Post on 26-Feb-2023
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Global Center For AdvancedStudies
Holy Terror
Ernest Becker and Terror Management Theory in Christian Theology and Praxis
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Aaron Murphy
Is Theology Dead ? CTHEOC501 David Reinhart January, 1, 2015
Introduction While the death of theology is being felt in academia after
the enlightenment. The theological framework is outdated and
premodern in most churches. While much intellectual critique has
been given to the poverty of the Big Other, there has been little
analysis given to the psychological reasons. What they often miss
is the comfort that onto-theology brings. The death of the Big
Other God means giving up a kind of comfortable certainty. This
discomfort can be heard in Nietzsche's Mad Man when he cries out
asking, “who unchained the Earth from the Sun?”
Ernest Becker's Denial of Death explores how all belief is a
denial of death. He uses an existential psychoanalytical
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framework to delve into the human condition and the human psyche.
This is a similar framework to the one that Peter Rollins uses,
which draws heavily from the work of the likes of Lacan, Zizek,
and existentialist like Kierkegaard. Using Becker's
psychoanalytic anthropology and Rollins' radical theology, a
critique and response to the problem of the death of theology can
be formulated.
What situates Becker in the Judeo-Christian tradition is his
debt to Kierkegaard's psychology. Pagan philosophical traditions
expressed either detachment from the physical world and a life of
contemplation (Platonism) or the abandonment of contemplation and
emphasized self-indulgence (Lucretius).
In contrast, the type of self that Kierkegaard proclaims is a
paradox of both, “the infinite and the finite, the temporal and
the eternal, freedom and necessity” (Kierkegaard, 43).What pagan
philosophy attempted to do for Kierkegaard is to come down on one
side of this paradox to see what is really essential for a human
being. The question for the pagans was to figure out whether the
self was primarily the body or soul. Kierkegaard, rejecting such
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notions by introducing a dialectic that presented a human being
as a complex interplay of both internal and external factors all
of which were in relation to each other.
Rollins himself owes a debt to Kierkegaard as well, which he
admits to, and it is on the figure of Kierkegaard that Becker's
analysis of the human condition turns. It is also from
Kierkegaard, who all future writers in the existential thinkers
would draw inspiration, including those who would rework
psychoanalysis from its narrow focus on sexuality to a more
robust focus on human existence as such.
Becker's Existential Psychoanalysis
To first understand Becker's philosophy and how it has
resonance with the practices and theory Rollins espouses, we must
first understand his use of psychoanalysis. Becker takes familiar
psychoanalytical theory and broadens them to be existential
categories. For Becker, the main dilemma is the paradoxical
two-fold nature of what could be called an existential
anthropology: “Man has a symbolic identity that brings him
sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a
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name, a life history”(Becker 28). Unlike most other animals,
human beings have consciousness of self. They can say the pronoun
I, have an internal world, can imagine possibilities for
themselves, create and dream. Each person grasps themselves as a
symbolic self which is unique from all others and has and
understands that that self they refer to is sentient. At the same
time human beings are mortal. The curse and gift of self-
consciousness is to be able to know that I am I, while at the
same time know that we have the same fate as every other thing on
the planet.
This is where Becker begins to introduce strong psychoanalytic
elements into his work. The master stroke is to emphasize the
idea of conscious self understanding of meaning into the anal
stage. It is universally understood that the anal stage is
concerned with appropriate social rules manifested in toilet
training. The element that Becker introduces is the fact that the
child knows the meaning of the waste product he creates: “the
anus rand its incomprehensible product represents not only
boundedness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay
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and death” (Becker 31). Thus, a more robust existential
interpretation of anality takes into account the fact that the
child knows that social rules and codes ultimately protect
against one thing: the personal extinction of the child who is
learning them.
The child, if not reared in a manner that is understanding and
patient can become neurotic. This neurosis, which might be
fetishized in an obsession of a certain phobia is actually a
response to the global fear of death which is focused into a
single point as a way of managing locally what is global and
universal.
