A Theological Answer to the Government Who will not Prosecute Itself

I don’t think there is much that can be done within state politics to get towards some real justice over torture. It is quite clear that, yes, America did it. And yes, torture is illegal. It also seems equally clear that prosecutions will not happen, or at least in the current climate. Quite frankly, the reaction to scandals like Watergate seem like a thing of the past. Instead of torture bringing down Bush’s presidency, it was Clinton who nearly ran aground, but on the rocks of didn’t-keep-his-pants-on. Seems a bit out of proportion? However my argument isn’t with the most recent impeachment trial, it is with the fact that our government ain’t gonna do much.

So what, I ask myself, is the theological answer? It is quite simple: we won’t forget what the ‘powerful’ want us to forget. But first the Christian thought begins with Jesus and so briefly part of the story needs to be retold. By most measures of success, Jesus failed. Indeed, in the passion God seemed to lose. But the story does not end there, and nor did it begin at the cross either. The work of God as we know it began with Creation and the covenants in history. After a time, the person of Christ took on the human story in the kenotic incarnation, and therefore enacting the divine act of drawing humanity up into the divine life and orienting creation towards its proper telos. This conversion or transformation of the broken world was shown through the juxtaposition of the rule of God and broken life. The parables and teachings of Jesus, along with his faithful, divinely incarnated life, broke open the closed system of death. Jesus died because the economy of death, that claims to determine who can live and die, responds with death. Thus in his death, Jesus showed the bare life as impoverished: there is nothing freeing in an economy of death. Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection showed a more powerful economy that focused on flourishing and support: an economy of love and grace (pure-gift).

So what is this story? In one way, this is a memory of someone who lived dangerously as counter to the then established, self-serving order. This is also a memory of someone who was tortured. If rightly done, as Christians we remember this life in a very specific way: this Christological life calls us to identify with those tortured in such a strong way that we look like Christ, the one hung from a tree. This is certainly not a safe life, but it is the good life. This is in a word, solidarity.

So to the government and the self-serving powers who aim to sweep your oppressive work under the rug, we will not forget because God will not forget the browbeaten. And while political vendication may be far off, that is if it ever does occur, here in the now, because we are formed by the Christ-life, we will be the voice for those you have attempted to silence. No more torture! Stop the oppression!

The theological response is not simply strong talk, it also seeks justice: the holistic reconciliation between people. Thus we will love through action: we will seek out and treat those whom you have considered as less than human.

Government, Christianity will seek your redemption through playing partisan politics by caring for the vulnerable, hurt, and needy. Christianity in living the life of love will expose the impoverished life of the powers that be. Quite simply, government, we will prosecute you.

Cavanaugh on Torture at The Other Journal

William Cavanaugh has a piece at The Other Journal on torture. Go check it out! Below are a few quotes:

Torture is both a product of—and helps reinforce—a certain story about who “we” are and who “our” enemies are. Torture helps imagine the world as divided between friends and enemies. To live the Eucharist, on the other hand, is to live inside God’s imagination. The Eucharist is the ritual enactment of the redemptive power of God, rooted in the torture, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In my book I describe some of the ways that the Church in Chile used the practice of the Eucharist to resist the imagination of terror and torture imposed by the military regime.

…In what follows I will use what I learned about torture from the Chilean experience and relate it to our own context. I will argue that torture is a way of imagining who our enemies are. I will then explore the Eucharist as the Church’s counter-imagination, a way of resisting the state’s creation of enemies.

…In the Eucharistic rite, the commemoration of the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ spoken after the words of institution is called the anamnesis. This is the Greek word used by the New Testament in rendering Jesus’s command “Do this in remembrance of me” (e.g., Luke 22:19). The Greek word an-amnesis is the opposite of amnesia; it is literally an “unforgetting.” It is an odd term, for how could we forget about God?

Perhaps it is because we are constantly tempted to forget the victims of this world.

