AGAPE AS DEATH DRIVE Christian Soteriology and Sacrament as Vectors of the Traumatic

Alwyn Lau

AGAPE AS DEATH DRIVE Christian Soteriology and Sacrament as Vectors of the Traumatic

Alwyn Lau

Abstract

Psychoanalysis and Christianity hold forth the promise of genuinely radical change, transforming a person so substantially such that ‘nothing remains the same’; even if the objective conditions of one’s existence stay fixed, the very lens with which the ‘born again’ subject (and faith-community) views the world would have undergone so traumatic an upheaval that values, priorities and everything previously deemed essential (or not) would have been reimagined. It is, quite truly, a new beginning. This paper aims to insinuate a close proximity between Žižekian concepts of the traumatically emergent and new vis-à-vis Biblical ideas of salvation, vocation and agape love. I also wish to demonstrate how even the Christian sacraments of baptism and the eucharist point to death and dying as their constitutive elements, with the result that sacrifice for the world becomes the main political role the Church must play.

Keywords

trauma; christianity; salvation, psychoanalysis, sacraments

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