Phenomenologically, the movement into anality represents the
birth of the child as a being that grasps himself as a separate
entity. Before this point he exists in a type of quasi symbiosis
with mother who is the totality of the child's life-world. Now
the child finds himself in a bind. He is still dependent, yet at
the same time he is conscious of himself as an independent being.
He
wants freedom, and thus enters into the Oedipal complex.
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Classically the Oedipus complex saw the child as a rival of
his father for sexual reasons. Becker re-works the oedipal
complex to be more robust and holistic. In Becker's framework,
the child's motives are not entirely sexual. Instead the child
sees the father as a rival because he wants to be his own father
(Becker 36).
What better way to secure all the power and resources against
death than to be one's own father? He would be totally self
generating and have full uninterrupted access to the person that
he associates with the spring of all life? What the child, who
still does not fully understand sex differences or biology, is
fighting against is his own finitude. He wants to be the spring
of his own life.
This is what Becker, drawing from Spinoza calls a causa sui. The
child takes upon himself the project of becoming a god with full
power over himself and all of his faculties. The Oedipal project
means adhering to a type of self sufficiency that makes the child
almost sees himself as not needing anybody. Needing anything
would mean, after all, that the child was not an all powerful
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uncaused force unto himself, independent from all causal
relations in the world. This is why children of this age can be
so stubborn. Asking for help is a sign that they lack the power
to be a god and are mortal like everybody else.
This is Inevitably, the causa sui project is abandoned. It has
to be in order for the child to fully enter into society. As
Becker succinctly puts it, “the child gives up being his own
father to the Fathers” (). Ultimately he enters the world of
social codes. When he does there is a sense of loss for the
remainder of power that he would have if he were god-like, thus
he searches for his immortality outside himself via a
transference object.
Becker's work begins to take a religious tone here. We look
for a power supplement in a transference-object. This object
serves as a type of master signifier that makes life ultimately
meaningful and secures immortality for the person who is faithful
to this god object.
Causa Sui and the Imago
This is the first point of harmony with Rollins. Both thinkers
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deal with how theological terms we look for a power that we feel
is lost and will complete us. As mentioned above, for Becker this
is the causa sui. Rollins deals with this power loss under the
heading of the Lacanian imago. In both cases we see how religion
and theology works as an object for a power that we perceive as
being lost.
The mirror stage takes place between 6 and 18 months of age,
while the anal stage lasts from 18 months to three years. Before
this period the child does not differentiate between himself and
his environment. The mirror phase marks the child's grasping of
himself as an independent entity.
Rollins using Lacan, seems to see the trauma as separation from a
sense of holistic oneness that comes from a per-lingual world.
This is the return to the womb. Becker on the other hand, sees
the loss as the exact opposite, who see the child as protecting a
kind of god-like individuality. This problem is easily resolvable
though. The child sees the causa sui power as part of the
Lacanian imago. The gap that exists is between the image the
child has of himself as a god that is perfectly capable and the
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way he actually experiences himself, as a subject with drives and
desires that skirt the boundaries of his control and erupt out of
him both metaphorically and literally. This gap is what the God-
supplement is often used to fill.
God of the Gaps in the Gap
The theology that is born out of desire for what some kind of
primordial loss often results in what Bonhoeffer would call the
Deus Ex Machina. God here acts as a supplement for what lacks in
human agency. The world after the enlightenment is a world for
Bonhoeffer and Rollins, come of age. We no longer live within a
super-naturalistic frame of reference that relies on the divine
for direct participation in the physical world. The planets get
along just fine without God's hands moving them. What is often
missed is to what effect this paradigm shift rocked the western
world. No longer was God the invisible hand holding the planets
up in the heavens a growing understanding of the sciences painted
a new picture of the universe as a play of causal forces.
At the same time, this unshackling of humanity was the birth
of a much more anthropocentric world. This emphasis on human will
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and choice best shown with the increase in the belief in
democracy and the abolition of the divine right of kings. No
longer did humans accept that God ordered hierarchies by divine
will that could not be protested against. God was in essence,
decentered from existence as an all powerful cause. Yet this is
the theology used in churches today that has been dead since the
19th century. What is not taken into consideration is the
emotional and psychological comfort that this idea provides.
