#culturally and temporally (and just seasons being seasons) means bringing way more clothes than I would for a just summer trip

[waugh-bao]

[encephalonfatigue]

advent, power, and bodies that matter

an opening introduction to a series of Advent contemplations leading through Christmas, into Epiphany.

I have been thinking a lot about bodies this year. Bodies have been all over the headlines, so maybe you have been thinking a lot about bodies also. Maybe you have watched shaky phone footage of unarmed Black bodies being gunned down in the street. Maybe you have heard a lot about how powerful men have sexually assaulted bodies of women in their lives.

The human body is a site of great tension. Firstly, there is something sacred about human bodies. We frequently intuit that bodies are precious, deserving and requiring care, and it pains us so much to see bodies around us so disgracefully violated or brutalized. Secondly, however, there can be something really terrifying about bodies – bodies, which are capable of enacting this type of violent dominance over other bodies. Nuclear weapons are the result of human bodies as much as hospitals and schools are.

If one takes seriously the claims of rigorous science, then we can recognize that bodies were shaped by the time and space within which they evolved. The environment over thousands and millions of years have yielded human beings capable of great love and nurturing, but also human beings capable of great brutality and violence. The notion of ‘falleness’, to my mind, is an honest recognition of this human capacity for violence and cruelty, particularly in circumstances of highly unequal power. 

Beyond the last million years of hominidal evolution, human bodies exist along an even larger timeline of cosmic processes, within an unimaginably enormous universe whose outer limits are accelerating farther and farther away beyond any distance we are likely to be capable of probing in the near future. The magnitude of time and space possibly gives us the impression that maybe there’s nothing much to fuss about when it comes to human bodies. Maybe we’ve just gotten carried away, and maybe our fixation on human bodies is a form of narcissism that simply has yet to be overcome.

But I think this is a failure to recognize that human bodies are a mysterious thread within an even more mysterious tapestry, which is biological life on this Earth. Sure we may speculate that biological life does likely exist elsewhere in this universe. But the fact that we have found it so difficult to encounter in the short time we’ve been exploring space as a species, does reveal that biological life is somewhat rare, in the sense that it composes a very tiny almost negligible proportion of the universe. Does its negligible size signify its negligible importance? Marilynne Robinson beautifully wrote:

“Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant, or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view. Scarcity is said to create value, after all. Of course, value is a meaningful concept only where there is relationship, someone to do the valuing.”

The “puff of warm breath” is tongue in cheek reference to James 4:14: “Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” Yet even with the demise of the human species in sight, or biological life as we know it, it is beautiful to contemplate that the miracle of biological life (including the emergence of human bodies) ever happened at all. In contrast to Ray Brassier’s sort of nihilism that believes that because nothing will endure, nothing is worth our time, John Caputo’s ’nihilism of grace’ sees nihilism as a gift, the very precarity and fragility from which life derives its value. It’s important precisely because it is so finite and rare. This finite nature of life provoked me to contemplate death last Advent.

So maybe what is often cynically mislabelled as anthropocentric narcissism is in fact touching on something important. Beyond just biological life, maybe the temporality of our solar system, in whatever duration it lasts for, is beautiful nonetheless. In all its imperfections as a mere blip in the vastness of time, it still permitted something as tiny but precious as human love to flourish. 

But its not all roses out here. There’s a lot of suffering too. And if human love, in its tiny negligible existence within the vastness of the universe is radically precious and dare I say important, so then human suffering may be thought of as immensely important also. 

For some people of faith, the portion of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun we currently inhabit is recognized as Advent. It is a time of waiting. Waiting in anticipation. An anticipation that dares to commit an act of imagination, and to host a world other than the one that is before us. To believe that another world is possible. This is a time that some people of faith contemplate Incarnation. That is, the embodiment of God’s love, peace and justice, on Earth. Both in the past, and in the future.

