



































The Faith of Job and the Recovery of Christian Atheism


[Expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 105-113]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747-5376 

 

 

The Faith of Job and the Recovery of Christian Atheism 

FREDERIEK DEPOORTERE 

Katholiecke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) 

 

 

It would be easy to dismiss Slavoj Žižek‟s contributions to The Monstrosity of Christ as 

coming too late, 45 years too late to be precise.
1
 For what Žižek defends, namely the 

Hegelian reading of Christianity, was itself already developed in all of its radicality by 

Thomas J. J. Altizer, the most colorful proponent of the so-called “God is dead” theology, a 

short-lived theological movement which flowered in the second part of the 1960s. The 

Hegelian reading of Christianity which was proposed by Altizer (in his 1966 book The 

Gospel of Christian Atheism) and which is now being re-endorsed by Žižek in The 

Monstrosity of Christ entails that it was God Himself who died when Christ died on the cross 

on Calvary and that this death marks the transition from God as transcendent Father to the 

Holy Spirit as the community of believers, understood by Žižek in terms of a collective of 

revolutionary individuals.
2
 This basic scheme, adopted from Hegel‟s Lectures on the 

Philosophy of Religion, has informed the Christological reflections offered by Žižek in the 

past ten years,
3
 but it has been rejected by a majority of theologians as being heterodox and 

therefore unacceptable. Moreover, “God is dead” theology – albeit somewhat fashionable for 

a couple of years and sparking many heated debates in the media and among theologians – 

was never fully able to become mainstream. Such comes as little surprise, given the fact that 

it is actually a theological dead-end: it seems to offer merely a theological justification for the 

end of theology as God-talk. Moreover, Žižek‟s dependency on Hegel‟s basic scheme seems 

to suggest that one is forced to an all-or-nothing choice when it comes to accepting or 

rejecting his Christological reflections: either one shares this basic scheme and is able to 

follow Žižek in his ruminations on Christ or one does not share the basic scheme and can 

only reject Žižek‟s interpretation of the Christ-event. However, the aim of the present article 

is to show that in approaching Žižek, even if one does not follow him in his Hegelianism, one 

can nevertheless enter into a theological dialogue with him. As Žižek‟s contributions to The 

Monstrosity of Christ are very dense and touch upon a wide variety of issues, in what follows 

I will focus on one element, namely his interpretation of the Biblical character of Job and its 

relation to the issue of atheism. To start our discussion from within the context of 

contemporary theology, I will begin by taking a look into the reading of the Book of Job 

which has been offered by French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), one of the 

founding fathers of contemporary hermeneutical theology. 

 

Paul Ricoeur: The Faith of Job 

 

Paul Ricoeur‟s most extensive discussion of the Biblical character of Job can be found in his 

early work The Symbolism of Evil (1967; French original in 1960).
4
 In the first part of this 

book, Ricoeur discusses three “primary symbols” of evil: defilement, sin and guilt. Here, the 

figure of Job is introduced as witnessing to a crisis, the crisis caused by what Ricoeur 



The Faith of Job and the Recovery of Christian Atheism 106 

 

designates as “the hypersubjective reality of sin,” the fact that “my sin [is conceived to be] 

within the absolute sight (regard) of God” (84). As noted by Ricoeur, this “being seen by 

God” was initially a positive thing: it was a source of self-awareness, the person who is seen 

by God becomes a Self precisely by being seen by God (84–85). In the case of Job, however, 

the sight of God has become “an inimical seeing that pursues him” (85). God‟s sight, Ricoeur 

continues, “suddenly reveals itself as the seeing of the hidden God who delivers man up to 

unjust suffering” (85–86). The seeing of God, which used to be experienced as salutary, has 

now become unbearable, an “inquisitorial eye which makes man guilty” (319). 

