But We Proclaim Christ Crucified (Part I): Isaiah 53 in Buddhist-Christian Dialogue

[Please check out the Introduction to this series.]

Whenever I see a crucified figure of Christ, I cannot help thinking of the gap that lies between Christianity and Buddhism...

Christian symbolism has much to do with the suffering of [humanity]. The crucifixion is the climax of all suffering. Buddhists also speak much about suffering and its climax is the Buddha serenely sitting under the Bodhi tree by the river Niranjana. Christ carries his suffering to the end of his earthly life whereas Buddha puts an end to it while living and afterward goes on preaching the gospel of enlightenment until he quietly passes away under the twin Sala trees. The trees are standing upright and the Buddha, in Nirvana, lies horizontally like eternity itself.

Christ hangs helpless, full of sadness on the vertically erected cross. To the Oriental mind, the sight it almost unbearable...

The crucified Christ is a terrible sight and I cannot help associating it with the sadistic impulse of a physically affected brain.

- Excerpts from D.T. Suzuki's essay "Crucifixion and Enlightenment," found in his Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist.

The ideal of Mahayana Buddhism is the Bodhisattva, who vows to forestall nirvana until all sentient beings have been liberated from samsara, this realm of suffering. This ideal demonstrates a Buddhist commitment to end all suffering. This powerful commitment makes a lie of the common Western assumption - taken from the common English translation of the First Noble Truth, "Life is suffering" - that Buddhism is passive and pessimistic. Buddhism does take seriously both human suffering and the suffering of all sentient beings, which it identifies as a fundamental problem. But Buddhism is not only a description of a problem; it is also a prescription for the solution of that problem. At its best, it is a way of life deeply committed to the cessation of suffering.

For this reason, the image of Christ hanging in agony on the cross is a troubling image for Buddhists. The common Christian understanding of this event as an act of redemptive suffering, in which God through Jesus takes on the suffering of the world, is foreign to their way of thinking. But within the scandal of the cross there can, I hope, also be found the grounds of some kind of reconciliation between Christians and Buddhists.

I believe that both Christians and Buddhists share a deep concern about suffering, and a commitment to as far as is possible alleviate suffering. This shared common ground - despite what D.T. Suzuki refers to as the sadism of the image of the crucified Christ - can be the foundation for the joining of Christians and Buddhists in the cause of alleviating suffering wherever it is found.

A little while ago I received an email from a young Buddhist (I don't know his age, but I do know that he is just beginning to explore a Buddhist life, and I salute him for that) troubled by the image of the "Suffering Servant" presented in Isaiah 53. His concern reminded me very much of D.T. Suzuki's concern while looking at the image of Christ hanging on the cross: What kind of a God would do this to someone?

His concern compelled me to explore the image of the "Suffering Servant" in Isaiah 53, and what follows is an excerpt from my response to him:

The passage from Isaiah that you are concerned with comes from what most scholars (regardless of the religious commitments) call Second Isaiah. While it is now included by both Christians and Jews in the book of Isaiah, it was almost certainly not originally part of the same work. According to the Jewish Publication Society's commentary on Isaiah, chapters 1-39 were the product (though, I would add, this does not necessarily mean that they were written down in his lifetime) "of a prophet who lived in Jerusalem during the 8th Century BCE." The passage you are concerned with - coming from Second Isaiah, chapters 40-66 of the book of Isaiah - comes from the work of a different prophet, who addressed the concerns of Judean exiles in Babylon, which means that it comes sometime after 586 BCE.

So the unknown prophet whose work is lumped in with that of Isaiah was concerned with the needs of a group of Jews living in exile, after their homeland was destroyed by the Babylonian Empire. In that context, it is not hard to see why any prophetic work would have to address the suffering of a defeated and demoralized people, who believed themselves to be chosen by God, only to have their homes and their identities crushed by a mighty empire.

