Spin-Off of an Addendum: Beyond Theism; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Death of God™

I wasn't expecting my brain to generate all this material, but my addendum to my post of a few days ago has itself generated a spin-off as a section that I originally included as part of that post has grown in my mind over the past day to the point of needing its own post.

Originally, my last post had section where after discussing Von Balthasar's image of the "pillaged Church" (I also called it the "Giving Tree" Church) I pointed out that Žižek goes even further and suggests that, basically, we really do have to undergo the "death of God" and that Christianity is something like "the religion of atheism," but that it will involve sacrificing the form to save the substance (of universal spiritual liberation or love or whatever): "That is the ultimate heroic gesture that awaits Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice itself–like Christ, who had to die so that Christianity could emerge." 

Though I myself am no atheist, I do think there is a wisdom here nonetheless. I think lately, due to experiences of my own, I've been realizing more and more that God can be made into an idol too (we'll call it God™). That theism in the traditional sense can really just be the "other side of the coin" of atheism. That to propose God(™) as this thought-stopping capstone ending all thought, who "closes the system" by acting as the final unmoving anchoring point of meaning...can be extremely problematic, and that this sort of Absolutism easily devolves into fundamentalism and a certain type of totalitarianism. The Warrior God™ of All-Consuming Submission being often just the meme of ultimate oppression and suffocation.

And yet, I think, this is how many theists think of God and His function in their metaphysics. He is the Supreme Being or Transcendent Signifier, but in a way that implies that, basically, He is just one Being among all the others (albeit the highest one), one signifier among others (albeit the grounding one.) God then becomes this rigid sort of final monad or something like that.

However, I think this goes back to what I've said before about how in Eastern Christian theology, God is spoken of as "hyper-being" beyond Being. That is to say, God's essence is beyond all duality, all categories, beyond even the being/non-being duality. Beyond even the God/Not-God duality. This, I think, is Meister Eckhart's distinction between "God" and "the Godhead" (which is actually very Postmodern).

When I say that God(™) in this system can become an idol too, what I mean is that if we try to "essentialize" God as the "Being" part to the exclusion of the "non-Being" part, or even objectify Him as the "God" part as opposed to the "Not-God" part ("part" being a very imprecise term here!) then we are trying to contain Him and in the process make an idol. By confusing The Divinity for Divinity (in other words, confusing the hypostases for the ousia) we risk making an idol out of "The."

There are some creatures in Dr. Who known as the "Weeping Angels." They move around quickly and invisibly until they are observed, at which point they become "quantum locked" and stuck in stone form. This idea is based on the concept from quantum mechanics of super-imposed wave-functions. How mathematical models basically describe a universe that is probabilistic, not deterministic, and so which "version" of the wave-function actually "collapses" can ultimately only be defined as the one we observe (whether our observation "caused" it or not, depending on the interpretation). Shroedinger's Cat can be alive or dead, but our definitive observation "quantum locks" it in one state or the other as "real," our observation, our consciousness, being the only factor that differentiates the "actual" from the merely "potential" or "possible." But of course, God is "pure act," so who are we to exclude anything that God "might be but isn't" or anything like that?

Of course, God™ who can be an idol...is not simply different from "the real God." In fact, He is in some sense the Real God, but the Real God abstracted from and kept separate from the Unreal God (because divinity can't be "quantum locked" in one category or the other). So God™ is not merely some falsehood we must smash to get to the "real God." God™ is rather more like the mask that God (or Godhead) uses to appear to human beings or rather, perhaps, one that we projected onto Him in our weakness or finitude.

And yet, if we are to "get through" to Godhead, this mask God(™) must die. He(™) is (or can be) an idol that must be smashed, and also (as I discussed above) a sort of totalitarian oppression. He(™) must be dissolved like the God at the end of the Golden Compass books. Yes, Christianity must accept the death of this God(™), in fact that's the message all the crucifixes of the world seem to cry out. Of course, when I speak of "death" here, I don't mean atheism. Like I said, atheism and theism are just two sides of the same coin, and atheism (especially as popularly conceived) sets up its own idol in the form of simply a god-shaped Void. Rather, the "death" I'm talking about is (to go back to that Eastern theology) not simply replacing an image of God-Being with an image of God-Not-Being, but recognizing that God is "both and/or neither." I mean God(head) "breaking free" from that objectification into just one of the "quantum states," to escape that sort of determination and become something like "undeconstructability." (Caputo speaks of this in his "weak theology.")

To refer again to the quote I used in the post the other day: "the divine identity cannot be a straightforward sameness or self-equivalence," and yet I feel like God™ the idol is just that: God (or, rather, human concept of God) reduced to straight-forward self-equivalence, and all the rigidity that imposes on the system that "terminates" with Him™. However, what the modern world is realizing sociologically is something that Christians should have realized 2000 years ago: that God is dead. This was revealed to us on the Cross, but as that Williams/Von Balthasar quote makes clear, this could only be, could only effect salvation, effect that transformation of human consciousness if it was revealing something that was always inherent to God's essence: that He is not a straightforward self-equivalence, and that if we worship the God-Who-Is-God to the exclusion of the God-Who-Is-Not-God, we are locking Him in stone, like a Weeping Angel, and then He™ is an idol to be smashed. The modern world is no longer accepting this sort of "God as the keystone which locks the arch in place" in terms of organizing a hegemony of desire and truth in society...and maybe that's a very good thing, because that use of God makes Him into God™.

That God™ is a monster. I realized that in the past year but, unfortunately, was still under the impression that He™ is to be worshiped. This is not an unreasonable error, however. Because, as I said above, it's not as if this idol is "not really God." Like I said, He is the Real God, but the Real God objectified to the exclusion of the Unreal God. So our attitude here must be extremely nuanced and complex. We shouldn't hate the Real God, but to avoid idolization we also have to realize His Death.  

Maybe it's like the constitutional monarchy that keeps the symbols of hierarchy to represent the authority which is now realized democratically...and really always in actuality was anyway, inasmuch as popular acceptance/agreement was "secretly" the source of authority all along. (As opposed to a Revolutionary government which tries to found its authority, ultimately impossibly, on the very overthrowing of Authority itself).

With the rise of pluralism/secularism, we are realizing this sociologically now, I think, this Death of God(™). We are getting rid of totalizing ideological systems which enforce any God's place "upon the throne" with coercion (mentally/spiritually speaking). With this comes disenchantment, but also genuine freedom and love and grace. And yet, this is also something that I think will continue being a process in each life. Even with sociological progress, it is to be expected that most people are going to start out knowing God as simply self-equivalent; many would likely find the things I'm saying here impossibly subtle (and probably quite scandalous).

And like Osiris, His bones, the fragments of His broken body, lie all over the world, in every church, in every work of religious art, wherever the sacred is encountered even out in the profane in the world like that tantalizing "scent of the Beloved" that Von Balthasar describes the Bride smelling in the streets. These fragments are the "clues" that the kenotic God, in His self-emptying self-abnegation, leaves us to recognize that beyond the smashed idol-mask there is, in the very smashing into such shards, still Godhead.

Anyway, that all probably sounds like mystical rambling, but it's the best I can do right now to express these realizations...