Some Thesis 'bits'

Just so I can have something here for people when they say 'what did you say in your thesis', here are some sentences which sum it up well:



"Christian discipleship means giving one's self over to a divine designation, even if that means suffering and death."



"Christian martyrdom is merely the working out in a particular circumstance of the identity in which individual Christians participate."



"...no account of identity can be theologically adequate that does not acknowledge the crucial significance of temptation ... and providence."



"The crowning of martyrs is...a divine rather than a human business."



"The focus in Christian martyrdom is...on the vindication, rather than the innocence, of the martyr."



"...the act of renunciation is performed as a witness to, and in imitation of, Christ; and thus involves the martyr in a close identification of himself with this other self, emerging fro his union with Christ."



"In a critical gesture, then, the self-as-martyr testifies to the provisionality of human systems of security relative to divine providence."



"Truth and love are the non-negotiables, not pain."



"...martyrdom is not merely a stance of eternal dissidence; it is a witness to the rule of God in Christ."



"...the followers of Christ are authorised to manifest his powerful and universala rule by means of communicative and persuasive acts of witness."

Some Perspective

A poster on Ruth Gledhill's blog shared this:

"This is to let you know the sad news that David Mohamed Ali, a Somali Christian evangelist and a long-standing member of St Matthew's, was shot dead last week by two Islamist terrorists in Badoia, Somalia, because of his Christian faith. He had been sent to Badoia by Ethiopian and Somali borderpolice, for reasons that are not clear.

David was an intelligent and gifted evangelist who thought deeply about hisf aith. For a while he ran a website for Christian Somalis. I had recentlygiven him a reference to do a Degree in Theology at ETC (EvangelicalTheological College), Addis Ababa. He was single man, aged about 35, who was based in Addis Ababa but travelled widely sharing his faith.

We thank God for his life and courageous witness, and pray for his mother,sister and other members of his family. We also pray for the Somali Christian community, that they may be comforted and strengthened at thistime when Christians are under great pressure in Somalia.
David's death comes just two weeks after four Christian teachers (2 British Somalis and 2 Kenyans) were killed in Beledwayne, Somalia."



[Ruth has been running an excellent series on persecution - really different stuff for a major newspaper. ]

Black Watch

In a comment on a previous discussion, Drew alerted me to a very recent play, Black Watch. The play follows in the tradition of Journey's End, and The Long and the Short and the Tall, stage plays which described the horrors of war. Black Watch, based partly on interviews with real soldiers, does it for the current Iraq war.

Towards the end, one of the officers offers a monologue including this comment:

We in the West have failed to understand the logic of suicide terrorism. The choice to become a religious martyr is the outcome of a struggle to establish an identity in adolescence. The possibility of death, once accepted, presents an alternative idea of the self as a religious warrior. They're looking for glory, and they seem to be finding it in martyrdom. Glory, however, is something which my boys are very unlikely to emerge with. The controversy around this war means there'll be no victory parade for us... (p. 58)

I am interested that this text connects some of the themes of my study. Interestingly, the play is about the struggle for identity and an idea of self in the young soldiers on the Western side...Of course, I think Christian martyrdom evades this characterisation. This comment is revealing as to the extent that martyrdom is understood as a flashpoint... it's the possibility of death. In the West, it isn't accepted that this could present an alternative and valid idea of the self...

Martyrdom in the Gospel of Judas

Harold Attridge has a fascinating review article of some books on the gnostic Gospel of Judas here.

Interestingly, Elaine Pagels and Karen King read the Gospel of Judas as an anti-martyrdom tract - in contrast to the orthodox promotion of martyrdom, which they read as propping up the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Of course, a contemporary theological protest against martyrdom is very much in evidence in their sympathetic reading of Judas. Attridge puts it this way:

'Not far below the surface of their analysis, it should be said, lies a fairly clear theological position that is open to debate. Their book, in other words, offers not simply a historical analysis but also a contemporary argument, though the two are almost always interconnected. They clearly want to protest the kind of religiosity that glorifies martyrdom, a glorification they see as contrary to efforts to improve the human condition. In an age of suicide bombers and jihadists, many might sympathize with that critique of a bloodthirsty religion. But perhaps there is also something to be learned from the Church that celebrated martyrs, told tales of their gory ends, built shrines to their memories, and linked their deaths with that of Jesus.