Before the advent of modernity the Deus Ex Machina was
somewhat valid as an explanation for phenomena, even if it still
served as a causa sui, it could still fit into a framework that
was somewhat justifiable from a premodern worldview. Yet it still
lingers after all of this time as a security blanket. It is only
with the gap between intellect and emotional dependency that the
source of the Deus Ex Machina is laid bare as a power supplement.
Yet it is hard to overcome, since it is being protected by layers
of defense mechanisms.
For Becker character is a vital lie. Simply put, nobody can
take the shock and awe of existence carte blanche. Human's build
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character as a way to cut back the intensity of life. We simply
can not stand alone against what Becker calls, “[man's] real
creature feeling before the crushing and negating miracle of Being”
(Becker, 73). All character traits, our belief in any sense of
cosmic specialness, politics, narratives, and even identity arise
out of the need to protect ourselves from the fear and trembling
of being before Being as such. It should be said that not all
defense mechanisms are bad. Healthy defense mechanisms, such as
sublimation. Even these defense mechanisms are not part of what
can be called the the authentic person. Drawing from
Kierkegaard's characterology
Becker states that, “the lie of character is built up because the
child needs to adjust to the world, to parents, and to his own
existential experience” (Becker, 73). Before the child is even
fully formed he begins to develop character traits, which make
life tolerable by cutting himself off from the larger
experiential horizon.
Religious narratives, for Becker, are just one more story
that we rely on to make up for that help shield us from the
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trauma of Being after after castration from the causa sui
project. It is natural to look for power elsewhere. We look
externally for sources of power to secure us to compensate for
our existential vulnerability. God from this perspective sounds
very much like the Deus Ex Machina, which, building on
Bonhoeffer's Prison Letters, is very God that Rollins critiques
in Insurrection.
For Rollins, even though he does not use the concept of the
causa sui directly, it can well be placed in his work since he,
like Becker draws upon psychoanalysis and the use of defense
mechanisms. Rollins drawing on Bonhoeffer and psychoanalysis
states himself:” The religious God provides provides us with
such stability that the experience of losing it involves nothing
less than the horrifying experience of being forsaken”
(Rollins,16). Isn't Rollins saying exactly what Becker is?
Namely, that God often functions as a transference object to
ensure stability in a world that bears down on every human
subject with its sheer too muchness? The religious beliefs and
religious character often function as a way to shut out any sense
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of contingency. God functions as a master signifier stabilizing
personal meaning in the lives of people. Any time this belief
system is attacked the individual feels it as an attack on
himself since his very sense of identity comes from being
enclosed in a rigid structure that is ultimately built on straw.
In this way the God of onto-theology is a limiting factor on
human life. This all-powerful God of Philosophy stops a person
from standing before the larger horizon of Being, while at the
same time ensuring that human power is supplemented when the edge
of finitude is reached by a person and they experience the
boundaries of their own agency.
What a person needs to do to be liberated from such a way of
thinking involves a kind of trauma. Footing must be lost. The
ground beneath the persons feet must give way and the character
defenses the person has built up must violently collapse in upon
themselves. This involves undergoing a certain kind of living
death that is found paradoxically in the central event of
Christianity. In order for a person to wake up to a more living
faith that is not a mere security blanket that functions as a way
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to help them sleep at night they must undergo the experience of
standing naked in the storm of life. The very experience
testified to by Jesus on the cross.
Christian Nihilism
One of the central motifs of Christianity is that of the
crucifixion. During this event Jesus is put outside all of the
cultural acceptable forms of terror management. Jesus, God
Godself is stripped of the structures that secure his symbolic
identity. This is not a biological death, what could be called
real death. It is instead the type of death that a prisoner feels
when he is thrown in jail and forgotten by all the social
structures that should acknowledge him as a human being. It is a
living death in which a person is excommunicated and reduced to a
being of sheer biological life.
In psychoanalytical terms, a person can only become authentic
when they are exposed to what they are underneath their defense
mechanisms many are which are found in forms of inauthentic
existence. For Becker, drawing upon the psychology of
Kierkegaard, there are certain forms that this inauthenticity can
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take. The most widely experienced in today's society, which is
becoming more and more mechanized is the “normal cultural man.”