The second part of The Symbolism of Evil deals with four “„myths‟ of the beginning and 

the end” (“the „ritual‟ vision of the world,” “the „tragic‟ vision of existence,” “the 

„eschatological‟ vision of history” and the vision that expects “salvation through 

knowledge”). In this context, further reference is made to the figure of Job in the fifth and 

final chapter of the book (titled “The Cycle of the Myths”), in a section dealing with “The 

Reaffirmation of the Tragic” (310–326). According to Ricoeur, the God of the Bible is to be 

understood as “an ethical God” and the Hebrew Scriptures basically offer “a moral vision of 

the world”. This entails that “History is a tribunal, pleasure and pains are retribution, God 

himself is a judge. At the same time, the whole of human experience assumes a penal 

character” (314). In Ricoeur‟s view, the Book of Job signals the breakdown of this 

understanding of history. Here, the “„ethicization‟ of man and God” collides at its limits. The 

case of Job shows that there is evil in excess of that which can be accounted for by 

retribution. Retribution is not able to explain all of the unhappiness and suffering in the world 

(314). It should be noted, as Ricoeur does so himself, that this problem of unjust suffering – 

that is, suffering that cannot be justified in terms of “he that mischief hatches, mischief 

catches” – is inherent to the ethicization present in the Hebrew Scriptures. Indeed, it is only 

when God is conceived as “ethical” that the problem of unjust suffering can come into 

existence. Outside the context of such an ethical vision, suffering can still be a problem (cf. 

Buddhism), but it cannot be a moral problem, an issue of justice. For, what happens in the 

case of Job is that a tension comes into being between God as Creator, who may be excused 

for moving in a mysterious way, and God as Lawgiver, who may reasonably be expected to 

comply with his own law. 

It is here of course that theodicy begins, the attempt to justify God in light of unjust 

suffering. This is the way taken by Job‟s pious friends. They do their best to close the gap 

which opened between the Creator-God and the ethical God, “mobili[zing] forgotten sins, 

unknown sins, ancestral sins, the sins of the people, in order to restore the equation of 

suffering and punishment” (315). Job, in contrast, refuses this option and it is here that 

Ricoeur sees a tragic vision re-emerging in the heart of the Biblical ethicization of God. Job 

rediscovers “the tragic God” – that is, “the inscrutable God of terror” (319). In this way, he 

moves beyond the ethical vision of man and God, world and history, and enters “a new 

dimension of faith, the dimension of unverifiable faith” (319). Moreover, what also makes the 

Book of Job a return of tragedy is its outcome: Job falls silent and God answers out of the 

whirlwind, but what He says is in no way an answer to Job‟s predicament. All God does is 

“show him Behemoth and Leviathan, the hippopotamus and the crocodile, vestiges of the 

chaos that has been overcome, representing a brutality dominated and measured by the 

creative act” (321). In this way, Ricoeur continues, God “gives [Job] to understand that all is 



107  Depoortere 

 

 

order, measure, and beauty – inscrutable order, measure beyond measure, terrible beauty” and 

He points to “an order beyond order, a totality full of meaning, within which the individual 

must lay down his recrimination” (321). When Ricoeur returns to the symbolism of evil in his 

later book The Conflict of Interpretations (1974; French original in 1969), this renunciation is 

interpreted in terms of love: “The only thing shown to [Job] is the grandeur of the whole, 

without the finite viewpoint of his own desire receiving a meaning directly from it. A path is 

thus opened … I renounce my viewpoint; I love the whole as it is.
5
 In this regard, Richard 

Kearney, following his master Ricoeur, sees the Book of Job ending with “a contemplative 

wisdom of love:” at the end of the story, Kearney writes, Job has learned to love God for 

nothing.
6
 

The figure of Job also plays an important role in Ricoeur‟s 1966 Bampton Lectures, titled 

