Per Caritatem

David Horstkoetter is a doctoral student in systematic theology at Marquette University. He received his Bachelor’s Degree at Multnomah Bible College and his Master of Arts at Union Theological Seminary in NYC. David’s interests are history, social ethics, and systematic theology. He blogs at Flying Farther.

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Violence is often seen as evidence of divine un-favor—the opposite of blessing within a prosperity gospel context. Here violence done to one is equated with a person losing; while to be victorious, or feeling the victory promised by the church after one gets saved, is predicated on vanquishing. Now, of course this is far from unoriginal, but the twist here is that this logic also works itself out on a more subtle level when people feel that they aren’t winning in their life. The import is that a simple feeling of malaise becomes evidence of divine un-favor or no salvation. The result is a Christian life as pragmatic and will-to-power, even in every day details, whether one subscribes to a prosperity gospel explicitly or not.

Where we place the importance of violence will determine (literally and logically) whether we do—or ignore—violence to others. Half jokingly, I wonder if we should recover the theological category of divine smiting, just to make sure that violence is put in its proper place, rather than allowed to have too much purchase. If we are not careful, violence becomes legitimated because it is understood as earned. I believe this explains much of the logic for conservative Christian proclamation that parades like a Hebrew prophet of old, explaining away natural disasters and, say, September 11 through terrible theodicy arguments. In such cases, violence was understood as deserved divine punishment-retribution. (I should say here that I am not ignoring the political concept of blow back. The September 11 attacks were certainly the result of blow back from American policy.) This is the same logic used by people who blame the victim in rape cases. Here one sees a(n) (ana)logical consistency between individual rape cases and the oppression that liberation theology addresses on a structural level. And perhaps this explains some of the current resistance to liberation theology: why align one’s self with the losers? After all, Jesus didn’t tap out, right? (See jesusdidnttap.com/. Wait, people seriously say that?!)

We must obviously take care to understand violence as parasitic (not determinative) and that Christians are called to God’s economy. Perpetrators of violence warp the God-who-judges and simplistically see violence as the evidence of judgment, while ignoring the economic and social vulnerability so crucial to God’s sense of judgment-justice and gratuity. Violence visited upon the weak is not God’s way because the divine kingdom is not a self-serving empire or spitefully vindictive. If the Psalms and the Sermon on the Mount have anything to say, it is that God cares for the true victims. Gustavo Gutiérrez has rightly seen that the “God in whom we believe is the God of life. Belief in the resurrection entails defending the life of the weakest members of society. Looking for the Lord among the living leads to commitment to those who see their right to life being constantly violated. To assert the resurrection of the Lord is to assert life in the face of death” (Gustavo Gutiérrez, God of Life, 14). Thus to let others be defined by violence has allowed us to write them off — they did not triumph on their own, so they are not worth our attention. Blaming the victim rids the person or people of their humanity and thus turns subjects into objects of derision. Weakness has somehow become something to take advantage. Clearly this is incongruent with God on the cross.

Up until now I have oh so eloquently made moves that the Hulk could describe: “Violence, bad!” How does this square with its conflict with texts of terror? First, a few boundaries. We must be aware of historic anti-semitism in Biblical studies that subtly still rears its head at times. And we also cannot give into a Marcionite urge. However, we also must allow for honesty: there is indeed a tension that seems to exist. Is there inherently a supercessionism in Christianity? But J. Kameron Carter has argued that supercessionism has helped bring about racist racial categories (Race: A Theological Account). Then again, what about the different kind of supercessionism, a universalizing kind, that Jesus spoke about with the woman at the well? Questions abound and the complexity is mindboggling.

I do think there is a way to deal with some of the issues around violence that hopefully eliminate what should not be an issue in the first place. Perhaps this is evidence of my time among the Jesuits, but difference in order to unify may work here for moving beyond impasse or paralyzing frustration. The distinction? Covenant.

