flying.farther

Welp. I am graduating soon and moving on to another program. First it was a Bible college, then a “liberal” seminary, and now on to a Catholic school. It should continue to prove interesting. However, before moving on, required for graduation by most any MA program is a thesis.

If the reader has been paying attention for any length of time to this blog, one would notice that torture has routinely popped up. Well, thats because I have just done my MA thesis on torture. This thesis is available for download in pdf (now that I’ve realized they’ll let you attach pdfs in the new wordpress) and is titled “Responding Theologically in the Face of Torture: Re-Politicizing American Christianity in Light of the Interruptive Jesus.”

I still plan on bringing up parts here and there in a more “bloggable” form, as I have already. This allows comments on each section to be made easier. However, for those of you who want to see the entire argument, in all its theological jargon, here it is.

A Christian community that situates itself in the world, does so, whether it explicitly acknowledges it or not, through a Christology. The experience of Jesus - in both ontology and praxis - remembered by the community, forms the foundation for an ecclesial politic. To begin to engage, say, torture, we must look back at whom Jesus was. Thus implications for change upon American Christians are vast, because Jesus was and is fundamentally interruptive. Therefore, the community of faith that understands itself primarily around the Christ should likewise understand itself as interruptive.

Theologically, we are bound to a tragic past and we also have a tragic future as well. Save for the interruption of God, we live in evil and its consequences, tragedy. But such an idea does not play well in the state that says it is the agent of peace or the market that claims a monopoly on lifestyle. The state could not be the agent of peace if it did not claim the ability to achieve it, which necessitates power and the moral will to create this “peace.” Likewise the market could not claim the ability to achieve happiness if it could not force humanity into a structure that gains wealth for some. Optimism, of a Deus ex Machina nature – our self-made god by our constructed machine (i.e. social structure, technology, etc.), is a necessity for the state and the market: We will intervene and resurrect ourselves when it seems bleak. Faith in the American experiment is a must, or the false stories die and torture loses its foundation.

The remembrance of 9/11, as remembered by the state and the market, is inherently an American memory and not a Christian memory. Allowing our memory to be altered by the matrix of culture’s identity leads into a vindictive Christology by the Rome of our time, rather than allowing the challenge of Jesus – the scandal of Jesus’ life – to wash over the body of Christ. Because “the image of Jesus…allows us to encounter him as the revelation of God’s open narrative,” as opposed to the closed narrative of the state and market who seek to maintain power and control, quite simply, Jesus, and not the state or market, “can be described as God’s interrupter.”1

The incarnation was an interruption. It validated creation and yet opposed commodities. God came as a human, an impoverished human, and not a dollar sign. Jesus was not to be bought and sold, nor a price tag put on him – it was an evil act that sold him for thirty pieces of silver. Jesus was also born not into Roman citizenship or among the emperor’s family, but into a “lowly” status. Jesus was not a commodity or human royalty, but God interrupting economic anthropologies with God’s own economy of grace.

The preaching of the basileia was an interruption of the Emperor’s rule, in both political and economic forms. The very words of Jesus interrupted the language and stories of the status quo – the basileia had come.2 Jesus accompanied his words with actions, equally interruptive actions as the rule of God.3 To name some praxis: there were healings, caring for the poor, miracles, and upsetting the established economic balance in the temple: “Jesus not only aroused the amazement of the bystanders, but at the same time he summoned the forces behind the hegemonic narratives against him in their defense.”4

The cross was an interruption – the death of God was and is a scandal. The idea that God would be the tortured and not the torturer, the criminal and not the emperor, and the one who died instead of lived on, was a scandal of the highest magnitude. “A crucified messiah, son of God or God must have seemed a contradiction in terms to anyone…and it will certainly have been thought offensive and foolish.”5 Quite simply, Jesus suffered; Jesus was tortured and executed in political terms at the low social level of a slave and by Jesus’ own admission, forgotten.6 The connection then of the cross, and the torture associated with it, to the oppressor yesterday and today is not a comfortable connection. “[T]he earliest Christian message of the crucified messiah demonstrated the ‘solidarity’ of the love of God with the unspeakable suffering of those who were tortured and put to death by human cruelty.”7 The cross calls us to the margins, where the people are tortured, and not to stay where we are as complicit with the torturer. This interrupts our entire life and lifestyle.

The resurrection was an interruption. The resurrection made clear that no oppressor will win forever and death lost its sting. For the Romans, and by implication, America today, “the suffering of a god soon had to be shown to be mere simulation, rapidly followed by punishment for those humans who had been so wicked to cause it.” Indeed, the cross still ought to be a scandal that informs the body of Christ about those who suffer in society today – the cross was not followed by a war, but a resurrection and hope with solidarity. The resurrection pre-pictured the parousia and added an extra dimension of eschatological hope in the basileia, combined with the suffering of Jesus.