“Religion, Atheism, and Faith.”
7
 In these lectures, a new direction and contemporary 

meaning of Job is mapped out. During his Bampton Lectures, Ricoeur defended “the 

religious significance of atheism,” stating “that atheism does not exhaust itself in the negation 

and destruction of religion” but that it rather “clears the ground for a new faith, a faith for a 

post-religious age” (59/440). This entails that atheism, and it is the atheism of Freud and 

Nietzsche Ricoeur has in mind here, takes the intermediary position between religion and 

faith, it is what links them together and what separates them. Or, as Ricoeur puts it: atheism 

destroys religion and liberates us for a faith beyond religion (60/441). The religion that is to 

be destroyed is summarised here by Ricoeur in terms of “two fundamental activities,” “the 

fear of punishment and the desire for protection” – i.e., “accusation” and “consolation.” This 

entails that the God that has to pass away is the “moral God who [is] the principle and 

foundation for an ethics of prohibition and condemnation” (68/447) and “the providential 

God” – that is, God both as “the ultimate source of accusation” and as “the ultimate source of 

protection” (82/455). According to Ricoeur, this “death” of the ethical God, enables a 

transition to new kind of faith, a “tragic faith beyond any assurance or protection,” and it is 

precisely Job who is put forward by Ricoeur as the model for this new faith (82/455–456, 87–

88/460). This post-religious faith is described by Ricoeur as follows: 

 

It would be a faith that wanders in the darkness, in a “new night of understanding” – 

to use the language of the mystics – before a God who has not the attributes of 

“Providence.” This God does not protect me but delivers me up to the dangers of a 

life worthy of being called human. Is not this God the Crucified, the dying God, the 

God whose weakness alone may help me? The new night of the understanding is a 

night for our desire as much as for our fear, a night for our longing for a protective 

father. Beyond this night, and only beyond it, will be recovered the true meaning of 

the God of consolation, the God of the Resurrection, the Pantocrator of Byzantine 

and Romanesque imagery. (88/460) 

 

This suggests that for Ricoeur atheism can play an instrumental role on the way to a purified 

faith. In his view, atheism should have the same effect for us today as the crisis of the moral 

God that befell Job had for him. In this regard it is important to note that Ricoeur emphasises 

that Job, despite his severe criticism of God, always remains in relation with God.
8
 His 

criticisms are precisely formulated as complaints addressed at God. As Job passed through a 



The Faith of Job and the Recovery of Christian Atheism 108 

 

dark “night of understanding” and rediscovered God, but a God beyond the law of retribution, 

the modern believer should pass through the darkness of atheism to recover God at the other 

side of the night. Or, as Ricoeur put it at the end of his Bampton Lectures: idols have to die in 

order to be recovered as symbols (98/467). 

 

Slavoj Žižek: From Job to the Recovery of Christian Atheism 

 

Let us now bring forward Slavoj Žižek to join the conversation. The figure of Job appears in 

Žižek‟s oeuvre on a regular basis. This happens for the first time in the early Enjoy Your 

Symptom! (1992).
9
 Here, Žižek first endorses René Girard‟s basic claim concerning the Book 

of Job as put forward in the latter‟s book on Job.
10

 Girard dismisses the whole set-up in the 

Prologue – with Satan seducing God into putting Job to the test to check whether he will still 

be righteous when all is against him – as a mythification which hides the subversive core of 

the book, namely that Job is a sacrificial victim, the scapegoat of his community, subjected to 

religiously sanctioned violence. The revolutionary character of the Book of Job, Žižek states, 

while following Girard, consists in the fact that we encounter here a victim that speaks, that 

refuses to undergo his victimization in silence, but protests and rebels instead. Moreover, the 

subversive power of the Book of Job consists in the fact that the perspective of the sacrificial 

order (represented by Job‟s “pious” friends) and the perspective of the victim are found next 

to each other. As a result, the “official” perspective is deconstructed by the perspective of Job 

while the presence of the perspective of the perpetrators guarantees the truth of the 

perspective of the victim (56). Although Žižek endorses Girard‟s basic claim concerning Job, 

he is also critical of him. He reproaches him for turning Job into merely a forerunner of 

Christ, “the true paradigm of a victim who speaks out and subjectivizes himself” (57). 