'A yearning for death and fascination with pain and suffering are certainly pathological and inimical to human well-being. Yet suicidal martyrs are only a part of the story of early Christianity and the contemporary Church. Alongside the fanatics, and probably outnumbering them, were those who insisted that divine reality demands both justice and compassion, that violence is not the way to solve human problems, and that by the example of their deaths they were upholding, and helping to spread, these beliefs. It is a willingness to stand firmly for peaceful Christian values, even at the cost of death, that the Christian martyrological tradition celebrates, and can be seen from many examples, starting with Saint Stephen in the first century and Perpetua and Felicity in third-century Carthage, and continuing on to Archbishop Oscar Romero and Sister Jean Donovan and her companions in twentieth-century El Salvador.'

This is well put. There is no point in denying there were maniacal martyrs in the early church - there certainly were! But that is not the whole story, not by a long shot.

martyrdom and bellydancing...

We were talking about martyrdom and the act of relinquishment of self-hood that it models. And then my friend (whose identity I won't disclose) said:

it is kinda like doing the shimmy in belly dance... you gotta learn how to stand right, to position yourself, to hold it... and simultaneously let go so that your fat wobbles

Personally, I wouldn't know... but if she says so!

Talal Asad explains why we find suicide bombing horrific

Asad's examination of this subject should cause the secular liberal west an uneasy conscience. It is a fierce account indeed.

Why is that suicide bombing produces this reaction of particular horror from westerners? He gives four reasons, each of which points to 'identity being destroyed'.

1- an unexpected suicide is always shocking - it disrupts the pattens of everyday life with an unregulated violence. War, by contrast, though even more horrible possibly, is legitimated and deemed necessary to defend our forms of life.

2 - we in the west depend on laws which make crime and punishment seperable. But in suicide bombing, there is no possibility of punishment or restitution.

3 - modern subjectivity is held together by the tensions between individual self-assertion and collective obedience to the law, reverence for human life and its legitimated destruction and so on. Suicide bombing pays no regard to this fragile balance of tensions on which the democratic state seems to depend.

4 - Asad suggests that the Judeo-Christian tradition has bequeathed to secular witnesses the thought that there ought to be redemption in death. The suicide bomber communicates only that there is death and only death...

How much of this loathing is ALSO felt at the thought of martyrdom? I think a great deal. Asad is right: it isn't the idea of a redemptive death that is abhorrent to the secular person. Despite WWI, we accept deaths in the cause of horizons of significance like 'democracy' not exactly readily, but certainly, we find them intelligible. And we don't overturn governments that sanction this kind of sacrifice. But public deaths for a religious cause are horrifying because religion is essentially private. That dividing line is brutally shattered in martyrdom, as it is in suicide bombing.

Talal Asad - On Suicide Bombing

Talal Asad is a terrifically interesting writer on religion and secularism - though his views are certainly not incontestable. I picked up a copy of his book On Suicide Bombing.

In its opening pages he writes that:

...I draw on some aspects of Christian theology: the crucifixion is the most famous suicide in history, whose horror is transmuted into the project of redeeming universal humanity - again through a combination of cruelty and compassion. p. 3

I did a double-take of course. A suicide? Hmm... Turning to the later passages in his book he DOES have some very interesting things to say about the atonement (as Charles Taylor does in The Secular Age). But he takes as his guide Aulen's very dated Christus Victor...

Trying to get the crucial paragraph right

As it seems to happen with theses, refining the argument is pretty much the last thing to fall into place. So, here is an attempt to get the crucial paragraph in the introductory chapter really right. Hmmm...