Covenant is originally given, not earned; covenant was instituted by grace and fulfilled in human response. Also, Jewish covenant, especially with Abraham, has a tendency toward expansion, if not outright universalism: a blessing to the nations. Some of the covenants clearly had conditions, however, blessings and curses in covenants work differently than prosperity assumes.

We, as Christians, are not in covenant that speaks of any blessings or curses. None. The book of Hebrews may come close—that is, at least there is contention on whether one could lose their salvation by continued disobedience. But this has nothing to do with blessings and curses associated with obedience and disobedience through the Jewish covenants. We do, as Christians, work within a different paradigm that also has continuity with Jewish thought: God’s economy of gift. Or at least we are supposed to.

The logic of violence as divine un-favor has no support within contemporary Christian thought, yet somehow it continues. I suspect that such a discourse has more to do with capitalism, privilege, and victimization, than it does with Christian notions of humanity and what God desires.

Jeremy Begbie continues to impress me with his creativity and theological astuteness.  Listen to the following passage on the Christian God who freely creates and freely loves. 

“We have seen that for the Christian, the world we inhabit can never be seens as just there, a naked fact, to be treated as a neutral boundary or (worse) as something that is basically an impediment to a fulfilling life.  The cosmos did not have to be.  It is made freely, without any prior constaint or necessity superior to God’s nature or will.  It is given, and given in the rich sense:  as an expression of divine love, the love that is God’s own trinitarian life (Resounding Truth, p. 212).”

Begbie then discusses by way of a passage from Leo Spitzer’s work, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, the differences between a Pythagorean and a Christian view of music.  As Spitzer explains, the Pythagoreans identified “the cosmic order”  with music, whereas Christian philosophers identified this order with love.  (Or in the case of St. Augustine, combined and tranformed the conception into “loving order” (ordo amoris).  Finishing out the passage, Begbie writes, “[t]here is a huge difference betwen regarding the harmony in which musical sounds are grounded simply as a bare fact or as an outpouring of love” (Ibid., p. 213). 

St. Paul in Acts 17, by quoting a Greek poet, essentially claims that the Christian gospel takes up and fulfills (though at the same time corrects) a theme in ancient Greek religion, which religion both St. Paul and we would consider to be historically fictitious. Is it possible that God could have given Israel a mythology which is similarly taken up and fulfilled by Christ, a set of stories which, while not historically referential, nevertheless provided a framework in terms of which His person and work would make sense?  Let’s say that excepting Adam (or a first historically real human being qua imago Dei representing the race and through which sin entered the race), Abraham, and Moses, many of the other early OT figures are not historically referential. That is, what if figures like Job or Jonah are fictitious characters?  Would something like that necessarily be outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy?   The claim would be something like Genesis and Exodus are historically referential, but we must be sure that we are not importing an extra-biblical and distinctively modern idea of what historicity means, as this term is not univocal over time and culture.  Part of what we have to do, then, is to be sensitive to the ways in which the Bible may be doing history on a model other than the modern model, on a model, in fact, that would have been more at home in the Ancient Near East (a novel idea-I recall this suggestion being “that-which-none-of-the-critics-of-he-who-should-not-be-named-seem-to-grasp”). God has the right and ability (enter the infamous Incarnational Analogy here) to accommodate Himself to such models if He so chooses. After all, many liberals and conservatives tend to assume a modern historiography and then either deny historicity (some liberals) or stretch the text embarassingly out of joint to make it fit (some conservatives).

Here what “he-who-should-not-be-named” may have in mind would go something like this: Genesis and Exodus are history, but we can’t know the extent to which they would translate directly into a modern historical model. Or, to put it in other words, the text is historical, but Ancient Near Eastern history does not share the modern concern for point by point movie-camera-like reconstruction of the past. Or again, some of our modern historical questions go beyond what the text is trying to tell us, and so we have to be careful of beating an answer out of them.