However, Žižek states, insofar as Christ‟s death on the cross is “a gesture of love,” something 

is lost in the transition from Job to Christ, namely “the anxiety-provoking abyss of the 

Other‟s [i.e., God‟s] inconsistency” (57). In Christ, Žižek adds, “God himself changes into a 

lover and reaches back toward man – thereby concealing the abyss of Otherness that no 

sacrifice could appease, i.e., with which no relationship of exchange is possible” (58). This 

suggests that at the time Enjoy Your Symptom! was written in the early 1990s Žižek was still 

rather critical of Christ‟s gesture and seemed to prefer Job over Christ. 

Almost ten years later, Žižek‟s next reference to the Book of Job appears in On Belief 

(2001). Here Žižek‟s earlier criticism that Christ is a step back in comparison with Job is not 

repeated and the claim will not reappear in future work. In On Belief, Žižek mentions Job in 

passing when he writes that what happens in Christianity is that God himself as Christ finds 

himself in the situation earlier experienced by Job, the situation of being God-forsaken. When 

Christ dies on the cross, abandoned by his Father, the gap that separates human beings from 

God, the gap earlier experienced by Job, is reflected back into God himself.
11

 

The next year, in the Foreword to the second edition of his For They Know Not What They 

Do (2002),
12

 Žižek devotes a couple of pages to the figure of Job. Žižek begins his discussion 

of Job by repeating the link, already made the year before in On Belief, between Job and 

Christ. He states that Job is the key to understand the Christ-event (Job prefigures Christ) (li), 

while adding that both are linked by the meaninglessness of their suffering. What 

distinguishes Job from Christ is of course that when Christ suffers, it is God who is himself 



109  Depoortere 

 

 

the victim and is abandoned by God (liii). This time, Žižek also focuses on the dénouement of 

the Book of Job. He dismisses God‟s intervention at the end of the book as “a pure argument 

of authority grounded in a breathtaking display of power” and as “a kind of cheap Hollywood 

horror show with lots of special effects.” God, Žižek notes, behaves here like somebody who 

is “caught in [a] moment of impotence – weakness, at least – and tries to escape his 

predicament by empty boasting” (li). Žižek further stresses that “the true greatness of Job,” 

which, in his view, consists in his persistent refusal to give in to the “ideology” of his 

theological friends who want to give some meaning to his suffering (li–lii). Žižek even claims 

Job as the first true materialist, someone who is able to accept the contingency of the 

vicissitudes of life without having to search for a hidden design behind them (lii). But if Job, 

as Žižek claims, staunchly refuses to accept that his suffering can have any meaning and 

resolutely rejects any secret design hidden behind it all, why does he fall silent? Why does he 

even repent?
13

 

This question does not receive an answer in For They Know Not What They Do, but it does 

the next year, in The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003).
14

 In The Puppet and the Dwarf, Žižek 

first repeats his reflections on Job already printed in the Foreword to the second edition of 

For They Know No What They Do. In this repetition (124–126), he further inserts the idea 

that Job is confronted with the impenetrability of God (124). After the material that was 

repeated, Žižek raises the question which remained unanswered the year before: why Job‟s 

silence – especially when the discrepancy between Job‟s question (“why do I suffer?”) and 

God‟s answer (power display, boasting) is so obvious? To this question, Žižek now 

formulates the following answer: 

 

What, then, if this was what Job perceived, and what kept him silent: he remained 

silent neither because he was crushed by God‟s overwhelming presence, nor because 

he wanted thereby to indicate his continuous resistance, that is, the fact that God 

avoided answering Job‟s question, but because in a gesture of silent solidarity, he 

perceived the divine impotence. God is neither just nor unjust, simply impotent. 