This dissertation asks: what kind of self is the Christian martyr? – and by doing so, seeks also to critique existing concepts of selfhood and identity. What are the implications for human identity of Christian martyrdom? Confessing ‘I am a Christian’, as the martyrs do, is also a refusal to accept alternative construals of one’s identity. It is a refusal to make or discover one’s own meaning through (for example) security, pleasure, power, action, nationhood, ethnicity, or honour. Rather, in the midst of a world in which the human individual is under threat of disintegration, it is an offering of one’s self up to the providence of God. This is learned from and empowered by the life, death, resurrection and promised return of Jesus Christ. As such, the martyred self offers a sharp appraisal of other forms of self-making.

New books on martyrdom

Two very good and readable books which explore martyrdom have come to my attention recently. One is Chris Huebner's A Precarious Peace; the other is Craig Hovey's To Share in the Body.

Both writers are clearly of the Hauerwas-Yoder school, though I don't mean that to be a pigeon-holing of them. I particularly enjoyed this, about promise, from Hovey:

...the truth of a martyr's testimony is like the meaning of the martyr's death: both are gifts. Promise is the way that a gift is known. It is known without being grasped, leaving the promise maker free to fulfill the promise. It is impossible to have a promise without the promise maker. Grasping after promises turns promises into brute knowledge bereft of surprises and alienates the free action of the promise maker. Ultimately grasping actually results in the death of the promise maker, just as the heri in the parable of the vineyard is not just beaten and sent away but killed. A bruised heir will still inherit the vineyard according to the promise of inheritance; the heir's death is the only way to secure tenancy as a possession.

In the same way, a dead Jesus allows for a knowledge of grasping, controlling, and manipulating. Promises are unwound, detatched from both thei beginning and end. They float free as words and phrases that are made to function according to the logic of convenience, persuasion, defense, and ideology. When they are spoken, it becomes impossible for such words to constitute true testimony because their truth was only ever bound up with the continuing faithfulnes of the one who gave them to us. Ironically, the grasping and controlling that released knowledge from promise in hopes of imparting direct access to them has actually worked counter-productively. Such knowledge may be useful for accomplishing ends, but it can no longer be true knowledge, as direct apprehension is revelaed to be a myth in which what is apprehended is evacuated of anything new of real. A dead Jesus means dead knowledge.
In contrast, though, the Holy Spirit is the spirit of the risen Christ, whose presence owes to Jeuss's promise to remain with his disciples and not leave them on their own. The gift that is the Holy Spirit continues to give the gifts of promise... p. 145-6

Ben asks a great question

My old uni friend Ben T. asked this great question in response to an earlier post. I thought it was too worthwhile to be buried, so I have taken the liberty of reproducing it:


Hey Michael, can I pose (badly) two questions that have been concerning me over the question of martyrdom and the contemporary Western church? I'minterested to know what you think.
The first is a question that I am sure you have done much more thinkingabout than me. In Desire of the Nations, O'Donovan says:

"Much martyrdom is suffered simply at the hands of the barbarians orcivilisational revanchists, for whom the combination of irreligion andviolence is more attractive than the rule of law. One can be martyredfor refusing sexual demands, for opposing ruthless landlords, forasking embarrassing questions about forgotten prisoners, and for manyother things. But these occasions of martyrdom are sporadic andunpredictable. The martyrdom to which the church must always be lookingforward (from what distance, who can tell?) is the martyrdom exacted bycivilisation itself when it lifts its arms against God. A church too determined to be at home in the world will be unprepared for this, andso 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 andquestion 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?

I think these are such important questions I am not going to answer them straight away....

How Suicide Bombing Began...

David Brooks, in the Atlantic Monthly of June 2002, conflates martyrdom and suicide bombing in discussing how since the 1980s Islamic terrorists have changed their tactics:

The red passions of the bombers obliterated the grays of the peace process. Suicide bombing became the tactic of choice, even in circumstances where a terrorist could have planted a bomb and then escaped without injury. Martyrdom became not just a means but an end...

