Our situation may be defined as follows: the war of religions continues, and there will be no Christian return of Christ. If Christianity is the religion of the exit from religions, Christ is the exit from Christianity itself. Let us take a step further, fulfilling this insurrection. It is up to us to invent his impossible coming.
So many christs have been imagined, so many gospels written, plagiarized, copied, canonized or kept secret, unfolded in the light of exegesis or buried in the desert; so many christologies and hermeneutics, so much literature elevated to the dignity of “theological” and sometimes “canonical” texts, that there is nothing excessive in inventing anew his advent, by proposing a christo-fiction that openly declares and advocates itself as such and that consists in a controlled conjugation of renewed scientific-type procedures and old philosophical-type theological models. Why should painters be allowed this right of invention, above and beyond that of mere cataloguing—the right to mix their colors with the flesh and blood of Christ? Why should evangelists, historians, theologians, confessions, churches, and believers have the right to freely fabricate images and stories when there may be a discipline of Christ that, while still fictional, is this time rigorous—a discipline of the faithful grasping themselves as quasi-physicists of the body of Christ, striving to speak his substance and his effects? If Christ cannot be identified with the set of legends that is Christianity, if he is barely recognizable in his Jewish milieu through his Greek words—a folly for philosophy and a paradox for the Jews—then it is urgent that we revise our categories, which are still those of our beliefs; that we take the leap of thought that is called fidelity, and forge a fiction capable of upholding this fidelity. Above all, not rationalist or materialist disillusionment—that reason is not ours, that materialism is not the materiality of the blood and flesh of Christ. This book, therefore, is not written so as to enrich the treasury of theological knowledge, to verify once more its standards of acceptability, still less those of academic admissibility. Under the punctilious gaze of those standards, its author can only confess shame and confusion.
What is a “rigorous fiction,” and is it worth pursuing if it does not essentially reproduce an already recognized truth? Our problem is not that of traditional theology and christology, which, in a sense, we do not seek to challenge; they are first-degree disciplines or symptomal material, like the philosophy with which they are impregnated. Our problem is the Principle of Sufficient Theology (PST) that has taken hold of them. Believing themselves sufficient to think Christ-in-person (the Christ of the faithful rather than that of believers), they lack a second dimension—let us say a theologically and christologically nonstandard dimension. It is a question of drawing them out from their lived (vécu) of belief and their legendary historical tale, of positing the conditions of their use as means directed toward the raising of a Christ more “authentic” than the legendary Christ because his excess and his effect will be commensurate with “ordinary” or “generic” man—as if the intention were to establish what certain physicists call the “anthropic principle” within the human sphere. A fictional or fictioning fidelity is certainly not a fiction of fidelity. With new means, of nontheological provenance and of what we shall call a “quantum-oriented” order, we have won the right to be atheist religious leaders—that is to say, atheists capable of taking religions from the side where they are usable, and of relating them to that special “subject” called “last instance” that is generic man.
This book belongs to the exoteric genre of theology, but more precisely to a genre of overtly espoused theoretical theo-fiction that can scarcely be said to exist, unless we treat the whole of the Gospels as a literary enterprise of testimony verging on fiction. In relation to Christian theology, christo-fiction distinguishes itself through the removal of belief in its religious and theoretical (that is to say, philosophical) aspects. Theological generality is dissolved in favor of its condensed christic kernel, and above all is reduced to the state of a symptom or raw material for a science of Christ—a science that, despite its positivity, must remain in-Christ. Christo-fiction is distinct from christologies just as the faith of the faithful is distinct from the belief of Christians. More than a literary genre to which the Gospels and all of Christian literature would belong, less than a classical theological genre, christo-fiction is a thought experiment, or more exactly a faith experiment—a practice of nonphilosophical or nonstandard writing that presents and produces its axioms and its rules commensurately with that which they invest. Whence a “demonstration” that is at once globally linear and locally spiraling or resumed.
1In what way is this book a faith experiment? Can a fiction be a “testimony” that is “formalized” and thus scientific in spirit? What distinguishes the fiction in the testimonial literature of the Gospels, and ultimately of all Christian literature, from a self-declared christo-fiction based on a theoretical model? In both cases, it is a matter of a truth based upon a positive knowledge.
2 But the paradox lies in an inversion of characteristics: either the truth of testimony is but the continuity of a historical knowledge or the transmission of a spontaneous belief, or it is based upon scientific knowledge, on a model that, albeit contingent in its own way, is rigorous and formalized rather than being a transmitted lore. These are two ways to be contemporary with Christ through the introduction of fiction into truth: either through transmission from a supposed origin (in which case the fiction is imaginary in the literary and psychological sense, even when based on historical facts), or through the controlled production of a cognizance
3 that is nonpositive (in which case fiction is a higher-degree formalization, since it is subtended by scientific knowledges). Neither ancient nor modern, the contemporary of Christ that we seek to be is contemporary either through unfounded, apparent, and hence all the more sufficient belief, or through generic and modelized faith. Two types of truth, two types of subject. Belief is a supposed truth that can be recognized subsequently as being only a fiction. Faith is a truth established a priori under the rigorous conditions of a “well-founded” fiction—that is to say, a fiction founded on the conjugation of a positive knowledge and a theological symptomatology. Perhaps a new kerygma is announced here: belief is the sufficiency of God, but faith is the nonsufficiency of Christ and thus of humans who abase or bring down the sufficiency of God. To sum up all of this, the target and the arrow, we have on one side a Principle of Sufficient Theology, and on the other side (the side from which our struggle is prosecuted) a necessary but nonsufficient faith.