Category Archives: Martyrdom

The martyrdom of Stephen and narrative theology

Posted by on June 3, 2011 33 comments

In the last few weeks I’ve spent a good bit of time in Acts, and more than a little of it on the story of the martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 6-7). The more I read it, the more I’m struck by its profoundly explosive nature, and especially how it stands as a witness against what we commonly think of as “narrative theology.”

Stephen’s “defense” (a more profound misnomer I’m hard pressed to think of) recounts the whole story of Israel in a new way, a deeply offensive way. Indeed there is nothing defensive about his speech. His constant emphasis is that God’s people have consistently rejected God’s agents and God’s actions and have refused to obey. All this culminates in their rejection of Jesus, the presence of God himself. This is very crucial to see: Stephen tells the story of God’s people against themselves. He narrates their history as a history of their failure and refusal of God’s intentions and actions. In effect, his telling of the story of Israel is his own attempt to rob them of their assumed possession of that story.

It is a common tenet of most accounts of narrative theology that the telling of stories is crucial to how communities fashion and shape their life. We tell our stories as myths that support and sustain us; our telling of our story is a source of coherence, stability, and formation. Stories are meant to reinforce, strengthen, form us into a common identity, and that is how the church is directed to appropriate its Scriptures and traditions.

Interestingly, Stephen does the exact opposite of what we normally think of as “narrative theology.” He tells their story to literally “undo” them and all they have built themselves up to be. He claims that what God’s people have made of themselves is a failure so great that they have become the very murders of God come among them. He tells their story, not to shape, form, and maintain a community, but rather to blow the hinges off the doors that enclose this community (note that this whole conflict arises out of a controversy involving religious/cultural divisions, cf. 6:1). In his witness to the Gospel, Stephen explodes the very story that secures them, that binds them together. He is not building up, he is out to destroy. To destroy in the service of the new creation which the Gospel proclaims, to be sure, but this proclamation cannot simply be accepted (or “overaccepted”) into the existing narrative inscription, rather a break, a fracture must occur if the Gospel is to be truly spoken of and lived.

What Stephen’s opponents cannot see, and what they violently (cf. 7:54, 57) refuse to see or hear is the freedom that Stephen’s destructive narration has to offer them. The event of the resurrection, and the judgment it speaks is too much for them. They cannot accept anything other than the Old World run by Death, which is the weapon they choose to use against Stephen. And yet in the very event of wielding the power of death to try to silence his witness, the reality of the resurrection and its repetition in the martyr-witness of Stephen is made only too clear, as he dies willingly, with words of forgiveness for his killers, seeing and testifying to nothing other than the lordship of Jesus Christ, who stands at the right hand of the Father.

 

Martyrdom without Fetishization

Posted by on September 21, 2009 5 comments

Daniel Izuzquiza’s Rooted in Jesus Christ is a very stirring addition to contemporary theology, and in particular is a helpful engagement with and extension of the project of liberation theology. The book focuses on four central features of liberation theology: method, God as liberator, the martyrs, and the poor. Some of his statements about martyrdom are particularly good:

If our discourse about martyrdom focuses on the violence, suffering, and death operating against the poor people—instead of highlighting their fortitude and endurance—the unwanted effect might be a victimization of the people themselves. In this scheme, the poor would be mere passive recipients of the violence exerted on them, while the real protagonists would be the executioners. The paradoxical outcome of such a theology of martyrdom would be a factual dis-empowerment of the victims, who are left with no other option than silent suffering of their unjust fate. Considered from another perspective, this approach seems to mimic the dominant discourse, with its emphasis on dramatic excesses, that may get attention from the mass media. In a sense, the recent film The Passion of the Christ might be an example of what a distorted theology of the cross and martyrdom may look like: a bloody and dreadful affair with little connection to human praxis in daily life. (p. 13)

In other words, if a theology of martyrdom is fixated on the violence suffered by the martyrs rather than on their courage and witness, we end up simply valorizing violence itself, making martyrdom something of a fetish.