...Recruits are sometimes made to lie in empty graves, so that they can see how peaceful death will be; they are reminded that life will bring sickness, old age, and betrayal. "We were in a constant state of worship," one suicide bomber (who somehow managed to survive his mission) told Hassan. "We told each other that if the Israelis only knew how joyful we were they would whip us to death! Those were the happiest days of my life!"

...Martyrdom has replaced Palestinian independence as the main focus of the Arab media. Suicide bombing is, after all, perfectly suited to the television age...

...it's time to face the reality that the best resource the terrorists have is the culture of martyrdom. This culture is presently powerful, but it is potentially fragile. If it can be interrupted, if the passions can be made to recede, then the Palestinians and the Israelis might go back to hating each other in the normal way, and at a distance. As with many addictions, the solution is to go cold turkey.

Christology and martyrdom

[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.

Wannenwetsch on Martyrdom

Political Worship is a book with myriad juicy excurses (as well as a compelling central thesis too).

In responding to Milbank, Wannenwetsch writes:

'Here we are forced to remember that it was actually the Church in the form of its martyrs, who refused to submit to the power of those who were stronger, which gave what was perhaps the most forceful political thrust towards the dissolution of the Roman Empire, as people withdrew from the political worship of the Empire. The effect of the Christian martyrs must, of course, not be interpreted to mean that the principle of non-violence proved superior to Roman violence. Their impact was not based on any ontological ascendancy of non-violence over violence. It was due to the fact that the refusal to go along with the worship of the gods of war, who represented the imperial claim to rule, pointed to the question about the authorization or empowerment for such action. If Christians found this empowerment in their worship, that worship did not merely reflect the impossibility of joining in the worship of Roman tyranny; it also showed the possibility of seeing this risky refusal through. Even today, the decisive constructive question of political ethics is the question about the formation of power.' (p. 114)

'If the Christians had viewed their worship as a private domestic cult, they could easily have enjoyed the religious tolerance betsowed by the Roman authorities in this respect, and would have been spared the experience of martyrdom. As it was, martyrdom was inevitable, since the ekklesia was bound from the beginning to celebrate 'political worship'. It could not worship the Lord of the cosmos as the penates were worshipped' it had to do so in a way which its pagan environment could not avoid viewing as an insult to the gods of the state, and was bound to suffer the sanctions imposed upon an 'atheism' hostile to this state...' (p. 148)

Ethelbert Stauffer on 'The Martyr Church'

One of the few New Testament Theologies to pay direct attention to the concept of martyrdom is that of Ethelbert Stauffer, published in the 50s (at least, the English edition).

'We have already remarked how the life of Christ constitutes a prototype for the life of the believer. Nowhere is this pototype more concretely and seriously expressed than in the correlation between th epassion of Christ and the sufferings of the martyr Church.' p. 185

'The man who confesses Christ is taken up into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings; indeed his destiny is conformed to the death of Christ.' p. 185

Stauffer argues that the passion of Christ was envisaged under three themes: doxological, antagonistic and soteriological, and that the imitation of his passion must follow the same pattern.

Thus, martyrdom doxologically undergoes great suffering on the path to glory. Via crucis - via lucis ! What the world rejects, God honours and accepts and even glorifies.

Of course, this rests on the antagonism of the world: 'the doxological interpretation of martyrdom finally comes to expression in an antagonistic conception: the tempter, the accuser, the opponent, the violent enemy and slanderer and evil one, the opponent of the generation of the righteous, puts everything in the wolrd to action so as to effect the downfall of the saints of God, or to destroy them... (p. 186). Hence, the imagery of a battle or a struggle become more and more the stock in trade of the martyrologist - 'It is but a little thing for the Satanic powers of the world to get rid of God's witnesses. But the Christian who has confessed CHrist in his death stands for a power in history that cannot be got rid of, a reality not of this world that the persecutor can never master.'(p. 187)

