One of the interesting elements of Johann Baptist Metz’s political theology are the multiple interstices between it and the theological-philosophical expostulations of Slavoj Žižek. One of the essential points of continuity is the way in which both of the, drawing on Frankfurt School Marxist critical theorists, try to take seriously the realities of how modern capitalism has shaped history. Both attempt to work out a form of critical social theory (and, at least for Metz, a praxis) that takes the situation of modern suffering and nihilism seriously. A key convergence between these two thinkers on this point lies in how both reject theoretical strategies to fashion conceptual systems that provide guarantees of meaning and existential closure in light of the modern history of human suffering and death. Žižek and Metz both insist in their distinctive ways that a theological reading of the modern age does not provide a seamless integration or sublimation of the history of human suffering into a divine history of salvation, but rather requires our reading of historical human suffering to become more radically historical and open-ended.
God, for Žižek is not a guarantor of meaning, rather history emphatically manifests the absence of God. For Žižek Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross manifests precisely the way in which humanity endures the complete annihilation of divine transcendence. For Žižek God is not a guarantor of historical meaning beyond the absence of God in history, rather God is the event of that absence within which humans must labor and strive, in the face of the death of transcendence to realize the future of hope. For Žižek it will not do for us to hope in God, rather we must realize that God hopes in us.
Metz’s reading of the history of modernity ensconces a similarly stark frame of reference. Like Žižek, Metz is against any tidy narrative of salvation history which renders intelligible and understandable the history of human suffering. The history of human suffering is precisely a nonidentity for which no “explanation” can be given without betraying the distinctive character of that history of suffering. Metz resists any theodicy which proffers simple closure in the face of the reality of radical evil. Rather, for Metz it is precisely within the context of the inexplicable reality of radical evil that theology, prayer, and hope in the apocalyptic future of God in Christ must take shape. For Metz, the Christian theologian must point to the radical openness of the future in light of God’s past of interrupting the world in Christ. For the Christian theologian, the agenda is not to find a way to give the world’s history of suffering some sort of “meaning”, but rather to point to the radically new transformation that is hoped for in Christ’s apocalyptic invasion of the world. By construing history apocalyptically, the theologian testifies to the world as a history which is held open for the redemption of the hopes of those who have died stripped of any hope whatsoever.
Both Žižek and Metz struggle to come to grips with the reality of the history of human suffering and the demonstrable absence of God in that history. However, in Žižek’s “theology”, we are thrust ever and always onto the plane of immanence in which the being of God is identified with God’s absence into which we must radiate presence, grasping and fashioning for ourselves any redemptive future that may be. We are left stumbling about in an ontology of the void. For Metz, however, while not falling into a scholasticism which would seek to dissolve the ambiguity and dissonance of history, calls attention to the apocalyptic hope of God’s interruption of the world in Christ which functions as the church’s “dangerous memory.” Metz constructs no fictive guarantees of meaning or closure, but points instead to the radical possibility of transformation in Christ which is rendered imaginable through the remembrance of Christ. In contrast to Žižek, Metz, while fully recognizing the godforsakenness of the world, provides us with a way in which to go on living in the world of godforsakenness in hope. For Metz, it is the apocalypse of God in Christ that alone promises a future in which we can hope for a resumption of life beyond the rupture of history, even as we stare the maw of that history directly in the face.
In his newly-translated Faith in History and Society, Johann Baptist Metz makes a great many fascinating contributions to political theology, engaging seriously with the problem of human suffering. In the process, he makes a number of interesting observations about how other theologians deal with the problem of suffering. Taking Karl Barth, Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann, and above Hans Urs von Balthasar together as exemplifying a distinctly Hegelian trajectory, Metz notes the trend in contemporary theology to articulate a vision of God’s Trinitarian engagement of the world in Jesus Christ as the answer to the problem of the history of human suffering. “In light of God’s kenosis in Jesus Christ, the nonidentity of human suffering is taken up into the Trinitarian history of God.”
For Metz this confusion of “the negativity of suffering” with “a dialectically mediated concept of distress” will always attend attempts to “conceptualize and interpret the rending of the human history of suffering within the dialectic of the Trinitarian history of God.” Metz argues instead that “we have to rule out any conceptual, argumentative mediation and reconciliation between the redemption that has occurred in the past and is operative now, on the one hand, and the human history of suffering, on the other. They lead either to the dualistic, gnostic eternalization of suffering in God or to an interpretive reduction of suffering to its concept.”
David Congdon has put out the 
In the latest issue of the Princeton Seminary Bulletin, one of the articles is a lecture given by Stanley Hauerwas to their Forum on Youth Ministry. Now, of course picturing Hauerwas giving advice to blossoming youth ministers is funny enough. Fortunately, however we need no worry that his distinctive style was hampered by this rather unusual context for him to be speaking in. Here’s a priceless quote:
In his helpful guide through Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, Aidan Nichols points out key themes that mark out Balthasar’s Christologically-centered theological aesthetics. For Balthasar, theological aesthetics must not become simply an “aesthetic theology” which simply offers a “correction of a deficient philosophical ontology.” Rather, theological aesthetics, as offered by Balthasar “centers on the confrontation of beauty with revelation in the context of dogmatic theology.” For Balthasar the event of revelation which takes place in Jesus Christ is the full disclosure of God’s glory and as such is the criterion of transcendental beauty. For Balthasar, theological aesthetics must be grounded in a thoroughly aesthetic Christology.
Most of us have seen Rublev’s ikon of the Hospitality of Abraham in which the Trinity is portrayed as three angelic persons in communion around a table. Now, of course many of us are predisposed to immediately point out the theological problems with the ikon, the most glaring of which is its seeming portrayal of the persons of the Trinity as three separate individuals. However, to enforce such theological specificity into an ikonic witness to the Trinity is to make a distinctly Western theological mistake, namely the mistake of thinking that we can univocally represent God in any form whatsoever, be it verbal or pictorial. What I find more illuminating and provocative about this ikon is actually its name. This is not simply an ikon of the immanent Trinity (how I think it is usually read), but of “the hospitality of Abraham.” I find a couple of insights in that.
One of the ongoing commitments I have in doing this blog is a commitment to 
The works of Kathryn Tanner offer a great deal to the contemporary theological community. Her theology is deeply centered in the development of two key concepts: a theology of divine transcendence and the principle of noncompetitiveness. Her development of these themes was portrayed most clearly in her Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology and such insights were later applied directly to economics in her more recent Economy of Grace. Both of these works make substantial contributions in their own right and as such have real value. However, there are some debilitating weaknesses in Tanner’s account of a theological economics which flow from her construal of the shape of noncompetitive gift-giving.
In contrast to Tanner’s insistence that we need never suffer or give anything up, Rowan Williams offers us a much different account of the implications of the triune life of gift-giving for the shape of our own lives. Williams argues that, “If the substance of the gospel has to do with God’s giving up possession or control – in Paul’s language, the Father giving up or giving over the Son to the cross, or Christ giving up his ‘wealth’, security, life for the sake of human beings – then the speech appropriate to this must renounce certain kinds of claims and strategies.” Williams argues, contrary to Tanner, that the shape of God’s self-giving in Christ places distinctly self-limiting and self-sacrificial demands on those who would follow Christ. As Williams argues, “I can either attempt to close off my vulnerability or I can so work with it as to show the character of God.” (Rowans Williams, On Christian Theology, 257-259). Here Williams recognizes precisely what Tanner wishes to close her eyes to, namely that we live in essential vulnerability. Her longings for a community of mutual fulfillment where we all get to have everything we want is precisely the desire to flee from the vulnerability of creaturehood. 
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