Samson: a tricky case study

Then Samson called to the LORD and said, "O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be avenged upon the Philistines for one of my two eyes." And Samson grasped the two middle pillars upon which the house rested, and he leaned his weight upon them, his right hand on the one and his left hand on the other. And Samson said, "Let me die with the Philistines." Then he bowed with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people that were in it. So the dead whom he slew at his death were more than those whom he had slain during his life.


A suicide bomber of a kind? Or a glorious martyr?

Augustine for his part writes that it was an exception ordered by God:
When God orders, and shows without ambiguity that he orders. no one will bring an accusation against obedience. Who will lay a charge against a loyal compliance?

A convenient case of the 'teleological suspension of the ethical', a la Abraham and Isaac?

Lacey Baldwin Smith gets it wrong...

In his book "Fools, Martyrs, Traitors - The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World", Lacey Baldwin Smith writes

Jesus the martyr, the man who elected to suffer and die, not the risen Christ, became the inspirational source for the philosophy of martyrdom that emerged during the next three centuries. p. 87

This strikes me as almost entirely misguided. It was in fact the resurrection - and ascension - that propelled martyrdom; or, at least, the resurrection as the vindication of the suffering and death. The martyrs did not merely die out of some imitation of Jesus' heroism, but out of a hope borne from his rising to life. They did not die merely out of admiration for him. They did not display courage only, but courage along with hope.

Perhaps the error here is: Jesus is not a martyr but a model for martyrs. Martyrs are not imititating Christ in his martyrdom, but rather becoming martyrs out of imitation of Christ.

Glorious...

As the Westminster Confession states it, the supreme goal of human beings is “to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” Human destiny – our noblest aspiration - lies Godwards: in the experience of heavenly bliss enfolded in his arms, glorifying him by loving him for his own sake.
The goal of glorifying God is not a means to some other end: it is its own end. As Moltmann puts it, “it is simply meaningful in itself.” As Augustine, in his On Christian Doctrine, explained: “sinners make use of God in order to use the world; but believers make use of the world in order to enjoy God.” Therefore, our relating to our world and even to ourselves is ordered to this glorious purpose.

And as Moltmann sees it (picking up an idea with strong roots in the Reformed tradition) the glorification of God is not primarily an ethical thing: it is aesthetic. This idea picks up from scripture the visually radiant scenes of God’s glory: Moses’ radiant face, the encounter of Isaiah with God in Isaiah 6, the glory of the light of God in John’s gospel, the woman’s hair in 1 Corinthians 11 and the sheer glow of the heavenly city in Revelation 21-22. The appropriate response to the vision of God’s glory is doxological; and so we are lead by the heavenly creatures and the beasts in Isaiah and Revelation: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty, the whole earth is full of his glory.”

How does this relate to our question? The goal of glorifying God is goal in the sense of a telos; but it is also our true destiny, because God himself will bring it about. But how? Moltmann describes the glorification of God not merely in terms of the self-glorification of a narcissistic deity, or as the result (in Hegelian terms) of his self-realisation through the process of history, but more as the overspill [my term] of his divine life into the creation. The language of the pleroma, the fullness of God, in John 1:16, Eph 3:19 and elsewhere reflects this idea, as does the remarkable promise of God being all in all in 1 Corinthians 15:28. As Moltmann puts it, “The fulness of God is the rapturous fullness of the divine life; a life that communicates itself with inexhaustible creativity…The fulness of God is radiant light, light reflected in the thousand brilliant colours of created things.” Jesus himself of course continually compared this future for humanity with God as a joyful wedding feast. It is a moment of ecstatic consummation to which the first imagined human reaction is profound joy.

The human identity is thus ordered to this particular destiny. It is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which took place by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom 4:17) that is the type of our destiny, sown in dishonour and raised in glory. Having made reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth, Jesus of Nazareth is the exact radiance of God’s being, the image of the invisible God: he fairly glows with God. Remarkably, the transformation was won from within the human sphere, by a man in the likeness of sinful flesh.

