God is in pain (Zizek VIDEO)

This morning I happened to come across Zizek's recent statement that "God is in pain" and a paper/chapter that he wrote called, "Only a Suffering God Can Save Us"; timely for me as some of this relates to a paper titled "The Pain of Eternal Becoming" that I am presenting at the upcoming North American Schelling Society conference, as well as another paper that I am presenting at P.E.S.T. on something that I am developing called "bleak theology," part of my larger project of speculative naturalism.  As Zizek summarizes the idea,

This brings us to the third position above and beyond the first two (the sovereign God, the finite God), that of a suffering God: not a triumphalist God who always wins at the end, although "his ways are mysterious," since he secretly pulls all the strings; not a God who exerts cold justice, since he is by definition always right; but a God who – like the suffering Christ on the Cross - is agonized, assumes the burden of suffering, in solidarity with the human misery. It was already Schelling who wrote: "God is a life, not merely a being. But all life has a fate and is subject to suffering and becoming. /.../ Without the concept of a humanly suffering God /.../ all of history remains incomprehensible."

- Slavoj Zizek, "Only a Suffering God Can Save Us"

Link to Zizek's book HERE, video below.


Slavoj Zizek: God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse