But at the same time: why not Christ?

The official sequel to the hit post "Why Christ?"

In my previous post, I reflected on my experience of returning to the kind of “politically-engaged theology” that shaped me in grad school, from the perspective of someone who has basically stopped trying to make Christianity work. Where previously I saw the task of finding the authentic, good version of Christianity as absolutely urgent, essential, and—crucially—achievable, I now see many such attempts as some combination of projection and wishful thinking. I also suggested that, capacious and underdetermined as many Christian symbols are (above all, Christ himself and the Virgin Mary), they still seem to me to come “pre-loaded” with some content that is both unavoidable and, from a modern ethical and political perspective, deeply problematic, namely supercessionism (which I discussed a while back in connection with an irritating dip into current Pauline studies) and redemptive suffering (the attempt to escape which was the most important goal of most of my earliest publications in theology).

My misgivings about the project of “politically-engaged theology” does not at all diminish my admiration of many of its leading lights. Indeed, I underlined and transcribed so much of Ruether’s methodological chapter in Sexism and God-Talk that I might as well have simply uploaded a PDF to my reading notes. In my previous post, I characterized that chapter as “a truly amazing performance of laying all her cards on the table and yet still winning,” and I want to unpack that a bit here.

Basically, Ruether admits up front that she is reimagining Christianity from the perspective of her contemporary values—first of all the full humanity of women, but also the many other commitments that are intrinsically bound up with that. She justifies her procedure by pointing out that everyone has always been doing that and it would not be possible to do otherwise. First of all, “What have been called the objective sources of theology, Scripture and tradition, are themselves codified collective human experience” (14)—so there is no escape from “mere” human experience, even in the most authoritative foundations of religion. And we inevitably respond to the human experiences embedded in the authoritative sources in terms of our own experience:

However much the community, both leaders and led, seek to clothe themselves in past codified tradition that provides secure access to divinely revealed truth, in reality the experiences of the present community cannot be ignored… Received ideas are tested by what ‘feels right,’ that is, illuminates the logic of the symbolic pattern in a way that speaks most satisfyingly to their own experience of redemption…. It continues its vital development only to the extent that such thinking remains in touch with depth experience… The ordinary believers…., in their local communities of faith, are always engaged in making their own selection from the patterns of received tradition that fit of make sense in their lives. (15)

Some religious symbols prove more durable than others, but that is precisely because they are able to resonate with a wider range of human experiences: “Such has been the Exodus-Passover pattern for Jews and the death-resurrection paradigm of personal conversion for Christians. The circle from experience to experience, mediated through instruments of tradition, is thus completed when the contemporary community appropriates the foundational paradigm as the continuing story of its own redemption in relation to God, self, and one another” (16). And most of the time, the continued resonance of those key stories and symbols is enough to provide a sensation of continuity in the tradition that allows for the normal churn of differing emphases and interpretations to take place within a broadly shared framework.

But sometimes it’s not enough. As Ruether puts it, “Religious traditions fall into crisis when the received interpretations of the redemptive paradigms contradict experience in significant ways” (16). Note that the problem is not simply that people come along with newfangled ideas. She assumes that religion must, and can only, respond to people’s experience in the present. The problem is the mismatch, and the side that is changeable is not people’s actual experience of the world—Ruether is never going to be convinced that she was mistaken about women being fully human, for instance, nor should anyone dare to ask her to—but the religious interpretation.

The first line of defense in the face of this crisis of a mismatch between religion and current experience is the kind of ongoing reform that “goes on in minor and major ways all the time.... So long as this is accomodated within the community’s methods of transmitting tradition, no major break occurs” (16). Yet “when the institutional structures that transmit tradition are perceived to have become corrupt,” a more radical break is needed, and that normally takes the form of a kind of reboot back to the original sources (16). This can work as long as “The revelatory paradigms, the original founder, and even the early stages of the formulation of tradition are still seen as authentic” (16). Ruether is aware, of course, that you can’t really go back to any previous era, but she nonetheless supports the gesture because “the myth of return to origins is a way of making a more radical interpretation of the revelatory paradigm to encompass contemporary experiences” (16). In other words, it’s not a question of making ourselves contemporary with the early church or whatever, it’s a question of making those foundational moments contemporary with us again.

Sometimes even that won’t work anymore: “A stilll more radical crisis of tradition occurs when the total religious heritage appears to be corrupt” (17). Yet even in this case, Ruether doesn’t think we can start from scratch: “The effort to express contemporary experience in a cultural and historical vacuum is both self-deluding and unsatisfying. It is self-deluding because to communicate at all to oneself and others, one makes use of patterns of thought, however transformed by new experience, that have a history” (18). And in this connection (as with so many of the thinkers identified with the “politically-engaged theology” side of the field of political theology), Ruether makes a gesture reminiscent of the genealogical side of the field: “Even among feminist thinkers such as Mary Daly who regard themselves as having totally rejected the Judeo-Christian tradition for an alternative worldview based solely on women’s experience, the basic categories of Christian theology continue to operate in unconscious ways” (38).

In short: the answer to the question of “why Christ” is that it is not possible to escape our formation. The foundational religious symbols that shaped us from an early age are going to continue to be operative whether we want them to or not, even if through a kind of inversion where they become what we must define ourselves against. As I sometimes tell my students, if you make up your mind to do the opposite of what your parents want, you’re still letting your parents determine your life. The only answer is to be conscious of what is shaping you and decide what positive use, if any, you can put it to—with full openness to the possibility that the answer will be “none.”

