Although it's Eastertide, I'm kinda stuck on Good Friday. The faculty staged a preview of this year's Sprunt Lectures by convening a panel discussion on Margaret Miles' recent article in The Christian Century.
Miles argues that in the early and medieval Church, the symbol par excellence of God's love was the Virgin Mary nursing the baby Jesus. But in the early modern period the breast became secularized and eroticized, and the cross replaced the lactating Virgin as the paradigmatic icon of God's love. Miles laments this shift, for the result is a modern culture which objectifies women's bodies and glorifies violence.
The historian on the panel, as I saw it, politely demolished the notion that the cross is an inherently problematic symbol and the nursing Virgin an inherently benign symbol. True, early Christians were loathe to incorporate crosses into their art, but that's because the Emperor Constantine viewed the cross as a symbol of pacifistic insubordination to the Empire. Moreover, when an 11th century Byzantine Emperor launched a campaign to pacify the countryside, his army marched under the banners of the Virgin and Christ child. Our historian reminded us of a chapel service last month led by our Korean students in which a symbol of the hope for Korean unification was displayed, two pieces of wood, one from each side of the border, fastened together to form a cross (i.e., crosses aren't always a tool the Man uses to keep down The Other).
What he didn't do was dispute Miles's argument about how and why a lactating Virgin Mary disappeared from Christian iconography. I'd like to hear more about that.
Our theologian acknowledged the fact that the cross is a multivalent symbol, but noted that what's important is how the cross is preached and depicted and expressed gratitude for Miles's concerns about a brutally eroticized culture.
My opinion: "Getting rid of the cross" is a non-starter. Purging Christianity of the idea of sacrifice is non-starter. Verse for verse, the biblical writers are far more interested in the blood of sheep, goats and the Nazarene than they are in his mother's milk. A cross-less Christianity would be thin gruel indeed; just look at Joel Osteen, as our historian pointed out.
That said, I'd be happy to see nursing Virgins re-entering Christian art, and nursing mommies out and about. Women ought to take their breasts back from the plastic surgeons and oogling men.
Protestants generally would benefit from a rise in the Virgin's profile. The Annunciation can shed a lot of light on that peculiarly Reformed theological neurosis--predestination. Mary's faithfulness in suckling her son, despite Simeon's ominous prophecy that such love would only be paid back in grief, is as challenging and inspiring a call story as this Sunday's gospel lesson in which the Risen Jesus bids Peter follow him to his own crucifixion. Protestants shouldn't make Mary the linchpin in the chain of salvation in the way that Medieval art and theology did, which Miles nicely delineates in the article, but the deafening silence among us on Mary does no one any good.
Protestants would also benefit from reassessing our theologies of the cross. Listening to many a preacher, you'd think that God was like that angry guy who came home from work and kicked the dog. Or, you'd think that the cross was the result of a divinely pre-ordained scheme of salvation which makes unintelligible the culpability of Judas, Pontius Pilate or the chief priests.
Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, to which we owe the theory of penal substitution, is much more subtle than that. Anselm acknowledges early on that Jesus's relentless pursuit of justice in an unjust world led inevitably to his crucifixion, thus holding together the historical particulars and the cosmic significance of Jesus's death.
He also held the Son's divine and human natures together, so that you don't end up with a Father who scapegoats His Son, but a God-Human who is the only one who can make satisfaction for sin because, 1. satisfaction has to be made by a human and 2. the debt owed approaches infinity, making satisfaction a possibility for God alone.
Anselm also didn't have the last word on the cross. There was Abelard, who conceived the cross as the ultimate example of God's love, rather than the payment of a debt. There were the many patristic theologians who interpreted the cross as a victory over demonic powers which held humanity captive. It's important that preachers and theologians not shoehorn every scripture into a theology of penal substitution. Some texts lend themselves to that (Isaiah 52-3), but others do not. Rather than giving up on the cross (and thus giving it over to the sole proprietorship of Mel Gibson), preachers, artists and theologians need to help the cross be seen and heard in its diversity, like the facets of a diamond.
One of the best recent words on the cross was penned by my friend Rosemary Power for the new issue of Coracle, the Iona Community's magazine. (Alas, her article is not online yet, but you can check for it here). Rosemary has written a moving theological reflection on a prayer long-associated with the Iona Community :
O Christ, the Master Carpenter,
who at the last, through wood and nails,
purchased our whole salvation,
wield well your tools
in the workshop of the world,
so that we who come rough-hewn to your bench
may here be fashioned
to a truer beauty of your hand.
We ask it for your own name's sake. Amen.
This is not a God who kicks the dog when He's angry. Rosemary notes how the aristocratic author of the prayer broke with convention and his own privileged upbringing in introducing us to a Christ who is not a royal overlord, but a worker plying his trade.
The prayer is realistic about the violence and sin in the world and in ourselves. Note the irony that the Master Carpenter's artistic media is turned against him at the end. But poem envisions Christ's atoning work not as satisfying divine vengeance but as a purchase, like the pearl of great price, of something valuable--the human race--for which Jesus is willing to pay anything.
Nor does the poem leave us as disinterested bystanders to a transaction between the Son and the Father, as some atonement theories do. Rosemary writes:
This is at the heart of the prayer: that in saying it we ask for the courage to take the risk of being changed, to allow our hurts to become part of the grain and the strength of the wood. The prayer offers the laying aside of our autonomy to become active participants in allowing God to work with us in our reshaping, freed from the passive domination of our own will and allowing ourselves to be shaped for wider use. It is allowing ourselves to be part of the house of God, fulfilling God's work on earth, being joined in unexpected ways to the other people implied in the 'we,' prepared in the 'truer beauty' as beams, lintels, doorsteps, rooftrees, parts of the body that are the temple and indwelling of Christ.
A carpenter's bench and a nursing mother can disclose the mystery of salvation as much as a courtroom can. We cannot get rid of the cross, but we can interpret it and other symbols of salvation in ways that are edifying.
Hi, I am from Australia.
The trouble with all of the usual Christian propaganda, texts, and arguments re blood and the body, is that they inevitably reduce everything, especially human beings, to the gross meat-body level ONLY.
They thus do not even allow for even the possibility of a Spiritually informed spirit-breathing Way of Life.
Such gross meat-body based ideas mis-"inform" all of the usual "religious" arguments.
To be identified with a meat-body ONLY, is to be hell-deep saturated with fear (of the death of ones body).
And to be inherently fear-full of all other bodies, human and other-wise. And indeed of the entire world process altogether which will eventually (and CAN at any moment) reduce ones body to mince-meat.
For instance the words Consciousness and Light (the energy of Consciousness)are seldom, if ever, used in any of the usual Christian arguments, or in/on the hundreds of Christian blogs. It is all meat-body stuff, and argument ONLY. And the INEVITABLE dreadful applied politics of fear-saturated meat-bodies.
That having been said please find two references which give a completely different Spiritual Understanding of the body, whatever the body is altogether. And of its un-inspected binding meanings too. Un-inspected meanings which bind us to fearful infantile and childish mortality, and which thus prevent us from growing up.
http://www.dabase.org/2armP1.htm#ch1b
http://www.dabase.org/meaning.htm
Plus on the hell-deep fear of death in being identified with the mortal meat-body
http://www.adidam.org/death_and_dying/index.html
How to live a Spirit breathing way of life which takes bodily existence fully into account.
http://www.adidam.org/teaching/truth-life.aspx
Plus on the bloody scapegoat politics INEVITABLY dramatized by dreadfully sane meat-body personalities.
http://www.dabase.org/p5egoicsociety.htm
Posted by: John | 02 May 2010 at 11:56 PM