Remembering Romero

Posted by on March 24, 2009 1 comment

Dave Horstkoetter offers a good reminder that today marks the anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero. Romero is one of only two bishops who have ever been assassinated while performing the Mass, the other being Thomas Beckett. Both of these men were instituted into their positions on the assumption that they would be fairly docile and pliable to the whims of the political establishment. In both cases, the powers that be proved mistaken and found themselves resorting to lethal violence to silence them.

Romero’s final words before being shot in the process of consecrating the Eucharistic elements were these:

“May this Body immolated and this Blood sacrificed for Mankind nourish us also, that we may give our body and our blood over to suffering and pain, like Christ–not for Self, but to give harvests of peace and justice to our People.”

The Martyr versus the Fighter

Posted by on August 28, 2008 2 comments

“The pathology of a martyr complex is often a heavy-handed attempt to escape the vulnerability of speaking the turth without the means of convincing others that it is true. It signifies impatience with the freedom of others not to believe. It betrays an insecurity that cannot bear its own knowledge without compulsion for everyone else. In a word, it expresses doubt. Such doubt may explain why martyrdom is sometimes misconstrued and applied to the deaths of fighters. For the New Testament, martyrs do not die because they fight for what is right but precisely because they refuse to fight for what is true. A fighter fundamentally dubts whether his truth is true and anxiously grasps at it, preferring secure knowledge to uncertain promise made certain only through faith. Fighters do not stand by the truth of their convictions.”

~ Craig Hovey, To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 148.

Martyrdom and Self-Denial

Posted by on August 18, 2008 1 comment

“Self-denial does not kill the martyr. The martyr does not die of neglect or self-mastery, which we would more accurately speak of as suicide. Rather, self-denial enables the martyr to face with courage the situation that calls for death, though that death is inflicted by someone else. In this way, the martyr is freed from the necessity both of killing his accusers and of killing himself. Rejecting the necessity of both requires the kind of formation intrinsic to the askesis of a martyr-church, rejecting the offer to take control of the situation through violent means. The martyr exhibits confidence in peace as a powerless hope that is no less hopeful on account of being powerless, disabused of the means of securing life through coercion. The offer of Christ’s peace cannot be safeguarded from rejection without imperiling its peaceableness. Those who bear crosses do so in the confidence that a new world has been created in which, despite appearances, the peace of Christ is a more sure reality than the violence of human agonism.”

~ Craig Hovey, To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008), 61-62.

The Purple Crown: A Review

Posted by on August 13, 2008 8 comments

The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom is the second book in Herald Press’s excellent new series, “Polyglossia: Radical Reformation Theologies.” Chris Huebner’s book, A Precarious Peace opened up the series with a book of supreme quality, erudition, and sophistication. Tripp York’s The Purple Crown proves to be a solid addition to the series and a helpful study on the nature of Christian martyrdom. He opens the book with a discussion of the early church’s experience and theology of martyrdom, especially emphasizing the connection between martyrdom and baptism, as well as the relationship between martyrdom and liturgy. For the early Christians, martyrdom was, in fact a public liturgy in which the powers of the kingdom of God entered into contest with the powers of Satan. 

The second chapter puts forth a theology of the body in light of martyrdom. York argues that martyrdom is impossible unless the Christian body has been duly trained for it through the discipline of ecclesial-liturgical askesis. Christian liturgy is a form of bodily training for martyrdom; without such training the body will not be able to endure the heavenly contest between God and the Devil that takes place in the site of the martyr’s body. The material reality of the body is crucially important to York’s account here. Because the body is the mode through which humanity enters into communion with the divine (chiefly through the Eucharist), the body is of the utmost soteriological importance. The body is the site of salvation itself. This is why Christians cannot offer up their bodies (or the bodies of others) for anything other than God’s own kingdom. The body, being  the site of salvation, cannot be given over to any ideology or community that is not salvific.

