Should I Care about Valentine's Day?

Isn’t that just a marketing scheme for restaurants, florists and chocolate companies?  In fact, wasn’t it recently invented by Hallmark?

It’s true that the holiday provides a huge boost for retail.  This year, Americans are slated to spend over $18 billion dollars with their Valentine sweethearts!  And an estimated 1 billion cards will be sent (85% of which will be sent by women) - making Valentine’s Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. 

But in truth, celebrating Valentine’s Day has a long history.  According to History.com:

Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began selling the first mass-produced valentines in America. Howland, known as the “Mother of the Valentine,” made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap."

The holiday traces further back into the history of France and England.  We find references to “Saint Valentine’s Day” in the writings of William Shakespeare and John Donne.  Some find an even earlier reference in a holiday of the same name mentioned in Geoffery Chaucer’s 14^th century poem, Parliament of Foules: “For this was on Saint Valentine's Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate.” 

The earliest surviving valentine is, of course, French: a 15th-century poem written by Charles, Duke of Orléans to his wife while imprisoned in the tower of London: 

Je suis desja d'amour tanné

Ma tres doulce Valentinée...

But before it was colored by its familiar rose-hues and romantic sentiment, this “holiday” - like so many others - was a “holy day” of the church.  Though the tradition’s roots are muddled in legend and ambiguity – there were multiple “saint Valentines” – we know that the first feast of St. Valentine was observed on February 14^th, 496 AD.  

According to the most common tradition, St. Valentine (Valentinus) was a priest near Rome martyred under Claudius Gothicus in 270 AD for, among other things, clandestinely marrying soldiers to their sweethearts.  The emperor had earlier banned the institution for the military, believing marital life was poorly suited for martial life.  Valentineus’ skull now sits with adorning flowers in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome.  Happy Valentines, right? 

Okay, what has this to do with you?  In truth?  Not much, really.  But men, let me ask you this: why pass up this opportunity to creatively pursue your wives and remind them why you 'chased' them in the first place?

Brian Lowe, pastor at Exodus Church in Charlotte, has a good word for us:

Whenever I talk about this, here’s what I hear:  

No Money - For some, this might be true.  But, It doesn’t cost a lot of money to set aside time each week to engage your wife.  Pour a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and listen to her.  And for the record, if you have more than 15 channels on your TV, you have money.  Cancel cable and date your wife. You’ll be glad you did.  

Can’t find a babysitter - BULL…If you wanted to do this, you would figure it out.  So, figure it out.  

I don’t know how:  OK…now we are getting somewhere.

•  Here’s a book that will show you how to do this.  It’s got a weekly checklist and a list of 100 ideas on how to do this.  There are men in your church who can help you with this.  Learn how to do this. 

• We have google -
 google Romantic Dates in Your City ...  Pick one and do it.

 Men, you figure out what you love.  Figure this out.

Lowe closes with this quote from Kevin DeYoung:

Be a man. Be a leader. Try to impress her. You managed to do it once, but chances are much of your impressiveness has worn off under the rough edges of career, laziness, and time. Men shouldn’t get married so they can stop pursuing women. We get married so we can perfect the pursuit with same woman over a lifetime. Don’t give up the chase gentlemen.

God-forsaken?

Was Christ forsaken by God at the cross? In short, yes.

In a recent article for Christianity Today, Al Hsu provocatively argues to the contrary (see Daniel Wallace's response here). Jesus wasn’t actually abandoned, he asserts, but rather only seemed abandoned, and His infamous “cry of dereliction” was simply a "this is that" identification of the messianic sufferings rehearsed in Psalm 22 with his own experience at Calvary.

The article is, in my humble opinion, a theological disaster, rife with false dichotomies. His subtitle, appropriately, says it all:

“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me" was a cry of vindication, not despair.

His first concern is "the apologetic challenge."  What about the charges of cosmic child abuse? What will the big, atheist bullies say? Do we really believe in a god who would abandon his child because of sin? What kind of parent is that?  (Ugh, when can this straw-man finally be put to rest?)