The soteriological understanding of martyrdom links for Stauffer to the indea of the final massacre of the saints...'The witness who gives his life helps by his death to complete the toll of suffering that God has descreed for the world as punishment and expiation for its sin, so that the divine wrath should be truned and at long last the day of grace should dawn.' (p. 188) Martyrs in this way actually bear the afflictions of Christ in the service of his Church. The bear upon themselves the punishment of the world (after a fashion). Not in quite the decisive way that Christ does of course, but in imitation and conformity to him. After all:

'it is not just the Church of Christ that will benefit from the atoning power of the apostle's sufferings - the confessor suffers for mankind that despises him, the martyr dies for the cosmos that rejects him...the death of the martyrs is a plea for the ending of affliction, culminating as an intercession for the sins of many. (p. 188)

Yoder on suffering

Yoder says:

...the true missionary congregation is marked by suffering. This suffering, like that of the faithful servant in 1 Peter, is not the result of misbehaviour but of conformity with the path of Christ. It is not the resigned acceptance of limitations or injustice in an imperfect world but the meaningful assuming of the cost of nonconformed obedience.

It is no accident that the word 'martyr' has the double meaning of testimony and innocent suffering. The suffering of the church is not a passing tight spot after which there can be hope of return to normalcy; it is according to both Scripture and experience the continuing destiny of any faithful Christian community... (From The Royal Priesthood p. 86).

Is it the continuing destiny? Is that true of experience, really? If suffering is here persecution, then surely that is not the case experientially. The suffering of the faithful servant in 1 Peter is not the sign of his faithfulness: it is, rather, the very real possibility that he courts. But his duty is not suffering but faithfulness. His faithfulness is the sign rather than his suffering. There is no hope of a return to normalcy, true: but neither is it quite true to say that it is the 'continuing destiny' of any faithful Christian community, as if the lack of suffering was a sign that the plot had been well and truly lost. Suffering itself conveys no dignity of its own.

Foucault, as often, gets it...

Nice stuff from Michel Foucault. By exomologesis he means the acts of penance by which you show yourself penitent...

Foucault / HERMENEUTICS OF THE SELF

To justify this exomologesis and this renunciation to oneself in manifesting the truth about oneself, Christian fathers had recourse to several models. The well-known medical model was very often used in pagan philosophy: one has to show his wounds to the physicians if he wants to be healed. They also used the judicial model: one always appeases the court when spontaneously confessing the faults. But the most important model to justify the necessity of exomologesis is the model of martyrdom. The martyr is he who prefers to face death rather than to abandon his faith. The sinner abandons the faith in order to keep the life of here below; he will be reinstated only if in his turn he exposes himself voluntarily to a sort of martyrdom to which all will be witnesses, and which is penance, or penance as exolmologesis. Such a demonstration does not therefore have as its function the establishment of the personal identity. Rather, such a demonstration serves to mark this dramatic demonstration of what one is: the refusal of the self, the breaking off from one's self. One recalls what was the objective of Stoic technology: it was to superimpose, as I tried to explain to you last week, the subject of knowledge and the subject of will by means of the perpetual rememorizing of the rules. The formula which is at the heart of exomologesis is, in contrary, ego non sum ego. The exomologesis seeks, in opposition to the Stoic techniques, to superimpose by an act of violent rupture the truth about oneself and the renunciation of oneself. In the ostentatious gestures of maceration, self-revelation in exomologesis is, at the same time, self-destruction.

Criteria for success?

An important task for the writer of a thesis is to set himself some criteria by which the success of his argument might be rated.

In my case, I am setting up my argument as a response to a Rushdie-led attack on the life which is given shape by Christian martyrdom. How will I be able to measure my success in this?

1 - If I can show that Rushdie has mis-described Christian martyrdom, or at least, that his account of martyrdom, while fitting for some religious and even some Christian martyrdoms, does not fit for authentic Christian martyrdom. It is just not accurate. So, his critique won't stick, though we may welcome the chance to clarify things.