This is the person who holds down the job he is supposed to, does
what he is told by the ethical standards of the day. He might
even be praised by others for being an exemplar of the ethical
standards of the day, yet within him lies a dark secret: He has
conformed to these standards in order to cut himself off from the
broader existential horizon. He is playing it safe. At the
deepest level this is the person who has convinced himself that
he wants exactly what society offers and nothing more. He has
manged to shut out any deeper yearnings that might expand his
world.
Much of theology in America is aimed at perfecting a person
into a “normal cultural man.” Christianity for these people is a
way of ensuring the static social order that shuts out any kind
of opening through which new possibilities might arise. They
simply do not want to stand open before possibility. Beliefs are
a way to ensure a pagan idea of eternity that is found in the
idea of endless stasis and certainty. In a Kierkegaardian sense,
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this was the problem with much of Danish culture in his day.
Christianity becomes reduced to a purely socio-ethical form of
life, which in its most radical form is nothing except a social
code and menu of behaviors that have completely external locus of
control. In effect this type of Christianity functions as a way
to avoid the experience of Christ's crucifixion all together. It
is testified to only as a belief amongst others, not as a lived
event that must be undergone before one can become an authentic
human being.
The example par-excellence of the normal cultural Christian
is found in the Fydor Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor. The Inquisitor
himself falls into a category all his own. He after all, is
willing to stand before Christ in open rebellion. He fully
believes in what he is doing, even if what he is doing is an act
of rebellion. What he seeks is to make the entire world into a
normal cultural world by blinding them with the immediate. The
people who follow him are cultural Christians, and are thus only
as good or bad as the social codes the Inquisitor creates allow
them to be. It is the the followers of the Inquisitor who
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represent the automatic cultural men of society. They are more
than happy to obey whatever laws are put in place and will
happily abandon their freedom to block out the wider scope of
being to reduce anxiety through both routine and mindless
pleasure.
It is easy to see why both Rollins and Becker are fans of
Kierkegaard, for whom a person to be crucified with Christ, which
means, “having the self broken in order to become itself” (Becker
88). Becker also finds this line of thinking in Zen Buddhism as
well, not to mention psychoanalysis (Becker, 89). For those who
are confessing Christians what makes this type of death so unique
turns on the person of Jesus himself who is God incarnate in the
flesh. Jesus offers himself over as an act of radical solidarity
to the entire human race.
This crucifixion is a necessity for a person to be
authentic, or as Becker himself says, “the school of anxiety
leads to possibility only by destroying the vital lie of
character”(Rollins,88). Like Christ we must stand before the
universe naked. Most churches build up a narrative that works as
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a sheltering device, when in actuality to stand in the place of
Christ is to be hurled into the middle of being without armor.
Rollins sums up this experience to be not a site of security, or
a safe harbor where personal beliefs are re-enforced, but
instead, “signals the experience in which all that gives us
meaning is lost”(Becker, 22).
While this nihilistic move seems morose, it is a necessity for
human development. The person is shut-up inside themselves,
blinding themselves through immediate pleasure (what Kierkegaard
would call the aesthetic) or blindly follow the cultural mores of
the social codes around them. What lies on the other side of this
is a new authentic person, who is ready to face up to the
hardships of life. This person can drink the cup of life dry with
all of its bitterness and sweetness. This new orientation is
described by Becker as,“an opening towards new possibility, the
ability to face into anxiety” (Becker, 72).
The crucifixion experience, for Becker is the only way for
the person to open up to possibility or as he puts it himself:
[the self] must be thrash around in its finitude, it has to,
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'die' to see whats beyond it” (Becker, 89). The pay off of this
thrashing about is an opening to what Becker, who begins to sound
a lot like Tillich, calls the Ultimate Power of Creation.
Although it is the only time he uses the saying in the entire
text, Becker is using a term that sounds more like an existential
theology than the all too familiar theist framework of onto-
theology. The person is brought into contact with the Ground of
Being in which all beings have their being. This Ultimate Power
of Creation seems to be a wellspring of personal power to create
one's self and venture courageously out into the world rather
than a deity.
