Since I posted the Rowan Williams quote and since we have had our podcast on the resurrection, I have been doing some more thinking about Easter and figured I would turn to Eastern Orthodox Theologian David Bentley Hart for some more wisdom. Here Hart explores what it might mean to reject the cross as the symbol which points us to a God whose primary mode of salvation is found in a sacrificial system that we can comprehend as producing a theoretical “resurrection” whose only meaning is found in an idea or in the mind’s meaning. Hart also then gives a counter reading on the resurrection that actually incorporates some Marxian critiques of humanity’s tendency to externalize. Hart uses this Marxian critique as a way of critiquing theology that frames ressurection as simply idea, and proceeds to then give his own quasi-Marxian defense of the bodily resurrection:

“Christian love erupts from the empty tomb, and so must always be in rebellion against all tragic “profundities”. Such considerations call even more severely into question Lash’s reading of the story of Easter as the communication, by the power of the Spirit, of Christ’s experience of transcendant “meaningfulness” in the midst of his sacrifice, his sense of the significance of his whole life as standing eternally in God’s light. There is before all else, a moral danger in Lash making Easter a secondary, speculative vantage upon what happened at Golgotha: it comes perilously close to placing his reading on the side of the pagan order of sacrifice and of its wisdom regarding the crucifixion (regarding every crucifixion). One should, first and foremost, be troubled by the way this reading makes knowledge and spiritual comfort the fruit of an annihilation of finite form; every theoretical recasting of violence is mactation, a sacrifice in the most elementary propitiatory sense. It requires a certain very refined, altogether exquisite sensibility to grasp the crucifixion in just this fashion: one must step back from the act of murder itself, enacting the partial withdrawl of theoria, to that place where truth never simply happens (as difference, as irreducible historical particularity), but where “Truth” is intuited as total light, something recollected. Such a reading invites not only Kierkegaard’s critique of contemplation’s aristocratic indolence, but the still more solvent critiques of both Nietzsche and Marx. On Lash’s reading the crucifixion becomes a spectacle in the Hegelian sense – with its convertibility between death and life, negation and spirit, death and wisdom — which means it is “true” only insofar as it has a speculative inner fold: the spectacle is always a speculum, the mirror whose specular reflex allows the self a contemplation of itself, a return to the self; and thus the crucifixion constitutes an act of speculation in the economic sense as well, which secures a return to the investment made in the surrender of the particular.” (The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, 387-388).

In other words, Hart is pointing to a crucial tension in the Easter story: If Christ’s death be real, but his resurrection only an idea, then Christ is not significant in his particularity as the one who died in history and also was raised in history, then Christ must simply become the abstract idea or meaning of salvation, not salvation’s particular bodily, historical form. Hart continues:

“But theology is not permitted to make the cross a place of enlightenment, or to allow it its “spectacular” singularity, because the resurrection occurs as yet another event, in excess of the totality death bounds, and so upsets the tragic balance of the scene and leaves it in a state of dramatic undecidability: Is it a kind of ending or beginning? Does Christ on the cross affect history or succumb to history’s violences? Where can the cross be aesthetically placed, how can it be seen, when the blinding radiance of the next historical event (where Christ’s history would seem to have been exhausted) has so radically altered its deployment of shadows and light? Easter forces Christian reflection out of the depths of speculative solace and back to the surface of history. Christ’s resurrection transgresses the orderly metaphysics that makes negation a tragic or dialectical moment; for theology, then, the…crucifixion is never translated into contemplative repose (self, “meaningfulness”, eleos and phobos, Geist), because the serenity of every tragic representaiton has been disrupted by a sudden, unanticipated, inassimilable declaration of divine glory. Any attempt to reinterpret the resurrection as the speculative inner fold of the crucifixion is also an attempt to moderate the aesthetic affront of Easter, so that the crucifixion may still subserve a return to the self and the Same; but within the Gospel narratives themselves Christ’s resurrection is seen as calling us not to ourselves but beyond… (The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, 389).

I think Hart wonderfully displays the danger to the particularity of the Christian faith if the resurrection is simply an idea. What do you think?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 9:51 am and is filed under Zac's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.