Romero on the Church

This is the theme of my letter: the church is the Body of Christ in history. By this expression we understand that Christ has wished to himself the life of the church through the ages. The church’s foundation is not to be thought of in a legal or juridical sense, as if Christ gathered some persons together, entrusted them with a teaching, gave them a kind of constitution, but then himself remained apart from them. It is not like that. The church’s origin is something much more profound. Christ founded the church so that he himself could go on being present in the history of humanity precisely through the group of Christians who make up his church. The church is the flesh in which Christ makes present down the ages his own life and his personal mission.

Voice of the Voiceless: The Four Pastoral Letters and Other Statements, 69-70

Body as a Theological Category

Body must become a theological category. There is no way around it and I think we should not seek to get around it. In many ways, it already is a category. Embodiment and the physicality of our existence is visible in the doctrines of Creation and the Incarnation. It is also, because the incarnation is a hypostatic union, that at the very least, the fight against Arius and his followers was a fight for the recognition of embodiment. Creation is indeed good. To say it simply, body as a theological category is orthodox.

However, too often body seems of no consequence. To recognize embodiment as a base theological category is to recognize in every instance of life, that our bodies, and the bodies of those around us, play vital roles. From that recognition, theology could actually move forth on issues like race and gender to name a few.

At the Ekklesia Project’s Summer Conference a few weeks back, the topic was on race (some of the papers are available for download here). Among some people, I heard the exasperation, “How do we make time for this?” After all, work on race requires a great deal of time. Merely on the basis that to begin, new relationships must be created. And I am glad that at the very least people understood the daunting task. However, to address race cannot come from compartmentalized relationships — not that compartmentalized relationships were or are an explicit intent, but too often the differences made by culture and the more significant differences of experience seem to move race into compartments. Still, how would we address race, without striving to make more time in the day? Exist as a human being, who is by nature a body.

The key here seems to be to exist with the fact that bodies matter all the time. Even in a “white” context as a white person, the lack of people of color doesn’t mean that race isn’t staring me, or the community around, in the face; invisibility does not mean it isn’t a problem. With the rise of recognition about a problem like race, the realization of embodiment, and if liberation theology (which is at its very heart a theology of the body) is correct that economics and sexuality/gender are wrapped up together with race as well, the actual issues and questions in front of the church can be correctly addressed. Neither one can be addressed adequately without the others, and each will bring up the other. Embodiment gives us a daily way of rethinking our lives and addressing the actual problems before us because we are thinking about and addressing the very physical reality at hand.

Importantly, what the category of body is not, is not anthropocentrism. Bodies only exist — our humanity only exists — in a biosphere. To seek to elevate human embodiment outside its context is to do a very bad thing. We cannot live without air, we cannot live without food, we cannot live without the environment which God created for us (or will continue to create for us, for those of you who want to bring up the story of Satan tempting Jesus with bread). While we may maintain the Imago Dei, we cannot use that to act as if we are not integral to creation. We are in creation. We are part of creation.

Also critical about the category of body, is the yes to acknowledging division and seeking to recognize those divisions in everything we do. The divisions are condemned and we attempt to subvert them, but this can only be done after we see that the segregations are artificial groupings to begin with. Simply, to be aware of body, and therefore constructed disunion within the church, leads to the universalism inherent in the body of Christ. We can start to understand what it means that Jesus was and is for everyone, while at the same time, attempting to render true the notion that there is to be no “Jew or Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female.”

Body as a theological category is a rich vein that currently seems to have fallen by the wayside. In fact, I am suspicious that for divisions to exist as they do today, Christianity in the past had to discard the reality of the body in a significant way. To reclaim the body in someways, and to blaze a new path in other ways, is where the church must go. We cannot continue to address the problems as we do now, and I suspect that embodiment must play a larger role for the church to live into the reality of God’s rule.

It preaches!

This is me moving towards a conclusion in my thesis:

We will go the way of the German church in the face of Nazi Germany, into a fragmented, torturous death followed by generations of condemnation, if we do not find solidarity with the hopeless and raise the interruptive hope of the crucified God as a community. The church, the body of Christ, must move into death as the consequence of living the interruptive Jesus, or it will find a true death without resurrection. Jesus was tortured and we therefore seek out the tortured and oppose the torturers. This may mean the death of the church at the hands of the oppressor, but this death is a death that multiples the community and the community’s voice exponentially. The interruptive community sees a resurrection, unlike the traitor or coward who dies a thousand times.

The Destruction of the Church by America

Fundamentally, the myths of innocence, nature, God, chosen, and millennial are stories that alter our identity in favor of a white washed America. It is true we are exceptional – we are exceptionally bad. We have a tragic past, as I have displayed, and a tragic future, as we maintain an innocence of our past. “The American national mythos is messianic; it seeks to tell a story of freedom spread through self-sacrifice, not victories won through the spread of terror. To sustain the myth, Americans need to rewrite history just as surely as did Stalin to sustain his own version of communist orthodoxy.”1 It is incredibly telling that to confront the myths of America, Robert Hughes spoke of the prophetic, Black experience. The implication is, that the American myths are categorically racist; the American hagiographic myths hide the evil past, present injustice and the future of malevolent violence. There is very little in the myths that pushes America forward in a moral way.2 Instead the myths make it possible for America to turn a blind eye to violence, to injustice, to torture and insomuch that Christians take in these myths, they take in the blindness as well. The simulacra of American messianism subverts the real Jesus, and therefore, it unsettles and divides the body of Christ.