2 - Further, Rushdie's concerns for human life and identity that he thinks are corrupted or negated by Christian martyrdom are actually affirmed by them. The human aspirations and longings that he records are actually fulfilled or better fulfilled in the Christian self-understanding.

3 - But: we don't necessarily want to accept the terms of the discussion as set by Rushdie and others. My aim is not to win according to the terms he sets, but to through his terms into question. This I fear happens with a number of theological accounts of martyrdom where the concept is so broadened to include people who die for liberal or democratic or tolerant values. To include someone that Rushdie accepts is not my idea of victory. Gandhi was not a Christian martyr, however noble he was. Neither do I want to be reduced to a consequentialist debate. That would undo the whole point of martyrdom, which is a witness to 'another' reality.

4 - If I can show that the martyr's life and death has an explanatory power that continues to be compelling for human life, then I will have succeeded (I like to imagine). That is, to show that martyrdom is a form of 'piety', but that 'piety' is utterly transformed under the acid of martyrdom, so that we accept the challenge of the Rushdies but do not accept entire their framing of the challenge...

Jeffrey Stout and Piety II

Piety - an intriguing notion. It was precisely for lack of piety - meaning that mix of civil and religious duty - that the early martyrs were killed.

I think the accusation is still very much in play: Christians, if/when they are faithful witnesses, stand accused of impiety against the liberal secular order.

Stout describes modern piety thus:

Piety ... is not to be understood primarily as a felling, expressed in acts of devotion, but rather as a virtue, a morally excellent aspect of character. It consists in just or appropriate response to the sources of one's existence and progress through life. Family, political community, the natural wolrd, and God are all said to be sources on which we depend, sources to be acknowledged appropriately. Emersonians and Augustinians agree that piety, in this sense, is a crucial virtue, and they share an interest in clarifying the proper relationship between civic and religious piety. But they disagree over how the sourecs should be conceived and what constitutes appropriate acknowledgment of our dependence on them. ( Democracy and Tradition, p. 20)

Benedict XVI proves my point...

The pope's latest encyclical, whose title is 'In hope we are saved', proves my point about the renewed interest in martyrdom:

Certainly, in our many different sufferings and trials we always need the lesser and greater hopes too—a kind visit, the healing of internal and external wounds, a favourable resolution of a crisis, and so on. In our lesser trials these kinds of hope may even be sufficient. But in truly great trials, where I must make a definitive decision to place the truth before my own welfare, career and possessions, I need the certitude of that true, great hope of which we have spoken here. For this too we need witnesses—martyrs—who have given themselves totally, so as to show us the way—day after day. We need them if we are to prefer goodness to comfort, even in the little choices we face each day—knowing that this is how we live life to the full. Let us say it once again: the capacity to suffer for the sake of the truth is the measure of humanity. Yet this capacity to suffer depends on the type and extent of the hope that we bear within us and build upon. The saints were able to make the great journey of human existence in the way that Christ had done before them, because they were brimming with great hope

Why the renewed interest in martyrdom?

I think it is quite fair to say that, whereas martyrdom was scarcely mentioned by theologians of a generation ago, today martyrdom is mentioned by almost everybody. Why? What has changed?

Here are my speculations:

• as we have moved into a post-Christendom situation, theologians are more aware of a creeping hostility to their discipline, and to the church in the wider culture. Instead of feeling part of a largely Christianised culture, we now find ourselves seeking an identity in contradistinction to the culture. These are themes in the theologies of Milbank and Hauerwas among others, too.
• a move away from abstraction towards enfleshed particularity; the attraction of the exemplar, in moral terms rather than the theory.
• a growing awareness of the plight of Christians world-wide, and the way in which real martyrs have made a difference in terrible situations in recent times. Luwum and Romero, for example.
• has liberation theology made a difference here?
• the spectacle and fear of religious violence

Hmmm....