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When, in Being and Time,Heidegger insists that death is the onlyevent which cannot be taken over by another subject for meâan-other cannot die for me, in my placeâthe obvious counterexampleis Christ himself: did he not, in the extreme gesture of interpassiv-ity, take over for us the ultimate passive experience of dying? Christdies so that we are given a chance to live forever....The problemhere is not only that, obviously, we donâtlive forever (the answer tothis is that it is the Holy Spirit, the community of believers, whichlives forever), but the subjective status of Christ: when he was dyingon the Cross, did he know about his Resurrection-to-come? If he didthen it was all a game, the supreme divine comedy, since Christ knewhis suffering was just a spectacle with a guaranteed good outcomeâin short, Christ was faking despair in his âFather, why hast thou for-saken me?â If he didnât, then in what precise sense was Christ (also)divine? Did God the Father limit the scope of knowledge of Christâsmind to that of a common human consciousness, so that Christ ac-tually thought he was dying abandoned by his father? Was Christ, ineffect, occupying the position of the son in the wonderful joke aboutthe rabbi who turns in despair to God, asking Him what he shoulddo with his bad son, who has deeply disappointed him; God calmlyanswers: âDo the same as I did: write a new testament!âWhat is crucial here is the radical ambiguity of the term âthe faithof Jesus Christ,â which can be read as subjective or objectivegenitive: it can be either âthe faith ofChristâ or âthe faith / of us, be-lievers / inChrist.â Either we are redeemed because of Christâs purefaith, or we are redeemed by our faith in Christ, if and insofar as webelieve in him. Perhaps there is a way to read the two meanings to-gether: what we are called to believe in is not Christâs divinity as suchbut, rather, his faith, his sinless purity. What Christianity proposes isthe figure of Christ as our subject supposed to believe:in our ordinary lives,we never truly believe, but we can at least have the consolation thatthere is One who truly believes (the function of what Lacan, in hisseminar Encore,called yâa de lâun).The final twist here, however, is thaton the Cross, Christ himself has to suspend his belief momentarily.So maybe, at a deeper level, Christ is, rather, our (believersâ) subject supposed NOTto believe: it is not our belief we transpose onto others, but,rather, our disbelief itself. Instead of doubting, mocking, and ques-tioning things while believing through the Other, we can also trans-pose onto the Other the nagging doubt, thus regaining the abilityto believe. (And is there not, in exactly the same way, also the func-tion of the subject supposed not to know? Ta ke little children who are sup-posed not to know the âfacts of life,â and whose blessed ignorancewe, knowing adults, are supposed to protect by shielding them frombrutal reality; or the wife who is supposed not to know about herhusbandâs secret affair, and willingly plays this role even if she re-ally knows all about it, like the young wife in The Age of Innocence;or, inacademia, the role we assume when we ask someone: âOK, Iâll pre-tend I donât know anything about this topicâtry to explain it to mefrom scratch!â) And, perhaps, the true communion with Christ, thetrue imitatio Christi,is to participate in Christâs doubt and disbelief.There are two main interpretations of how Christâs death dealswith sin: sacrificial and participatory.4In the first one, we humansare guilty of sin, the consequence of which is death; however, Godpresented Christ, the sinless one, as a sacrifice to die in our placeâthrough the shedding of his blood, we may be forgiven and freedfrom condemnation. In the second one, human beings lived âinAdam,â in the sphere of sinful humanity, under the reign of sin anddeath. Christ became a human being, sharing the fate of those âinAdamâ to the end (dying on the Cross), but...
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