Our first concern, however, shouldn’t be apologetical - important as that is - but biblical. What is the biblical understanding of Christ’s death? To pick up only one thread of the apostles’ reflections, the cross was understood as a curse. Jesus was accursed. In fact, Paul states it even more starkly:

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.”

How should we understand this “curse of the law”? Looking to the book of Deuteronomy (see Deut.27:15-26; 28:15ff.), which is the source of Paul's quotations in Galatians 3:10-14, we discover that the curses are God's covenant sanctions against disobedience. In short, when Paul discusses “the curse of the law,” he contemplates the judgment of God against those “under the law.”  The law's curse was God's curse.  In fact, the text Paul paraphrases in Galatians 3:13 actually reads: “…his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God,” Deuteronomy 21:23.

Jesus was born “under the law” and died hanging from a tree.

But do we dare conclude with the apostle that Jesus was cursed by God? Cursed by His own, heavenly Father? Isn’t this outrageous? What will the critics think? There is a reason why the cross has always been such a scandal. From the Greek and Roman perspective, the cross was the symbol of unspeakable shame - not even to be mentioned in polite company. What god suffers such shame? From the Jewish perspective, it indicated God's curse. How can Messiah, blessed be he, be cursed of God? From a Gnostic perspective, how can Jesus, as the highest "emanation" of the divine, suffer the ignominy of physical limitations, most scandalously death itself? From an Islamic perspective (to make a more contemporary application), how could God ever abandon His prophet to such horrible mistreatment? Now way! It is scandalous! But then orthodoxy has always been scandalous. In his classic, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton writes:

When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay, (the matter grows too difficult for human speech,) but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

And this brings us to the meaning of Jesus’ cry of dereliction. Hsu, promising a “key biblical insight” on Jesus’ words, reveals:

So when Jesus says, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he's saying, "Psalm 22."

Why should this be a remarkable observation? Everyone agrees that Jesus’ referencing the psalm here indicates His identification with the persecuted, messianic figure who suffers unjustly, particularly in His apparent abandonment by God in the hands of his enemies. Moreover, the standard “Christocentric” interpretation of this psalm has always understood this identification to include the vindication of the “suffering servant” in the second half of the psalm, magnificently fulfilled in Jesus’ resurrection from the grave.  Jesus amazingly fulfills this psalm as both victim and victor.

Hsu’s unique reading of Jesus’ usage, however, turns on this false dichotomy:

Is Jesus saying "I have been forsaken by God"? No. He's declaring, "Psalm 22! Pay attention! This psalm, this messianic psalm, applies to me! Do you see it? Do you see the uncanny way that my death is fulfilling this psalm?"

But there’s no reason for this disjunction. Precisely because Jesus is “fulfilling this psalm,” He is saying, “I have been forsaken by God.”

On the one hand, we must keep in mind that the messianic laments are not merely predictions about the eschatological future, but also autobiographical accounts of real sufferings at present (e.g., Isaiah’s rejection and the “suffering servant” of chapters 49-53). The same can be said of the messianic royal psalms (e.g., Psalm 2, 45, 72, 110).  They point not only to a glorious future, but also speak directly to David's household.

On the other hand, in so far as these present sufferings and glories anticipate the coming Messiah's, they are only approximate.  With regard to the messianic royal psalms, they can be applied to the monarchy in ancient Israel only as “hyperbolic rhetoric,” a kind of royal propaganda. Similarly, the psalmist's vindication in Psalm 22, whatever exactly it entailed and however glorious it may have been, falls infinitely short of Jesus' walking out of the tomb as death's conquerer.   Surely the claim that all generations and all the nations would remember his sufferings and subsequent vindication was something of a poetic embellishment.

Yet in speaking exaggeratively in the present, these prophets pointed precisely to the future in Christ.

So we understand that the psalmist, despite his complaint in Psalm 22:1, wasn’t actually abandoned by God.  He sure felt like it at that moment.  But he was speaking emotionally, even hyperbolically.  But what he dramatically pleads before God in his perceived abandonment, Jesus publicly proclaims as His actual experience on Calvary.  The psalmist felt forsaken by God. Jesus really was.

