April 2015 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.

The Cross of Christ and the Mystique of Violence

Notes from W. O’Brien’s 2.28.15 talk “The Cross of Christ: Justification for Redemptive Violence” or a call to Gospel Nonviolence

Many years ago, a friend recounted a story of taking his five-year-old son to the library of the seminary which his wife was attending. It was a Protestant seminary, but it so happened that the foyer of the library contained a large wooden sculpture of the crucifixion of Christ. This particular crucifix was not the typical serene view of Jesus with outstretched arms and eyes gazing heaven-ward: the Nazarene victim’s body was distorted in agony, his face contorted in a horrific visage of pain.

My friend was a faithful Baptist, and his young son was already very used to going to church. But this crucifix scene was something the boy had never witnessed, and despite his juvenescent theological training, he had no context to take in this monstrous image. He stopped, gripped his father’s hand tightly, his eyes opened wide, and said in a low, stunned tone: “What happened!?”

My friend was himself shaken by the question. He recognized that in his own theology, the death of Jesus was so commonplace as to be taken for granted. But seeing it anew through the horrified eyes of a child, he himself had to struggle in a new way with this core notion of his faith.

The Christian church worldwide is preparing to celebrate Good Friday, remembering the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ. The cross of Christ is at the heart of Christian theology. It is the image, the symbol, the idea, the reality, that distinguishes Christianity from its roots in Judaism and from any other major religion. We Christians recite it in our creeds, sing about it in our hymns. Practically every place of Christian worship has a cross at its core. The cross becomes a badge of identification, an assertion of conviction. It is an iconic image in the Western cultural tradition – even a fashion statement.

Yet in recent years, this cornerstone of Christian faith has come under serious questioning – including from Christians them- selves. Particularly in communities has come forth that the theology surrounding the cross carries an implicit message of violence – and has been used, directly or indirectly to foster violence.

When Christians say make the doctrinal proclamation “Jesus Christ died for our sins,” they are communicating some form of a “substitutionary atonement” theology. Church theology over the millennia have agreed on a basic formulation (with some variations) of this atonement theology: humans are all under the bondage of sin, and thereby fundamentally alienated from God; in God’s plan, the Only Begotten Son takes on the sin of the world, and suffers in our place; he dies in our place, he “pays the price,” we are “washed in the blood” – and God is thereby satisfied, granting forgiveness, achieving for us reconciliation and salvation.

The doctrine of atonement grows out of sacrificial notions common to many traditional cultures: in order to satisfy, appease, please, or placate God, we sacrifice something – we burn an offering, we slay an animal (or even human). We ritualize killing and blood-shedding. We hallow our life through sanctifying death.

This theology is found in various forms in some strands of the New Testament, such as the Gospel of John’s powerful image of Jesus as “the lamb of God,” or the Letter to Hebrews, which is in many ways a midrash for a Christian Jewish community trying to find a way forward in a post-Temple world.

But as some Christians have charged, this theology is ultimately founded on violence. An angry God needs blood to be satisfied. Our sins can only be forgiven through death. This is not just an intellectual critique: precisely because this theology is rooted in violence, it has been used to bless, condone, and even foment violence in the world – from pastors encouraging wives to accept physical abuse from their husbands, to Christians supporting the death penalty, to holy wars from the Crusades to current Middle East military actions.

One of the first such critiques came from womanist theologian Delores Williams, who reflected the pain of a community marked by the violence of church-sanctioned slavery. Writing in 1993, she spoke of the cross as an image “shrouded in Violence … At some level, the cross is a constant reminder of innocent suffering and violence, regardless of the messages it is supposed to communicate about salvation. Too often, Christians are thereby taught to believe that something good can result from violence.”

Another African American feminist theologian, Julie Hopkins, pushed the issue further, writing in 1995: “It is morally abhorrent to claim that God the Father demanded the self-sacrifice of his only Son to balance the scales of justice … A god who punished through pain, despair, and violent death is not a god of love but a sadist and despot.”

In their powerful 2001 book Proverbs of Ashes, Rebecca Ann Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock build on the stories of survivors of violence to argue that “every theology of the cross … mystified violence and offered dangerously false comfort. Theology cloaked violence and taught people to endure it. Christianity’s denial of violence appalled me.” With echoes of abused women and wounded soldiers in their ears, they write, “All these ways of seeing Jesus on the cross ended up sanctifying violence against women and children, valorizing suffering and pain, or denying loss. You couldn’t look on the man of sorrows and give thanks to God without ending up a partner in a thousand crimes.”