Yet ‘incarnation’ can be a sensitive topic. It’s of course not the place of Christianity to set the agenda for seasonal spiritual contemplation, nor to translate its religious grammar into the language of other faiths, as a way of explaining other faiths. There’s always a risk of subsuming another faith’s distinctiveness into the supposedly ‘universal’ meta-narrative of Christianity. I do feel though that what Christianity refers to when it speaks of incarnation is deeply related to themes of other faiths, particularly Judaism. (I have yet to read John Hick’s “The Metaphor of God Incarnate”, though I intend to read it next Advent. But I hope to avoid the approach Hick is known for in interfaith dialogue.) Incarnation more generally is about this rather old idea of God dwelling with us, an ever present theme in the Tanakh. So too, the ‘coming of the Messiah’ is a central theme in traditional Jewish faith.

Elie Wiesel, in his memoir “All Rivers Run to the Sea”, recounted a joke told by Martin Buber (although there seems to be some agreement that it’s an interfaith moratorium formulated by Wiesel himself that he projected back onto Buber):

“My good friends, what is the difference between you and me? Both of us, all of us believe, because we are religious, in the coming of the Messiah. You believe that the Messiah came, went back, and that you are waiting for Him for the second coming. We Jews believe He hasn’t come yet, but He will come. In other words, we are waiting. You for the second coming, we for the first coming. Let’s wait together.” After a pause, he said, “And when He will come, we will ask Him, have you been here before?” Said Buber, “I hope I will be behind Him and I will whisper in His ear, please do not answer.”

I don’t mean to place this fanciful story here to downplay the coercive force other faith groups often feel during the so-called ‘holiday season’. Slapping a new label on the festivities of this time of year (’happy holidays / ‘holy days’), does little to address the fact that Christianity (at least in its shallowest form, as a dominant cultural force of empire) has been allied with coercive power for centuries, and that the global economy in many ways is still largely structured around the Western Christian calendar. Tomoko Masuzawa has even shown how the category of ‘world religion’ has its roots in the fairly racist philological work of Christian supremicists, and continues to shape academia today.

Hauerwas and Willimon, in their seminal book Resident Aliens, write about one of the notable shifts away from this government-mandated Christianized culture:

“Sometime between 1960 and 1980, an old, inadequately conceived world ended, and a fresh, new world began. We do not mean to be overly dramatic… When and how did we change? Although it may sound trivial, one of us is tempted to date the shift sometime on a Sunday evening in 1963. Then, in Greenville, South Carolina, in defiance of the state’s time-honored blue laws, the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. Seven of us—regular attenders of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street Church—made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, then quietly slip out the back door and join John Wayne at the Fox… That evening has come to represent a watershed in the history of Christendom, South Carolina style. On that night, Greenville, South Carolina—the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the Western world—served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church… Before the Fox Theater opened on Sunday, we could convince ourselves that, with an adapted and domesticated gospel, we could fit American values into a loosely Christian framework, and we could thereby be culturally significant. This approach to the world began in 313 (Constantine’s Edict of Milan) and, by our reckoning, ended in 1963.”

Hauerwas has been a prominent opponent of Christianity allying itself with what he perceives to be all illegitimate power. This movie theatre opening on Sunday offered a new opportunity for the Christian faith to divorce itself from the power of civil religion. The practice of Sabbath must be an intentional task, not one mandated by a coercive force from above (i.e. the civil religion of government). December 24-26 as a ‘Public Holiday’ and consumer capitalist festival might better be left as ‘Happy Holidays’, than as a festival bearing the name of poor peasant refugee child from the Middle East who grew up to speak of flowers clothed more beautifully than Solomon and critiqued the power systems of his day. Many Christians are rightly embarrassed that this time of year (full of rampant consumerism) is associated with Jesus. Jesus is the reason for this season of holiday and Boxing Day shopping hours that keep minimum wage employees away from their loved ones and Western consumer habits burdening more of our planet’s ecosystems? I really hope not.