On this point we must be clear: at the cross Jesus didn’t just appear to suffer God’s judgment. He actually did.  He didn't just seem abandoned by God.  He told us that He was.  And His expressions in anguish weren't merely the understandable overstatements of grief.  Nor was He simply echoing Scripture for the sake of messianic self-identification. If Jesus, in the integrity of His faith and person, asks God, “why have you forsaken me,” then He obviously believed He was.

 This brings us to another false dichotomy.  Hsu writes:

Jesus is not saying that God has forsaken him. He's declaring the opposite. He's saying that God is with him, even in this time of seeming abandonment, and that God will vindicate him by raising him from the dead.

Jesus is declaring both. He is at present abandoned by God. But He will be vindicated. He was cursed by God.  And yet this same Jesus would also be superlatively blessed by God, such that, “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth.” Cursed and blessed.

Hsu also states that the traditional evangelical understanding of Jesus’ rejection at the cross does violence to the doctrine of the Trinity (a serious charge). However, he makes little attempt to justify his claim.  So I won't spend much time on this, despite the weightiness of the implications.  I’ll simply point out that orthodoxy has always taught that Jesus bore our sins "in His body,” and suffered according to His human nature.  The impassible and immortal divinity of the Son endured no change or alteration in His humiliation (from the cradle to the grave), either in respect to Himself or to the other Persons of the Godhead.

Most importantly, we must understand why the Christ would be cursed in our place. The reason is as simple as it is profound. We are cursed, and justly so. To be blessed, we needed someone to take that curse away. And the only way to remove the curse from ourselves was for someone else, worthy and willing, to bear it. At the cross we see not only divine mercy – our escape – but also divine justice – what we deserve executed in another: God-forsakeness.

…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Romans 3:23-26)

Preaching Christ in the Haunted South, Pt III: From Christ-Haunted to Christ-Beloved

Hazel Motes understood that the best way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin. Only sinners need a savior. If we can redefine sin as manageable behavior, according to our own preferences and predilections, we can steer clear of Him. We can be “good Christians” without Christ.

American Christianity has been aptly labeled by sociologists as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, a.k.a., the gospel according to Oprah. At Advance10, Tyler Jones refined the label in application to southern Christianity, referring to it as “quaint moralism.”

Quaint as the Christian faith may seem to Yankees, in the South it is the norm. In the film The Shawshank Redemption, the inside joke among the prisoners was that everybody was innocent. In the South, everybody is born again. Many can even articulate a doctrine of salvation “by faith alone.” However, an essentially Galatian confusion prevails. That is, Jesus’ work isn’t sufficient to make us good. It merely makes our becoming good possible. The rest is up to us. And of course, as with the ritualistic legalism foisted upon the Galatians, what constitutes this “good” is reduced to an arbitrary minimum.

If you’re Old South, this moralistic reduction looks like avoiding the stereotypical Baptist taboos: “don’t drink, smoke or chew, or go with girls that do,” or some variation thereof. If you’re New South, it’s a bit more complex. Tolerance, open-mindedness, authenticity, transparency and suspension of judgment – these are the shared values of our culture. And we dutifully perform them. We are very careful to show grace toward others, to self-deprecate and not be outshone in humility, to carefully construct our “authenticity” in front of others, etc. In our dedication to modesty, we insist with Jesus, Do not perform your righteous acts before men to be seen by them! Yet this is precisely what we’re doing all the time.

When you drill down deeper, what you find is that the South (New or Old) isn’t so much concerned with morality as with the pretense of morality. We are far more interested in appearing to lead moral lives than actually living them. In Dixie, appearance is everything. And it is our peculiar rules of image-maintenance, of sustaining the show of righteousness, which constitute the “quaintness” of our southern-fried morality. If I’m convincing enough, then I am justified. My deism here is nearly atheism.

But even our most compelling performances do not exorcise the Ghost. Behind our careful façades we, like Motes, know we’re not clean. We run from the spreading stain, and a long, cruciform shadow.

