The Temple was not only the center of Jewish religion but of the society, culture, and of the law of Israel. Jesus as Temple recapitulation (see here), means that Christ in some way fulfills the various roles of the Temple within himself and the extended meaning of who he is (in the church and in his disciples). This is not simply Temple destruction though, but fulfillment and completion in process (thus recapitulation). The Temple is representative, one piece of the larger implication of the incarnation, that redemption is worked through history and society and that truth is not to be had apart from the socio-cultural orders which constitute humanness. The Temple is the concrete point, fulfilled in the incarnation, that Emmanuel (God with us) reveals and makes himself known humanly, socially, in relationship. God in Christ is not known on some other basis, a transcendent or apophatic unknowing. God can be thought, and this cognition of God in Christ has social import, and is first and above all else something of social and personal import. In Hegelian terms taken up by Gillian Rose, “The idea which a man has of God corresponds with that which he has of himself, of his freedom.”[1] Knowing God in Christ pertains to knowledge of self as part of the social order. Not that God decides to intervene historically, socially, and culturally as opposed to some other means, as if this is one arbitrary possibility. Christ intervenes in all things human, such as family, religion, and politics so as to reorder ethics, values, and truth itself. No longer are natural ethical bonds of family (the “natural” polity and public life) determinant of truth and value, as one who would be a disciple of Christ must “let the dead bury the dead” (Lk 9:60). Those worthy of Christ must reprioritize their definition of love, not in addition to knowing Christ, but this is knowing him.
On the other hand, if God is not known on this basis, then knowledge is not available in the human realm. “If ‘God’ is unknowable, we are unknowable, and hence powerless.”[2] But the way in which God is known, is the way in which truth about all things are discerned. The Pauline recommendation to “act as if not” (I Cor 7:29) in regard to marriage, mourning, and business, is of the same order as Christ’s, “let the dead bury the dead.” God cannot be known through the value system of a corrupt society, so money, marriage, and one’s station in the world, are to be treated “as if not” – or detachment, otherwise God is not known. It is “natural” to organize identity around capital, around death, or around race and status. Suspending this realm is on the same order as suspending the punishing effects of the law; the Temple, marriage, death, and law, are not abolished, but their priority is suspended. “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mk 12:17). Caesar, the state, and even the Temple, are not annulled, but their obligations are not definitive. Imperial rule, sacrificial religion, and state security, demand one’s life be invested in a false identity. The question may be what we owe this system and how we negotiate it? According to Rose, building on Hegel, this question cannot be answered apart from taking up the cross (speculative Good Friday) in response to historical Good Friday.
In Rose and her portrayal of Hegel, the distinction between religion and state puts everyone in the place of a “broken middle” from which we cannot be extracted, this side of the eschaton. Christ’s intervention into the social order creates a split, that is always impinging and shaping our grasp of the Truth. Marcus Pound describes this “middle” as a “third space, not a unitary space (e.g. the neutral space of secular liberalism) but a place of anxiety to the extent it is the sheer ‘givenness’ of the political and ethical situation which resists the retreat into sanctified beginnings or utopian ends.”[3] There is no simple unifying of difference through ethics or politics or religion.
God can be known but this knowing is never without the process of Temple-like recapitulation. Knowing Christ is not thinking ourselves out of the world but it is a reordering and an emergent understanding within the world. God can be known but this knowing presents a gap, a struggle, a suspension that is working toward a synthesis always in process. We are surrounded by and inundated with untruth, misrecognition, prejudice, greed, and desire, so that the ordering of our values and arrival at the truth is always in media res, or in the midst of the story. Destroy this Temple and a new one is being built; this death and resurrection are being worked out corporately and individually.
In this sense, Christ as Logos is not a discontinuation of law or the symbolic order, but the law of love takes up where the letter, the scriptures, the Temple leave off. The letter is required for the word, and the word is transformed and filled out by the Logos, and in the same way the social order, the legal order, the religious order, or simply the symbolic order are the medium but not the end. The letter is not ultimately determinative any more than the social order is final, which is not to say the aporia between politics and ethics and the universal and particular, are evaded in some postmodern atheism, or fundamentalist utopianism. The telos is at work in the “broken middle” where we live. Thinking occurs here, and thus there is no evading the symbolic, the law, or the social, by imagining the “expectant city” is already our address. Rose explains, by comparing the choices offered by Mark Taylor and John Milbank, who put us between “ecstasy and eschatology, the promise of touching our own most singularity [Taylor] and the irenic holy city [Milbank], precisely without any disturbing middle.”[4] Pound extends this critique by appealing to Rose’s general critique of French thought as “melancholic” drawing on Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia in that “they see life as founded on absence that we’re always illegitimately trying to make present” (inclusive of Jacques Lacan’s and Slavoj Žižek’s philosophy).[5]
Rose claims we live in a time when philosophy has damaged and destroyed itself: “One by one all of the classical preoccupations of philosophy have been discredited and discarded: eternity, reason, truth, representation, justice, freedom, beauty and the Good. The dismissal of ‘metaphysics’ is accompanied by the unabated search for a new ethics.”[6] She sets forth her alternative in Mourning Becomes the Law: “The just city . . . is not built by the abandonment of reason or the proclamation of uncompromised virtue. It is built by faith in the achievements of even ruined reason and in the different chances of politics that are not ashamed of themselves.”[7] She begins with Antigone, illegally mourning her brother Polynices (declared a traitor) outside the city gates: “In these delegitimate acts of tending the dead, these acts of justice, against the current will of the city, women reinvent the political life of the community.”[8]