Christmas has been co-opted by the powers that be, both governments and MNCs. One of the things that initially attracted me to Hauerwas was that he was a theologian that engaged seriously with the work of Foucault. Foucault was profoundly life-changing for me, and his theory of power-knowledge dynamics gave me a framework for understanding my religious upbringing. It critiqued not only my faith’s regimes of truth, but also the regimes of truth of ‘scientific rationalism’ and ‘secular modernity’. Hauerwas, in engaging with Foucault, has immense sensitivity to power. He wrote:

“From Foucault's perspective, the Panopticon is no less a disciplining of the body than torture. In some ways torture is less cruel because at least when you are tortured you know who has power over you. In contrast, the Panopticon is a machine in which the one whose body is subject to such an unrelenting gaze becomes the agent of their own subjection. Accordingly, the body so subjected becomes disciplined to be what the gaze of those in power desire without their power ever being made explicit.”

Associating Jesus with what has become the holiday season is a deeply contradictory endeavour.  Colossians 2:15 reads: “And having disarmed the powers and authorities, [Jesus] made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”

This sensitivity to implicit power relations and disguised oppression is growing. There is an exciting level of consciousness emerging around us, and victims are gaining ground on publicly showing how their bodies were so unjustly violated and the disarming of oppressors is a continuing and arduous journey. The shift in political views I experienced in my own life is the result of many hardworking people who took the time to talk openly with me about these important problems of power.

The opening up of countless numbers of sexual-assault cases this year is a sign that there is an important growing awareness of the sacredness of our bodies. The feminist theologian Jane Schaberg, in her book The Illegitimacy of Jesus, made a carefully researched proposal that Mary was possibly raped by a Roman soldier, and Gospel writers like Matthew and Luke were aware of the so-called ‘illegitimacy’ of Jesus as they delicately put their texts together. As Jesus is often associated with Moses as leading a sort of Exodus from slavery, Schaberg’s speculation slightly resembles Freud’s theory that Moses’ father was Egyptian in “Moses and Monotheism”. 

I have not read Schaberg’s book on this topic, but encountered a summary of it in the end-notes of a book by Peter Stevenson and Stephen L. Wright called “Preaching the Incarnation”. I want to be careful treading around an issue of such immense sensitivity, especially for my evangelical friends. Someone apparently lit Schaberg’s car on fire one night over her book, so this is obviously very controversial terrain.

Before even going into Schaberg’s argument, I want to point out that I believe, like many today, that historically Christian notions of ‘virginity’ are problematic in many ways, which I will not get into here. Contemplating the term virgin this week, I was thinking we would mind our language well and use the right words, to say: if Mary was raped, she did not have sex. She was raped. That is not sex, it is rape. Rape is not sex, it is violence.

In any case, it’s fairly well known that the original Hebrew word ‘almah’ in Isaiah just means ‘woman’ and not ‘virgin’, and the Septuagint translation brought in the ambiguous Greek term ‘parthenos’ which more often means ‘virgin’. Wright and Stevenson (in Preaching the Incarnation) point out that the citation of Isaiah 7:14′s “Behold a [parthenos/virgin/woman] shall conceive” should have an original meaning, even according to standards of Conservative theology, before it takes on its prophetic meaning as pointing to Jesus. So if one interprets the verse literally, in its original meaning, then Jesus’ ‘virgin’ birth could not be considered unique. Anyways, R.T. France (in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew) suggests there is no clear semantic distinction between ‘almah’ and ‘parthenos.’ For example, after Dinah is raped in Genesis 34:2-4, she is still referred to as a ‘parthenos’ in the Septuagint.

Anyways, Schaberg’s case begins with Celsus, a second-century anti-Christian Greek philosopher whose work survives through excerpts cited in Origen’s refutations against his work “The True Word”. Celsus claimed that some Jews identified Jesus’ father as a Roman solder named Pantera. Schaberg’s proposition is that maybe Celsus was right. But for Schaberg, it’s unlikely that Mary’s encounter with the soldier was an affair (as Celsus puts it), but rather, given the colonial power dynamics, Mary was likelier raped by that Roman soldier. Schaberg explores an allusion Matthew makes to Deuteronomy 22:23-27, a law concerning the rape of a betrothed virgin which would have required Joseph to either distance himself from Mary or stone her. Schaberg, however is not rejecting the account of the Gospel writers, but interprets Isaiah 7:14’s “Behold a virgin shall conceive” to mean that a woman who is currently a virgin, will eventually become pregnant by natural means, and then conceive a son.

