To share in the body?
27 May 2008
Craig writes… are Christians worth persecuting? My assumption in To Share in the Body is quite simply that most of the time we are not. Martyrdom, when it ever happens to Christians, is something Western Christians are far removed from. It either happens in countries far away or in periods of history we can read about from an equally safe distance. “We” are not the ones being martyred. But is that as it should be?
What if the reason has less to do with Western governments being benevolent and more to do with the church’s compromise to culture?
In the book, I try to take seriously the fact that the New Testament often seems to assume martyrdom and persecution. Was that more than a historical curiosity that we can look back on? What if instead our reading of the Bible causes us to wonder whether we are not persecuted for the right reasons? This is the question I put to my investigation into the Gospel of Mark.
Jesus was a threat to power. Part of what made him threatening was his refusal to use force. This is why fighters and soldiers can’t be martyrs. Martyrs don’t fight for what is right; they refuse to fight for what is true.
A major target in my book is the idea that only Jesus had to suffer and die. Christians may be thankful that Jesus did something extraordinarily difficult, but we sure are glad that he did it for us (meaning instead of us). But surely this is a false belief. It arises out of our comfort and the ease of living as Christians in the modern world. If we were suffering for our faith, we would be looking for (and by now probably have found) ways of talking about our own suffering in light of Jesus’s. We would not suspect that we have been let off the hook.
The point is that all of the disciples were supposed to suffer and die. What else is the cup of suffering they all shared the night before Gethsemane but then refused when they fled in the middle of the night? What else might it mean to “take up your cross and follow me” if not come and be a martyr and endure the cost of your opposition to the world?
Not as though their deaths would mean something or accomplish something, though. An equal danger is certainly that of our courting danger simply for its own sake. What seems wrong with doing this is not so much its recklessness as its attempt to take one’s life into one’s own hands precisely by so taking one’s death and attempting to control it and its meaning. That would not be martyrdom but suicide. Christian martyrs cannot kill themselves or force their killers to kill. This not only distinguishes them from suicide bombers, but from every over-zealous attempt to try to achieve something apart from God’s gift. If the deaths of martyrs do anything at all, it will only be because God has fulfilled a promise to them.
The political danger of the church in the West probably disturbs me the most. By “danger” I mean precisely the fact that we are so obviously not in danger of needing to suffer for the confession that Christ is Lord. It is a dangerous situation for the church since it means the church is likely to be satisfied with the deal it has struck with the powers that be. We will behave ourselves and police the radical edge of the gospel in exchange for being left alone to do . . . what was it exactly?
I worry that for too many, church has become a place to go in order to meet with like-minded people whose personal encounter with God will be reinforced but not ultimately challenged or questioned, where Jesus is praised and thanked but not finally followed to the cross.
Let’s face it. The gospel radically reorients Christian loyalties, forms a new people called out of the world for the sake of the world, called and equipped to live differently in joy before the promises of God. In baptism, Christians are not just washed, but drowned. We have already died there. In Mark 10, James and John wanted the goods of baptism without the costs. When we share in the Lord’s Supper, we share in the body of Christ—a reference to both Jesus himself and the church—and both are broken. We cannot partake of it as though there is no cost involved.
Whether we like it or not, every Christian is a member of a martyr-church. That does not necessarily mean that you and I will be killed for our faith. We might; we might not. After all, nothing is certain in this life, not even the mode of our deaths. But let’s be sure that if we do not die the death of Christ that it isn’t because we fled and left Jesus to die alone.
Craig Hovey
Tagged: martyrdom
21 comments
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Comment by steven hamilton
11.06 am on 27 May 2008
craig, i love the book so far, i’m about 1/4 into it.
i am thankful for this reminder, because i think you have found something again that was lost, martyrdom. so thank you.
question: how would you put into words the radical edge of the gospel in our western context?
Comment by steven hamilton
12.54 pm on 27 May 2008
one other question and perhaps a beginning of an answer:
how do we re-instill what was lost? (or to use a hirsch-ism: how do we re-activate the martyrDNA of the Church?)
we have been begining to work in a dangerous part of baltimore, maryland, working with victims of human trafficking that are all of over america, both foreign nationals and domestic victims, trapped in the underground sex industry as modern-day slaves. it amazes and saddens me how many of the churches we have sought partnerships with to do this work run from the danger (it’s not that we are throwing ourselves into danger, just trying to do something Jesus might do in loving and possibly rescuing these girls (about half are not adults)…and it is dangerous, as we continue tio do this, we become a threat to the power of the violent gangs and pimps who think they ‘own’ these girls and the girls make a hefty profit for these guys…
all said, it occured to me while beginning your book that martyrdom is likely if we truly follow what the Father is doing in combating human trafficking and rescuing victims.