…Johann Baptist Metz has written of the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ as a “dangerous memory” that disrupts the forgetfulness of the world, what he sometimes calls the “forgetfulness of the forgotten.” The dangerous memory of Christ’s torture and death at the hands of the powers disrupts the march of the powerful. As Metz says, in this memory

the dominion of God among us is revealed by this, that dominion of men over men has begun to be thrown down, that Jesus declared himself to be on the side of the invisible, the oppressed and exploited, and thus proclaimed the coming dominion of God as the liberating power of an unconditional love.36

The dangerous memory of the anamnesis gives us hope that the way things are is not the way things have to be. To take part in the anamnesis is to live inside God’s imagination, in which, as Jesus tells us, no sparrow is forgotten, and the hairs of each person’s head are counted (Luke 12:6-7).

…Remembering all victims will help us to tell the truth, both about others and about ourselves. If we live inside God’s imagination, we will see that even the people we most demonize as enemies – fundamentalist Muslims, for example – are made in the image of God. Furthermore, they have something to teach us about ourselves. In Roxanne Euben’s phrase, Muslim fundamentalists are the “enemy in the mirror” for the Western world. Our fear of Muslims can tell us what we fear about ourselves. Our charges of irrationality and violence against them can tell us about our own unreasoning fanaticisms and our own violence. Peace will not be achieved by torturing and bombing them into democracy. We have been making terrorists faster than we can kill them. Only by addressing the underlying causes of terrorism honestly is peace possible.

But Christians cannot put too much faith in the nation-state to be peacemaker. To be the Body of Christ means not merely to speak the truth to power, but to live the truth. The Church is the politics of Jesus, and must oppose the politics of the world when it brings death instead of life. We have much to learn from the example of Chile, where the Church eventually realized that the government was not listening, and decided to act more concretely on its own. In our own context, this might mean protest and concrete acts of solidarity with the victims of our violence. It would mean especially that Christians must simply refuse to fight in unjust wars, and refuse to use unjust means.

The world did not change on 9/11; the world changed on 12/25. When the Word of God became incarnate in human history, when he was tortured to death by the powers of this world, and when he rose to give us new life—it was then that everything changed. Christ made friends of us who are enemies of God, and He thus made us capable of loving our enemies as ourselves.

Sean Hannity the Heretic

I know this is a bit late for a response, but I’ve been quite busy. See below the video of Sean Hannity saying that Christianity is compatible with torture (just over 2 minutes into the video). Yes, this is literally heresy. For multiple reasons.

To quote Jon Stewart: “F$#@ You.”

For more on torture, see here.

Honor God: Say No to Torture

For my friends at 100 Days Campaign and Witness Against Torture.

On Scandal and the Future

Many an important theology has been born out of more than mere reaction, but an urge to address an established evil. Theologians in the past have been rightly scandalized by slavery, abuse, torture, genocide, and reacted with all their being. In a crazy world, it is the calm, sane person who may have the real problem, for they are not responding to what reality is. Simply, the question of theodicy or oppression in a violent world has galvanized theologians like Moltmann, Sölle, Metz, Cone, Copeland, Isasi-Díaz, and numerous others.

I’ve found that often, while there is a social foundation to evil, there is also a specific occurrence that grabs a theologian and never lets go. I myself have found a slew of scandals instances that could function as scandals for theologians in recent years, or at least have scandalized me to one degree or another: the “war on terror,” American torture, neo-colonialism, immigration, the response to Rev. Jeremiah Wright (racism), the sexist treatment of women, to name a few. And this makes me wonder, what will be the theodicy questions and issues that will push us forward in the future? What will we respond to? Have we as a generation yet to be gripped?

Humane? Lies.

From Yahoo News on Omar Khadr:

The prisoner appears to have given up hope by the end and doesn’t seem likely to cooperate with authorities, former FBI agent Jack Cloonan said after viewing the excerpt. “He has probably made up his own mind that he is dead, he is dead man walking.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, denied Khadr was mistreated. “Our policy is to treat detainees humanely and Khadr has been treated humanely,” Gordon said.

The video was made by U.S. authorities and turned over to Khadr’s defense team, Gordon said. The tapes are U.S. property.

A Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs report said a Canadian official, Jim Gould, visited Khadr in 2004 and was told by the American military that the detainee was moved every three hours to different cells.