For more of Schaberg’s observations (including the four ‘disreputable’ women mentioned in Mary’s genealogy - e.g. Bathsheba, the reference of Jesus as the “Son of Mary” in Mark’s gospel, the parallel language between the Magnificat and Deuteronomy 22, and the silence from Paul and John’s gospel concerning the virgin birth) this Slate article written by the Episcopal priest Chloe Breyer is worth checking out.

While I understand that the majority of historical scholars believe Schaberg’s speculations to lack substantial evidence to bear any significant weight, I do think her work still functions as a wonderfully creative site for Midrashic contemplation.

Celsus claimed that Mary was convicted of adultery. It may very well be possible to imagine a young Jewish woman garnering a reputation as ‘seductress’ after being raped by a Roman soldier, finding herself being victim-blamed like so many of today’s survivors of rape and sexual assault. Can you picture the media pundits of Nazareth saying: Mary was obviously seducing this Roman soldier by wearing her shawl in this particular way, or was irresponsible for walking around a certain part of town at a certain time of day, or she could have resisted if she wanted to, she could have just kept her knees together, or she deserves sympathy but there’s nothing we can do but face the fact that she is ‘less valuable’ a human being now and does not deserve to ruin the reputation of a respectable man like Joseph. Even if one takes the traditional interpretation of the virgin birth at face value, one cannot deny that the talk going around town would not have been as much concern over Mary as a possible victim of rape, but rather over her ‘chastity’.

Jesus was raised by a mother who may have faced a sort of victim-blaming stigma all her life with the suspicious conception of Jesus. There was a meme I saw floating around feminist social media communities that fits so well with this idea that Jesus would have learnt well to be suspicious of victim-blamers, being raised by a mother of disreputable status. The meme said something along the lines of: Jesus didn’t blame women for their objectification by telling them what they should or should not wear, but he told his disciples that if their eye causes them to sin, they should pluck it out.

Jesus must have eventually understood the fear and trembling that his mother Mary felt as she faced potential stoning while carrying a baby she believed to be the Messiah. Kierkegaard called Mary a knight of faith because she could not explain her situation to anyone. It would just come across as absurd in such a patriarchal society. Sound familiar? How many victims of rape and sexual assault have felt like a Kierkegaardian knight of faith, resigned to silence, unable to explain the terrible burden they carry because it is beyond the comprehension of a sexist patriarchal world around them, yet still believing that they could one day do something to help other women never have to face the trauma they were confronted with in their own life. The #MeToo campaign has opened up something very important, though there’s still so much pain and hurt out there and so much more that needs to be done.

Advent to me is a yearning and expectation that all oppression shall cease. In a series of posts this Advent, I wish to continue some theological contemplations on incarnation. What implications do Advent and Christmas have for the way we treat bodies? What does it mean for Jesus to be a victim of state-sanctioned violence, as the Maccabean martyrs were, whom Jews remember during Hanukkah? And how does the expectation of Resurrection by Jewish martyrs tie these two faiths together in such a way by which sites of solidarity can be fostered in faith communities resisting the ways of empire, which so often degrade marginalized bodies? In yearning for a future where all oppression shall cease (i.e. all the sins of the World will be taken away), what ways are Incarnation and Atonement deeply entangled? What do the anthropomorphic sketches of God in the Tanakh have to do with incarnational ideas hanging around first-century Judaism? 

I hope to explore some of these questions in the coming weeks, leading up to Epiphany. Please join me if you have a chance, and call me out on anything you feel is problematic. If anyone has read this far, I owe them a lot more than a fair hearing.