The death of Christ, the destruction of the Temple, and the resurrection of Christ (the Temple reconstituted), point to this mourning recognition of the injustices of the city. “To acknowledge and to re-experience the justice and the injustice of the partner’s life and death is to accept the law, it is not to transgress it – mourning becomes the law. Mourning draws on transcendent but representable justice, which makes the suffering of immediate experience visible and speakable.”[9] To not acknowledge the injustice of the city is to endorse its violence and injustice. The blood of Able, of Antigone, of Christ, cry out against the violence of the Temple, of the priests, of the Romans, of the city. Mourning acknowledges the injustice and the violence: “When completed, mourning returns the soul to the city, renewed and reinvigorated for participation, ready to take on the difficulties and injustices of the existing city. The mourner returns to negotiate and challenge the changing inner and outer boundaries of the soul and of the city; she returns to their perennial anxiety.”[10]
The disciples do not abandon the Temple, as if it is corrupt and finished after Christ, but they continue meeting in the Temple courts (Acts 2:46). To oppose the ethic of love against the law, is to miss that love incorporates, lifts up, corrects, and completes the inadequacies of the law. “To oppose new ethics to the old city, Jerusalem to Athens, is to succumb to loss, to refuse to mourn, to cover persisting anxiety with the violence of a New Jerusalem masquerading as love.”[11] The violence embedded in the structures of the city (the “principalities and powers”) are exposed by the injustice of the one killed outside the city, and to pass over this, is to let the injustice stand.
Rose sees this as the great failing of the church, as it has aligned itself with the state and as it has ceased to critique the injustices of the city. “The history of the Christian religion is the history of its relation to secular power and to ethical life, and this history is the history of the perversion of the Christian ideal of freedom. Christianity perpetuated the lack of freedom of Roman institutions, and the even greater bondage of feudal property forms and political institutions.”[12] The church became an ethical power by eliding the contradiction between state ethics and Christian ethics. Slavery, the oppression of women, military and judicial violence (the ethics of the state) were allowed to stand: “this cannot be acknowledged by a church which debases the ethical, and Christian doctrine has therefore justified both the evil and the just acts committed in its name.”[13] The possibility of Christian civilization was at the price of a degraded Christian ethic allowing for an oxymoronic “Christian barbarity.”
Rose traces Hegel’s presentation of history, as one in which Christian freedom and ethics are perverted, by Rome, by Germany, by France and then this failure is reified in the philosophy of Kant and Fichte. “It is like the Roman in that it has no vocation to impose itself on the state, for it serves the state. Just as in the time of the Roman empire political life [is] universally devoid of principle.”[14] Hegel describes a Gospel that is no longer salty, in which its very foundations have been removed: “The latter have, it is true, brought life to themselves by means of reflection, have found their satisfaction in finitude, in subjectivity and its virtuosity, and consequently in what is empty and vain, but the substantial kernel of the people cannot find its satisfaction there.”[15] This is the opposite of speculative Good Friday; a betrayal of historical Good Friday.
Rose’s philosophy, embracing “mourning” in the “broken middle,” might be read as a meditation on the how of Hegel’s recommendation to transform the historic Good Friday into the speculative or apprehended Good Friday. “To do this, philosophy must form ‘a sanctuary apart’, ‘an isolated order of priests’. Hegel draws attention to this status of philosophy in order not to impose its concept. The priests are not to act as Christian priests have done; they are to remain isolated.”[16] Her conclusion: “This is how the philosophy of history should be conceived, not as a teleology of reconciliation, not as replacing the exhausted attempt to create a Christian civilization, but as perpetual repetition, as the perpetual completing of the historic Good Friday by the speculative Good Friday. There is no end of religion and no end of history, but a perpetual ‘speculative justification’ to complete the faith which ‘justifies nothing’.”[17]
Temple building begins with “destroy this Temple” and acknowledgement of its death in baptism. Paul pictures the ‘body of sin’ as in process of being reduced to the ‘nothing’ from whence it came (Rom 6:6) through a reversal of the power it exercises. To die with Christ in baptism is to be joined to a form, bringing about an alternative conformity (Rom 6.5; Philippians 3.10-11, 21). He encourages his followers to live out their baptism, to realize the death they have died and to participate ethically (to live out) the reality of resurrection. The work of Temple building is an ongoing engagement in human brokenness achieving this resurrection life.
[1] G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophie der Religion, I, 83, tr. I, 79. Cited in Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, (New York: Verso, 2009) 98.
[2] Rose, 2009, 98.
[3] Marcus Pound, “Political Theology and Comedy: Žižek through Rose Tinted Glasses” (https://www.crisiscritique.org/storage/app/media/2015-02-09/pound.pdf) 183.
[4] Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) 285. Cited in Pound, 184-185.
[5] Pound, 186, citing Rose 1992, pp. 102-104.
[6] Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 1.
[7] Ibid, from the blurb by Michael Woods.
[8] Ibid, 35.
[9] Ibid, 36.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Rose, 2009, 124.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Hegel, Philosophie der Religion, II, 342–3, tr. III, 150. Cited in Rose, 2009, 126.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Rose, 2009, 127.
[17] Ibid.