Martyrdom as communicative act II

Cranmer at the stake, 1556. Note: he holds out his right hand to the flames - the one that signed his recantations.

What is it about martyrdom that communicates (if it does)? This question asks at a deeper level: what is it in martyrdom, coming as it does out of a precisely Christian understanding of the world, that is able to be meaningful enough in the terms of a world view that is at least at face value utterly hostile to it? The word of the cross is a skandalon – and so are its re-enactments. In the first instance this question must be answered by saying immediately and of course that it is nothing but only the Spirit of God himself that illuminates this enactment of the gospel of Jesus Christ as a testimony to the truth. This ought not be conceived narrowly: the effects of a Christian martyrdom include not only the conviction of the individual but also the transformation of the political and social order.



But it is also possible to speak on the human side of the question: the witness of the martyr occurs within the human sphere of speaking and listening, acting and observing. This question is addressed by Kevin Vanhoozer in his recent work entitled The Drama of Doctrine. Fittingly, he uses in the book the motifs of the theatre and performance with which to describe Christian speech and action as it is generated and responds to divine speech-acts. For Vanhoozer, martyrdom as an imitation of the cross of Christ is an embodiment by the church of the gospel it preachers. As such, nothing is more alienating to the world: by acting in this way the church ‘throws into question Everyman’s everyday assumptions about the meaning of life and the human good’. This has almost exactly been our contention throughout this thesis. But it is not only given a critical function: martyrdom is a dramatic performance of the doctrine of the atonement; it is the ‘quintessential form of prophetic action’. As Brad S. Gregory writes (of the Reformation period):



More dramatically than sermons, catechisms, or common worship, martyrdom trumpeted what was at stake in disputes over the content and practice of true Christianity.

As a drama, then – a narrative performed, or enacted – martyrdom invites the outsider to consider the truth to which the martyr testifies. In martyrdom, speech and action are spectacularly united

Brad S Gregory - Salvation at Stake

Quite the most brilliant account of martyrdom in the Reformation is Salvation at Stake by Brad S. Gregory. Two things he has said have caught my eye:

Firstly, this about the relation of the will to the martyr's 'act':

The voluntary nature of martyrdom was profoundly paradoxical: the martyr’s agency depended up relinquishing control, their strength upon a naked admission of their utter impotence and total dependence on God. p.132

This is an essential description of the role of the will in the Christian life, in fact. It is, yes, an exercise of will, but in the form of a submissive and obedient - a properly faithful - will.

Secondly, this, on the inability of the contemporary world to file martydom in a convenient part of its draws:

…the martyr’s own words and actions show that whatever utility the postmodern, New Historicist notion of Renaissance self-fashioning might have, it is inapplicable to them. Prison experience entailed not calculating agency and self-interest, but passivity in a double sense – both suffering and “being done unto”. Behind stone walls there were no courtly patrons from whom to curry favor, no theatrical poses to strike; the Lord saw behind every mask, including dissimulation of his truth. The only sensible course of action lay not in “constructing” a self, but in stripping away every pretense to acknowledge the self one was: a weak, enfleshed soul, created by and radically dependent on God. p.133

Properly understood on its own terms, then, the martyr's intentions cannot somehow be reduced by Foucauldian cynicism to 'self-fashioning', or the construction of a suitable posture for the self. In fact, rather, we see here an unselfing...