If this is the case, then it would be wrong to suggest that “he-who-should-not-be-named” has subjected Scripture to the canons of archaeology. Rather, he is precisely trying to divorce Scripture from those canons so as to suggest that discrepancies with historical and archaeological findings need not make us shy away from calling Scripture historical.
Notes

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In case any death eaters are wondering, Hermione and Harry are very committed to the doctrine of original sin, and historical referentiality of Adam, Abraham and Moses.  Why?  Because it is our conviction that the ineradicable premising of Christ’s work on the OT persons named (Adam, Abraham, Moses), as well as certain events of the OT, make it extremely troubling to think of the OT tout court as a non-referential myth.  Thus, for example, that God entered into covenant with (a real historical) Abraham and gave the Law through (a real historical) Moses are convictions that Hermione (and Harry) are not willing to depart with given their importance in the redemptive historical narrative.

The only problem with this demonination in the context of present essay is that the “he-who-should-not-be-named” of this story is not a villain, but is instead the object of the death eaters’ quest to promote pure-bloodism and eradicate those who don’t fit the pure-blood ideal (the pure-blood model varies of course depending upon who is in power).  To make the analogy more accurate in relation to the Harry Potter series, the Voldemort figure would have to be the leader of the death eaters.

I’ve read elsewhere that a certain Professor Quirrell and his cohort, Barty Crouch Jr., have brought this charge against “he-who-should-not-be-named” in an attempt to show that “he-who-should-not-be-named’s” approach to Scripture cannot harmonize with the self-attesting nature of Scripture. However, it seems to me that Prof. Quirrell and Mr. Crouch are confusing extra-biblical evidence which functions as a ground versus that which functions as an occasion for re-thinking the nature of Scripture.  As one of my friends pointed out, it is not clear at all why Scripture’s self-attestation cannot harmonize with re-thinking Scripture on an Incarnational model.  After all, Hans Urs von Balthasar has a version of the self-attesting nature of Scripture, yet HUvB would have no problem with the IA-see Vatican II document, Dei Verbum.  As I understand “he-who-should-not-be-named’s” position, he is not using extra-biblical evidence to serve as the ground, but rather than the occasion for re-thinking Scripture, and this is exactly where the incarnational analogy comes in.  That is, it seems to me that “he-who-should-not-be-named” is holding up internal evidence, i.e., the Incarnation, as the guiding principle and is saying, “you see all this external evidence that is so difficult to make sense of on the older model of understanding Scripture, well, if we use the incarnational analogy as a way to understand the nature of Scripture, we have not only a better way to make sense of the external evidence but we also gain a richer understanding of Scripture, history, and of course of God himself.”

Jeremy Begbie, in his book, Resounding Truth:  Christian Wisdom in the World of Music, presents a nice definition of theology, viz., theology is “the disciplined thinking and rethinking of the Christian gospel for the sake of fostering a wisdom that is nourished by, and nourishes, the church in its worship and mission to the world” (p. 19).  Begbie then begins to unpack each part of his definition.  With regard to “disciplined thinking and rethinking,” Begbie emphasizes that theology involves intellectual effort; however, the intellectual activity in view is not a kind of detached, merely cerebral endeavor that fails to affect our willing and acting. Rather, this theological thinking touches every aspect of our humanity and is “inextricably bound up with story (the narrative shape of faith), symbols of various sorts (such as the sacraments), and practical action in the world” (p. 19).  Second, by “of the Christian gospel,” Begbie means “the announcement that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Triune Creator, the God of Israel, has acted decisively to reconcile the world to himself.  Here is theology’s raison d’être and its loadstar-theology is not a free-floating speculation, but it is disciplined by this gospel and seeks to interpret the whole of reality from this center” (p. 20).  The theologian then ultimately has to answer to his God-a God who is living and personal and actively engaged in the lives of his creatures.  Given that the heart of Christian faith centers on union with the Father through the Son by way of the Holy Spirit, true Christian theology then cannot be done apart from prayer, worship, and submission to Scripture.  Third, by “for the sake of fostering a wisdom,” Begbie wants to stress the practical orientation of theology. Here Begbie appeals to the wisdom literature of the Bible in which to become wise “means being able to discern what is going on in specific, down-to-earth situations and to judge what it is right to say and do in those situations in a way that is faithful and true to God” (p. 20).  Lastly, with the phrase, “nourished by, and nourishes, the church in its worship and mission to the world,” Begbie speaks to the importance of the communal dimension and ecclesial context of theology.    ”Theology that seeks a wisdom true to gospel, [...] cannot take flight from this community [the visible Church]-fallen, compromised and shabby as it is and always has been. [...] Theology’s first calling, I would contend, is to help build up the people of God, to shape the Christian community for the sake of its worship and mission to the world” (pp. 20-21).  