i still struggle with this myself ( as a father to young children)…so it is not as if i do not understand the reticence to do this work…
Comment by Helen
1.19 pm on 27 May 2008
i still struggle with this myself ( as a father to young children)…so it is not as if i do not understand the reticence to do this work…
I think this is a very important point – is it wrong to think “My children would greatly suffer if I was not around”? Is it compromising if a Christian parent of young children avoids things which would take him/her away from his/her children? Or if the parent avoids things which might jeopardise other basic needs of the children – food, shelter, etc? Should the parent set aside concerns about his/her children and trust that whatever happens to his/her children, God will ‘work it together for good’?
Jesus didn’t have any children (as best we know), so this wasn’t an issue that he had to deal with. Paul says it’s better not to marry ‘in view of the times’, but in Genesis God told humans to go forth and multiply. So the Bible isn’t against parenthood, period. So…what is a parent of young children to do?
Comment by Jeff Gill
2.27 pm on 27 May 2008
i still struggle with this myself ( as a father to young children)…so it is not as if i do not understand the reticence to do this work…
I know it is possible. Floyd and Sally McClung raised two terrific kids in Amsterdam’s red light district. Their book might be inspiring. Today they are in the middle of some of S Africa’s toughest townships.
I guess the questions is, what is God actually asking you to do?
Comment by Helen
1.02 pm on 27 May 2008
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Craig.
Can you get specific about what this means for the ordinary Christian in the West? (Maybe this is the same question as Steven’s)
Suppose a Christian reads what you wrote and thinks “Craig is right! I haven’t been willing to be a martyr – I’ve loved my own comfort too much!”
What should he/she do differently today as he/she gets up, goes to work, etc?
I’m guessing that putting on uncomfortable clothes to reduce his/her comfort is not what you had in mind :). So what do you have in mind? Do you get into specific changes ordinary Western Christians could make in your book? Or is it more focused on the reasons why Christians should change and it’s up to them to figure out what that looks like?
Comment by Craig
3.54 pm on 27 May 2008
It seems to me that the crucial question has less to do with what individual Christians need to do (What radical thing should I do today after I eat breakfast?) but whether the church, particularly in the West, can enable and then support those who suffer for radical discipleship. For example, I certainly think that Christians ought to be so committed to telling the truth and being told the truth by others that they will be among the first whistleblowers in corrupt corporate settings. But I am less concerned with enjoining individual Christians to blow whistles and more interested in the Christian community resolving to support those who lose their jobs because of their commitment to the truth–supporting the families, absorbing the crises of their now being without health insurance, and so on.
In a different example, if the Christian church and churches were so committed to the peace of God’s kingdom that military participation again became unthinkable for Christians (as it largely was in pagan Rome for the first several hundred years of Christianity), then many governments would have a national security crisis on their hands.
The point has less to do with doing something risky and more to do with being a faithful presence in the world that may at significant points provoke the hatred of (in these examples) corporations and governments. It is also to shift our thinking from the individual “heroic” Christian radical toward the church as a fellowship of saints that is better equipped to endure the loss that will occasionally result from obedience.
Helen’s question about children is a good one. But we need to remember that throughout the years, many Christians have taken their children with them to death since they preferred that their children die than that they be raised apart from the church. Now that’s radical. Yet it should confirm for us that, while Christian faithfulness does not take the same form for everyone, it also does not mitigate risk since if something is faithful for me, it is also faithful for my young children. In baptism, too, we do an eminently irresponsible thing: we die to our families, forsaking them in the drowning waters; raised with Christ in baptism, then, we receive back our families, but no longer responsible for their care because of biology, but because they are now (possibly) members of the same church–our “brothers and sisters” in a completely different way (this is the force of Jesus’s words in the Gospel regarding the true identity of his mother, brothers, and sisters).
Comment by Helen
3.05 am on 29 May 2008
Craig, so your emphasis is on the Christian community – that the community needs to be supportive of radical Christianity and helping radical Christians deal with the negative consequences being radical might bring about? Rather than the Christian community condoning not being radical?
How does the Christian community get there? If one person starts advocating being radical, then they’ll make everyone else feel guilty and uncomfortable – aren’t they more likely to get shunned than followed? If one Christian has a big TV he/she would rather other Christians get a big TV too than start questioning whether it’s right for anyone to have one – which would make the first Christian feel uncomfortable.