My reading of the Suffering Servant is that he represents the exiled Jewish community, who are deeply concerned about what their present state (in Babylonian captivity) says about their relationship with God. Here the unknown prophet offers the (contextually) comforting message that suffering is not incompatible with being chosen by God for some special purpose.

Christians would later - when wrestling with what we call the scandal of the cross - apply this passage to Jesus. Again you have a community struggling to come to terms with what suffering and defeat say about one's relationship with God. The one who had revealed God, and who had preached a powerful (and political!) message about the kingdom of God (if God is sovereign, then Caesar - with his foot to the throat of the Jewish followers of Jesus who eventually formed the Christian religion - is NOT sovereign; if the kingdom belongs to God, it does NOT belong to Rome!) had been crushed by the Roman authorities. What, then, does this say about Jesus? What does it say about the God of Jesus?

Part of the answer to this concern can be found in teachings concerning the resurrection of Jesus. Whether these teachings point to a physical, bodily resurrection, or to something more metaphorical, their effect on the Christian community is the same. The scandal of the cross is answer by the power of the resurrection. Rome could kill Jesus, but they couldn't keep him (or his message) in the grave.

But another important part of the answer was found in the prophetic passage that troubles you: suffering at the hands of worldly powers does not prevent one from having been chosen by God. Jesus can be both the Christ and the one crucified by the Romans.

Placed in this context, I don't read this passage as saying that God wills or intends suffering. Rather, this passage is a message of hope to those who are suffering that their suffering is not incompatible with their status as ones chosen by God. Whether that message still preaches today, in a vastly different sort of context, is obviously open for debate. What I'd encourage you to see is that this passage is not offered up as a timeless message from God to all persons everywhere, but rather a very situational message from humans wrestling with their understanding of God in the face of existentially disorienting suffering.

But We Proclaim Christ Crucified (Introduction)

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

"I will destroy the wisdom of
the wise,
and the discernment of the
discerning I will thwart."

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.

- I Corinthians 1:18-25 (NRSV)

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

- I Corinthians 2:1-2 (NRSV)

These words from the apostle Paul to the church in Corinth stand as a challenge to me. A challenge I can no longer shirk. With them he wrestles with the greatest scandal of Christianity: Jesus, dying at the hands of the Roman power he defied, hanging on a cross. With them he attempts to solve the problem that scandal poses by inverting it; seeing in it not the futility of the one whose followers proclaimed the Anointed of God, but rather the very power of God.

As I get time over the next few weeks and maybe months, I plan to wrestle here with the crucifixion of Jesus. This is what Christian theologians have been wrestling with for as long as there has been a Christianity. At this moment I can't articulate everything that I think that the scandal of the cross means and has meant. That scandal has been cheapened by those who wish to see in it an easy victory; those who refuse to wrestle with it honestly, exploring in it the mystery of God in the midst of human suffering.

I will say upfront that I do not believe that Jesus was God, or some perfect human. I do not believe that his death was a perfect atoning sacrifice for my sins and the sins of the world. I do not believe that his death was part of God's plan for the redemption of the world - I do not believe in redemptive suffering.

But I still call myself a Christian: One who seeks to follow Christ. One who sees the nature of God mysteriously revealed in Christ. And I do believe that God was at work in Jesus, the Christ, reconciling the world both to God and to itself. And so for me - especially since I cannot believe in completely perfect, sinless persons or divine-human cohabitation, and since I refuse to believe that God wills our collective salvation through the brutal execution of anyone, much less a man such as Jesus - the scandal of the cross looms darkly over me. If my theology cannot somehow wrestle honestly with the crucifixion of Jesus, then it is a fraudulent, dishonest theology.

In this series I will, then, look through Christian history to see how others have wrestled with the scandal of the cross. I will look across religious lines to see how the scandal of the cross has impacted Christian conversations with other faith traditions. And I will look within myself to see how my understanding of "Christ crucified" has changed over time, and is continuing to change.

I cannot promise any firm conclusions, or any safe or easy answers. I cannot pretend to understand the mystery of the presence of God within human suffering. But I can promise to use whatever theological tools I have at my disposal to, whenever I can, posting here my own wrestling with and reflections on the crucifixion of Jesus.