That technique, dubbed, “frequent flyer,” was one of at least two sleep deprivation programs the U.S. military used against Guantanamo prisoners. Detainees were moved from cell to cell throughout the night to keep them awake and weaken their resistance to interrogation.

Treated humanely? Bullshit. Techniques like that are not humane. Torture has to go. Jesus was Omar. This is wicked.

Again, from my thesis:

There is no help for the voiceless in torture. In fact, everything is against the voiceless, leaving the victim a hollow, deconstructed shell of a person soon ready to be filled with the voice of the torturer: “Torture inflicts bodily pain that is itself language-destroying, but torture also mimes (objectifies in the external environment) this language-destroying capacity in its interrogation, the purpose of which is not to elicit needed information but visibly to deconstruct the prisoner’s voice.”

In sum, torture does not merely leave its mark by the disillusion of one’s world through the mind and body. It also leaves an imprint – a constructed structure designed by the torturer. “In torture, it is in part the obsessive display of agency that permits one person’s body to be translated into another person’s voice, that allows real human pain to be converted into a regime’s fiction of power.” Like a brand searing into flesh, torture obliterates the established cellular structure as it also leaves a sign of ownership – a reconstituted structure predicated on the structure of the brand, or in this case, the state who tortures. Simply put, the tortured is re-made in the image of the torturer.

That is not humane, in fact, it is the exact opposite. It is a violent cloning, the force feeding of a story, the creation of zombies, a lobotomy if you will. Its wrong and it certainly is not humane.

On Torture, or Why America Should be Damned

A short video of an interrogation of Omar Khadr was released today. It shows torture for what it really is: a violent, coerced conversion. As usual, it made me sick. And again, made me realize my complicity. God help us.

From my thesis on torture:

The abstract “how” of torture, the grammar so to speak, is quite easy to cerebrally understand. Indeed, it is simple – the means of torture is overwhelming pain (physical or psychological) inflicted on a thoroughly vulnerable person by another human being to destroy the subject’s world. Either way the end result is a writhing, shamed, terrorized bio-mass that was once a human being. As one inflicts massive amounts of pain on the other, there is 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.” There is no gifting in such a relationship, only violation and impressment, for violence and blinding pain is the ruling language and defining experience.

I wrote my MA thesis regarding torture. For a much lengthier treatment, one can download it here, titled “Responding Theologically in the Face of Torture: Re-Politicizing American Christianity in Light of the Interruptive Jesus.” I realize quoting myself may seem a tad narcissistic, but I’m a bit busy and since I’ve already written on it, I might as well use what I’ve done. Its not like I’m pulling a Piper and quoting from another book I wrote, telling you to buy that as well…

A Video of Cavanaugh on Torture

For all of you who haven’t met the man (including me), but have found his work very informative, heres a video of Cavanaugh interviewed. Nothing particularly new, but fun nevertheless.

H/T to Someday. Some morning. Sometime.

Responding Theologically in the Face of Torture

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.

The Interruptive Jesus: “Who do you say I am?”

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.

The Challenge of Political Theology

Johann Metz constructed his political theology in the aftermath of Auschwitz. As did Jürgen Moltmann and Dorothy Sölle. It seems that today, political theology is reactionary and constructive — reactionary because the church exists in a world that it does not control and constructive because the church must find a way to situate itself within the world. Any theology that does this, no matter how critical it may be, is not sectarian. To be critical of complicity and to try and find our way that lives the basileia is the task of political theology — out of God, theology, and the church, we find our body politic, our social engagement.

With this in mind, I find no shortage of problems that the church must react to, particularly for those of us who are Americans. And yet, the church, or at least the Christians in America, do not seem to see many issues. Consider torture, among the myriad of problems. The National Religious Campaign Against Torture and organizations like it have helped voice opposition to torture. However, I find in some ways that these non-governmental organizations lack a driving force. Simply, they lack the church as they have tried to fit into the state’s categories and therefore lacks the unparalleled force of ecclesial movement. So, how do we respond to this?

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.

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.”

Thesis Intro

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.

________
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.

A Paragraph from the Thesis

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.

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