This introductory chapter addresses the questions of why Slavoj Žižek is engaged in the project of creating an atheist or “decaffeinated” theology and how an atheist materialist thinker can be acutely interesting for Christian theology and theologians. It provides an outline of Žižek’s intellectual pursuits, particularly his employment of Lacanian categories of thought in matters political and theological, and focuses on a presentation of Žižek’s multifaceted engagement with Christianity in his works: of the different ways in which he engages with Christianity and of the different strategies one may employ in order to examine his engagement with Christianity, mapping out the theological reception of Žižek’s thought up to now. The chapter also draws attention to Žižek’s political Pneumatology, i.e. to the role of the Holy Spirit in this “decaffeinated” or “atheist theology” as the community of those that have interiorized Christ’s sacrifice, as well as to Žižek’s appropriation of early Christian heresies in his version of Hegelian dialectics. This introductory chapter concludes with a presentation of this volume’s architecture, its authors and chapters, the problems and issues they address and the different strategies they employ, closing with a hint on the scandalous possibility of “caffeine.