Comment by Craig
4.43 am on 29 May 2008
Helen, I wouldn’t underestimate the possibilities for change in churches. Surely good ideas (well, and bad ideas) get passed on in a variety of ways. Of course some ideas die with a multitude of one, but others catch on. I think we could start by correcting–in our preaching and worship–the mistaken Christology I referred to above that essentially separates Jesus from the moral life of Christians. Reconnecting that for people might open up a lot of avenues for exploring the adventure of following Jesus from which we might have otherwise exempted ourselves.
Practically, churches might also begin (but not really “begin” obviously) by taking better care of their members rather than only referring them to state services. We might also resist taking our cues about race from the wider culture and make a greater effort toward reconciliation across differences to bring congregational realities in line with our eucharistic performance (one body because we all share in one bread). Imagine how the American civil rights movement might have been different if the churches had taken the lead by being the only places in the country where black and white ate and drank together as equals before God and one another. Of course that is risky and radical (for white and black both, though not in exactly the same ways). And yet surely we are still witnessing the awkward and largely inauthentic attempt to try to convince the world of a better way that Christians can’t, on the whole, seem to live ourselves.
Comment by Paul
8.43 am on 28 May 2008
“Are christians worth persecuting?” well maybe but the Q then springs to my mind is can anyone be bothered to persecute them?
Apart from the few people who are passionately anti-religion/God who tend to be ex-religious people who have had a bad experiences or new athiests, who get plenty of brick-bats thrown back at them – who really bothers?
Most of the time I find that people are happy that your happy and as long as you’re not hurting anyone else then you can believe whatever you want: God, green men, a labour win at the next election etc…
Maybe christians are not offensive enough in the right ways (rather than just strange ones) or maybe our faith just chokes in sea of apathy?
Comment by luke
7.05 pm on 28 May 2008
I share this sentiment, though I haven’t read the book yet.
I don’t think the lack of persecution in contemporary Western culture has as much to do with governments (though these institutions have an influence) or with a lack of provocative Christianity as much as it stems from general cultural apathy. the liberalism prominent in Western societies seems to have created a culture that’s somewhat inoculated from provocative or radical ideas.
in addition, modern Western culture has been absorbing, for 1500 years or more(?), Christian ideas that were perhaps more provocative at their first introduction?
Comment by Craig
8.20 pm on 28 May 2008
I agree with the comments about cultural apathy. But surely that is only the inverse of a Christianity that is self-policing? It is like what is sometimes said about modern atheism: that it is not very interesting because Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve.
Comment by Paul
10.54 pm on 30 May 2008
Thanks Craig, Mr Dawkins might disagree with you :)
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Comment by Jason Clark
8.35 am on 30 May 2008
Craig, firstly great book, and then thank you for posting and interacting with us here.
Reading your post reminded me of some writings by William Cavanaugh in ‘Torture and Eucharist’.
He suggests that in countries where people are tortured, and disappeared, that martyrdom, makes the body of Christ visible. That for Christians, when the state claims ownership of the bodies of it’s people, the body of Jesus (the church) seen as a radical alternative that it seeks to destroy.
Martyrdom isn’t sort, but it is the celebration that Jesus has mastery over our souls and bodies, and not the state.
His writings have made me wonder, how consumerism, can function as a perverted liturgy, it has control over us, and fragments us into isolated individuals, we torture ourselves now.
We police ourselves, and our bodies, with the rituals of consumer culture, fearful and competitive of each other, unable to do life together in community, along with self abusing our bodies, in service of the consumer ideal. We produce endless TV shows about self creation, and being whatever people need us to be, to be famous, for being famous. And being famous means often means, escape, of being independent from others.
And liberal secularism, with it’s hegemony, that all religious beliefs should be private, that religion is a matter of personal and lifestyle choice, it totalizing too. It is the idealogical background to the market and consumption.
So if martyrdom is resistance to this authority, this emerging religion, something that makes the body of Christ visible, that challenges the rule and beliefs of secularism, and that practices of consumer culture, what form does that take?
Any ideas, please let me know Craig :-)
Comment by Craig
4.13 pm on 31 May 2008
Jason, Well done. I think Cavanaugh’s work is extremely helpful for understanding the ways (theological ways) that the church in modernity has tended to restrict itself to the domain of the soul and hand over the body to the state. (Among other things, this relies on a problematic notion of “soul”.) Martyrdom, as you rightly say, reclaims the body for Christians, which only extends the kind of embodiment Christians practice eucharistically. That is what I am trying to communicate by using eucharistic language in the book’s title as a resonance of martyrdom, both embodied.
