Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ is treated less as the protagonist of a continuous biography than as the decisive figure through whom the book rethinks incarnation, suffering, and divine power. His significance lies in the reversals attached to his body and death: the divine appears not as a sovereign power safely above human misery, but as one who enters it; the crucifixion is not only a lesson in goodness or a transaction of redemption, but a crisis that implicates God in the imperfect world. Across discussions of the Eucharist, Protestant theology, the Shoah, and a modern film about the Passion, Jesus Christ makes the question of what redemption means impossible to separate from the question of how God relates to suffering.

The Embodied Figure of Incarnation

The book gives Jesus Christ a distinctly creaturely status. In its account of authority and symbolic order, the creature is not simply a pitiable victim excluded from full humanity. The category also names an excess that unsettles established authority. Jesus Christ on the Cross is identified as a creature in this sense: his significance does not depend on presenting an ideal human figure who stands above bodily vulnerability. The book instead makes his exposed, finite embodiment central to what Christian incarnation can mean.

That emphasis shapes its account of the Eucharist. The sacrament is read as participation in the body of Jesus Christ: an earthly person takes in a partial, enduring substance associated with divine life. The book presses the disturbing implication of this claim. If the sacrament promises participation in eternal life while the recipient remains mortal, then divine life is not merely a distant ideal; it enters bodily existence as something alien and irreducible to ordinary human control. The Eucharist therefore appears at once as redemption and as an unsettling encounter with an excess that ordinary distinctions between life and death cannot contain.

The argument also distinguishes this account of incarnation from two other ways of understanding Christ. In the Orthodox tendency described by the book, Christ can become an elevated model for human imitation. In the Catholic account it discusses, redemption can take the form of a symbolic or juridical exchange in which Christ pays for human sin. The Protestant interpretation associated with Martin Luther, by contrast, understands incarnation as God’s real identification with humanity in its abject materiality. On this reading, divine love is not love for an idealized humanity or for a humanity made worthy by exchange. It is love directed toward human beings precisely in their miserable, creaturely condition.

Truth, Suffering, and Historical Involvement

Jesus Christ’s bodily exposure also provides a point of comparison for the book’s account of the body as a bearer of truth. In its discussion of hysteria, physical symptoms are interpreted as a body taken over by unconscious truth and made into its medium. The comparison is structural rather than biographical: a body can cease to be treated as merely immediate, private reality and become the surface on which a truth is registered. The book connects this idea to the image of Jesus Christ on the Cross, whose creaturely body places truth and suffering in a material form rather than leaving them at the level of abstract doctrine.

The book’s theological argument becomes especially explicit in its response to the Shoah. It rejects both a triumphalist picture of God, who secretly directs events and ultimately wins, and a picture of God as a remote dispenser of justice whose judgments are necessarily right. It instead proposes the suffering God, with Jesus Christ on the Cross as its central image. In this account, God assumes suffering and stands in solidarity with human misery. Divine suffering matters because it means God is affected by history: human history is not a shadow-play directed from a safe transcendence, but a real struggle in which the Absolute is involved and its fate is at stake.

The book invokes Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s conclusion that only a suffering God can help after the Shoah, setting it against a call for a God who might still save the world from above. It takes seriously the proposal that the suffering of the murdered is also the voice of God’s suffering. This does not make catastrophe meaningful in any easy or consoling sense. Rather, it insists that secular language can fail to register the scale of historical horror when it translates religious categories into merely human culpability and legal offense. The crucified Jesus Christ furnishes a theological frame for approaching that failure: God is not exempt from the historical disaster, and the collapse of divine power is itself part of the crisis that must be faced.

The Cross and the Failure of Divine Self-Assurance

The book connects the crucifixion to a moment when belief itself falters within God. It recalls Jesus Christ’s cry to the Father as an instance in which God seems, briefly, not to believe in himself. This is not presented as a simple proof of atheism. Its force comes from placing abandonment inside the divine relation: the scene does not leave doubt and isolation outside religion as problems belonging only to unbelievers. It makes them part of the Christian image of God.

That reversal gives the Cross a particular importance in the book’s account of belief. A person may act with cynicism or disregard for ethical limits while relying on the assumption that the symbolic order—the external field in which belief is embodied—does not know what is happening. The book argues that such a structure can preserve the existing state of things even when individuals change their stated convictions. Against that arrangement, the crucifixion figures a more radical disturbance: not simply a change in what a person believes, but a crisis in the presumed knowledge and authority of the Other. Jesus Christ’s abandonment therefore bears on the organization of belief as well as on the meaning of suffering.

The Passion as a Test of Representation

The book’s discussion of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ tests these claims against a modern representation of Jesus Christ’s suffering. It notes that Pope John Paul II was reported to have reacted to the film by saying that it was as it had been, after which official Vatican spokesmen withdrew the remark. The contrast between spontaneous response and cautious institutional neutrality serves as an example of liberal tolerance’s tendency to soften religious conflict so that no group is offended. The book argues that suppressing aggressive religious passion does not necessarily dissolve it; it may leave that passion smoldering beneath a managed public appearance.

Its criticism of the film goes beyond the controversy surrounding its religious politics. The book argues that the work’s attempt to present itself as fundamentalist Christian cinema ultimately sacrifices the inquiry into what the crucifixion means. It identifies three explanations that the film does not explore: a dualist struggle between Good and Evil, a sacrifice that satisfies justice, and an exemplary death intended to inspire goodness. It then proposes a fourth possibility: Jesus Christ’s death may be understood as God the Father repaying a debt to humanity for creating an imperfect world marked by suffering and injustice. This interpretation makes the crucifixion not merely a payment demanded of Christ or a model offered to human observers, but an admission of divine implication in creation’s failures.

For the book, the omission matters because spectacle cannot substitute for an account of the Cross’s theological stakes. The Passion is significant not simply as an image of suffering, but as the point where incarnation, historical injustice, and the failure of divine self-assurance converge. Jesus Christ’s role in the book is therefore less to resolve these contradictions than to make them visible: redemption must be considered from within vulnerable embodiment and historical suffering, not from the security of an untouched power above them.