Since these early critiques, more and more Christian theologians, pastors, and laypeople have begun to wrestle with the serious question of how our theology of Christ on the cross has become a taproot of the myth of redemptive violence. And more Christians are trying to articulate a new theological vision: that of the nonviolent atonement.

One important step toward a new theological paradigm would be to pose the question in a fresh and new way, like the startled five-year-old: “What happened?” A critical part of the theological mystification of the Cross of Christ that allows it to be hijacked for the service of violence and oppression is that the church has allowed the historical and political context of this core gospel story to be marginalized.

It is not sufficient to say that Jesus Christ died for our sins. We also have to assert – because the Gospels assert – that Jesus of Nazareth was executed by the Roman Empire. He was arrested, unfairly tried, denied of basic human rights, condemned as a political rebel, tortured in ways that would have drawn the ire of Amnesty International, and officially executed according to all legal requirements, with a particular concern for public propaganda and suppression of political dissent.

Jesus’ ministry happens in the cauldron of Roman-occupied Palestine. The time was marked by constant political turmoil, as various militant Jewish groups rose up against Roman rule. Many messianic movements sought to overthrow their colonizers and re-establish an independent Israel with a restored Davidic king. History also makes clear that Rome, while painted with the historical reputation as a law-abiding civilization, the promulgators of the great Pax Romana, was brutal in enforcing its rule and in putting down rebellions. The historical figure of Pontius Pilate had many violent repressions of Jews (his portrait in the Gospels is not very accurate). The final Jewish uprising, with the razing of the Temple and the legendary standoff at Masada, were the culminating chapters in a violent period that seethes between the lines of the New Testament. What our theology obscures is that crucifixion was a Roman tool of political execution, reserved for rebels and escaped slaves. (The Greek word for the two “thieves” (lestes) with whom Jesus is crucified means “bandit,” but in the sense of Robin Hood – social bandits, who were often part of mercenary groups of disenfranchised peasants who engage in low-level economic subversion and political terrorism.)

Roman crucifixion was meant to be brutal, dehumanizing, and public. More so than a punishment for the offender, it was an imperial public service announcement: to those who wish to challenge our authority, here is what you can expect. ...

Even many Roman moralists were appalled by such state terrorism. Seneca wrote: "Can anyone be found who would prefer wasting away in pain dying limb by limb, or by letting out his life drop by drop, rather than expiring once for all? Can any man be willing to be fastened to the accursed tree, long sickly, already deformed, swelling with ugly welts on shoulder and chest, and drawing the breath of life amid long-drawn-out agony? He would have many excuses for dying even before mounting the cross."

James Cone’s powerful 2010 book The Cross and the Lynching Tree takes an unflinching look at the real violence of the cross of Christ, which he sees fully echoed in the African American experience of lynchings. Both were vicious public expressions of violence and terror. Because of that, African Americans can understand that Christ’s execution was not merely an abstract episode in a cosmic scheme, but a real existential moment of God’s utter identification with all victims of oppression.

But Cone also makes the hopeful assertion that the cross has transforming power, precisely because it is a cry for liberation for those victims; and to the degree we stand in solidarity with the suffering, we partake in the beginning of salvation. And the resurrection is the breakthrough of hope that suffering and oppression can and will be overcome.

So – what happened? Is it enough to say that Jesus died for our sins? We also need to say that Jesus of Nazareth defied the powers of his day by proclaiming the reign of God, by enacting healing and liberating of the victims of the political and religious domination system of Roman-occupied Palestine. Jesus built a new community, breaking down social barriers and affirming those on the margins, while proclaiming an economic Jubilee, release to captives, and good news to the poor. He called his followers to a way of mercy and forgiveness, love and nonviolent servanthood.

He was a revolutionary, and his gospel challenged the powers of his time. In this sense, we can understand his death by looking at others who have been executed for their lives of radical faithfulness and solidarity with the oppressed and suffering – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, Sister Dorothy Stang.

Instead of being a justification for redemptive violence, the cross of Christ can be a call to gospel nonviolence. Instead of seeing Jesus’ death as a bloody sacrifice to appease an angry God, we can see it as a divine choice to enter into the world of suffering, to challenge systems of domination and oppression, a call to follow the way of nonviolent love and liberation, even with the risks that entails.

This Good Friday, Christians can still claim that Jesus died for the sins of the world – but in a different sense: Jesus willingly entered the world of human brokenness, sin, and darkness, joining in radical solidarity with all those who suffer under oppression, and in that place he proclaimed that God’s love is greater still.

So we take up our crosses in this world of pain, injustice, and violence…

And we march toward Easter.

Will O’Brien

Will O’Brien is director of the Alternative Seminary - alternativeseminary.net/