Daily Archives: February 18, 2010

J. Kameron Carter on Haiti: From Theodicy to Christ-odicy

Posted by on February 18, 2010 Comments Off

As was mentioned in the comments to my quote from Nate’s article on Haiti, you should also make sure to check out J. Kameron Carter’s excellent reflection on the tragedy. Here’s a quote:

For in Jesus, so we confess, God was manifest, not metaphysically above the fray, but in the flesh, in our condition (1 Tim. 3:16). In him, pain and suffering are taken up into God’s identity. Our economy of pain is received into the divine economy of life. The suffering and pain that marks the humanity of God, thus, includes the realities of physical and social death, as well as the conditions that perpetuate death and suffering. In the person of Jesus, these realities have been decisively dealt with and, indeed, dealt with not by a god who is above the fray but by one who is named Immanuel, God with Us, one who walks in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Jesus’s resurrection from the dead by the Spirit of God points to that form of life within and ultimately beyond the conditions of death.

And yes, we must say both at the same time: within death but ultimately beyond the conditions of death. We must say “within death” to indicate how Jesus has absorbed death and its power within himself. From within his taking up of death and suffering, a social space is constituted beyond death and suffering. Thus, we also say “ultimately beyond the conditions of death.”

From here, we also glean the significance of the resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection, which we live into by the Holy Spirit, empowers us now to work within tight spaces—the tight space confronting the world community now, among other tight spaces, is the trauma of the Haitian earthquake—to bring life from death.

By coming at the issue of God and suffering, which this Haiti crisis compels us to do, from the vantage point of the God not above our pain but the God known in and who is identified from our pain, the classical theodicy question comes to an end. We step beyond theodicy and into a “Christ-odicy.” That is to say, we address suffering from Jesus Christ. And to approach suffering from him is to approach those who suffer, not as those merely needing our charity (which positions us above them), nor as those who trigger our intellectual and aesthetic capacities to glean the beautiful from the tragic (which also positions us as masters, above the fray), but as those who witness God to us, the God who is the Neighbor—the one and only Neighbor—who has come to us (cf. Luke 10:25–37). They are neighbors in whom God is known and is present to us. And thus, Haiti is the witness to our redemption. The script is Christologically flipped: they are the missionaries to us. To neglect them, to position ourselves above the fray and thus above them, to not work to change the social conditions that make natural disaster worse—these are all signs of the refusal of salvation.

Nate Kerr on Haiti: Prayer, Solidarity, and Revolt

Posted by on February 18, 2010 6 comments

Nate Kerr has a new article up at The Other Journal responding to the issue in Haiti, and particularly underscoring the theological importance of prayer and solidarity in relation to such events of radical suffering. Its definitely worth reading. Here’s just one quote:

At the heart of all Christian prayer is the cry “Thy kingdom come!” It is with this cry that we move out into the action that speaks to God by waiting upon the free coming of God. It is with this cry that we speak to and for the coming again of Christ—that decisive action of God by which the powers and principalities of this world are to be subverted and creation is to be opened anew to its revolutionary transformation into new life. In prayer, we come to participate in this revolutionary transformation. Thus, Barth says, the action to which Christians are called by Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit is a specific kind of revolt. Specifically, the Christian prays in “revolt against all the oppression and suppression of humans by the lordship of the lordless powers,” against those powers that have gained their lordship by virtue of their refusal of humanity’s and creation’s relationship to God. At the same time, the Christian prayer of revolt is rooted in an equally specific kind of hope. The Christian acts against the lordship of the lordless powers not so as to win her own freedom from their rule (as if by some equally autonomous power), but rather in the recognition that she has been implicated in a struggle that refuses their rule as false and illusory, in recognition that she has already been liberated from their rule in the original revolution of Christ’s cross and resurrection. For Christians to cry, “Thy kingdom come!” in revolt against the lordless powers is to act “in the sphere of freedom” from the powers which “is already given to them here and now on this side of the fulfillment of the prayer.” Prayer, Barth is saying, should make revolutionaries of us all. Indeed, what kind of an invocation of God’s kingdom would it be if it did not testify through specific ways of working and living and loving to the path through and out from under the lordless powers—cosmic, political, and religious alike—that enslave the powerless poor by presuming to deny the resurrection of the crucified?

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