| This dissertation proposes the theology of the cross as a deconstructive and eschatological event of the overcoming of the ideology of violence and suffering. It demonstrates that the theology of Jürgen Moltmann, read in conjunction with the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and John Caputo, counters the violent omnipotence of patriarchal theopolitics by articulating the "powerless power" of God. Moltmann argues that the God on the cross is the passible, perichoretic, and trinitarian God, who is with, for and among the oppressed. Caputo approaches the cross as a deconstructive challenge to all dominant powers. Derrida, with the figure of "circumfession," suggests at once the cut and the wound of deconstruction itself, and the inerasable mark on his body, which opens the messianic "passion for the impossible." Caputo develops that passion into a theologia crucis unfolding weak power and social order through the figures of the kingdom of God, the event, the poetics of grace, and the economy of the gift. Instead of the patriarchal hierarchy of the world, the kingdom of God suggests the "an-hier-archical" rule without a ruler. God is weak, not because of a lack of power, but because of the event of overflowing love. The excess of the event of the cross is repeated in the new present of the deconstructive event and the eschatological novum, which are circumcised, dislocated, "ana-chronological" kairo-poetic time. Both in Moltmann's eschatological and Caputo's poststructuralist renderings, the cross marks historical time, but not a calendrical date. The cut of the cross opens a chronological date and reveals the novum in history. The cross repeats historical liberation and hope in ever new contexts—such as the shattered and torn down Korean han-filled history. But the repetition is a difference without sameness. In the dislocation of eschatological time, the cross promises not an old and closed memory but the radical consequences of Christian life and theology. |