As has been mentioned before, theology in the church is an
example of how terror is managed through a narrative that
provides people with a transference object to compensate for the
loss of perceived power after castration from the causa sui
project. Such belief systems operate as a shield against the
shock and awe of being. Sociologically this causes a heard
mentality, in which groups of like-minded believers flock to each
other in order to re-enforce their own beliefs. In Kierkegaardian
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language, what results is “the crowd”, the source of untruth.
Such crowds can be very reactionary,choosing to hold on to ideas
long after they are antiqued in the name of security and
certainty.
Such reactive communities are often willing to push out others
who might have ideas that are foreign, because they perceive them
as an existential threat. It also has been mentioned that the
crucifixion offers a counterpoint to such ways of thinking, in
which one stands raw before the too-muchness of being.
From Theism to A/Theism
One way that Christian communities manage terror is through
rigid beliefs that guarantee certainty and clarity. While such
ways of thinking can provide a sense of peace, such a piece comes
at the price of holding on to antiquated structures that are
becoming irrelevant in the 21st century. The need for literal
clear-cut images of God reduce God to onto-theology.
Modernism also is to blame for such ways of thinking about
God. Science has become the dominant way of finding truth, and
has expanded itself to all fields and modes of discourse. This
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has lead to the death of ambiguity in church culture and with it
the death of mystery. Theologies of certainty put a great deal of
emphasis on having an exact object of study. While this provides
comfort, because it promises exactitude, it is also squishes any
type of critique or analysis that might open up Christian
theology to become part of a wider cultural discourse.
One alternative offered by Rollins proposes is what is called
a/theism. Unlike having a positive theology that is based on pure
affirmation, a/theism is a return to the via negativa. Unlike the
dominant way of modernist thinking, which puts a great deal of
effort into making objective truth claims about phenomena,
a/theism sees talking about God as a language game, in which all
speech-acts are failed attempts at trying to describe a hyper-
present saturated phenomena that exceeds human grasp, but at the
same time, must be put into language which is always less than
that which is overflows both understanding and experience.
Instead of objective description, which is always transparent
in it's subject matter, all descriptions are seen instead as a
poetic response to that which is excessive, overwhelming and
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eluding our very capacities to describe it. A/theism is a
paradoxical move that allows both affirmation and denial. All
truth claims are seen as constructs for something that exceeds
what language can possibly contain.
A/theism allows the Christian community to make claims about
the divine, while at the same time allowing them to understand
that such claims are not literal but arise out of necessity. This
opens up theology to a much wider horizon that is flexible since
all descriptions are provisional.
At the same time, a/theism can not be said to be a middle
position that will find resolution in some final synthesis.
Instead, what arises between affirmation and negation is
theological dialogue itself: Every theistic claim is held in
tension with an un-naming based on the hyper-pr of God. In this
way, even the critiques of the New Atheists like Dawkins,
Dennett, and Harris are seen as a form of negative theology that
remind the believer that God is beyond the rational-empirical
methods that are used in fundamentalism to define God as an
object.
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A/theism is a complex dialectic between thesis and anti-
thesis in which the final product is not a synthesis,but instead
the discourse that rises between the twin poles of affirmation
and negation. Such a dialectic values dialogue between
conflicting points of view, because for every signification the
Christian community has of God, it also glorifies God to have God
de-signified.
While signification points to what the believer understands God
to be de-signification is the act of pointing out God's
hypernymitity. A/theism thus shifts discourse from a re-enforcing
monologue to a dialogue which can open the Christian community up
to the world, since the act of having discourse put into question
is seen as part of the Christian faith. Where as before doubt was
seen as a totally negative phenomenon that indicated a lack of
faith, now doubt can be seen in itself as an a holy experience.
When one doubts there is often an inability to construct a
language to express what one is experiencing. The familiar
vocabulary that is used to express belief does not work. Instead
of being a form of sickness or weakness. The experience the
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silence of doubt can be seen as holy. The doubter who does not
know how to speak of their doubts occupies the same space as Job
in the Old Testament who while in the presence of God in the
whirlwind said, “I shut my mouth.”