The third chapter is one of the most interesting ones in the book, as it deals with perhaps the most crucial question for a Christian theology of martyrdom, namely that of Christians who are named as martyrs who were killed by other Christians. Here the issue of the sixteenth-century conflict between Catholics, Protestants, and Anabaptists is particularly important. On both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide there was mutual killing which both sides narrated differently. Those of their own who were killed were holy martyrs, while those who they themselves killed were criminals being duly punished by law. The Anabaptists occupy a somewhat different place in this narrative as they alone were solely on the receiving end of violence in the sixteenth century. As such, they developed a very strong theology of martyrdom as delineated in the tome Martyr’s Mirror. 

York explores these debacles and attempts to hold them open rather than find a way to neatly close them. The question of how to make sense of a Christianity that persecutes itself cannot be easily closed, especially in view of the fact that the self-descriptions of the bodies involved in this historical debacle all invariably identified those against them as the antichrist, rather than as fellow-Christians. In the end, York shows his preference for the Anabaptists, a point that clearly has a strong case to be made for it. However, he also notes that, in addition to embodying a witness of nonviolence in the face of extreme persecution, the Anabaptist tradition includes within it an impetus towards a hermeneutic of martyrdom that is capable of recognizing the martyrs outside of one’s own camp. This is seen in the fact that, within Martyr’s Mirror there are included many stories, including at least one of the martyrdom of a Lutheran pastor. In the end, York struggles to leave the whole question of how to interpret the sixteenth-century debacle open, but one wonders if, by leaving it endlessly open, he has not in fact found a way of taming the problem itself. Sometimes telling us to “live in the tension” is itself a way of dissolving the tension.

The fourth chapter of the book is a foray into the work of William Cavanaugh, John Howard Yoder, and Augustine on the issue of the relationship between the heavenly and the earthly city. Herein York give a cogent account of the sort of theopolitical vision that has become commonly identified with the work of Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder. The church is public and political by virtue of its own reality as a community constituted by baptism and the Eucharist. It is in the church’s worship, rather than its attempts to “get involved” in the world that the church embodies its particular politics.

The fifth chapter is something of a biographical summary of the life and martyrdom of Oscar Romero. The book closes with an epilogue on the non-sacrificial economy of gift that is embodied in the witness of the martyrs. Keying off the work of David Bentley Hart, York argues that the martyrs embody a different order of vision, a different optics in which the Eucharistic mystery is lived out in conflict with the powers, showing forth to the world the luminescence of the divine economy of grace.

On the whole, York’s book is a solid and helpful account of martyrdom. The book does not quite live up to Huebner’s book which preceded it, but it should not be slighted for that reason. If anything, what could have helped York’s book more would have been more attention to connection. One of his best chapters is the fourth one, in which he helpfully lays out an Augustinian-Yoderian mode of theopolitics. However, this whole chapter offers hardly any mention of martyrdom at all, or the connection between this theopolitical vision and a proper theology of martyrdom.

Another key point that should be considered is whether or not York makes too much of the connection between the Eucharist and martyrdom. He claims that “the importance of the Eucharist for a faithful account of martyrdom cannot be overstated” (p. 152). I think, however that indeed it can be overstated, and York has perhaps overstated the importance thereof. Surely the Eucharist is central in forming a martyrological imagination, but it does so as a part of the whole sacramental and communal universe of the journey of discipleship. Eucharist alone cannot make martyrdom possible; the amount of Eucharist that was happening in Nazi Germany belies such a simplistic answer to such questions. Certainly York does not intend any such simplistic answer, but it is important to be cautious against “Eucharist” simply becoming a cipher that answers every theological question, as it, and so many other concepts and practices are wont to do.

Ultimately, York’s book offers a helpful addition to the Polyglossia series, and is a very cogent articulation of the theopolitics of martyrdom. It is to be commended to anyone interested in martyrdom and its implications for discipleship and ecclesiology.

Martyrdom and Narrative Closure

Posted by on August 7, 2008 4 comments

A further thought on the nature of martyrdom: It seems that what makes martyrdom what it is is determined by the community of memory to which the martyr belongs and who narrate that memory. That a person’s death is a martyrdom is a hermeneutic statement about the whole shape of that person’s life and death. It is to say that, given that this person has died, that their life has been terminated and is now a completed whole, this life says this. For someone’s life to be martyrological that life must be a finished life, a completed story. As long as I am alive, the story of myself is open to revision. Only with my death will the who of who I am be permanently settled and open for final evaluation. To call someone a martyr is to claim that their life, now being closed, completed, finalized makes this statement, bears this witness, proclaims this reality.