The promise of Christian eschatology is then something like this, from Philippians 3: “…our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” The new humanity will be glorious, but glorious because it is washed in the overspill of God’s own glory.

More Badiou

Differences, like instrumental tones, provide us with the recognizable univocity that makes up the melody of the True. p. 106

Badiou shows that Paul presents us with a schema of discourses. In Paul's thought world, both 'Jew' and 'Greek' operate as subjective dispositions or regimes of discourse: ways of thinking and speaking in others words. Jewish discourse is the discourse of the sign, the demand for miracles. On the other hand, the Greek discourse is the discourse of the logos, the demand for wisdom/rhetoric. The Jewish discourse is about election and exception; the Greek one is based on cosmic order and nature.

Paul's profound idea is that Jewish discourse and Greek discourse are the two aspects of the same figure of mastery. For the miraculous exception of the sign is only the 'minus-one', the point of incohernece which the cosmic totality requires in order to sustain itself...the Jew is in exception to the Greek. Neither of the two discourses can be universal, because each supposes the persistence of the other, ...and secondly, that the two discourses share the presupposition that the key to salvation is given to us within the universe, whether it be through the direct mastery of totality (Gk wisdom) or through mastery of the literal tradition and the deciphering of signs (JEwish ritualism and prophetism).

Humanity is riven in two, inevitably, on either conception.

The announcement of the gospel, that word about an event, is made without wisdom or depedence on sign (thought it is not the absolute destruction of either). The event of Christ's resurrection subverts both of these two discourses by not being dependent on either. It is the language of 'naked event', not of proof. Paul does not prove his gospel: he preaches it.

Paul sets up Christian discourse only by distinguising it further from a fourth possibility: the mystical 'discourse of non-discourse'. It is interesting to me that Badiou shows Paul repudiating this apophatic way, given its recent resurgence in those theologians interested in Derrida in particular.

Badiou on Paul

Alain Badiou's book 'Saint Paul - The Foundations of Universalism' is, like Zizek's work, a cheeky attempt to recover the genius of Paul for the 21st century.

In brief, his thesis is that Paul was able to combine the notion of truth with the subjectivity of the inward experience in a remarkable way:

...Paul himself teaches us that it is not the signs of power that count, nor exemplary lives, but what a conviction is capable of, here, now, and forever. p. 30

Badiou reads Paul's lettes as 'interventions' - that is, they are radically situational, militant documents, more Lenin than Marx, more Wittgenstein than Russell (more Luther than Calvin, I would add.) Paul is an 'antiphilosopher', propounding a 'speech of rupture, and writing ensues when necessary.' p. 31 His is the thought of event and conviction rather than Law or Logos.

Paul operates out of an inward, subjective but nonetheless actual truth, the truth of his conversion. This kind of truth has little time for outward customs, which a merely limp enactments incapable of really mirroring or capturing or expressing the inner conviction.

The Wreck of Human Culture

John Carroll, professor of sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is not afraid of big ideas. His 2004 book The Wreck of Human Culture – a substantial reworking of a 1993 effort – ­is a passionate, daring and sustained attack on the bloodlines of what we call “the West.” He calls his book “a spiritual history of the West.” He writes with a refreshing polemical zeal and with none of the hedging and over-qualifying so characteristic of academic prose.