The final installment of my transcription of Turner’s lecture.

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Step five, viz., that music as I put it is prototypically Eucharistic.  Maybe by now you’ve caught hold of the connective tissue of the thought … the formal similarity of thought structure.  For on Thomas’ account, in the Eucharist is brought the absolute limit possible before our resurrection that same conjunction of absolute bodiliness and absolute transparency of meaning.  For the Eucharist is a communication of the word that is all body, and it is body which has become all communication-all word, all sign-an identity of message and its meaning.  Or and this is just another way that Thomas has of putting it, in the Eucharist there is absolutely nothing left of the bread and wine’s materiality, but only their character as signs-all smile and no cat again-for the cat has become all smile.  As one might want to get Thomas inelegantly to say, the cat has thus been entirely transubstantiated into its expression.  For these are signs which now make real a presence of Christ’s body, but in such a way as to push to the very limits any force that we can lay hold on for the words “real” and “present,”  and then we have to add, and beyond such limits.  For this is a bodily presence which escapes from itself.  And we should note in this connection that the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is in Thomas emphatically also a doctrine of the real absence.  We might say that it is in his teaching on the Eucharist that we find Thomas’ last word on ontology about what is most real.  That ontology tells us that his paradigm of the real is the presence of the Christ of the Eucharist, a bodily presence which is total communication-all word-but just for that, the more intensely bodily, not less.  So on the one hand, no body could be more present, nor bodily than Christ’s body as present in the Eucharist. But no body could be more purely language or purely word.  And if that it is so, then on the other hand, it is a word which is not only intensely animal, but is also a word which is ultimately beyond all understanding. Its intrinsic transparency of meaning must remain opaquely mysterious to us because our bodies are not themselves yet totally communicative.  For our bodies like formal speech retain a surplus of unmeaningful materiality over and above their capacities for meaning.  That is because, unlike Jesus’ body, ours are not yet raised.  Jesus’ body is wholly present to us because his is raised.  But it is also experienced in our bodies as absence because in our present historical contingency, ours are not.  Hence, what the Eucharist makes real is both the now of presence and the not yet of absence, and it is just that conjunction of presence and absence which is made real.  The Eucharistic presence is caught up in an eschatological and not merely a linear temporality.  Thomas’ ontology-his account of the real-is essentially sacramental because essentially eschatological.  The Eucharist is then an uncompleted eschatology realized as bodily exchange.  The bread and wine become that body-a body which is all communication, the flesh made most perfectly to be word-futuriae gloriae nobis pignus datur-as Thomas says in one of his Eucharistic antiphons-a pledge given to us of future glory.    It is in these respects then that music both shows us what is central to reason and in doing so shows how reason is prototypically Eucharistic.  At any rate, we could mean that much by reason if we simply did not abase ourselves between the altar of that recent intellectual history, which had reduced reason to ratiocination, [i.e.] to its minimal sense which is logic.  If music is a kind of spontaneous natural theology, just because it is a kind of spontaneous natural eschatology-which is why I think it is that all great music whether its mood is happy or sad matters not, is in a certain way which is characteristic of it as music always sad.  [Why?] because music always strikes chords-because music is the lacrim mirarum [sp?], the “world’s tears”-its recollection of what yet cannot be.  At any rate, whether it is that weird and terrible trio of the Schubert string quintet or that hushed moment of reconciliation in the finale of the Marriage of Figaro, whichever it is at one end or another of the emotional spectrum, or wherever in between, all music makes you cry.  And I think it does so because music is in a way a shadow cast onto human sensibility [of] that eschatological temporality of the Eucharist.  The sadness of music is a sort of sensual nostalgia for what one has caught some glimpse of but cannot yet possess.  This as it were, a premonition of a premonition.  It is a shadow of the Augustinian anamnesis-a depth dug into memory, scoring with a sort of hope made real, but also as lost and as absent.  Made present but as yet to be real; it is our homeland glimpse, but as yet from a distance. 