As the public spectacle of sin and divine wrath, the blood-spattered cross exposes the depth of my shame. I am so broken that nothing less than the violent crucifixion of Jesus Christ could save me! To embrace the cross, then, I have to abandon my displays of moral fitness. The show mustn’t go on. I have to confess that I am not, after all, “a good Christian boy.”

Yet at the cross of my sin and shame is simultaneously revealed God’s unfathomable love. There hung “the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.” Such love makes me tremble.

As this gospel of God’s overwhelming love and justifying grace in Christ is boldly and repeatedly proclaimed, I am arrested in my Christ-haunted flight to find my rest in Him…as Christ-beloved.

Preaching Christ in the Haunted South, Pt II: From Christ-Haunted to Christ-Fearing

If you read Mark 4:35-5:20 closely, you’ll see a Jesus who was especially frightening. Though his supernatural power saves them on the violent Sea of Galilee, the disciples are not comforted but “filled with great fear” (4:41). Jesus is more frightening than the life-threatening storm.

Next, in a scene straight from a horror movie, a demoniac in a Gerasan graveyard, clad only in broken chains, shackles, and dried blood, literally runs at Jesus, only to fall to the ground in a panicked heap. The monsters in the man scream, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me” (5:7). Jesus scares demons.

After Christ commands the demons into the pigs and they rush into the sea – all 2,000 of them! - the townspeople arrive. They see “the demon-possessed man sitting there, clothed and in his right mind and they were afraid” (5:15). Then, just as the unclean spirits had previously begged Jesus to spare them, the locals “beg Jesus to depart from their region” (5:17). They too want to be spared. Jesus is more frightening than a legion of devils.

The disciples fear because they still haven’t comprehended Christ’s cosmic authority. The demons fear precisely because they have. The Gerasenes, on the other hand, fear not only the terrifying display of Jesus’ power, but the violent interruption He inflicts upon their way of life. Two thousand pigs is a lot of bacon.

The failure of faith and subsequent lack of nerve that occurs on the Sea of Galilee, and much more tragically in the country of the Gerasenes, is the fearing of something or someone more than Jesus. Such idolatrous fear renders Christ utterly terrifying to us.

If the South is Christ-haunted, it is so because it isn’t Christ-fearing. We are haunted by Jesus because we fear for our idols. And through an infinite variety of means - alcohol, television, trips to the coast, church-attendance, desperate prayer – we beg Him to leave us alone.

What are the idols we fear for in the South? Where is the money spent? Where is time invested? What are the boasts of the culture?

Southern Comfort

Southerners are notoriously lazy. By and large, we labor not for status but for comfort - for the twin engine boat on the lake, the mountain home in the Blue Ridge, that beach trip next summer on the Isle of Palms. Living in South Carolina for the last four years I’ve concluded that the state song should be Margaritaville. Life’s a beach – at least on the weekends. That’s what we live for, and when we really live! We love life after work. We love our vacations. We love our cookouts and porch swings and sweet tea. We love our comfort food. We love our comfort. And Jesus threatens our comfort.

Southern Hospitality?

We southerners pride ourselves on our “famous hospitality.” Yet the South also has a darker reputation in terms of welcoming strangers. This is ironically intimated in this early 19th century observer’s description of Southern hospitality:

"The hospitality of southerners is so profuse, that taverns are but poorly supported. A traveler, with the garb and the manners of a gentleman, finds a welcome at every door," (Jacob Abbott, New England, and Her Institutions, 1835).

Note the qualification. Those who didn’t fit that description were, shall we say, less welcomed. And even those who were welcomed didn’t always experience a sincere reception. One student of the South, for instance, writes of the “natural theatricality” of southern hospitality, consisting in “a comedy of manners that will apparently run forever, no matter how transparent its characters and aims” (Shirley Abbott, Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South, 1998). That is to say, our southern warmth and decorum is itself an attempt to maintain a distance between ourselves and the other.

Xenophobia means “fear of strangers,” and stands in obvious contrast to philoxenos (“love of strangers”), which is the Greek word we render “hospitable.” Racially, politically, economically, geographically, denominationally, and even regionally, the South has been infamously xenophobic.