Christian suffering and hope are intertwined and together constitute the climax of Christian interruption, while the state’s continued torture shows the stark contrast between Jesus and the state.9 9/11 Christology leads to blindness, a subsumed racism, pride, (at least) partially undeserved wealth, and oppression – a bourgeois Christianity comfortable in its sloth. Opposite, Jesus forms a communal body that seeks to speak of God’s salvation in the world. “For Christians, professing Christ is then also the interruption par excellence of history.”10

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1. Lieven Boeve, Interrupting Tradition: An Essay on Christian Faith in a Postmodern Context, (Dudley, MA: Peeters Press, 2003), 145.
2. Ibid., 121-124, 127-131.
3. Ibid., 124-127.
4. Ibid., 126-127.
5. Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 10.
6. Ibid., 46, 51.
7. Ibid., 88. Also see, “Jesus, the memoria passionis, mortis et resurrectionis Jesu Christi both attest to God’s solidarity with all victims of suffering and oppression and assures the final, still unrealized deliverance of the victims. Christians thereby read history not in affirmation of conquest but in hope for the conquered.” Bruce Morrill, Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology in Dialogue (Collegville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 2000), 36.
8. Hengel, 15.
9. Anthony Kelly, Eschatology and Hope (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2006), 88.
10. Lieven Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval (New York: Continuum, 2007), 47.

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.

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.

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.”

I’ve got a good working title for my thesis now:

“Responding in the Face of Torture: Re-Politicizing American Christianity in Light of the Interruptive Jesus.”

I think I’ll keep working on it, but it does strike me good enough as is. Thoughts?

In other news, I’m over half way into the thesis. Woo hoo. About 25 more pages to go before April 1, thats doable.

R. O. Flyer wanted to see the thesis statement, but I just figured I’d post the introduction. So, whatcha think?

Introduction
Subverting Torture
This thesis first understands itself in relation to torture. While much of the thesis itself may not mention torture explicitly, and in fact could be used as the foundation for a political theology that engages more than just torture, the reader should not forget that each argumentative turn is made with torture in mind. The thesis functions in this unusual way because it attempts to strike at the fundamental logic of torture by the state, instead of getting lost in the mire of case studies that use the threat of immanent danger to justify manipulative violence. Quite simply, I am subverting the whole discussion as I ask again and again, “Why should we torture?”

While this thesis is chiefly arguing at levels deeper than the specific action of torture, it is both deconstructive and constructive at the same time. I identify and argue against some of the first assumptions, while proposing a re-oriented economy – a different ontology, epistemology, etc. – all first grounded in the identity of a savior who suffered and the community of faith that follows suit. Therefore, the second question driving the argument is, “What should we look like if we are to be a people who refuses torture?”

Consequently, the problem this thesis seeks to address is the American Christians’ quiet acceptance of torture. Despite how little this thesis may actually mention torture, implicit in each move is the subversion of a theology that allows for current American theology to be either apathetic towards or blasé about torture (since most Christians do not seem to explicitly support torture) or, even worse, candidly protorture.

Assumptions
This thesis has many presuppositions, but I shall touch on a few of the most important. I first assume that torture is morally and ethically wrong, and that torture should not be used. This is not a discussion on the justification of torture, for that is a whole other argument worthy of its own time; rather, this thesis understands torture as a form of violent conversion used by the state and, as such, is to be handled with considerable suspicion.

Secondly, I assume, as hinted above, that Christianity is a deeper association than the citizenship in a nation-state or one’s cultural-economic participation. Christianity is cosmically rooted. At the same time, Christians are defined by the culture they live in. Therefore the politics of the body of Christ is a complex mixture of the existential situation in the present and the rule of God. In the end, however, the basileia informs the space and time of the here and now, resituating one’s ontological understanding and praxis within the cultural milieu at hand.

I also assume that Christianity does not naturally merge well with the nation-state or bourgeois market. In fact, Christianity can function as an antagonistic and an interrupting movement: “Christians are bearers of the subversive, dangerous memory of the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”1 Therefore, Christianity critiques society through the church’s formative discipleship rooted in the remembrance of Jesus.

Lastly, I assume that political theology, as Johann Baptist Metz asserts, must begin with engaging history, because historical consciousness regularly reforms our current identity and thus allows for the continual, interrupting praxis of solidarity.2 As such, any engagement with or construction of a body politic must address the historical discussion of one’s cultural genesis. In this case, the historical myths America asks its citizens to believe, in contrast to the example of Jesus and the political implications of his life and message, are no longer uncritically assumed canonical stories, but instead are now subject to suspicion. Such critical interrogation will shed light on the negative and oppressive nature of the American story.

