I've finally been getting to the Zizek/Milbank debate in "The Monstrosity of Christ" and I'm planning a few posts in response to the book, but let me begin by quoting Zizek; this is - I will claim - Zizek's challenge to theism, and deserves a healthy response. We will see if Milbank is able to provide that response... for now, Zizek:
"[W]hen people imagine all kinds of deeper meanings... what really frightens them is that they will lose the transcendent God guaranteeing the meaning of the universe, God as the hidden master pulling the strings - instead of this, we get a God [in Christianity] who abandons his transcendent position and throws himself into his own creation, fully engaging himself in it up to dying, so that we, humans, are left with no higher Power watching over us, just with the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility for the fate of... God himself. Are we not still too frightened today to assume all the consequences of the four words ['he was made Man']? Do those who call themselves 'Christians' not prefer to stay with the comfortable image of God sitting up there, benevolently watching over our lives, sending us his son as a token of his love, or, even more comfortably, just with some depersonalized Higher Force?"
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