the (un)ethical christian

when we define a christian in a positive sense; as in, a ‘christian is someone who gives to the poor’ what we do is marginalize someone who is unable to give to the poor. what we do is deny the essence of the person and impose a factory-like caricature upon those who might not fit that certain category. this method of defining another human denies the very ontological state of our being as beings. it transforms people into machinations of ideology. what occurs is that we use labels is the disappearance of distinction, because over time if these ideas become rules, then the rules become gospel, all the while marginalizing the true essence of the gospel. in reality then the rules begin mediating for that which it promises to fulfil, all the while not being able to be nothing other than a stand-in or representation. is this not what idols are? representations of the object, things that promise to be something they are not? is this not also the premise of advertising too, whereby an object is placed before us and promises to fulfil itself in the form of the object we desire but as we all know can never fulfil? here lies the very perversion of the ethical christian or even the idea of god (the unnameable) being the alpha and omega or the beginning and the end.

because that phraseology does not promise that god is anywhere in the in-between; it also imposes upon the essence of god the metaphysical notion of language and description and in doing so denies the essence of the being we call god. language itself is that which promises us something but can never fulfil it. it is the greatest act of perversion. language must empty itself to then return again to be used in a different manner, is this also not the nature of the incarnation? a god who arrives in a different form, a god who descends out of itself to be with the object of its desire. is this also not what is happening in the lost narratives? remember those, the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. each story has someone looking for the object of their desire, for some its waiting for the return of an object, for others its intentionally seeking it out, and for another its embracing the object as part of itself. the major presumption in these stories is that something is lost, something is missing, something is not right.

at least this has been the orthodox interpretation for quite some time. what if the stories show us something about the reversal of loss? as in the lost object was not what was being searched out, but rather the lost object was the person searching and through their journey they became found. they discovered an aspect of themselves they did not know before? that to be lost is to be found, that to lose something we thought we knew of ourselves is to be found? to embark upon a a new journey of any kind is to deviate from the original path that one was taking before they embarked upon such a journey. this is why a christian cannot be ethical, because it presumes the journey is over before it ever begun.