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1. Lee Griffith, The War on Terrorism and the Terror of God, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 38.
2. Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 63.

Tortured and Torturer, a Good Friday Reflection

The Silent Torture of the Church by a Democracy

While torture, as Scarry states it, “aspires to the totality of pain,” torture does so with the specific aim for destruction of a human being. It is the literal beating down of a human being into nothing: “Torture is a condensation of the act of ‘overcoming’ the body present in benign forms of power.”1 Torture is the violent, systematic deconstruction of a human being by another human being. “Apart from its ineffectiveness and illegality, torture is one of the cruelest, and most dangerous things that the United Stats can be doing. The claim that torture should somehow be justified is really an attack on the very dignity of humanity. It sinks us all to an inhuman and uncivilized level. It debases the victim and the torturer. In the end, torture destroys everything we value as human beings.”2 The anthropology of torture is thoroughly counter to any conception of humanity by Christianity. In fact, to move Christians in America towards accepting a torturous of vision for humanity is an attack on the Christian story and the community that claims to be the body of Christ.

However, American Christianity seems to care so little about torture. Torture is meant to isolate and break down other human beings and it is done in an incredibly violent and/or coercive manner, as I have argued. Torture results in victims who “are scripted into a different socio-political drama, recreated as abused, bastard children of the regime” and yet comparatively, so little is said about torture.3 Some Christians have no answer when challenged, they are simply indifferent, while others are resolutely pro-torture.4 In my mind, this is a gigantic theological leap from the kerygma; to be indifferent of or for torture is not based on the Christological event of Jesus – the one who was tortured. So how might such a leap be made? What is it that makes these Christians the torturer?

This leap is not theologically acceptable, however, the justification for torture can find less opposition outside of Christianity and a positive perception of torture within society, especially within the powers behind the status quo – the state, with its raison d’état, and the capitalistic market.

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1. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain 57.
2. Ratner and Ray, Guantánamo: What the World Should Know, 35.
3. William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 42.
4. From a discussion with Randall Balmer. The subject of the discussion can also be found here: http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i42/42b00601.htm. “Following the revelations that the U.S. government exported prisoners to nations that have no scruples about the use of torture, I wrote to several prominent religious-right organizations. Please send me, I asked, a copy of your organization’s position on the administration’s use of torture. … Of the eight religious-right organizations I contacted, only two, the Family Research Council and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, answered my query. Both were eager to defend administration policies.”

Imagining a Theopolitical Response

I watched Romero today.

It got me thinking, again, on how Romero responded and how we might respond to our circumstances. I imagine something that I call liberative action-speak rooted in the subversive communal-existence of the church.

In today’s crises, the combination of war by the state and economic oppression by Wall Street, we need an Oscar Romero. We need someone who would not stop proclaiming the Christ who saves – the Christ, who incarnated in the Church, stands against the violence of the state and the coercion of the market in a stand-fast love (hesed).

We need another Martin Luther King Jr. who, as an ordained minister, died for both civil rights (or theologically, human dignity) and condemned the war in Vietnam before it was fashionable to do so. In fact, it is easily argued that it wasn’t civil rights that ultimately led to his death, but the standing against evils that America perpetrated; once the “north” saw MLK Jr. as a threat to the powerful in America (not that visible racism isn’t a real, violent power), he was a marked man.

We need a loud prophetic voice and the church to surround such a man or woman. We need an ecclesial movement that moves into the margins. I see the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and a number of other movements started by Christians, but these seem to lack a specific force behind them.

It is quite plain to me that the state forces the stripping of the prophetic tradition in black theology, merely on the basis of electability; the economic forces attempt to absorb the criticizers; and the media, with their own poor understanding and latent racism (not to discount the racist tendencies of the state and market), will call those speaking truth in the church as the church, racist.

The freedom of God is never at the expense of someone else, while American freedom says that others must die. The freedom of God is the rejection of throwing people down. God’s freedom recognizes that the American wealth accumulated is by and large blood money – stolen at the cost of others’ lives and continues to mine people as if they were ore deposits.

This new Romero must stand up in today’s world – in America – and speak for both hurting Americans and those outside of America. While there are numerous domestic issues that desperately need to be addressed, there are equally a multitude of foreign issues as well. What is the common denominator? Xenophobia. The fear of strangers, and more specifically, that these strangers are a threat to future prosperity. Never mind that these economic “gifts” we have “received” are at the cost of other people.

Therefore the new Romero is an international person, with international concerns. No one is a stranger for the new Romero. While there might be people outside of one’s community, an “other” if you will, they are no stranger, nor treated as a stranger. The new Romero is hospitable in a “radical” way, a subversive way that says creation matters first and foremost – the guiding hermeneutic for living in the world is how we treat other humans. This new Romero captures the attention of many people, while he or she regularly condemns the crises at hand. However, this new Romero, as part of the church, follows in the footsteps of Christ that lead to ruin. The church may find itself in “ruin.” It will find itself in death. It will find itself in death.

