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Document Details : Title: De dood staat op Subtitle: Naar een seculier opstandingsverhaal. Een onderzoek met Jean-Luc Nancy Author(s): TEN KATE, Laurens Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie Volume: 53 Issue: 1 Date: 2013 Pages: 26-43 DOI: 10.2143/TVT.53.1.3203306 Abstract : In his philosophical project of a ‘deconstruction of monotheism’, Jean-Luc Nancy explores the hypothesis that the historical roots of secularization should be traced back to the beginnings of the monotheistic traditions. The secular is not exclusively a feature of modern culture. The complex connections and tensions between secularity and religion in recent decades can only be analysed effectively if one rethinks the notion of the secular along these historical lines. The author offers a brief introduction into Nancy’s project, before focusing on a theme that is central to one of the monotheistic traditions, Christianity: that of the resurrection. He reads and comments on parts of Nancy’s essay Noli me tangere, an innovative interpretation of John 20,11-18. In dialogue with Nancy he then develops a new view on the resurrection, in which paradoxically death is given a central meaning. In the resurrection, it is death itself that resurrects; he is critical of the idea that death would be vanquished into a life after death – as Christian doctrine has it, thereby expanding the modest little epilogue that the tale of the ‘empty tomb’ actually is in the gospels, to a massive foundation of Christian redemption. It is a life in death, and a death in life that is affirmed here. The resurrection of the mortal, earthly and vulnerable God that Christ is, invites an affirmation of the here and now, of humanity and of the human body: a ‘yes’ to the world, not to an afterworld. Parallel to this analysis, the author takes up Nancy’s suggestion that the resurrection, and in fact the entire gospel, is a parable, and that its ‘truth’ is a parabolic truth: playing with the impossible and the miraculous, in which truth and falsehood become entangled with each other. |
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