Thus, it seems that martyrdom should be understood as a possibility, and indeed an imperative for all Christians. Of course, at this point we have extrapolated the meaning of martyrdom out to its furthest possible point. And at this point it raises the question, if this sort of notion of martyrdom is correct, does one necessarily have to be violently killed to be rightly accounted as a martyr?

Martyrological Epistemology

Posted by on August 6, 2008 10 comments

In his superb book, A Precarious Peace, Chris Huebner explores the connection between epistemology and martyrdom:

“Martyrdom names and approach to knowledge and a way of life more generally which assumes that the truth of Christ cannot somehow be secured, but is rather a gift received and lived out in vulnerable yet hopeful giving in return. On such a reading, the martyr is not one who dies for or because of her beliefs. Rather, the death of the martyr is in some meaningful way the very expression of belief itself. Martyrdom does not arise out of a feeling of control over death. Rather, it is but an expression of a way of life that gives up the assumption of being in control.” (p. 137)

This opens up a crucial vista on the nature of truth, the gospel, and the promise of peace through Christ. The martyr does not give “evidence” for the truth of Christian belief so much as embody a particular way of knowing that refuses to understand truth as a possession. The reality given to us in the gospel, the peace of Christ, is not something that is settled, stable, or under our control, or even ever able to be totally assimilated by us.

“Peace is itself and agonistic reality. It does not name a settled territory that we can fully embody or own. It is not something we own as a first instance called knowledge, which then informs our actions. Rather, it is a gift that might be given through us only when we no longer seek violently to control it.” (p. 142)

Thus, a martyrological epistemology, a mode of knowing and bearing witness to the truth of the gospel as given to us in Christ will take the form of constantly laying ourselves open before the ever-new Word of God which speaks Christ unexpected peace to us in the form of gratuitous and unprecedented gift. Thus the Christian way of knowing, in step with the martyrs, must eschew attempts at offering a total perspective, a closed circle, an indubitably justified belief:

“The knowledge of the martyrs is not preoccupied with epistemic justification but is shaped by the epistemological virtues of patience and hope. It is an agonistic mode of knowledge that proceeds in fragments and ad hoc alliances, not the development of large-scale totalities. This knowledge resists closure, refusing the lie of the total perspective and the search for a purified idiom of speech, recognizing that language about God is finally not limited to our current vocabularies.” (p. 143)

The epistemology of the martyrs is constituted by the refusal to totalize our way of knowing the truth, but rather to live in a constant state of kenotic openness to the gift of God’s truth in Jesus Christ. And only by embracing such a martyrological way of knowing can we be grasped by the truth, stand for the truth, and be found in the truth without reducing that truth to our own possession which we are driven to violently defend

Bonhoeffer as Martyr

Posted by on August 5, 2008 6 comments

In his book, Bonhoeffer as Martyr, Craig Slane makes the following argument:

“Martyrdom is a circumlocution of sorts for the quite personal and fatal consequences of the ontological collision between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world. As a collision of kingdoms, martyrdom is, and always has been, rife with political overtones. And as contemporary martyrs have shown, seldom is it ‘neat around the edges.’ On a clearly reasoned yet sophisticated theological foundation, Bonhoeffer freely brought his faith into the polis–brought his confession into action–entering into solidarity with and sacrificing himself for the Jews of the Holocaust, and thus, like Jesus, he laid down his life for others. I conclude, therefore that Bonhoeffer deserves to be styled a true martyr of the church.”

This reflection is helpful in that it directs attention away from the subjective intentions, feelings, and alleged motives of potential martyrs. Too often we embrace a highly instrumentalistic and moralistic notion of martyrdom. To be martyred is to be killed because of one’s own moral effort in regard to our confession. We are killed because of our explicit and intentional efforts to bear witness to Christ through not compromising our confession, not denying Christ, and so on. 