What Job suddenly understood, was that it was not him, but God Himself, who was 

actually on trial in Job‟s calamities, and He failed the test miserably. Even more 

pointedly, I am tempted to risk a radical anachronistic reading: Job foresaw God‟s 

own future suffering – “Today it‟s me, tomorrow it will be your own son, and there 

will be no one to intercede for him. What you see in me now is the prefiguration of 

your own Passion!” (126–127) 

 

More recently, Žižek has elaborated once more on Job at the occasion of the paper he 

contributed to St. Paul among the Philosophers (2009)
15

, a paper which was almost verbatim 

reprinted in The Monstrosity of Christ (43–55, 56–61 and 87–89), or vice-versa (in what 

follows we refer to The Monstrosity of Christ). Falling back on the remarks on the outcome 

of the Book of Job by the English Catholic writer Chesterton (1874–1936) in his 

“Introduction to the Book of Job,” Žižek notes that what we get there is that God answers 

Job‟s questions about the design of the world by showing that the world is in reality even 

more incomprehensible than Job already thought it was (53).
16

 Žižek even suggests that the 

end of the Book of Job presents us a God who himself does not understand it all, “a God 



The Faith of Job and the Recovery of Christian Atheism 110 

 

overwhelmed by his own creation” (244) and maybe a God who is, as Žižek had already 

suggested in On Belief, even a mystery for himself: “the enigma OF God” is also “the enigma 

IN God Himself”, “God is an enigma also IN AND FOR HIMSELF.”
17

 The figure of Job, 

Žižek further adds in The Monstrosity of Christ, shows us how to respond to catastrophes that 

have befallen us or may befall us in the future: by resisting any attempt to give them 

meaning, by refusing to integrate them into a larger whole (53). This also entails that we 

should get rid of “the standard transcendent figure of God as a secret Master who knows the 

meaning of what appears to us to be a meaningless catastrophe” (54). Clinging to such a God, 

Žižek contends, is “obscene” in light of the atrocities that have happened and are still going 

on around the world (54–55). 

In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek also once more links Job to Christ. He repeats his view 

that in the crucified Jesus, God occupies the place of Job: the gap that separated Job from 

God is transposed into God himself. To emphasize the far-reaching and revolutionary 

character this has in Žižek‟s view, we can first refer to his comments on an unfinished 

drawing of the crucified Christ by Michelangelo (reproduced on the cover of The Monstrosity 

of Christ). Žižek draws attention to a number of “unsettling details indicat[ing] an underlying 

attitude of angry rebellion, of defiance” and in particular to the stretched finger of Christ‟s 

right hand, a gesture which Žižek interprets (following Quintilian) as a gesture of devilish 

rebellion (277–278). This can be linked to a fragment from Chesterton‟s Orthodoxy, quoted 

by Žižek, in which the former states that only Christianity has a “god who has himself been in 

revolt”, a god who has shared the atheists” isolation, a “God [who] seemed for an instant to 

be an atheist.”
18

 Thus, what happens when Christ is on the cross, is that God the Son rebels 

against God the Father. Like Job before, the Son staunchly refuses to accept that his suffering 

can have any meaning and resolutely rejects any secret design hidden behind it. Therefore, 

Žižek concludes (following Chesterton), “Christianity is „terribly revolutionary‟.”
19

 He 

explains this further as follows: 

 

In the standard form of atheism, God dies for men who stop believing in him; in 

Christianity, God dies for himself … Christianity … enacts the reflexive reversal of 

atheist doubt into God himself. In his “Father, why have you forsaken me?”, Christ 

himself commits what is for a Christian the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith. 

