Salvific Distance
My post from a fortnight ago hinted at the way pornography offers a cheapened form of intimacy by eliminating any form of social, cultural or visual friction, factors that Byung Chul Han calls “negativity” (which is his idiosyncratic way of describing anything that escape my ability to comprehend or control).
In so eliminating this negativity, there is also an elimination of difference and otherness, which in turn makes pornography end up as a parody of love, a love of self that is more than metaphorical, played out on a smooth surface of metaphysical sameness. All of a sudden, the injunction “go fuck yourself” is more than just a euphemism.
The question here is: how is this erasure of negativity or closure of distance a theological problem? Moreover, what does the Christian tradition have in response to this closure?
Regular readers might have heard me reference Graham Ward in a number of posts (I have examples here and here), in particular his Cities of God, which I have read cover to cover many times, and each time finding something new. In thumbing through its pages looking for another point, I stumbled across a passage that I did not read in depth, and have glanced over unprocessed many times before.
The passage (105) concerned the drama that played out within the persons of the Trinity during Christ’s Passion, which is the fulcrum of our salvation. Christians might be familiar with the motif of Christ’s taking on sin in our stead so that, in the words of the Second Letter to the Corinthians (5:21), “He who was without sin became sin on our behalf, so that we might be made righteous” (this is a motif I explore in Redeeming Flesh). Less familiar might be what happens within the persons of the Trinity as this drama is unfolding, something that Ward draws our attention to.
Ward links the Passion to a series of extensions. There is an extension taking place in the body of Christ (indeed, as I argue in Redeeming Flesh, it is something that precedes the Passion). Crucially, a second extension taking place is within the Triune God, whereby one person is distanced from another, even to the point of separation (encapsulated in Jesus’ cry of dereliction). This distancing, however, constitutes a crucial element of our salvation, for what is caught up in that distanced is then brought into the life of the Trinity. This distancing, says Ward, is an “embrace [of] all that is other”, which then becomes “a mark of God within creation”.
I draw this out in the context of a discussion with pornography because it draws a line of demarcation between the soteriology offered by pornography (which I explore in Pornography & Christology), which is underwritten by the closure of distance and the elimination of otherness, and that offered by the Triune God, underwritten by extension and distance as the precursor to the embrace of all otherness.
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