The first post in this series will come later today, when I post some reflections on Isaiah 53, on the "Suffering Servant" - a passage from the Hebrew Bible co-opted by Christians in our attempt to wrestle with the scandal of the cross.

Thanks, Tom

I'm not back to "real" blogging yet, as cramming three credit hours into two weeks takes up far too much time. However, I did have to share this, which Tom just sent me:




Thanks, Tom. Thanks a lot.

(Muttering incoherant profanities under my breath...)

She's Back, and We're Off!

At 5:30 this morning, I heard a plaintive yeow. Elise was home.

And, just in time, too, as we're headed off to Holden Beach, NC, sometime this afternoon.

Holden Beach holds as special place in our hearts, and not just because it is quiet and calm, far removed from its neighbor to the south, Myrtle Beach, SC, in temperment. Holden Beach is also a place of family history. My great grandmother owned a house on Holden Beach, where my maternal grandmother grew up until it was destroyed by Hurricane Hazel in 1954.

I grew up hearing stories about that legendary storm, which so rocked my grandmother's world that she hasn't been back to Holden Beach since. According to family legend, Hazel literally uprooted the house, carrying it several blocks before it unceremoniously plopped it down on a different street. When my family found it, and began to clean it out, they noticed something truly bizarre. It turns out, the air pressure from the storm was so strong that even though the house flew through the air and then crashed, destroying almost everything, all of the dishes were still neatly stacked in the cabinets. They hadn't moved.

I'll return from Holden Beach next Friday, just in time to start an intensive summer class. So I don't know when I'll be able to get back to blogging. But, while you're cruising around the blogosphere eagerly awaiting my return, make sure to check out Tom's haircut! It was his first in over four years!

Cat AWOL

Before Sami and I had Adam, we had our animals, and they are as much a part of the family as anyone. Late Sunday night, one of our two precious cats (the friendly one, not the autistic one - yes, my wife, who works with autistic children all day every day, claims we have an autistic cat), "Elise," or, as I call her, "Knucklehead," disappeared. Here is my favorite picture of her, taken one Christmas as we were putting the boxes away:



And here she is balancing on my feet one night before bed:



"Knucklehead," if you're out surfing the 'Net, know that we miss you! And come home soon, before we really start to worry.

In other news, we'll be taking our annual pilgrimage to Holden Beach, NC, later this week, so I may not blog for a while. We're leaving the 'Ville on Thursday, and won't get back until next Friday, at which point I'll be starting a six day a week summer class, which should take up most of my time.

So, exactly how many carrots is that?

Tom just sent me this, from Discovery News, on the universe's largest diamond. OK, so the article is actually about why there are no diamonds in the skies of Uranus or Neptune, but it does mention a "white dwarf star with a solid diamond core," which begs the question asked in the title of this post.

If you're bored...

you might want to read these:

Here is an excellent op-ed piece I found in the LEO by Dee Davis, the director of the Center for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg, KY, on Democratic candidate for president John Edwards' recent trip to Appalachia. It first aired on NPR the before Edwards arrived in Kentucky.

And then there's this monument to colossal stupidity, by Frank Lockwood, the Bible Belt Blogger. Evidently, even though no one yet knows what the hell the Emergent church is, Frank Pastore, my new nominee for the idiot-of-the-month club, thinks that they're aiding and abetting al Qaeda.

Harry Potter and the Myth of Redemptive Violence

[Note: While this will engage some themes in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it should still be relatively safe reading for those who have not yet read the book but wish to do so. In other words, it should have no spoilers, though, of course, any discussion of any aspect of a piece of art involves a degree of spoiling. That said, no plot secrets will be revealed here.]

As I noted in my last pseudo-post, I've finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and have now had a few days to ruminate on it. I meant to post some initial observations on the end of the Harry Potter series earlier, but circumstances conspired against me until today. Perhaps there is some providence in that, as what I'm sitting down to write right now is not what I would have written right after I finished reading.

