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Article Excerpt
THE LONG UNCONTESTED STATUS of the cross as the distinctive symbol of Christianity suggests that the very heart of the faith is the belief that we are redeemed by the crucified Christ. Although the church has never defined this belief as dogma, conversion to the faith has, since Paul, been connected to and even identified with the adoption of it. Indeed the exigence of explaining it led to the development of the central dogmas of the faith (including the Trinity and the Incarnation). It is therefore difficult to exaggerate the significance of the contemporary theological movement that aspires to dismantle the heuristic of retributive justice on which the most influential traditional theologies of redemption have relied. Because this heuristic profoundly affects, when it does not determine, the way redemption is ordinarily understood, abandoning it requires us to radically rethink this most pivotal of our beliefs and the event of the Crucifixion it has traditionally helped us to understand. What is involved here is nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of Christianity itself.
According to its contemporary critics, (1) the heuristic of retributive justice is not simply historically outdated; it is morally offensive and hence renders morally problematic the conception of redemption that has had the greatest impact on both the Catholic and Protestant traditions. While the theologies of redemption proposed by thinkers such as Anselm, Aquinas, Calvin, and Luther differ significantly from one other, and do not all espouse the view that Christ suffers divine punishment in our stead, it can be plausibly argued that all of them do interpret the suffering of the crucified Christ as the alternative to---hence in some sense a substitute for--the retributive punishment we sinners deserve; and it is precisely this suffering of the Crucified that these theologies construe as redemptive. (2) The critics of the heuristic insist that: (1) retributive punishment is indistinguishable from revenge; (2) it is a response to evil/violence that repeats the evil/violence it punishes; and (3) a good, loving God does no evil, and so does not respond to evil retributively. (3) It follows that: (4) the Crucifixion was the result of human evil, not divine providence; (5) Jesus suffers and dies because he opposes the power of evil, not because he is a surrogate for sinners who deserve punishment; and (6) the wounds inflicted on Jesus and the suffering they entail cannot redeem humanity from historical evil since they are themselves paradigmatic examples of such evil. (4)
This critique of traditional theologies of redemption has received encouragement and gained momentum from two different but related streams of contemporary theological thought. One is the stream of theologizing that derives from the work of Rene Girard who argues that the religious tradition of sacrifice involves sacralizing the murder of a scapegoat by using the heuristic of divine retribution to rationalize it. (5) According to the Girardian, the use of this heuristic by traditional theologies of redemption has served to cover up what is revolutionary about Christianity, namely, the fact that it exposes the scapegoat mechanism and summons us to abandon the logic of sacrifice and retribution. (6) But criticizing this logic is not sufficient to liberate Christian belief from it. A new concept of redemption has to be developed. In their effort to do this, critics of retribution are inclined to draw upon another stream of contemporary thought that also aspires to radically rethink the Crucifixion, namely, Liberation Theology. In her exegesis of the Cross, the liberation theologian eschews the heuristic of retribution and employs what might be called the heuristic of empathetic identification. The Crucifixion is not an event that is in accord with the exigencies of divine justice. It signifies God's identification with the violated--with the victims of oppression. (7) It does not offer to God a passive suffering that is somehow pleasing to him, and hence supposed to be emulated. On the contrary, it enacts God's preference for the oppressed and summons us to make his liberating love for them a historical reality.
Moving from a conception of the Crucifixion that relies on the heuristic of retribution to a conception of the Crucifixion that employs the heuristic of empathetic identification leads to a paradigm shift in our understanding of redemption. According to the heuristic of retribution, redemption occurs when the Crucified One suffers in the place of those who deserve to be punished. Here, it is the sinner, the human being who commits evil, who is the focus of God's redemptive concern, and the human being who is violated--the victim of oppression--can be redeemed only by recognizing her own sinfulness and guilt. (8) According to the heuristic of empathy, on the other hand, the focus of God's redemptive concern is the oppressed as oppressed, the violated as violated (among whom must be numbered the violator insofar as he too is a victim of his violence). This new paradigm, which Girardian thought, liberation theology, and the critique of retribution all help to promote, introduces into theology for the first time the view of the Crucifixion that is adopted by the oppressed themselves when they recognize, in the Crucified, a God who knows, as no one else does, the suffering they have seen. Approaching the Crucifixion from this point of view provides access to truths about the Crucifixion that the heuristic of retribution covered up. Theologies of redemption that depend on this traditional heuristic are able to see the Crucified only as a surrogate for the sinner who deserved punishment, and not as the paradigmatic image of all historical victims. As a result, Jesus' cry of thirst is not heard as the voice of the oppressed. But if redemption is God's salvific response to the historical reality of evil, as all traditional theologies of redemption have claimed, it has to mean that God hears and answers the cry of the violated. The new paradigm enables us to harken to this cry, and so has the potential to revolutionize the theological understanding of Christianity as a whole.