However, as Slane shows, though the lens of Bonhoeffer, this notion is all wrong. Martyrdom is not about moral resoluteness or the absence of compromise. Clearly Bonhoeffer did view himself as compromised and was plagued with crucial questions of moral doubt throughout his life of striving for faithfulness to Christ. What makes Bonhoeffer a martyr is that the church has discerned in his life and death, the collision between God’s kingdom and the powers of Satan. Insofar as anyone dies in that conflict, regardless of their intentions, compromised status, or moral incoherence, their lives become a witness, martus. To be a martyr is precisely not to perform a valiant moral act, but rather to be caught up in the reality of Gods’ kingdom in its irruption into the world. To live and die martyrologically is to be drawn, by Christic and pneumatic grace, into participation into the Trinitarian life of God’s kingdom. As such, we can never martyr ourselves (against the Islamic notion thereof); we can only hope to become martyrs, hope that our living and our dying will be found in the realm of the kingdom of God rather than the kingdom of Satan.

What is Persecution?

Posted by on June 6, 2008 8 comments

There has been a ridiculously long discussion on a post from a while back on persecution, specifically on whether or not Christians in the West should be considered as a persecuted group.  This opens up the question what it is that really constitutes persecution.  Is persecution just any curtailment of our ability as Christians to do whatever we want in a given society?  And what is the relationship between persecution and the lack of impingement upon our freedoms?  Is impingement of freedom the same thing as persecution?  What, other than a preoccupation with Enlightenment notions of freedom would even lead us to equate the two?  And what sort of compulsion is it that leads us to equate marginalization or disestablishment with persecution?  What is it that drives the evangelical desire to be able to say “I am persecuted”?

I for one am wary of equating persecution with the sort of inconveniences that Christians face in the West regarding how they are allowed to influence public policy, what sort of on-campus groups they can sponsor in public schools, and the like.  I do not think that we can disentangle the discourse of persecution in the New Testament from the early Christian experience of martyrdom.  It seems to me that a lot of the rhetoric of persecution that obtains in conservative evangelical circles often functions as a way to name ourselves among the persecuted without ever having to contemplate or face the realities of martyrdom that attend the daily existence of truly persecuted Christians throughout the world.

This is not to say that its no big deal when Christians in contemporary liberal societies find it hard to get things done, or find an intellectual climate that is not friendly to the Christian faith.  However, lets not cheapen the language of persecution to satiate our angst about feeling disestablished in the West.  Being disestablished as the church is hardly the same thing as persecution; frankly I see no reason to view it as anything other than an opportunity for the church to rediscover herself as a distinctive body within the world.  Recovering a healthy sense of ecclesial homelessness within the realities of the Western empire represents the opening up of a space in which great faithfulness and authentic witness is again become possible for the church in a way that was stifled under the sort of cultural Constantinianism that has been part of the whole ethos of America specifically, and the West more generally.  The sort of evangelical paranoia that attends the way in which the conservative discourse of persecution takes shape today seems to be based on little more than the a longing to live in control rather than out of control.  This sort of desperation for legitimization and influence cannot be a good thing for the church.  Indeed, only when the church rejects this sort of compulsiveness of purpose can she rest securely in the gospel of the resurrection which promises us that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God.  Freedom from desperation based on fear allows us to name persecution truthfully.  We are no longer driven to self-legitimation by nominating ourselves among the persecuted.  Rather we are freed to find our identity as Christians and as the church outside ourselves in the crucified and resurrected Christ who de-possesses us from our frenzied desire to be validated, to have control, and to be in charge.

Moral Certitude, Martyrdom, and Hope

Posted by on May 13, 2008 15 comments

I sometimes wonder about the statements of conviction we make.  I’m firm believer in making very few commitments quickly while making damn sure you always keep the ones you do make.  But absolute statements, declarations, and manifestos are some of the most easy things to say.  They role right off the tongue and theological books are full of them.  For example, I offer this statement:

I would rather die than end up unfaithful to my wife; I would rather die than deny by a profligate life what I have taught in my books; I would rather die than deny or disown the gospel. (D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990], 120).