But if that is the sort of thing that is meant by reason, and if this is maximal, as also in its most fundamental sense, our animality as in itself being the quasi-sacramental bearer of that sole escaping significance, then we can take our final step to the conclusion, viz., that that too is the shape that must be possessed by that very particular exercise of reason which I have been [trying] so hard until now to get you not to reduce reason to-that minimal sense which consists in ratiocination, in inference, in argument and in proof.  Reason for Thomas is always bound to end up with God, so why not that minimal form of it which is ratiocination too.  For reason in that sense of reasoning gives names to things.  It names all that which music through its very indeterminacy-its refusal of constative character-can gesture towards, but does not and cannot name, because naming is precisely what music is the refusal to do.  But if reason in this form as reasoning names, it has to because that is just what it does.  It does so also in the shadow of music’s inarticulateness and indeterminacy-in the shadow of its apophaticism.  For if reason, as Thomas says, ever dares utter the name of God, it may do so only as that which finally defeats its powers of naming.  Naming God is reason’s supreme achievement, but only insofar if in doing so, it knows that what it names escapes from under the naming-dodges all the arrows of naming that reason can fire at it.  And that as Thomas says is thought omnes dicunt Deum.  When we name God, we have stretched naming out at the ends of its tether until that tether snaps.  Indeed it is the snapping of reason’s tether that is its primitive theological moment.  In God reason reaches the point of collapse because overweighted with significance.  Now when Thomas says this omnes of omnes dicunt Deum, I think that with greater confidence we can agree that all Christians, Muslims, Jews, but just as well, those atheists it would be worthwhile to have around to do their denying, engaging through their oppositio inter alia in scientiam [Latin?]. 

I have no intention of taking you through, still less of defending points of their soundness, those famous and much derided Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas.  I simply ask you to note that the argument structure [... at work?] for it has as music has the shape of the sacramental-the form of the body’s transparency and the mystery that we call God.  It is the same ontology at work.  It is only through our body’s intimacy to the world’s materiality-the way things move, to the way one thing depends on another, to the way things come into existence and pass out of it that we achieve that glimpse of the world’s ultimate significance, which is the unknowable mystery of God.  And herein is the paradox of our human rationality, which as I say, music is a sort of sign or anticipation.  When in the Prima Pars question 2, article 3 of the Summa Theologica, Thomas tells us that we can by these five points of inference prove the existence of God, he notes immediately afterward in question 3 that what proves God to exist also proves that [with regard to] that God, we have finally lost our grip upon the meaning of exist.  So that in proving God to exist, we prove reason to the point of its own exhaustion.  As to it is that by means of rational inquiries, we do in a merely speculative way what the Eucharist draws us into the very life of.  Reason gets you to where un-namable mystery begins, but stands on this side of it, gesturing towards what we cannot know.  And there [...] it is stunned in a sort of babble at the shock of its defeat-this reduction to babble is what is otherwise called theology.  But by the Eucharist we are drawn into that same mystery as into that very and oh so very carnal life.  So that we live by mystery-we eat it-though the mystery is no more comprehensible as Thomas says for being eaten than it is for being thought.  For he tells us that we do not resolve the mystery by faith, as if to reason it was some insoluble conundrum to which faith on the other hand holds the solution. For we do not know what God is even by the revelation of grace. By grace he says we are indeed made truly one with God so as to share the divine life, but as the one who is unknown to us.  [The recording cut out at 3:50 remaining and returns at 1:16].  Putting it simplest, his [Aquinas'] position is formally that of the Vatican decree, [viz.,] that there are grounds of faith for affirming reason’s capacity-for affirming that it can of its own resources know God. Reading Thomas alerts us not to confuse his faith being of reason with the far quarter of rationalism.  If un-alerted and you do confuse them, you will have all sorts of unnecessary and theologically damaging zero-sum problems, trading off faith and reason against one another.  At any rate that is what Thomas seems to say and so do I.  Well then I took the plunge into reason’s icy waters and you will have to admit bravely or perhaps rashly, and I found them not to be perhaps so chilly after all.  But now that I’ve done my bit, the question passes over to you.  Hopping about in those 13^th century waters as I have been the past 50 minutes or so, I will leave you to decide:  was I wading or was I drowning? 