Th traditional understanding of this verse might be interpret
Job as having words to speak but choosing not to say them out of
respect. A more subtle reading of Job might see Job's silence not
as a choice to speak something that is present, but instead as
the failure of language to construct any type of meaningful
statement due to Job's being in direct contact with God's hyper-
presence. The space that Job occupies would be defined by Rollins
as the God-shaped hole. Borrowing the phrase from Pascal, Rollins
reversed its polarity. Job's challenge is not to keep his mouth
shut to keep from offending God, but instead he must construct
language to speak top describe an experience in which all words
fail.
God Beyond Transference Object.
While Becker critiqued religion he also had a profound
respect for it: “ It answers directly to the problem of
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transference by expanding awe and terror to the whole universe
where they belong” (Becker, 202). This form of transference can
be seen as an unfetisihization. While a transference object, such
as a personal relationship, an artistic task, or a career is a
singular point to compensate for castration from the causa sui
project, only God has a scope big enough to encompass the awe and
terror of being. We can see how Job is a helpful figure. Job
stood alone before being itself speechless of it's power and
terror.
Yet at the same time, Becker's explanation of God-as-
transference-object is still a claim rooted in onto-theology. God
for Becker, is just another object that helps us sleep at night
by providing for us all that we lack. Any time God is an object,
God will become fetishized as an ultimately meaningful object
amongst other objects. Religion is reduced to just another way of
coping with the terror of reality. Rollins holds the key to move
us to a psychoanalytic understanding of religion that is beyond
transference. Drawing upon the critique of ideology, the God-as-
transference-object can be seen for what it is: an idol. In fact,
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idol and idolatry have the same root (Rollins 12). Now laying
fully exposed, we can see that making God a transference object
is an act of idolatry for the orthodox Christian community.
Idolatry takes two basic forms: The first form can be called
aesthetic idolatry, meaning God exists fully in a material object
like a statue. The second form is much more subtle and modern.
This is what can be called conceptual idolatry The belief that
God can be completely captured in a theological system
(Rollins,12). This conceptual idolotry is not the type that
attempts to make God present through a visible rendering, but
instead reduces God to an object of the intellect, (Rollins,12).
If God is hyper-present as Rollins claims, then it is
impossible to make God a transference object. God as hyper-
present is a saturated phenomena, which overflows both experience
and understanding. This saturation is the reason why theology is
over-coded. The over-coding comes from the excess of meaning.
Much like a fractal, which has endless layers the further the
observer looks it, every time God is signified there are more
significations that arise in a endless string of signifiers.
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The idol is only rendered when theology becomes a science
that promises exactitude and objectivity. Science must snip off
any unessential excess through physical and conceptual
reduction. While this type of reduction is necessary for the
scientific language game to take place, the over-extension of
this game has cause the Biblical text and God to be reduced to
idolic status. Instead, theology is best thought of as a poetic
attempt to make meaning through symbols which arises from an an
event that exceeds what can be seen as exceeding description
through a scientific paradigm. God talk is not what could be
called “blueprint language,” a way of talking that offers precise
descriptions, but a creative response to a tear in the very
fabric of meaning itself that can not be described with accuracy,
but instead calls for a creative response which testifies to the
crater left in God's wake. Such a way of thinking makes exact
transference impossible, since God can not be nailed down to a
specific object, but can only be described through a symbolic
poetics.
In order for transference to take place, there must be an
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object such as a person, or a concept that can be at least
partially identified with as present. A/theism reminds the
believer that any attempt to objectify God as an object or
concept is impossible. The symbols of worship are seen as just
that: pointing to something beyond themselves. It is only the
idolotrous gaze that apprehends the object as present in the
object .
Idolotrous theology calls for God to be a system of rigid
concepts. Such a way of thinking keeps the contemporary church
trapped in a pre-modern framework. This theology functions to
reduce God to a transference object that can be identified with
to make up for a lack in personal power. The static identity and
spatio-temporal location of the object allows it to be identified
again and again for transference. This is why contemporary forms
of Christianity practice theologies that emphasize literalism and
objectivity in either physical objects or conceptual objects.