Based on this, I think only two conclusions about D.A. Carson are possible.  Either he is far more mature as a Christian and a person than I shall likely ever be (which is certainly possible) or he is just making sentimental statements that make for well-selling evangelical devotional books (which, I think may also be possible, but I hope, less likely).

Now I’ll just be honest here, I would damn well rather cheat on my wife and deal with the horror that would unfold from that than get killed.  Certainly I know that wouldn’t be a moral act in any sense, but I know good and well that if someone put a gun to my head and presented me with that alternative that I’d most likely cave.  Maybe I’m underestimating the power of my own affections here, but I don’t think so.  I’d certainly rather live at variance from my writings than cease to live.  Disown the gospel?  I think on something that stark I might have a chance, but for all I know I’d end up going through a series of denials and recantations not unlike the Anabaptist martyr Balthasar Hubmaier.

Now certainly I agree that in all of the examples that Carson offers I agree that we should rather die than give in to such forms of sin and compromise.  And maybe Carson has had experiences in which these convictions have been tested.  I have not and as such I feel very uncomfortable making statements about myself with such boldness.  I fear such statements tends very quickly towards bravado and reflect a sort of fanciful self-construction.  Or at least I know that that’s what I’d be doing if I made those statements.

Do we not end up conjuring up notions of our own indefectability with statements like this?  We seem to implicitly claim to have come to some sort of indubitable self-knowledge and are certain that we are the kind of persons who above all would never do this.  Is not the message of the gospel often that we will indeed do exactly this?  Does not the message of gospel constantly remind us that we are the betrayers of the truth?  Statements of the sort that Carson makes seem to bear within themselves a grammar that is inappropriate to the whole discourse of Christian discipleship.  To say something like “I would rather die than deny the gospel” is often really saying “I am a person who cannot be shaken and I know it.”  Such statements sound far too bold for me.  “Even if everyone else deserts you, I will never desert you!”

I for one am terrified of death and can’t stand acute pain in the least. (People, if the persecution starts you all need to go into hiding immediately.  I am going to break fast if the torture starts.)  I have no confidence in my ability to become a faithful martyr of the Christian confession.  I cannot imagine writing down in a book that I would rather die than disown the gospel.  I do not find the resources of moral certainty in myself that Carson seems to find within (Let me emphasize, I hesitate to impute duplicity to him; I just know what those lines would mean if I were to write them).  If I were to make statements about my own moral resolve on the basis of the gospel I don’t know any other way to state them than in the interrogative:  “Can these dry bones live?”

I wonder if a truly biblical spirituality should perhaps avoid the indicative mood altogether?  The indicative makes statements about the reality of the present, but the faith of the resurrection is premised on the horror of the past and the promise of the future fracturing the givenness of the present and suffusing it with apocalyptic hope.  A faith that lives between promise and hope exists in the linguistic mode of supplication, of trembling, of desperate hope in the future of the one who has promised that his Life will be the end of all things.  We are called, not into moral certitude and self-confidence in our development as Christians, but rather to the wild patience of those who follow one who always remains beyond our grasp.

We must begin, not with an assertion of our own indefectability, however well-founded our confidence might be.  The mystery of salvation includes the claim that those closest to Jesus often refuse to be found alongside him in his sufferings.  We must begin, rather in the assertion of our radical defectability.  Only then can we embrace the hope that lies precisely outside of ourselves in Christ and the promise of his apocalypse.  “If we are faithless he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.”

The Gift of the Martyrs

Posted by on January 19, 2008 5 comments

“Christ crucified must thus remain ‘metahermenutical’; he stands outside modernity, outside the market, outside every human order of power, as a real and visible beauty.  Nor can worldly power ever overcome him in his mystical body, because, again, the very gesture of the rhetoric of his form is one of donation, of martyrdom, and one that the powers of this world can suppress only through a violence that creates martyrs, and so confirms – contrary to all it intends – the witness of a peace that is infinite.  In the time of sin, governed by an eschatological hope that has already been imparted in history but that is still deferred, Christian rhetoric can be only a declaration of witness, and a gift.  A gift of martyrs – which is the name that must, finally be given to the Christian practice of persuasion – can never be returned violently, as the Same; because this gift is always peace and beauty, violence can ‘receive’ the gift, but never return it.”

