but the fact that in both the church and the charts today we find the same style of music: one that holds up some object as the highest principle around which our life should revolve.
When such music is used in a church context, it renders the source of faith into just one more product promising us fulfillment, happiness, and unwavering bliss. The church then takes its place beside every other industry that is in the business of selling satisfaction.
In the same way that theological language has a name for this sense of gap at the heart of our being—Original Sin—it also has a name for the imaginary object that we believe will fill this gap: the Idol.
An Idol is not an Idol because of some property a particular object has; it is an Idol because we project an absolute value onto it.
For one person wealth might be a way of making life a little easier, while for another it is nothing less than a god.
What we see taking place in the church today is the reduction of God to an Idol, that is, to a thing that will satisfy us and fill the gap we feel in our hearts.
By misunderstanding the nature of faith, they turn the good news of Christianity into the bad news of Idol
worship. By claiming that God is the way to fill this gap, they reduce the divine to the level of a product.
Original Sin can be understood very simply as the sense of loss that all humans experience in the process of coming to self-awareness, while Idolatry refers to any object that we imagine can fill this inner void.
To put it another way, we mistakenly feel that we have lost something central to our humanity (Original Sin) and then postulate some object we believe will restore what we have lost, something we believe will bring wholeness and fulfillment to our lives (the Idol).
We can see this wonderfully expressed in Lacan’s reflections concerning a thought experiment forwarded by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason. Kant imagines that a man has the opportunity to sleep with a woman whom he desires. However, should he spend the night with her, the very next day he shall be hung on a gallows. For Kant, the decision concerning what to do is simple: the man should, for purely rational and self-interested reasons, refuse. Lacan, however, employing and developing the insights of Freud, showed how the very existence of an obstacle (here the gallows) can not
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obsessional desire in us. It is then the gallows that invests the object of our desire with its seductive, Idolatrous je ne sais quoi.
It is this very structure that the apostle Paul was referring to in his famous writings on the Law and sin. While people tended to think that the Law and sin existed at opposite ends of a spectrum—the Law being the thing that defended us against sin—Paul writes of how they actually are intertwined and exist on the same side. For Paul, the Law is...
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This Idolatry goes on to mark our entire existence, touching every part of our lives. This concept is captured in the often misunderstood notion of Total Depravity—a phrase that does not mean there is no good within us, but instead refers to the idea that there is no part of our existence that is not marked by and influenced by the effect of this separation and alienation.
Each of the brothers experiences a certain amount of pleasure. The first experiences the pleasure of better relationships, a lack of stress, and more recreation time. The second brother feels the pleasure that comes from the single-minded pursuit of a goal, with all the fantasies that entails. The third brother gains the pleasure of being able to buy many things that will make his life easier and more comfortable.
Here we witness how the Original Sin/Law/Idolatry matrix ensures that the life these brothers live is laced with a sense of failure, emptiness, and impotence.
Each path to what they believe will make them complete leaves them lacking in some way. Renunciation of the goal, the refusal to relinquish it, and the attainment of it all have their shadow side.
In this way The Bridges of Madison County reflects back to us a reality that we all face—the conflict between giving up what we long for or pursuing it only to find pain.
One of the primary fuels for hatred of others is the fantasy that they have access to the pleasure that we unsuccessfully seek. While the Idol is impossible for us to grasp, we imagine that others have been successful in getting it, and we can hate them for it.
More than this, we are willing to hurt ourselves in order to rob her of her pleasure (the most extreme form being suicide—where we will end our own life to cause the other a crippling guilt).
After deliberating on the case, Solomon calls for a sword and declares that the living son should be cut into two pieces, with each woman receiving half. As the judgment is pronounced, the true mother screams out, “Please, my lord, give her the live child—do not kill him!” In contrast, the liar responded, “It shall be neither mine nor yours—divide it!”
For it is obvious that the real mother would seek to protect her child at all costs.
If we cannot have the Idol, then we wish to prevent the other from having it.
Or perhaps a family that is falling apart on the inside sends yearly Christmas letters to friends and family describing how wonderful their children are and how well they are doing.
In both of these examples, the pleasure one receives is not gained from actually having something satisfying but rather in imagining how other people might think that one does.
What is interesting here is the way that these diagrams offer a solid visual description of the problem we have been describing thus far: we feel separated from that which will make us complete, and our various attempts at bridging the gap inevitably fail. However, instead of seeing Christ as the apocalyptic destruction of this whole approach, these diagrams see Jesus as a more effective way to bridge the gap.
Because so much of the church has bought into the idea that Jesus is the ultimate bridge between ourselves and that which we feel separated from, it finds itself with the same problem as any other company that promises a product that will make you happy: how to hide the reality that it doesn’t really work.
But this debate can obscure the most powerful aspect of groups dedicated to revealing secrets (such as WikiLeaks). Instead of the liberal claim that WikiLeaks is important because it tells the public things it does not know, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek has pointed out that its true power lies in telling us things we already know but refuse to acknowledge.
As long we are not confronted with the direct evidence, we can refuse to know what we know; to put it in another way, we can refuse to acknowledge what we are already aware of. It is not so much that we now know, but rather that now we know that we know.
