[I will return to the write up of the Providence conference soon, promise!]
Reading Stauffer was interesting. He made the rather obvious point that, if martyrdom is read as an imitation of Christ, then it matters a whole lot what your Christology is in the first place. So, he gives an account of martyrdom which applies his reading of NT Christology.
I think this is true of many contemporary accounts of martyrdom which rest on a rather adoptionist Christology and a subjective view of the atonement. Martyrdom is then primarily an exemplary act, an act of spiritual heroism which is sanctified somewhat after the fact. Or it is a primarily political act whose chief significance lies in its disruption and subversion of power. If you see Jesus chiefly as one who stood up to tyrannical authorities, then martyrdom for you will have this meaning too. And also, it is easier to say that anyone who dies standing up to tyrannical authorities is a martyr after the pattern of Jesus.
A traditional account of the person and work of Christ gives very different results. If for example we take the triplex munus Christi of Calvin, imitating Christ's death becomes more specifically related to the unique and unrepeatable work of Christ. And as such, martyrdom must be read as an extension of Christ's work in the power of the Spirit. It isn't an imitation of it, merely: it actually participates, shares in, the sufferings of Christ himself. The martyr does not become prophet, priest and king: but she shares in the prophetic, priestly and royal work of Christ.
The martyr is a prophet after Christ, because it is an act which speaks. It witnesses to the divine - it is an embodied proclamation of the gospel of Christ. It certainly isn't silent: Stephen's great prophetic speech in Acts 7, for example, continues in the tradition of the OT prophets, and shares their fate of rejection.
The martyr performs a priestly act of sacrifice, offering his or her life up on behalf of others. The early martyrologies have no doubt about the blessing that the martyrs were to the churches; but also, that is was by martyrdom that many came to faith. sanguis semen ecclesiae... This is not some blasphemy in suggesting that Christ's work is repeated, or that Christ is resacrificed in some way. Paul is quite clear in 2 Cor that his sufferings are a rounding out of the sufferings of Christ. The martyrs die for the redemption of the world too: not that their blood pays for sin in the sense that Jesus's does, but in the sense that because of them others come to know Christ.
The martyr is enthroned in death: over and over again we hear of them 'receiving a crown (a stephanos, note!). The martyrs 'overcome'; they 'conquer'. Not because they themselves conquer but becuase, in union with Christ and his death, they share in his victory over the powers.
To complement this schema, I should like to apply the great second-generation Lutheran Martin Chemnitz's christology, too - in his 'humiliation/exaltation' pattern. That's the next step.
1 comment:
Hey Michael,
can I pose (badly) two questions that have been concerning me over the question of martyrdom and the contemporary Western church? I'm interested to know what you think.
The first is a question that I am sure you have done much more thinking about than me. In Desire of the Nations, O'Donovan says:
"Much martyrdom is suffered simply at the hands of the barbarians or civilisational revanchists, for whom the combination of irreligion and violence is more attractive than the rule of law. One can be martyred for refusing sexual demands, for opposing ruthless landlords, for asking embarrassing questions about forgotten prisoners, and for many other things. But these occasions of martyrdom are sporadic and unpredictable. The martyrdom to which the church must always be looking forward (from what distance, who can tell?) is the martyrdom exacted by civilisation itself when it lifts its arms against God. A church too determined to be at home in the world will be unprepared for this, and so unprepared for mission."
It is not clear to me why and how the martydom "exacted by civilisation itself" is any less sporadic and unpredictable than the other martydoms "simply suffered" on O'Donovan's account. Is it really possible to demarcate "first-class" and "second-class" martyrs in this way?
My other question relates to your research overall. I am interested in what you are doing, but in thinking about that, I had to stop and question why I was interested.
I guess I want to ask, "In a privileged, powerful, politically-connected church context (which I think is not an unfair characterisation of Sydney Anglicanism and mainstream academic UK Anglican theologising), what relevance does examination of martyrdom have?"
You and I are exceedingly unlikely to become martyrs, and it sometimes seems to me that Christians (especially evangelicals) play with such labels to magnify any slight quarrels we might have in the workplace, or with our wider culture, in order to lend a significance to our ideological positioning that it would not otherwise deserve.
Being a martyr is a powerful, and completely un-self-serving position – while being a beneficiary of an overwhelmingly congenial political/theological settlement is not. How can we think in any way of ourselves as martyrs when we are, in empirical fact, amongst the most privileged people on the planet, and in our societies?
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