–David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 441-442.

Martyrdom: The Refusal to Ontologize Evil

Posted by on January 18, 2008 Comments Off

“Martyrdom denies tragedy and refused to ontologize evil by physically accepting the others’ lack of good.  Participation in the Eucharist creates martyrs, not victims.  It positions us in the divine economy, which, while it is lived out in the temporal city, resists the categories of tragedy and sacrifice, and envisions an apocalyptic hope in the final imitation of Christ: resurrection.  Resurrection is the end of sacrifice.  The divine/human gift exchange, manifested by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (and followed by those who call him Lord), creates an apocalyptic world that ends tragedy.  It is a world where the other, the martyr (as one among many “others” placed outside the walls of the territorial city), not only makes politics possible, but demonstrates true politics by witnessing to the kingdom that has arrived and is still to come.”

–Tripp York, The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom (Scottdale: Herald Press, 2007), 25.

Death, Martyrdom and the End of Words

Posted by on January 17, 2008 10 comments

I like words.  No, I love words.  I confess that I especially love theological words that I can often italicize, either because I like to emphasize them or (even better), because they are Greek or Latin words, the mere transcribing of which lends credibility to any argument.  Ekstasis, perichoresis, hypostasis, circumincessio, logos incarnandus, unio mystica, kenosis, plerosis, prolepsis, eschatos, koinonia, visio dei and other such fabulous words and phrases are ones that I want to throw into my writing whenever possible.  And I will continue to do so.

However, I would like to suggest that often the mere use of powerful words from our tradition can serve as a way of doing little more than playing a theological role-playing game in which we pretty much just talk a lot of shit without saying anything real.  To say it differently, and with more ironic flair, we often spend all our time doing “ontology” without even wondering about what our musings about the nature of being have to say about who or how we ourselves must be.

Many theologians who have drank from the patristic wells have seen how the Christian naming of Jesus as God, and the doctrine of the Trinity constitute a radical interruption in the history of metaphysics which is incredibly subversive.  To say that life is victorious over death is the to basically crush the larxnx of the entire world’s intellectual history under your boot in one fell swoop.  If Jesus’ resurrection, rather than our inevitable deaths are the true outcome of the world and all human stories, then everything is different.  It is a claim that literally destroys everything we’ve ever thought about the world and resurrects something entirely new in its place.  If life, rather than death is determinative of the being of the world then, quite literally everything is made new.

However, we’re often able to say such things in ways that are so boring and utterly suspect because of the way in which we ultimately fear what it might mean if our radically Christian view of the world might be true.  Do we dare live as if life rather than death will finally triumph?  And not just finally, but now, in my life and in my concrete comings and goings?  The simple fact of the matter is that the wider wisdom of the world constrains our lives in ways that are far to manifold to count.  We live as though self-protection is, at the end of the day, really how things must be done if we’re to really live.  Oh, sure we still play our linguistic role-playing games, and say stuff like “being is ek-static” or “personhood is realized in communio”, but such statements are really just words that are thrown out by a bunch of people who live their lives pretty much on the basis of the “denial of death.”

I intend to malign no one except for myself.  The point I am making is simply this: our ontologies don’t matter unless they are embodied in our lives.  The problem with doing a radically Christian ontology is not that it isn’t possible or that no such radical ontology exists, the problem is that we’re not able to live with the results.  If we truly believe that the resurrection rather than death is the last word about life, that means that we’re going to have to live as if death does not matter.  And we’re just not quite ready to swallow that.  Can we really live in a way that bears witness to our confession that life is more powerful than death.  Can our ontology be an ontology of martyrdom?

The thing is, most of us won’t because if we do then we have to die.  And death, despite our claims and italicized words is pretty much still sovereign over our imaginations.  If I were to state what I think it takes to be a truly great theologian, it would probably be something along the lines of “One who practices the rationality of the martyrs.”  The question for us is whether or not that is a rationality we are willing to follow to the end.

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