The final installment in the epic tale of Harry Potter was, like all of the others, and engaging - nay, enchanting -read. But, much like its immediate predecessor, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Price, it was also a disturbing read. Much has been made of the escalating violence in the Harry Potter books. While they began as children's books, they have been maturing with their audience, taking on more and more adult content.

"Adult content" - I'm not quite comfortable with that phrase. It is so often a euphemism for the worst sort of juvenile depictions of sexuality and violence. And there is a great deal of violence in the final Harry Potter book. But when I use the phrase "adult content" it does not merely euphemistically skate around something crass; rather, it indicates a deepening of the social and ethical content in the book.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a great story, but it is not just great because it captures the attention and imagination of the readers with compelling characters and an engaging plot. It is also great because it is an act of modern myth making. In fact, this is J.K. Rowling's genius: she creates modern myths, in an age in which mythos has all but been pronounced extinct.

I argued earlier that these modern myths - which I then called "fairy tales" - entailed both an existential and a mystical component. They also, I should add, contain an ethical component. As the Harry Potter books have matured, they have grappled with issues of racism, sexism, classism, totalitarianism, and violence. The final book brings all earlier ethical reflection to its telos, its natural end, its mature completion.

One of my biggest concerns about the Harry Potter series is that it, like so many other mythic works, divides the world into two basic camps: Good and Evil. This, coupled with the justification of the use of violence by the Good against the Evil, is an essential element of what Walter Wink identified as the Myth of Redemptive Violence. Wink calls this myth "the dominant religion in our society today," and its influence is not at all difficult to see. When president Bush identified an "Axis of Evil," he was speaking in the language of the Myth of Redemptive Violence. When he speaks of a war between Good and Evil, in which the Good will prevail if only they have the resolve to do what is necessary to fight and win, he speaks in the language of the Myth of Redemptive Violence. It could easily be argued that it is this myth - the true mythos of our culture - that lead us into the quagmire in Iraq.

And, it is no coincidence that Wink first noticed this myth not in his studies of ancient religions (though later he found it there) but instead watching cartoons with his children on Saturday mornings. Of the mythic structure of children's cartoons, he writes:

I began to examine the structure of other cartoons and found the same pattern repeating endlessly: an indestructible hero is doggedly opposed to an irreformable and equally indestructible villain. Nothing can kill the hero, though for the first three-quarters of the comic-strip or TV show he (rarely she) suffers grievously and appears hopelessly doomed, until, miraculously, the hero breaks free, vanquishes the villain or prevents his or her reappearance, and restores order until the next episode.

That's a familiar pattern that most of us recognize from our childhood entertainment. As Winks notes, you can see it in everything from Popeye to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This is also a pattern that can be found in the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation story, circa 1250 BCE, which Wink sees as possibly the origin of the Myth of Redemptive Violence. This mythic structure, then, has been around for well over 3,000 years, and has long shaped how we reflect on the ethics of violence.

As I understand it, two important hallmarks of the Myth of Redemptive Violence are:

1. the ineffectual nature of redemption, and
2. the relatively low cost of violence.

These two together mean that, in such a polarized and polemical moral universe (Good v. Evil), the Good are justified in using whatever violence they must to resist and overthrown the Evil threatening them. Attempts to somehow convert or reform the Evil are seen as cowardice at best, if not a covert Evil. There are generally disastrous consequences for nonviolent attempts to resist Evil, but there are little or no consequences for violent resistance. Sometimes violence is, in fact, the only mode of resistance contemplated.

In some respects, the modern myth of Harry Potter participates in this ancient but endlessly repeating Myth of Redemptive Violence. The magical world is essentially divided into two camps. There is a monolithically evil threat, Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters, who use Dark Magic. This threat must be resisted, and the resistance to it is often quite violent.