What’s the root of this fear? R.C. Sproul, in his classic book The Holiness of God, insightfully wrote:

God is the ultimate object of our xenophobia. He is the ultimate stranger. He is the ultimate foreigner. He is holy, and we are not.

The sad scene in Mark 5:14-17 is duplicated by “southern hospitality” ten-thousand-fold. Jesus is the terrifying Other who threatens that with which we are familiar and comfortable. He ain’t welcome here.

But for the South to become truly hospitable, we must first and foremost open the door to the Stranger outside (Rev.3:20). At our own doorstep we need to encounter the living Christ in all the trauma and grace of His awesome presence - to hear His voice in the preached word of the gospel. Where some will beg for Jesus to leave them, others of us - by the mercy of God - will beg to go with Him (Mark 5:18).

Preaching Christ in the Haunted South, Pt I: Church without Christ

If you want to understand the South, you have to read southern authors. Folks like Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, Pat Conroy, etc. Flannery O’Conner, one of my favorites, summarized its religious culture best: “While the South is hardly Christ-centered,” she wrote, “it is most certainly Christ-haunted" (The Habit of Being).

What did she mean by “Christ-haunted”?

Consider Hazel Motes, the main character in O’Conner’s first novel, Wise Blood. Hazel is haunted by the legacy of his evangelist grandfather who "had ridden over three counties with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger." He despised both the preacher his grandfather epitomized and the Jesus the old man preached - a Christ who paid to redeem your soul, and now comes to collect. Yet Hazel could never quite run (or drive) far enough away. Throughout his life this Jesus stalks him as “the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind." And despite himself, Motes would become a preacher.

Mocking the old forms of his tent revival roots (even down to the clothing), Haze announced “a new Jesus” and a new church: The Church of God Without Christ. Salvation without a savior for souls without sin! But in that pungent irony so peculiar to Southern Gothic, we later discover that under his shirt the anti-preacher wore barbed wire, and in his shoes he packed shards of glass and rock. This self-inflicted punishment was “to pay,” he explained. Despite his earlier insistence to the contrary, Haze would finally confess, “I am not clean.” His previously nonexistent soul needed atonement.

Motes’ tortured caricature of southern Christianity, in all of its grotesque proportions, is dead-on. O’Conner would later refer to him as "a Christian malgré lui," a Christian in spite of himself. And the same could be said of the South itself. The truth is, Jesus makes us uneasy; and yet still we pine for that “ole time religion.”

Here in the Bible Belt, Hazel’s Church without Christ is new in name only. The “Jesus” on our lips is more dead-letter creed than living Person. The Christ “in our hearts” is more ritual and rule than risen Lord and Ruler. Yet we know He’s still out there. We are haunted. Like Hazel Motes, we’re on the run. And what better place to hide than the church?

But we’re doubly haunted. In Christ’s absence, the spirit that remains is hardly holy. The specter haunting us is more often a monstrous distortion, such as Haze imagined. A Jesus whose redemption means bondage, whose forgiveness only enslaves.

What the South needs more than anything is to be introduced to Jesus through the clear proclamation of the gospel. Not a new Christ. Nor the Christ we imagine. In our flight from God, we need, like Saul, to be wonderfully interrupted by the living Christ. “Who are you, Lord?” “I am Jesus…whom you are fleeing.”

The Cross of Christ Part II: The Death of God, or the Death of Man

Zizek correctly identifies a devastating problem within Christianity, which theologians have historically called antinomianism – namely: my 'religion' has removed any and all prohibitive fear of punishment or consequence, thus encouraging me to "enjoy [my sin] with impunity."  But, as I argued in my previous post, Zizek incorrectly implicates this conclusion with historic orthodoxy. 

If this is corrent, then his proposed solution to the problem no longer seems necessary.  Zizek's proposal can be summarized as the removal of God as "the Absolute" from Christianity - within Christianity, as signified at the cross - and in the resulting Absence, embracing the "abyss of our radical freedom."  But this, I am arguing, is predicated upon an interpretation of Christ's death that is incoherent, and, finally, not radical enough.  

