Thus far I have finished my first draft of chapter 3 - it is not great, but at least it is "on paper." I have also announced to my congregation that I have accepted the call to the First Baptist Church of East Greenwich, RI, and have put my house on the market. It has been a pretty full time. With all this in mind, I was pleased when I found the time to read an article this morning, so please that I thought I should write something about it - if nothing else but to show that I did actually read something in the midst of the chaos.
The article was "Torture and Origen's Hermeneutics of Nonviolence" by Paul R. Kolbet. It can be found in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, September 2008, Vol. 76, No. 3, pp. 545-572. Kolbet (a professor at Boston College) is looking at Origen's view of a Christian's approach to torture and its application to today. Origen is one of those scholars that I have stayed away from because he is so brilliant and I have not the time to fully engage with his thoughts and writings. I have gotten the impression that either you jump into the writings of Origen or you step back and let others engage. He is not the type of scholar you would dabble with.
With all that said, here are some ramblings. Origen is considering how one is supposed to respond and endure with torture in a context when Christians were being tortured on a daily basis. Kolbert reminds the readers of Origen's hermeneutics of Joshua (which is considered one of the more violent books of the bible). Origen claims that the struggle between the Israelites and the Canaanites is representative of an internal struggle we all face with temptations and negative choices. God wants us to conquer our temptations and our inner-demons, so to speak. It is this hermeneutics that Origen then takes to the experience of torture. Not only are we to model and be like Christ in the moment of suffering, but we are also to recognize that the torturer is most likely suffering and struggling with his own inner-conflict. We are not to hate or condemn the torturer but to be a witness to society; a witness of the life and ministry and teachings of Christ (Kolbet uses the thoughts and writings of Foucault around the issue of capital punishment as another voice in the conversation). Such a response is a strong, non-violent response to the evil of a culture that is trying to devalue the human person through torture.
What of today? I do not anticipate the possibility that I will be tortured any time soon (although Origen did stress that we should always be ready). Yet I have found myself and continue to find myself in conflict with others. My initial reaction is to demonize the other, to call the other disparaging words and put the other down. My reaction is that I must win over the other in the conflict. Yet if I consider Origen's hermeneutic of Joshua, the conflict is not primarily with the other, but with myself. I am giving into a narrative of the world that encourages a distancing and dehumanizing of the one I am in conflict with. What if I conquer that inner-narrative, and then look at the other as one who is also struggling with this flawed narrative of the world? This does not mean that I would give into whatever anyone asks. I would still hold strong to those things I would find important, yet not in a way that is looking to win over the other. Instead in a way that looks to witness to the other.
What if we started speaking this way? Instead of "winning souls for Christ" we say we are "witnessing to souls for Christ"? No longer are we trying to manipulate others (which is a purpose of torture), but we are trying to relate with others. There is wisdom in such an approach.
2 comments:
Thanks for the summary of the article on Origen, Jonathan.
Your comment that Origen asks us to follow Christ's model under torture is very important, I think. Jesus says, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." In other words, he makes the focus (the immediate "purpose," such as it is) of his suffering the witness to those who are abusing him. One of the ways that the modern, though fallen, world--which is struggling as we speak to balance its evil love of victimizing "others" with its nobler concern for human rights and dignity--has tried to have its cake and eat it too is by bureaucratizing torture. The current American experience is the example par excellence of this trend, I think--essentially, the entire discourse (at least in the media) has been who authorized what exactly, and when? The story of torturing terrorist suspects--an issue with such enormous ethical, political, and spiritual implications--has been reduced to a memo trail.
(As an aside, I think this is all especially ironic because bureaucratization is often considered essential for civilization itself, and yet here it's being used to facilitate something completely uncivilized; this is one of the points made in Nobel winner JM Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians," where a torturer says to the narrator, "You would find it tedious." I think that there's something unavoidably tedious, banal, and numbing about torture at its core, as with any bureaucratic action, but all the more so because no matter how specific the information that you're seeking, at some point the process becomes all that matters--torture for its own sake, for no greater purpose.)
The (intentional) result of this bureaucratization is to take the torturer him/herself completely out of the picture--it's about the person being tortured, the procedure used, and whether that procedure is within the law. The (masked!) torturer is made completely anonymous, almost superfluous, and removed of any responsibility (and both international law and public opinion seem very forgiving to people who "just follow orders").
I think Origen's emphasis (and Christ's model) proposes such a dramatically different perspective--while I don't think God is indifferent to laws and nations and policies, what he really cares about is individual people, their actions, and their souls. Therefore the torturer--a person--is the real story as far as God is concerned, and Christians under torture can bless that person by their witness. To borrow a slogan from the pro-gun rights folks, at the end of the day, agencies don't torture people, people torture people. And to God and to Christians, those are the ones who need the witness most of all.
Thanks for the comment, Dan. Very insightful and I fully agree.
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