This type of idolotry was strongly spoken against in the early
church. Most art that can be found in catacombs of early
believers falls into the category of symbolic realism. These
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frescos never depicted the literal object that they were about.
They chose to use symbols such as the hen or the shepherd boy as
stand-ins for their subject matter so that it would not be
fetishized as an object of idolotrous worship.
In the same way that the ancient Christians avoided literal
physical depictions in paintings which could lead to idolotry,
the church should have a theology that is iconic. This iconic
theology would see all the symbol for God as non-reducable to any
kind of literalism since all God-symbols are stand-ins for God,
(Rollins, 38).
Fetishization, for Becker is a strategy for managing
existential terror. It occurs when global terror is focused on a
single entity. When children are young they fetishize the
genitals of the mother. This allows the child to believe that the
awe and terror of existence is in a specific place that can be
monitored (Becker, 39). This kind of behavior continues
throughout life as a person finds ways to rid the world of it's
ontological sting. By focusing the too-muchness of being into a
single point the rest of the world becomes managable because all
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the inexplicable beauty and terror of creation becomes located in
one single structure. Fetishization is not limited to physical
structures. If it were than any sense of arousal or terror would
be unachievable in the absence of a physical representation of
the fetish-object and fantasies involving fetishes would be
impossible. Arousal is possible from mental representationd of
the object just as much as physical representations of the
object.
,Mental objects can be anything that can be held in
consciousness, whether it be a concrete shape or an abstraction.
It thus can be seen how a theological doctrine can become a
fetish object. The fetishization of theology serves as a
container for existential dread.
In contrast the point of the icon is not to be grasped. An
icon is never literal but is a symbolic aid that is irreducable
to words, images, or experience (Rollins, 38). Icons do the
oposite of fethization. They open the worshiper up to that which
is beyond them. They are not stop signs of where are journey for
the divine stops, but arrows giving us a starting point to what
Murphy 32
is beyond them. The irreducable quality of the symbol imbues it
with an ambiguity that stops fetishization through partial
concealment.
An icon is also an absence. In post-structuralist terms,
language is a sign of what is not present. Fetishization of an
icon is impossible if rightly understood, because God is
literally not in the symbol. It is only through the fetishization
of the icon to construct a transference object to manage
existential terror that idol fetishization occurs. In other
words, idolotry is what happens when we take our symbols into
rigid singular points that are the actual spatial location of
God. Such idolotry can only ends up making God into an entity
bound to either the external space of a statue, as in primitive
religions or to the internal thought space of doctrines, creeds,
and truth statements.
Systematic theology often times attempts clarity. This
stripping away of an ambiguity comes from the desire to turn
religious symbols into idols. The more rigid the doctrines and
dogmas, the more transference can occur through fetishization.
Murphy 33
Icons on the other hand, are like the mirrors used in optics
experiments. They deflect the gaze of the viewer into space like
a light beam being bounced into the vacuum of space.
In terms of birthing theology again in the contemporary
church, having theology as icon instead of idol would cause
theology to be seen as a poetic way of making meaning. This would
allow other forms of discourse, like science to be seen as valid,
since it has different kind of language game than religion. This
would make church practice much more inter-disciplinary as well.
Instead of shutting out all other forms of knowledge as
existential threats to the transference object that must be
protected, it would be understood that God-talk is symbolic, not
literal, and that other subject areas have other ways of talking,
since they are different language games with different internal
rules of logic.
Killing God in Church
The first step to re-birthing theology in the Christian
community is to, ironically put God to death as the idol. One
such community that does this is Ikon's practice of Atheism for
Murphy 34
Lent. During this practice participants are asked to give up God
for the lenten season. While this might seem to be nothing but
tongue-in-cheek irony, Rollins is actually seeking to bring
participants into a space where they experience the awe and
terror of Christ on the cross. During this time the
participants read some of the greatest critiques by the likes of
Nietzsche, Marx, Feurbach, and Freud.