If consumerism elevates choice itself as the highest good (over the actual choosing of real goods), then it assumes a rather perverse account of agency. I like Nietzsche’s account of Zarathustra praising a fallen tightrope walker in this regard: “You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own hands.” Martyrdom then resists a consumer imagination by subjecting the truth to the reality of one’s whole life, something consumerism refuses so long as it refuses finally to commit itself to any goods–this is the self-choosing and self-creation you refer to.
But then the issue isn’t somehow to extol martyrdom as an act of resistance. It is that, of course. But martyrdom is only possible for a church that has learned resistance on multiple levels. Furthermore, resistance is not a first principle; it is not what Christians set out to do. Instead, we only find ourselves “resisting” because we are so caught up doing something else, another positive option. This means Christians may not ever really need to teach or commend “resistance” but only a way of life that is so compelling that all other options are rearranged accordingly. This is important to say since the consumer stands unconditioned before all choices and freely choses. But if this is the case, Christians will be anti-consumers since the way of Christian discipleship involves submissions and formations that close off a good many choices–its goods are better than choice. Put simply, a church able to produce martyrs will (counterintuitively) be marked less by what it is against and more by what it is for. Our “for” will be a witness against and to a culture of consumerism.
Comment by Jason
4.58 pm on 31 May 2008
I like your positive agenda, that resistance is result, and outwork of a life oriented around a compelling alternative, a life in the body of Christ, following Christ.
That reminds me of the procession of superlatives of good, to better, to best. How do we locate the best, in a consumer culture that swamps us with a never ending sea of the ‘good’.
And Paul talks about this:
“I can do anything I want to IF Christ has not said no, BUT some of these things aren’t good for me. Even if I am allowed to do them, I’ll refuse to if I think they might get such a grip on me that I can’t easily stop when I want to.” 1 Cor. 6:12 (LB)
And within that is a different agency, that commits, that closes down options, that is able to to say no to the permanently open ended ontological orientation of consumerism, and in which we find the cross, and true being.
Comment by Mike McNichols
5.14 pm on 1 Jun 2008
Craig’s book has challenged me on a number of levels. As I consider how the church bears witness to Jesus in the world, I am now forced to reconsider what a dangerous business that is.
Walter Brueggemann has helped me think about the church in the west (particularly in the US) as the church in exile. We don’t typically see our place in the culture as an exilic presence, but we do live within a dominant culture that may be benevolent toward us, perhaps only as long as we support the culture’s agenda.
The church’s call to witness involves, of course, the work of evangelism. Craig has helped me to think about evangelism in a new way. Rather than being a well-crafted presentation of a paradigm of salvation, it is perhaps more akin to the spirit of the term itself: It is the proclamation of the good news, that God, in Christ, is victorious and his kingdom has come.
That is a safe, martyr-proof message as long as it produces better citizens and keeps people spending money. But the good news is only good news to those who respond to a call to live in the alternative reality of the kingdom, where challenges to the dominant culture are inevitable. This is bad news to the culture that has been displaced by the kingdom of God. The threat to that dominance is what droves Jesus’ enemies to kill him.
I am coming to a place of believing that the call to come and die is not episodic–it isn’t simply associated with exiting my home in order to do the work of mission in a dangerous context. The call is to seek first the kingdom in all aspects of personal and corporate life, recognizing that such obedience is bound to fly in the face of that which dominates the larger culture.
As write this, I am aware that my friend Craig (along with my work associate Justin) is running a 27-mile marathon in San Diego. For my part, I only plan to run if someone is chasing me with a knife.
Comment by Jason
5.05 pm on 2 Jun 2008
Hi Mike, I thought a Marathon was 26 miles, trust Craig to go the extra mile :-)
Comments won’t nest below this level.
Comment by Mike McNichols
6.15 pm on 2 Jun 2008
Of course, you are correct. I must have been thinking of the distance from Long Beach, California to Catalina Island. There is a song about that: “Twenty-seven miles across the sea, Santa Catalina is a’waitin’ for me. Santa Catalina, the Island of Romance.”
I guess you had to be there.
Reply here
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Comment by steven hamilton
5.02 pm on 2 Jun 2008
i read this passage this weekend as Esther is getting ready to risk her faith: “If I die, I die”
’nuff said…
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