While in all other religions, there are people who do not believe in God, only in 

Christianity does God not believe in himself. (48–49) 

 

 

Žižek vs. Ricoeur: Concluding Remarks 

 

1. It is obvious that Ricoeur‟s Job and Žižek‟s Job stand for two diametrically opposed 

responses to the phenomenon of (unjust) suffering. Ricoeur‟s Job opts for resignation and for 

the hope that his suffering, which appears as senseless from his limited perspective, will 

somehow turn out to fit in a larger picture (this hope is what Job‟s “unverifiable faith” seems 

to amount to in Ricoeur‟s view); Žižek‟s Job, in contrast, opts for resistance and staunchly 

refuses to accept that his suffering could have any meaning at all. This shows that Žižek 

rejects Ricoeur‟s interpretation of the outcome of the Book of Job, according to which Job is 



111  Depoortere 

 

 

convinced – and even repents for daring to suppose that the world does not make sense
20

– 

because God makes him aware of “the possibility of […] an unassignable design, a design 

which is God‟s secret.”
21 

According to Žižek, no such design can ever justify unjust suffering. 

2. Ricoeur and Žižek also give completely different answers to the question of what the 

case of Job teaches us about God. According to Ricoeur, Job learns that God is impenetrable 

and inscrutable. His motives and the design inspiring his actions are hidden and beyond 

human comprehension. In other words, Ricoeur emphasizes the enigma of God. Žižek, in 

contrast, stresses the enigma in God and underscores that Job discovers God‟s secret, namely 

that He is actually impotent and imperfect. Remarkably, there is nevertheless a link between 

Ricoeur and Žižek. Ricoeur‟s view implies that Job has learned to love God for nothing. The 

love for God also appears in Žižek, who defends that it is precisely God‟s imperfection that 

makes it possible for God to become an object of love. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek 

explains this as follows: “Love is always love for the other insofar as he is lacking – we love 

the other because of his limitation. The radical conclusion from this is that if God is to be 

loved, he must be imperfect, inconsistent in himself” (39). This suggests that, if we follow 

Žižek in this understanding of love, the true religious attitude does not consist in worshipping 

God qua perfect Being, but in loving God qua impotent and imperfect. This also entails that 

the Ricoeurian answer to the predicament of Job, loving God for nothing, is only possible 

when God is not an omnipotent actor, not the one who is running the show, and when there is 

no hidden design behind what befalls us. God is not “a transcendent caretaker who guarantees 

the happy outcome of our acts” (55). In other words, we should accept the contingency of 

everything that happens. 

3. Furthermore, while Žižek explicitly links the figure of Job with the figure of Christ, this 

link is absent in Ricoeur‟s discussions of Job. It is possible, however, to introduce this link in 

the work of Ricoeur as well. The starting point for doing so could well perhaps be Ricoeur‟s 

reference to the figure of the Suffering Servant of the Lord from Second Isaiah, who has 

traditionally been understood as a prefiguration of Christ and in whom Ricoeur sees the 

opposition between suffering as retribution and unjust suffering surpassed in a third form of 

suffering, suffering as expiation for the sins of others.
22

 Yet, interpreting Christ‟s death in 

terms of this kind of expiation seems to entangle us in a “perverse” reading of Christianity, 

according to which God is “a perverse subject” playing games with his son and humankind or 

a cruel, merciless and jealous creature in need of a bloody sacrifice to satisfy his offended 

honor.
23

 According to Žižek, a non-perverse reading of the Crucifixion entails that one should 

understand it, not as a higher form of suffering, but precisely as the moment God is himself 

thrown in the abysmal experience of being subjected to unjust suffering. The Crucifixion is, 

as Žižek puts it in The Monstrosity of Christ, the moment when Christ “confronts the Father 

with the meaninglessness of it all” (57). This shows that, next to the ethical God of the 

Hebrew Scriptures and the tragic God which re-emerges in the Book of Job, there is a third 

“face” of God, namely the suffering God and, Žižek explains, it is in the suffering God that 

the tension between the two other “faces” of God is overcome (52). 

