Christ is God (Slavoj Žižek)

I claim that […w]e shouldn’t play this game of “God is the good-father up there who somehow manipulates things and you can trust him and everything will turn out well and so on…” [… Instead] I claim — and here I follow Hegel’s reading of Christianity — that what really dies on the cross is precisely this God. […] God as this secret mind which benevolently controls everything. […] Because,[…] if you want to be a Christian, be really a Christian, that is to say it’s not that we are here God is there and then God from time to time, why not?, sends a messenger. […] The ultimate lesson of Christianity, of embodiment, incarnation, for me is that: God is engaged in our history. What happens here on earth it’s not something that God observes from above. And the the way I read it is that the death of Christ on the cross… is not just the death of a representative of God. […] The death on the cross is precisely the death of that Christ as a of God as an absolute master [who] controls everything in a kind of teleological unity, that all our stains are somehow redeemed as contributing to some higher harmony even if it’s unknown to us. Christ coming here, suffering with us means precisely that our suffering is for real. […]

So what I claim is that something absolutely unheard of happens with Christianity which is that Christ, the death of Christ, means something very radical. It means, in all other religions we trust God, we believe in God. The death of Christ [instead] means, God trusted us. It means, “I give you your freedom, it’s up to you.” The Holy Ghost for me is — and I take it literally when it says in the Bible “Whenever the two of you are there, I will be there, I am there.” — it means the gift of freedom. It means, God doesn’t want to play that “up there a guarantee,” it means God entrusts the fate of creation, his own fate, into us. It means what happens here is part of, as it were, the history of God. And […] à propos iconoclasm […]: the prohibition to make images of God in Judaism does not mean this gnostic way “oh it’s too mysterious, we cannot paint it.” It means the exact opposite! It means God is alive not in your stupid deep meditations of up there, but how you act and react with others. And that’s why you shouldn’t make images because it’s not an image to be made up there. And I think, if anything, even more this holds for Christianity. That’s for me what the Holy Ghost is. God is no longer the substantial master up there, God is — to put it in this way — the spirit of our community, the gift of freedom.

I claim, if you don’t draw this crazy conclusion, then whatever you claim to be you re-paganize Christianity. You fall back at that level of “God is up there sending messengers or whatever…” […] Christ is not a messenger of God, Christ is God.

[via youtube]