In one moment in the final book, for instance, Harry attempts to disarm an attacker rather than kill him, and the consequences are almost disastrous. He is chastised, reminded that this is war, and that he must be prepared to kill if he does not want to be killed himself. Toward the end of the book we see both Harry and one of his former teachers using so-called "Unforgivable Curses" - curses which, we are told at the beginning of the seven-book series, may never be justified - against threatening Death Eaters, with no apparent remorse.

This participation in the Myth of Redemptive Violence is quite compelling at times, which is one of the reasons that myth has survived and thrived for so long. I shed many, many tears reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; some tears of sorrow, some tears of joy, and many, many mixed and confused tears. One of the most gripping moments in the book, one of the moments that drew out of my at least half my daily intake of water, was when Hogwarts rises up against Voldemort, and prepares for battle. As the defenses are raised, as each character - including the school itself, which becomes a character - girds themselves for battle, I realized just how gripping the Myth of Redemptive Violence can be.

But despite those participations in the Myth of Redemptive Violence, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows deviates in some important and ethically instructive ways from that dangerous if compelling myth. Most importantly, it challenges two of the most basic assumptions of the Myth of Redemptive Violence: the irreformable corruption of the Evil, and the relatively low cost of violence.

In the Harry Potter series, the magical world seems divided into two camps: Good and Evil. I noted that above. But, as the series matures, the moral universe in it becomes more complicated. There is some bleed-through between the camps. There are other camps that are not so easily identified. Characters become more complex, more human, and less easily identified as monolithically Good or Evil. In the final book, not only does Severus Snape - long the sole question mark in the series - become even more complicated; but also do such polarized figures as Albus Dumbledore and Lord Voldemort - long personifications of Good and Evil - become more fully human, more complex, and less monolithic.

This book explores the errors of Dumbledore's youth, making him a more tragic, more flawed, and ultimately more human and therefore more heroic figure. It also sheds some light on Voldemort's motives for his behavior, making him - like Dumbledore - a more tragic and more human figure. He is no longer a pure personification of Evil, but is instead a corrupt human being who has at least the option of redemption, whether or not he chooses to accept it.

Also, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the escalating death-count makes real the high cost of violence. Even though, ultimately, violence is imaged here as the best response to the threat posed by Evil, there are tragic consequences for the violence used, even when that violence is deemed just. There is simply no way to walk away from this book thinking that violence is ever easy. Too many friends lay dead at the end for that. It is, then, a very realistic depiction of our own moral universe, a universe in which we may occasionally find violence unavoidable (though my pacifist friends would say that situations in which violence is unavoidable are brought about not by the inevitability of violence, but instead by a lack of creativity) but never without harsh consequences.

Finally, this book deviates from the Myth of Redemptive Violence by its use of Grace. While not all in it are redeemed, there is no one in this book ultimately so intractably evil that Grace is not offered to them. No one, in other words, is beyond Grace. And that may be the most morally instructive aspect of this book, and the way in which it - despite its justification of violence - more closely resembles the Gospel than the Myth of Redemptive Violence.

If J.K. Rowling's epic tales of Harry Potter are to be our new modern myth, then they are a welcome replacement for the Myth of Redemptive Violence that has long gripped us, even if they contain some elements of that troubled myth.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I've been offline the last couple of days, reading the final book in the Harry Potter series. I'd love to write something meaningful about the book, but frankly I'm emotionally exhausted. I'm sure I'll write something at some point - even if only in the comments section of this or some other post - but right now I'm just going to link to my friend Heather's review.

I'd Rather Have Been Dumbledore...

You scored as Hermione Granger, You're one intelligent witch, but you have a hard time believing it and require constant reassurance. You are a very supportive friend who would do anything and everything to help her friends out. Hermione Granger 90% Albus Dumbledore 85% Remus Lupin 80% Draco Malfoy 70% Severus Snape 65% Sirius Black 60% Harry Potter 60% Ginny Weasley 55% Ron Weasley 50% Lord Voldemort 30% Your Harry Potter Alter Ego Is...? created with QuizFarm.com