Regarding this interpretation, Zizek once again quotes Chesterton as suggestive of his own position:

When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven it was not at the crucifixion but at the cry from the cross, the cry that God is forsaken of God…

The cry Chesterton is referring to here is the so-called "cry of dereliction": Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, which is Aramaic for “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” “At this moment,” Zizek states (perhaps still quoting Chesterton?) “God seems to be an atheist…” In other words, Christ is hereby gesturing toward atheism, and so subverting Christianity “from within itself."

But what is needed for the very real problem of antinomianism is a more radical interpretation – the orthodox one. Corrie Ten Boom’s interpretation.

Before I get to that, let me first suggest that Zizek's interpretation is self-refuting, since Christ’s supposed “gesture toward” philosophical atheism would render his cry - to borrow Zizek’s borrowing of Marx -“first a tragedy then a farce.” Briefly, if Jesus’ cry is finally a despairing of God (though this reading is quite impossible within the canonical narrative, cf. Luke 23:46), then, as Schweitzer would have it, Christ’s evident experience of abandonment on the cross signals the horrifying and pathetic realization that his whole mission was a desperate failure. But in so reading Jesus’ death as the casting off of the transcendent Other, we must of course despise Jesus’ life (as predicated precisely upon this “old Guy up there.”) And, thereby, Christ’s death is emptied of any possible, transcendent significance. He is in this way silenced forever at Golgotha; yet another messianic pretender crushed by Rome, and so to be rejected - most especially - by the faithful (cf. Paul’s logic in 1Corinthians 15:12-19, according to which, if a realistic interpretation of the resurrection be rejected, it is not God's intergrity that comes into question). To then present this as the supposed “perverse core” of Christianity - the undermining of faith’s transcendent object from within the framework of faith itself - as though it had any sustainable force is simply a farce.

That Zizek proposes such an incoherent undermining of Christianity “from within” as compelling only demonstrates just how “outside” of the faith he stands.

Consider, for instance, the film Inception. If Cobb’s totem at the end of the movie were to continue spinning indefinitely, at first, the audience would conclude that the final sequence was in actuality yet another dream (within a dream, within a dream…) – just as Zizek’s interpretation of Christ’s death would signify an awakening from the ancient dream of God. But it would not stop there; the whole narrative would in fact collapse like dominoes. Ultimately we would have to question whether Cobb’s explanation of the spinning totem is itself to be trusted. Isn’t even this just an irrational construct within a dream? Finally, we would be left with nothing to hold on to with any certainty, and could only dismiss the film as an entertaining "tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing."

But Jesus’ identification in the cry of dereliction is with something/someone far more shocking than a mere atheist. He was identifying with a Goddamned atheist...and a Goddamned rapist, and a Goddamned thief, and a Goddamned murderer, and a Goddamned perjurer, and a Goddamned religious hypocrite, etc., etc. Moreover, this wasn’t a gesture. This was an execution. Jesus’ identification wasn’t in being just “like” a forsaken man, “as it were,” cursed of God. He was Godforsaken. He embodied accursedness (Gal.3:13). At the cross, the righteous Son of God becomes the condemned sin of man (2Co.5:21; Ro.8:3).

Thus the cross signifies not the death of God as such, but rather the death of man as such.  That is, the death of post-fall man, existing "in Adam" under the law and under wrath.         

The cross of Christ is a spectacle for the whole world to behold - to see both the historical reality of God’s love and mercy for condemned men in the giving of the Son as a “propitiation for the sins of the whole world,” (1Jn.2:2; Ro.3:25), and the historical reality of God’s justice and wrath in the apocalyptic revelation of divine retribution against his sin (Ro.3:26). 

As a result, we learn from the cross that man is condemned to die.  He must die.  He will either die in Christ at the cross (Rom.6-8) in the day of His judgment (Jn.12:31-32), or he will die "the second death" in Adam (Rev.19; 1Cor.15) on His coming day of judgment (Rev.20).  Here is the radical conclusion:

through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal.2:19-20).