Carroll’s claim is that “humanism” – by which he means the intellectual and cultural movement originating in the Renaissance – has had its deficiencies exposed in the latter-day collapse of western culture. Most particularly, the humanist belief in the supremacy of the human free will as alternative to obedience to God has been revealed as self-defeating – not least by the devastating symbolism of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The strategy Carroll employs for demonstrating this thesis is a selectively genealogical one. In a deliberate snub of postmodern orthodoxy, he examines some of the finest works of high culture in the humanist half-millennium: Hamlet, Holbein’s The Ambassadors, Rembrandt and Poussin, Mozart and Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzche, the novels of Henry James and the films of John Ford. It is an idiosyncratic choice and an unorthodox method, which Carroll justifies because these exceptional masterpieces have “tapped the deepest truths of their time” (p.9). His interaction with these works is stimulating and masterful and makes The Wreck of Human Culture a pleasure to read.
Crucial to the history Carroll traces is the famous sixteenth century debate over the freedom of the human will between the doyen of European humanism, Erasmus of Rotterdam and the German reformer Martin Luther. Carroll bravely reads Luther as more anti-humanist than anti-Roman Catholic. The irenic Erasmus was a reasonable man. If there is no human free-will, he argues, why should the wicked reform? But Luther’s teaching of justification by faith alone meant a complete rejection of this reliance on human will and reason. For Luther, the human being is a slave to sin and sentenced to death; and must come, empty-handed, to the cross of the crucified Christ. Mere morality was a hopeless absurdity. The heart of the Protestant reformation, rooted in the writings of Paul, is an acknowledgement of the helplessness of the human as a result of sin and death and a need for absolute dependence on God. Humanism, with its alternative diagnosis of the basic goodness of human beings and their freedom to be moral, leads inevitably to the rejection of God. There are some mealy-mouthed versions of Christianity that espouse this kind of thinking, even today: but the calamities of history must be held up against them as evidence. Man has proved a very poor god; and ultimately, death still undoes him.

Luther’s insight is as crucial today as it ever was. What Protestant - in other words, Biblical - Christianity offers is a radically different diagnosis of the human condition. The humanist vision has been played out in full and now offers no comfort to the human soul. Carroll offers his work as a contribution to the funeral of humanism (p.268), with a warning for us not to give it another run.

But what does he offer as an alternative? Carroll enjoins the West to start again, to reach back into the past and recapture that right “enthusiasm for man and his works that the Renaissance attempted to enshrine” (p.266). He means by this a simple delight in place of the infatuation with the human that has bought us so badly undone. Carroll writes: “The culture of the West will not be renewed until the moment it kills Luther’s monster [ie death], and once again achieves a death of death” (p.267). For Carroll, it is in the art of Poussin that a particular alternative is indicated. Though the Frenchman Poussin was a Roman Catholic, Carroll claims that in his pictures he was able to represent Luther’s great ideas. He, too, sees that “darkness where the light of neither law nor reason shines” (p.70). He, too, sees the necessity for life and hope to come from outside sources and to be recognised as gifts. Yet he differs from Luther, writes Carroll, in that he appeals to a radically different divinity – “the sacred breath moving through the mythos” (p.71).

William Cavanaugh: Torture and Eucharist

Cavanaugh's book is a lucid and fascinating application of theology to recent history. He successfully keeps the lines open between the experience of those in Chile under Pinochet's regime and his conceptual/theological discussion. One of the interesting things here is that he recognises that martyrdom, which relies so much on the public nature of the suffering and the memorialisation of the martyr in stone and ritual, is thwarted somewhat by the modern regime's ability to operate in secret; and even its ability to not NOT kill but only torture its victims. The old pattern of martyrdom is not allowed a staging by contemporary states.

A couple of quotes on the way:

The imitation of Christ is not reducible to some principle such as “love”, but is rather a highly skilled performance learned in a disciplined community of virtue by careful attention to the concrete contours of the Christian life and death as borne out by Jesus and the saints p. 62

What is needed instead is rather a more eschatological and more ecclesial notion of what is meant by dying for one’s faith…one which does not make sharp distinctions between the ‘religious’ dimension of confessing Jesus as Lord and the “political “ implications of such a confession… The ancient church understood the martyrs’ deaths as an inevitable consequence of imitating Jesus, who was put to death for inaugurating a new reign which stood in contrast to the powers and principalities of the world. p. 62

He futher writes:

A martyr is one who lives imaginatively as if death does not exist.

and:

The eschatological imagination sees that, although they presume to kill us, Christ has vanquished the powers of death once and for all. The eschatological imagination of martyrdom is not a vertical ascension to another place and time, a distant heaven; the movement instead brings a foretaste of heavenly space-time to earth. p. 65

Marilyn McCord Adams on redemptive suffering...