I also speak in explicit Christian categories. Quite simply, I champion a way of acting and being for Christians in America; I promote an imagining of the ecclesia in the confluence of subversive communal-being and visible, liberative action-speak. After reviewing what torture actually is, I address deep assumptions, such as memory and willful self-blindness, inherent in the American story that are counter to a Christological ecclesiology.

In light of the basic assumptions, the thesis will also cut both ways, against both theological liberals and conservatives, because I do not fault the Christian Right alone. Rather, I put forth William Cavanaugh’s critique of the nation-state and Eugene McCarraher’s Catholic/Marxist critique of capitalism, who both take aim at the theological complicity and structural compromise of American Christianity as a whole.

Thesis
As stated earlier, this thesis is a writing on torture. More specifically, it develops a political theology which subverts any current American theology that seems apathetic to torture, blasé about torture, or worst of all, resolutely pro-torture. To be more percise, 9/11, as a microcosm of the greater American story, is used by the privatizing nation-state as an identity-forming, eschatological event (a “Christological” event within a larger colonizing context) that supplants the life of Jesus and the cross and resurrection and works with the commodifying market to break down the Christian call and community of Christians in America. And, just as the Christian story of the cross does not end with death, so too the nation-state supplies a hope for a grand future. However, this future is an anthropocentric future, most vividly seen in Ronald Reagan’s hope, which was wrapped around a perverted, humanly controlled and realized salvation of fear, anger, and violence. The state’s story and justification for violence – to ensure “safety” (the status quo) in the face of fear – become the ruling meta-narrative.

The outcome is a breakdown and reversal of relationships and allegiance and the end result is a Christian public polity that is at least indifferent to violence by the state. Accordingly, the body of Christ is no longer forged by the memory and promise of the cross and resurrection, if it indeed continues to exist as a body. The solution to engaging American Christianity against torture, then, is to bring to bear Johann Metz’s idea of “dangerous memory” and an explication on the political implications of church movement – liturgical/sacramental theology. Metz reorients Christians to the identity-forming memory of the Christological life, and it is in liturgy that Christians solidify themselves and act out, resulting in a politically prophetic movement by the church.

This political theology is an attempt to re-narrate the church in America. Such an act will hopefully place the church on the margins, with the marginalized. Christendom of old will not be resurrected, nor will the modernist project continue to hold sway. Instead, both the theologically liberal and theologically conservative will be moved in the direction of a politically liberative praxis championed by a community formed through the remembrance of Christ.

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1. Lieven Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval (New York: Continuum, 2007), 203.

2. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, translated by J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Herder and Herder, 2007), 150-155.

What is torture? What is the structure of one human doing destructive acts to a vulnerable, fellow human being? The question about torture, “Does it work?” is not an appropriate question. Of course it works, but to what end does it work and what is it effective at doing? Simply, what are the goals for torture and how are those achieved? What are the whys and the hows?

The How of Torture is Built on Pain
The abstract how of torture is quite easy to cerebrally understand. Indeed, it is simple – the means of torture is overwhelming pain inflicted on a thoroughly vulnerable person by another human being. As one inflicts massive amounts of pain on the other, there is fundamentally a great gulf created between the torturer and tortured. The tortured has lost, while the torturer has forcibly taken, control of the relationship resulting in one of the most sadistic, one-sided relational situations ever conceived: “Every weapon has two ends. In converting the other person’s pain into his own power, the torturer experiences the entire occurrence exclusively from the nonvulnerable end of the weapon.”1 There is no gifting in such a relationship, only violation and impressment, for violence and blinding pain is the ruling language and defining experience.

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1. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 59.

I’m curious as what the theoblogosphere thinks of my following MA thesis:

I plan on writing on torture, more specifically, developing a political theology that subverts current American theology that seems apathetic or blasé on torture (since most do not seem explicitly for torture, but even if that were not case, the political theology I envision would cut against those pro-torture as well).

To distill the thesis I envision, I summarize it as such: 9/11, as a microcosm, is used by the privatizing nation-state as an identity-forming, eschatological event (a Christological event within a larger colonizing context) that supplants the cross and resurrection, and works with the commodifying market to breakdown the Christian call and community of Christians in America. The state’s story and justification for violence to ensure “safety” (the status quo) in the face of fear becomes the ruling narrative. Because the Christian body is no longer forged by the memory and promise of the cross and resurrection, if it indeed continues to exist as a body, the outcome is a breakdown and reversal of allegiance and relationships and the end result is a Christian public that is at least indifferent to violence by the state. The solution to engaging American Christianity against torture then is to bring to bear the Metzian idea of “dangerous memory” and an explication on the political implications of church movement – liturgical/sacramental theology. Metz reorients Christians to the identity forming memory of the Christological life and it is in liturgy that Christians solidify themselves and act out resulting in a prophetic movement by the church that is inherently political.

Any ideas? Praise and glory is welcome, helpful criticism even more so.