In answer to the original question posed - which is the more obscene interpretation of suffering: that which slays God, or that which slays man? - at the foot of Christ's cross, the obscene answer is inescapable.  "Though He slay me, yet will I hope in Him..."

The Cross of Christ Part I: The Trauma of Golgotha

“Christ’s death on the cross,” Zizek argues, “means precisely that one should drop without restraint the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts…”

He goes on:

Christ’s death…is the death precisely of this God…the God above , the old Guy up there, so that when you are trouble here you can say, oh don’t worry too much, somehow we know it will all end well…

In this way, Zizek concludes, the cross of Christ signifies the death of religion that "obfuscates the brutal real of historic catastrophes."

There are two objections that occur to me at this point.  The first is Zizek's assertion that this moral obfuscation is the inevitable result of the traditional interpretation of the cross.  The second is the 'radical' interpretation he offers instead.  In this blog post, I'd like to address the first objection...

It is absolutely incorrect, on the basis of historic orthodoxy, to say that God’s existence as “transcendent caretaker” implies a “happy outcome” for all our actions. Such theological nonsense might well be promulgated within heterodox simulations of Christianity, but it does not represent historic orthodoxy.  Here I would wholeheartedly agree with Zizek in his exposure of (inauthentic) religion as the negation of any moral consequences to our actions.  And it is everywhere!  The cross means never having to say you're sorry.  Or, to use his hilarious illustration: the teenage girl who prays to “her who conceived without sin, 'Please, let me sin without conceiving!'”

Of course what Zizek is here referring to is the ancient heresy of antinomianism: the perverse logic that concludes, 'let us sin since we are under grace and not law' (see Rom.6). Zizek is absolutely right to detect and diagnose this ancient perversion within today's "institutional church."  However, just as this carnal twisting of the gospel has been found in the church since the very beginning (see Romans 3-8; Galatians 5-6; 1Peter 2-4; James; 1John; etc.), so orthodoxy has always vigorously opposed and condemned it.  So here Zizek is very orthodox!

Yet such amoral rationalizations studiously ignore other aspects of the gospel.  In particular, antinomianism must always circumnavigate the basic significance of Jesus' doctrine of hell. That is, unless there is a radical change in us, our actions will ultimately be answered in the superlative trauma of “falling into the hands of the living God,” (He.10:31). Here the unrepentant will experience a catastrophe so terrifying that even the most infamous calamities of our collective past can only serve as mere approximations (Mt.10:15; Lk.17:29; 2Pe.2:6; cf. Dt.29:23; Rev.19:20). So cataclysmic is this apocalypse of wrath that it will in fact mark (as the “outer darkness” of existence) the very end of history as we know it.

In light of this horror, Jesus warns his disciples: “Does your eye cause you to sin? Then gouge it out, and throw it away from you! It is better to enter into life maimed with only one eye, than having both eyes, be cast into the fiery hell.” Or again, “Do not be afraid of those who can destroy the body, but cannot kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell.”

In other words, historical trauma is to be preferred and endured rather than the dreadful trauma to come in judgment.

Of course, as we’ll see, the trauma of divine wrath is central to the cross’s meaning. Only if we neglect the crucifixion of Christ as the (violent) demonstration of divine justice (Ro.3:26) can we forget that the gospel we preach always and everywhere involves the God of judgment, “who will judge the secrets of men through Christ Jesus,” (Rom.2:16). To quote the apostle Paul:

…in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who will render to every man according to his deeds: … to those who are selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, wrath and indignation …

All of this to say - and it is almost too obvious to state – God’s reign from heaven does not guarantee the happy outcome of all our actions. It is exactly the reverse here: the divine sovereignty guarantees the unhappy outcome of our actions. I.e., we will NOT “get away with it,” but rather are assured that all of our transgressions are subject to the unrelenting punishment of an exacting justice.

Zizek’s critique here could only be felt among those who fail to see at the cross the apocalyptic judgment of God against sin (more on this later), and therefore already reject as unreal the God of Gehenna.