An interesting comment from Regius Prof Marilyn McCord Adams:

Christians can be martyrs and fill up the sufferings of Christ (Col 1:24) only to the extent that he cleanses them first. That is why continual repentance is not only necessary for the Christian's own reconciliation with Christ but also the best contribution he can make toward solving the problem of evil.

So, then, the work for Christians to do in the face of evil - in the first place - is to deal our own personal evils such that we may become effective witnesses to the judgment and redemption of God.

The shape of my project...

Well I am after your advice again!

I am at the point in my project when I really need to decide what it is about more specifically. Martyrdom as a theological theme provides the core, I know this already (that is, it is not a historical study of certain martyrs, but a conceptual/theological application/exploration of the concept of Christian martyrdom). I also know that I will be using TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral as the springboard for my discussion, and that methodologically I will use scriptural exposition and reference to a small bullpen of thinkers from the tradition. Here are the two alternatives I have before me at the moment:

1) Who are Christian martyrs?
When the martyr Secunda said to her interrogator 'I wish to be none other that I am ' who was it that she understood herself to be? How did those who remembered and celebrated her death understand her identity? What kind of self is the Christian martyr? This dissertation seeks to explore and expound Christian identity via the motif of martyrdom, which is the possibility latent in the Christian identity. Martyrdom thus analysed suggests itself as a great way to understand Christian identity in its own terms and in comparison to alternatives. So, how might a discourse of authentic selfhood (for example), one of our contemporary ways of thinking about selfhood, accomodate or interpret martyrdom and its self-denial?

Which is to say, the point of all this discussion of martyrdom is to outline a 'martyrological self' or a 'witnessing self'. The issue here is inteded to be the question of identity, or selfhood, though in fact I may decide that the Christian martyr refuses to BE a self as we understand it, and sees himself/herself in terms of another self.

2) What good do Christian martyrs do?
This study seeks to answer the question what good do Christian martyrs do? That is: following Dr Susan Parsons’ comment ‘the martyr sets ethics on edge’ we inquire as to how and why this is. Or, to put it another way, what kind of practical rationality can include Christian martyrdom as its highest expression, or at least as the external representation of its inner reality?

We pose this question in a context in which the very notion of religious martyrdom itself is viewed with considerable suspicion. It is a concept often critiqued as not good or as a lesser good: as denying the good of life; as promoting a victim complex, and thus the pursuit of violent retaliation by religious groups; as neglecting real opportunities for service and justice; as chasing shadows rather than concrete, this-worldly realities; as hypocritically and egotistically pursuing its own self-dramatisation and heavenly honour (martyrdom as a form of narcissism).

This is then, a more directly ethically oriented study, trying to understand what kind of act Christian martyrdom is in moral/theological terms. Is it an act at all, indeed?

Pacificism?

We have been reading Stanley Hauerwas and so inevitably we came upon the issue of pacificism, which he advocates strongly. In one of his toughest articles, Hauerwas argues that Just War theories are a failure of the Christian imagination, or of faith: that we fail to believe that God could bring about communities - and even countries - of peace on the earth, assuming that war is inevitable this side of Jesus' return. Assuming the inevitability of war dooms you to always pursue it and justify it.

The exegetical force of Hauerwas' argument (which he gets from Yoder of course) is that this is what Jesus himelf would have taught, and certainly what he would have enacted (notwithstanding that he doesn't call on soldiers in his audiences to leave the army but rather to be just soldiers...).

I am impressed but not convinced. I cannot see but that the kind of eschatological peace that Hauerwas hopes for is not given to nations in this way in this age, at least certainly not permanently. I cannot but see that we are left to make tragic calculations about the justice of the wars that might be pursued and that it is often our right calling to do so. We may so define just war so that it could never be pursued. But still we might retain the possibility that force may be needed to protect the innocent and pursue justice...