Summarizing his findings with regard to art and human beings in the final chapter of his book, Redeeming Beauty:  Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics, Aidan Nichols says the following:

Art has been a feature of human society since prehistoric times. [...] Art discloses what we think our society is like, or what it is not like but ought to be like.  As the main expression (other than childbirth) of human creativity it can be said to take further the original creation by bringing into being new realities of intrinsic worth.  Above all, it is or can be a pointer to transcendence in three main ways.  The first [...] by making us go beyond interpretations of this or that thing or event toward an overall reading of the world.  The second was to see the world as having as its own precondition a fundamental meaningfulness beyond itself.  The third (after we had noted the possible moral effects of art in making us go beyond the limits of our present character) was that art might be regarded as a kind of epiphany of divine presence, divine light. [...] The arts reveal the human world, either as it actually is or as it ideally is.  They express the creativity of man when the artist adds to the things of intrinsic worth in the world, or the art-appreciating public makes the artist’s vision of what he has made live again.  The arts point to transcendence, not just the way the world as a whole is wonderful and presupposes a meaning greater than itself, but also by enacting divine presence sustaining the special density of meaning that art, literature, music can contain (pp. 145-146). 

Nichols then relates his findings to three aspects of the person and work of Jesus Christ.  First of all, Christ makes manifest or reveals what humanity is.  “As the true Adam, he shows us the reality of what the human species should be like and on the Cross discloses the range and power of the evil which inhibits our being as the first Adam was meant to be, in God’s image and likeness” (p. 148).  So Christ reveals what the postlapsarian world is like and (thankfully) what it ought to be like.  Second, Christ’s redemptive work transcends nature “by bringing into being a further dimension of reality,” viz., salvation and “new resources of grace and life” (p. 148).  In other words, just as art advances and elevates creation, so too does the work of Christ.  Third, in Christ the meaning of the world as a whole is revealed and points to the “Father’s wonderful plan to bring about the nuptials of heaven and earth, the uncreated and the created, in the sacrificial joy of the Kingdom.  He points to the source of the world in a pre-existing divine truth, [...] Moreover, he enacts that truth-the truth which is the Holy Trinity-in his own person” (p. 148).    Though only the Son took on flesh, the Son is eternally “co-defined by the Father and the Holy Spirit.” Hence, “Jesus is always the Trinitarian Son, essentially related to the Father and the Spirit in his work on earth” (p. 148).  In fact, the whole redeemed creation shall one day enter into the eternal dance of the Trinity, as captured in Rublev’s famous icon of the Trinity (p. 148). 

The risen and ascended God-man is the true predestined goal of all creation.  Here the capacity of artwork to be the vehicle of divine presence in the material form of words or sounds or shapes and colours is super-filled.  Christ is, then the perfect art work in the sense of that reality in whom is realized those goals that all artistic making has as its explicit or implicit ends.  Because he is infinite meaning, life and being perfectly synthesized with finite form, the cave-painters at Lascaux, or Hesiod penning his hymns, or Beethoven working on his last quartets, were all gesturing towards him through they realized it not (p. 148).