Each one of these figures was such a powerful force, not
because of their critiques were founded in science, but in
culture. Each one on one level or another dealt with the
idolotry: For Nietzsche this meant tapping them with a hammer to
expose their hollowness. Marx exposed how religion is often used
as an opiate to oppress the masses. Freud showed how God
functioned as a form of wish-fulfillment for the father we never
had. Feurbach teaches us that theology is antropology, meaning
our figuring of the divine our projections of human traits
magnified one hundred fold.
The power of such critiques is their attack on the onto-theology
in some shape or form. In psychoanalytical terms onto-theology is
Murphy 35
a result of fetishization. They are secular prophets that lead us
to Gologotha to experience a crucifixion where belief is put to
death and like Christ, they stand before being without an
available transference object to shield them from their own
terror.
What makes the terror managable is not a transference-object,
like in most cases, but solidarity with Christ who suffered the
same loss. On the cross Christ does not act as a proxy to
experience what we do not have to, but allows us to undergo a
transformation by standing with humanity in the suffering and the
darkness.
What happens during contemplative practices like Atheism
for Lent is a shift from God being seen as an object to god being
seen as the Ground of Being. God is no longer a mythical figure
in the heavens, but is in the midst of life. The participants
enter into a new life-affirming form of being that can find joy
in the midst of suffering.
God is no longer an entity that is ultimately meaningful
sucking all life out of the surrounding world, like a black hole,
Murphy 36
but is that which makes everything else ultimately meaningful
(Rollins, 137). This is a very Tillichian move on Rollins' part.
God ceases to be an entity and is instead that, “which calls
everything else into existence”, (Rollins,137). This God is
beyond fetishization, since very literally speaking, is a ground
and not an object. This Ground is a no-thing that gives birth to
and establishes everything else.
This theology is beyond the narrow legalistic structure of
undead theology in church today. It is not a theology that
presupposes God as an entity beyond the world, but is the ground
that everything else rests on irreducible to an object and thus,
beyond the onto-theology that tends to dominate most discourse in
churches today.
In order to break the hold of the undead theology, what is
needed is not intellectual debate, but spaces and practices like
the ones Rollins is providing where people can come and
experience a psychological transformation. They allow people to
have the kind of experiential modalities that are popular in
churches today.
Murphy 37
One of the critiques of theology in the church is that it has
become a matter of private conscious powered by nothing but
subjective emotivism. If that is true then for theology to be
reborn as an intellectual discipline, there must be affective
practices that emphasize transformation through participation in
community.
Catharsis is a central experience of the death of God, in
which the causa sui that acts as a power supplement dies as
transference object. This crucifixion kills the God of onto-
theology that is pre-modern, exahsted and holding the church back
from intellectual discourse. It is only then that God can be
experienced as the ground of being, which causes everything to
emerge, as supposed to just a specific entity.
This theology is not only a thought structure, but can be seen
through the ways in which it's believers live their lives. They
are like Father Zossima from the Brothers Karamozov, for whom
everything is so beautiful that he falls down and kisses the
earth (Dostoevsky,78). Zossima is a man that can take in the
whole awe of creation, and stands awestruck at the whole of
Murphy 38
created order. Since he sees God as that which causes everything
to exist there is no secular-sacred divide since the profane for
him is sacred. His church is the whole wide world.
This person is not afraid to live outwardly, to venture out into
the world with all of it's uncertainty. Building on Derrida, it
can be said that for this person God is that which makes every
other other, not as otherness, but as that which makes the
otherness come forth. He lives the resurrected life, which is an
unconditional gift for better or worse.
Murphy 39
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. The Free Press: New York, NY 1975.
Dostoevsky, Fydor. The Grand Inquisitor with Related Chapters from The BrothersKaramazov. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc: Indianapolis, 1993
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness Unto Death. Penguin Books: London, 1849
Rollins, Peter. How(Not)To Speak of God Howard Books: New York, 2006
Rollins, Peter. The Idolotry of God: Breaking Our Need for Certainty and Satisfaction. Howard Books: New York, 2012
Rollins, Peter. Insurrection: To Believe is Human To Doubt, Divine. Howard Books: New York, 2011