4. Finally, Ricoeur and Žižek also conceive the link between the case of Job and the issue 

of atheism in differing ways. For Ricoeur, atheism remains something which is instrumental: 

it occasions a purification of the faith, but it remains something which originates from outside 

the realm of faith and something which, in the end, needs to be overcome – after the dark 



The Faith of Job and the Recovery of Christian Atheism 112 

 

night of atheism, a new daybreak of faith has to follow. According to Žižek, atheism is an 

intrinsic part of Christianity because Christianity is, as Chesterton stated, the religion in 

which God himself becomes an atheist. It is of course obvious that Žižek goes beyond 

Chesterton. For Chesterton, God was an atheist only for an instant on the cross. For Žižek, in 

contrast, Christ‟s experience of God-forsakenness on the cross is the moment God qua 

transcendent Father actually dies. This view of Žižek is of course a result of his Hegelianism. 

But, next to Žižek‟s faithfulness to Hegel‟s basic scheme, there is no justification for this 

transition from God the Son sharing the atheist‟s experience on the Cross to the death of God 

the Father – unless one limits the Father of Christ to the God qua “secret Master who knows 

the meaning of what appears to us to be a meaningless catastrophe” and the “transcendent 

caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts” who is discredited by the case of 

Job. Thus, even if we follow Chesterton and Žižek in considering atheism to be an integral 

part of Christianity, it does not automatically follow that we should also follow Žižek in his 

plea for a Hegelian reading of Christianity and his defence of Altizer‟s God-is-dead theology. 

But even if we don‟t do this, it remains possible to stick to Žižek‟s basic insight, to be found 

in On Belief, that “When I, a human being, experience myself as cut off from God, at that very 

moment of utmost abjection, I am absolutely close to God, since I find myself in the position 

of the abandoned Christ.”
24

 Thus, to conclude: The Monstrosity of Christ is a great 

opportunity for its readers to (re)discover the suffering and weak God at the heart of 

Christianity. Missing this opportunity because one rejects Žižek for his endorsement of 

Hegelian-style God-is-dead theology would therefore be a pity. 

 

Notes 

 

1. Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? ed. 

Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009). 

2. Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: The Westminster 

Press, 1966). 

3. For further details, see Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni 

Vattimo, René Girard, Slavoj Žižek (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2008), esp. 123–

125. 

4. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). 

5. Paul Ricoeur, “The Demythization of Accusation,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: 

Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 

1974), 335–353, 351. 

6. Richard Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 

92. 

7. Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New 

York: Columbia University Press, 1969). Paul Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” 

in Conflict of Interpretations, 440–467. 

8. See Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 86, 319–20. 

9. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: 

Routledge, 1992). 

10. René Girard, Job: The Victim of his People (London: The Athlone Press, 1987). 



113  Depoortere 

 

 

11. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (New York: Routledge, 2001), 146. 

12. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (2nd 

ed.; New York: Verso, 2002). 

13. See: Job 42:6. 

14. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity 

(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003). 

15. Slavoj Žižek, “From Job to Christ: A Paulinian Reading of Chesterton,” in St. Paul 

among the Philosophers, ed. John D. Caputo and Linda Martín Alcoff (Bloomington, 

IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 39–58. 

16. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “Introduction to the Book of Job,” http://chesterton.org/gkc/ 

theologian/job.htm. 

17. Žižek, On Belief, 145. 

18. Quoted in Žižek and Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ?, 48; See: Gilbert Keith 

Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 165. 

19. Žižek and Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ?, 48; with reference to Chesterton, 

Orthodoxy, 165. 

20. Compare “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” Harvard Theological 

Review 70/1–2 (1977): 1–37, 12; see also Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 321. 

21. Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” 13. 

22. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 324–325. 

23. Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting 

For? (New York: Verso, 2000), 157; Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five 

Interventions In the (Mis)Use of a Notion (New York: Verso, 2000), 47. See also 

Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, 98–101. 

24. Žižek, On Belief, 146 (emphasis in original).  

 