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Ruether’s presentation is of course very diplomatic and calmly rational, as suits her rhetorical purpose in trying to get as broad an audience as possible to accept the legitimacy of the project of a feminist theology. But she knew better than most that what she describes as a mismatch between contemporary experience and religious symbols is not just a matter of intellectual puzzlement. When religion isn’t working for people, it is often working against them. It is harming them. It is scapegoating and excluding them. It is making their lives unlivable. I experienced that even as a white straight cis man, and I spent my grad school career among those who experienced that in much more serious ways. Yet they and I were, to different degrees, still committed to finding some way to make it work—to come up with some articulation of our religious heritage that could affirm and support us and allow us to be in some form of communion with those who were doing their level best to make our lives impossible. This pattern of behavior is, at the very least, difficult to account for.

Once when talking to My Esteemed Partner, who did not have a similarly formative religious upbringing and hence is often puzzled by people’s attachment to institutions that are hurting them, I phrased the impulse less diplomatically than Ruether: “the answer to the question ‘why Christ’ is ‘because: screw you. You are the one who drilled this into me, you are the one who made it an inseparable part of me—and if it’s part of me, it’s mine. It’s not just a weapon for you to use against me, it’s not a veto on my life, it’s not just some malware you installed in me to exploit, it’s mine too.” In that moment, I think I recognized something that I hadn’t allowed myself to recognize when I was in the trenches: my effort to reclaim Christianity was not motivated solely by a passion for justice or a desire to help my fellow Christians be their best selves, but by anger.

In my case, it was anger at a lifetime of continual emotional manipulation that left me unable to trust myself at a fundamental level—a burden that has lessened but still presents itself at exceptional times of stress. I was angry that they put me through that, and I wanted some way to show them, on their own terms, that they were wrong and they should stop doing that. That was what was behind my polemic against the individualism of the Christian tradition in Politics of Redemption and other early essays where I relentlessly insisted on the communitarian nature of Christianity (despite my very solitary lifestyle!). I wanted Christianity to be about something other than locking yourself in your brain and overanalyzing your true motives and true level of faith until you drove yourself insane. (That was also, by the way, what motivated my brief “Catholic phase”—the bureaucratic objectivity of the sacraments appealed to me as an alternative to the ongoing nightmare of revivalistic spirituality.)

Others had even better grounds for anger—above all, the many variations on the theme of “God thinks the unchangeable way that I am and always will be is sinful and abhorrent.” Finding ways to reuse those deeply formative symbols and stories in a way that does not amount to consenting to your own erasure and self-destruction is a way of fighting back, of going on the offensive rather than simply retreating. In that respect, I find Marcella Althaus-Reid perhaps more honest in her obvious intent to give offense for its own sake, simply because her hypocritical conservative targets deserve it.

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That would all be well and good if religious symbols were just symbols floating out there—if religion were, as Althaus-Reid at one point suggests, simply a particular form of fan culture and we could all let a million fan fiction flowers bloom (Indecent Theology, 112ff.). But even in fan culture, there is a difference between the writers of fanfic who contribute in their free time and the licensed tie-in creators who can eke out a living. The fight for belonging in religion is not just about being able to imagine that Jesus loves you, but about access to cultural authority and resources. My fellow students at Chicago Theological Seminary were not simply exploring their creativity when they wrote their infamous “constructive papers” as the capstone of their MDiv program—they were finalizing their bid for an ecclesiastical structure to provide them with their livelihood. I was doing something similar in my PhD, where my most likely career path was to find my way into a mainline seminary, where I would have to make the case that it made sense to employ me to form ministers for institutions that, in the last analysis, I didn’t believe should exist at all. (If I got drunk enough, I would even start musing about seeking ordination purely for careerist reasons.)

This is yet another area where Ruether strikes me as uniquely clearheaded—she is the only author I have read in this vein who talks concretely about church endowments and placating donors. She talks a great deal about what it would look like to form an independent counter-community that could challenge or reshape the institutional church, but (perhaps because of her vantage point in the Catholic Church in particular) she is not optimistic about the prospect of a takeover and is dubious about the value of a kind of tokenized inclusion that would change the face of ecclesiastical power without changing its structure. Indeed, representation and inclusion can backfire, by lending legitimacy to an institution that is still, at bottom, doing harm to the vast majority of women or LGBT people or people of color who walk through its doors.

Returning, then, to my title question from a different perspective, perhaps the answer to the question of “Why not Christ?” is that the good version of Christ always runs the risk of propping up the bad version, and the cool person trying to change the system from the inside just winds up colluding with the forces that are producing endless generations of broken people. That is hard to think about, of course. I often retell a story where I told a Nazarene youth pastor that his job was hurting people by convincing them it was okay to continue to belong to an institution that hurt them and would hurt their children—and throughout our discussion, he continued to insist that he saw my point and didn’t think we really disagreed at all.

Maybe it really was fine for him. Maybe he was the kind of person it just rolled right off of. But maybe he just wouldn’t allow himself to be angry, wouldn’t allow himself to admit that it had been, in Ruether’s words, “that bad” (187). And understandably so! Admitting it was “that bad” is scary. Your whole life looks different in retrospect. And there’s no way to know in advance that your anger on behalf of Christ will not turn the corner into anger at Christ—that you won’t slide down the slippery slope from outrage at your church’s distortion of the gospel to the wish that you’d never heard the fucking gospel in the first place.

The benefit of entering that space, though, is that it’s where the best theology comes from—and indeed, the best political theology. As I ponder the project of treating both sides of the field in one introductory work, I wonder if one way to put it is that, whether we’re angry on behalf of Christ (politically-engaged theology) or angry at Christ (genealogical political theology), we’re all deeply, and righteously, angry.