But the theology of redemption emerging from this paradigm shift is still very much in the process of being developed and, in my judgment, has not yet responded adequately to either of the two central issues that any theology of redemption must address. The fundament of Christian faith is that God offers, through Christ, redemption from the oppressive reality of evil. Hence, a theological account of it must explain how redemption is effected for both the oppressed as oppressed, whom the traditional paradigm neglected, and the oppressor as oppressor. (9) The new theology of redemption affirms that God empathetically identifies with the oppressed as oppressed, that God knows their suffering by virtue of undergoing their wounds. But it is difficult to understand how such empathetic identification with the suffering of the violated can possibly be redemptive if, as the new theology argues, this suffering is precisely the evil from which the oppressed need to be redeemed. (10) Indeed, if suffering is the evil that needs to be redeemed, then God's identification with the oppressed can have no other effect than to infinitely exacerbate the already inexhaustible horror of the evil to which it is supposed to be a response. It can add divine intensity to the cry of the poor but not succor them from violence. Precisely because the new paradigm summons us to consider evil from the point of view of the violated, it compels us to ask, with more intensity and urgency than ever before, how God responds to the questions that pour forth from their wounds, questions that ask how God responds to the evil itself that is being done and to the evil-doers who are doing it. If the blood of the Crucified who identifies with the violated does not redeem, does it indict? If the Crucifixion is no substitute for penal satisfaction, if it is, on the contrary, the paradigmatic image of all historical horrors, does it condemn the oppressors who perpetrate it and call down upon them God's righteous judgment and just punishment? It is, to say the least, surprising that the new heuristic of empathetic identification can lead us to ask such questions, given the fact that it has been developed as a radical alternative to the logic of retribution. That it does lead to such questions suggests that there may be profound truths hidden in the folds of the logic of retribution that neither the traditional paradigm nor the critique of it has appreciated. It also suggests that the new paradigm for understanding the Crucifixion raises more questions regarding the theology of redemption than it has so far been able to answer.
That the new paradigm gives rise to difficult questions is, however, a merit, not a defect. For addressing these questions requires us to adopt the perspective of the oppressed and hence has the potential to break us open to redemptive truths that traditional theologies of redemption could not access. In the following pages, I try to find my way to such truths. I should emphasize that the kind of theological reflection I offer here is no substitute for a study of the historical Jesus and the historical event of the Crucifixion. We have no access to this event or to the person who suffered it except through painstaking historical inquiry of the sort undertaken by N. T. Wright. But as Wright has explained, (11) such inquiry requires developing hypotheses that provide a compelling explanation of the historical data, and it is not possible to develop such hypotheses without relying on a conceptual matrix--a complex web of theoretical meanings. Wright and other historical scholars argue that hypotheses that rely on the heuristic of empathetic identification do, in fact, provide compelling insights into the data available to us regarding the historical Jesus and the historical event of the Crucifixion. However, to clarify the web of meanings that these hypotheses employ, to distinguish it from the web of meanings to which the heuristic of retribution is wedded, and to assess the merits of these alternative conceptual matrices requires theological reflection of the sort I attempt here.
Such theological reflection need not be and, in my judgment, should not be only an exercise of theoretical intelligence; it ought to engage one's historical subjectivity as a whole. To use the biblical locution, it ought to engage the heart, that is, the core of one's historical being. This is especially the case when the purpose of such reflection is to enhance our understanding of the heuristic of empathetic identification. For appreciating the full import of this heuristic involves trying to hear, understand, and speak on behalf of the violated who cry out to the divine You. Theologizing from the heart enables us to hear the existential reverberations of this cry, and identifying with it has the potential to make theology prayerful. This does not disadvantage theological intelligence; it allows theological intelligence to become an exercise in caritas. That is why, in this article, I address the divine You, instead of talking about God.
I begin this exercise in heartfelt theological reflection by exploring the reality of evil as it is experienced by those who suffer it. This leads to a reconsideration of the logic of retribution and, from that, toward a theology of the Crucifixion that enables us to appreciate how the Crucified One, in the very process of being crucified, responds redemptively to both the violated and the violent.
EVIL AS CUL-DE-SAC
If redemption is the divine response to the reality of human evil, if it is, as Bernard Lonergan has argued, the process by which divine love transforms historical evil into good, (12) it is possible for us to come to some understanding of redemption only if we first come to some understanding of the evil that is to be transformed by it. (13)
Historical evil involves a voluntary decision to commit an act that violates an objective good. Put more concretely, it always involves an oppressor and someone who is oppressed, an agent who does evil and a victim who suffers evil. (14) (Even when the perpetrator and the victim are the same person, as in the case of self-hatred and suicide, the person as victim and the person as perpetrator are and have to be considered, from the moral point of view, distinct from each other). Our philosophical and theological traditions customarily locate evil principally in the violator--in the subjective intention of the agent who perpetrates it. (It is because evil is located in the evil-doer that gradations of intent determine the gravity of offenses.) Indeed, the Stoic and the Kantian, influenced by Socrates' arguments in the Gorgias, are inclined to claim or imply that we can only commit moral evil and cannot suffer it because moral evil, by definition, requires the intention to do evil. Traditional theologies of redemption imply that this view of evil is correct insofar as the account of redemption they propose concerns only evildoers, not those to whom evil is done.
But what makes a human intention evil is the evil character of what it intends. And what is intended is evil only because it violates an existing ontological/moral good. In the theological tradition that Anselm helps to create, this good is identified with the divine, and sin is defined as "dishonoring God" by "taking away from God what is his." (15) God is the one against whom the "offense" of sin is principally and primarily committed. But the same tradition that asserts this also insists that "nothing can be added to, or subtracted from, the honor of God" because the latter is "inherently incorruptible and in no way capable of change." (16) The divine You cannot be injured or harmed and so cannot be the victim who suffers evil because, as Aquinas explains, there is no passive potency in the divine act. (17) While evil is contrary to Your will, it is so not because it does violence to You but because it insults, injures, harms--in some...
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