Yet this folly or foolishness is the cross, with the trust that the body of Christ will never really die forever. Our political act is to walk forward and to not expect safety, for no disciple is greater than the master. Our freedom in God is to die and know that God will redeem despite of the evil done.

We need a new Romero. Perhaps Christians in America – maybe even the church as a whole – will collectively be this Romero and answer its call. I pray it does. For what other hope do victims have?

R. Niebuhr Quote on Military Chaplaincy

From Reinhold Niebuhr’s Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic

What makes me angry is the way I kowtow the chaplains as I visit the various camps. Here are the ministers of the gospel, just as I am. Just as I they are also, for the moment, priests of the great god Mars. As ministers of the Christian religion I have no particular respect for them. Yet I am overcome by a terrible inferiority complex when I deal with them. Such is the power of the uniform. Like myself, they have mixed the worship of the God of love and the God of battles. But unlike myself, they have adequate symbols of this double devotion. The little cross on the shoulder is the symbol of their Christian faith. The uniform itself is the symbol of their devotion to the God of battles. It is the uniform and not the cross which impresses me and others. I am impressed even when I know I ought not be.

I think he puts it well, despite the distance of time. In fact, the ability of this quote to continue to speak true tells us even more about a similarity between Christians then and now, rather that also the tension and incompatibility between the State’s violent arm and Christ’s body has always existed.

Pain like a Crushed Chest Cavity

I’ve always had a sinking suspicion that popular Christianity in the states has very little, if anything, meaningful to say on the subject of intense personal pain: be it addressing death, abandonment, betrayal, or a whole slew of other violations of close, personal relationships. And now after this summer, I’m pretty much convinced of the inadequacy. 

Fundamentally, it seems we do not know how to grieve and instead we look for the pain numbing salve or the morphine drip. However, we cannot truly medicate the grieving process. (Now I am clearly not saying that we shouldn’t use medicine, after all, I’m neither a Scientologist or  Tom Cruise; rather I am saying that the grieving process on the whole cannot be and should not be avoided, but is very necessary and very long.) The problems begin though – not with our feeble  attempt to address deep pain, but even before addressing pain – we first do not even have a clue about pain itself. 

I think this way because in my experience, we use our language in such a trite way – our greetings are devoid of meaning. When we say “Hello, how are you” we really just mean “greetings and tell me you’re happy.” And because we have lost the meanings of phrases to cultural connotations, I think we miss seeing pain, or even real joy, in others, much less ourselves. We first have to admit the presence of pain before we can address it, but our speech (much less the time we spend with one another, which is short in a fast paced world) betrays what we really want to hear from others, or what we are willing to say to others. 

Also, I do not think we can speak well to another person’s pain. While “Draw near to God” is theologically sound, its clichéd as hell and devoid of real meaning because no one really can say what the hell drawing near to God actually is.  So first, how do we put meaning back into the phrase? Well, the only way I can see the phrase beginning to have any meaning is when it comes from someone who has gone through similar pain. Other wise the person in pain just wants to shoot the person giving the advice. 

Even more important, what does the phrase “draw near to God” really mean? – besides crying out for peace, rest and sanity from the divine? It seems to me that this phrase has lost meaning because American Christianity has lost community; without community, it is far too lonely to attempt to live while one’s entire torso feels like a forcefully collapsed paper bag. Drawing near to God ought to mean that we draw near to each other in the body; we draw near to the Christ in each of us and in the other people. The personal relationship between God and the sufferer is vital, no doubt about that, but it seems that often, it is God through another human being is where we tangibly meet God’s loving presence – normally not receiving answers, but certainly presence and hope. You are not alone and it will not always be this way, now let us grieve together.

The future is no longer what it was: Those pretty falling stars are really fragments of a meteor headed right for you

This week, my personal life was a veritable shitstorm. It started sunday night, after I arrived at De Paul early for a conference where I didn’t actually know anyone. That was fun. I don’t mean to blame friends who had to stay home – far from it – instead I say this to highlight that I arrived at the Ekklesia Project Summer Conference, knowing no one and then everything fell apart after a phone call.

Interestingly, the conference was on congregational formation. Better yet, its a conference filled with scholars (generally of the theological type), pastors and lay people thinking about their congregation and the church at large. But they’re not farsighted, on Monday morning the introduction centered around what the EP is – family. I’ve heard this before, as I’m sure we all have, but its rare to see family realized in such a way. By God’s grace it was real; they really were real, really Christ. I can’t say enough, not only about the body of Christ, but the EP people. Strangers became family in three days. I can’t wait for next year. And thats the reason for this post. I highly suggest those of you who like the EP to go next summer – for both the discussion and the people.

In related news, the B. J. Hunnicutt in me got squashed (hence the meteor quip in the title). Perhaps Hawkeye is the way to go. Or the priest. Yeah. Hes the best. Maybe those vows aren’t so bad. “Remember what the good book says: Love thy neighbor, or I’ll punch your lights out!”