Proverbs Of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering,
and The Search For What Saves Us
author Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker
Beacon Press, 2001, 257 pages.
by
Viola Larson
Many recent conversations, news editorials and even sermons are attempts to
deal with the nature of Islam. ‘Is it an evil religion?” ‘Is it a religion
of peace?” ‘Is it radical at its deepest core?” I was thinking of these
kinds of questions when it dawned on me that the answers to some of these
questions could be found with the same questions and thoughts I was bringing
to my reading of a recently published book, _Proverbs Of Ashes: Violence,
Redemptive Suffering, and The Search For What Saves Us_. The authors, Rita
Nakashima Brock, research associate at Harvard Divinity School, and Rebecca
Ann Parker, president and professor of theology at Starr King School,
(Unitarian Universalist) for the Ministry at the Graduate Theological Union,
question the effect of the Christian understanding of the doctrine of
atonement on human attitudes toward suffering and violence. They understand
the idea of the Son suffering according to the will of the Father as child
abuse. Sifting through their own experiences of suffering they attempt to
hold on to Christianity while changing one of its most basic tenets. Some of
the questions I was mulling over while reading the book were: what makes
religion evil, is Christ’s death on the cross child abuse, what does the
death of Christ mean in the midst of religious evil, and what does suffering
mean to a Christian?
Looking at the evolution of evil in religious settings is a beneficial way
of critiquing Brock and Parker’s book. Differences abound in religion: a
transcendent God; a transcendent, personal, God; humanity as god or no god
at all. The human will bleeds into the formation of religious acts, and so a
thousand subjective variations on world religions and ethics proliferate.
For some, Islam is an example, God is so transcendent, so other, that he
would not become human nor could he enter into our suffering. For others,
for example Paganism, God is so ‘us” or ‘nature” that to know humanity or
nature, even with all its/our corruption is to know deity. For still others
such as Zen Buddhism, God is all there is and yet a void or emptiness,
entered into only with the loss of self-consciousness. The human propensity
to do evil can be nurtured in very human attempts to connect with God by
either trying to imitate God’s perfection, integrating the good and evil or
seeing such dualities as good and evil as unreal. If God is totally other
and does not enter into our world in an act of grace and atonement we are
left to overcome evil with our own will. If we are deity then all of our
nature is divine, the evil included. If God is that which is all and
non-dualistic, in the end evil does not matter.
Humans do not have the ability to live by religious moral codes perfectly.
In fact, for some the attempt toward perfection leads to the radicalization
of their religious beliefs. That is, in an attempt to obey the laws of their
religion as a means of connecting with God, they apply the moral code so
stringently to themselves and society that they become authoritarian in
nature. For instance, in radical Islam women become non-entities, hidden
people, in order to prevent lust and adultery. Radical Islamic men reach for
God through the suffering and humiliation of their women. In paganism, since
God is seen as creation, the desire to embrace an ethic that honors and
cares for nature often leads to nudity and sometimes sex is accepted as
religious rite. Every human protection against vulnerability, including
clothing, is removed in order to manifest and connect with the divine in
humanity.
A God who comes down in love, who suffers for humanity, is lost in this
religious maze. The God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ removes the
human effort to connect with God as well as any insistence that somehow evil
is necessary or unreal. Jesus Christ’s death on the cross speaks to the
awful truth of human sin while at the same time providing a way past
humanity’s guilt. Individuals are set free to serve God knowing that it is
the work of Christ that has connected them to God. They are wrapped in the
righteousness of Christ rather than their own righteousness. There is
freedom to follow biblical ethics out of love for God, but also with the
clear understanding that people fail. In deed, whenever Christianity moves
away from the implicit meaning of the crossthere evil begins to rear its
headwhether that means selling indulgences, burning witches at the stake or
replacing Jesus as the suffering savior with a Jesus of noble blood as a
means of elevating war as the German Christians under Hitler did. While
several theologians, through the centuries, including Calvin, Duns Scotus
and Anselm have suggested differing theories about how Jesus’ death on the
cross works, none until modern times have suggested that Jesus did not die
for the sins of the world.
It is within a religious viewpoint that eliminates the cross as forgiveness
that Parker and Brock began their spiritual journey. Parker was brought up
in a very liberal church and family. She was taught to believe that ‘The
importance of Jesus for liberal Christians is not that he paid the price for
sin. Jesus is important because he embodied loving concern for others and
called people to love their neighbors.” That meant the cross stood for
something else, ‘Jesus death on the cross overcame the sin of selfishness.
He did not concern himself with saving his own life”(32) Additionally,
Parker writes, ‘I was a liberal Christian. I didn’t believe God demanded
obedience or that Jesus’ death on the cross brought about our salvation.”
(21) In Graduate school she studied with process theologian, John Cobb, and
writes that ‘this led, me, eventually, to the ministry.” (35)
Brock in a much softer voice writes of her relationship with an Evangelical
family and her experiences in their family and church. She writes:
The church claimed that Jesus was my personal savior. I tried very hard
to believe that claim. I learned the right words to say. I made a
confession of faith and was baptized because I wanted to belong to
Denver’s [her minister friend] church. (66)
Later, Brock writing of her Japanese origins and her feelings of loss and
lack of identity in America relates, ‘An imaginary relationship to a
long-deceased savior was no improvement.” She continues:
The disconnect was not about faith and doubt what Christians meant by
faith in Jesus was so foreign to my inner self that I had no way of
being religious that connected me to others, that broke through my
isolation, that gave me living presence. Denver’s life had done that,
but not his theology. (82)
These two authors speak as the baptized unconverted. They admit to a faith
and relationship in a presence that is within humanity but not to a faith in
Jesus Christ as a living resurrected Lord. Here lies the dilemma of the
book. While one cannot be certain at this point whether Parker and Brock are
advocating only a god-within religion’ somewhat akin to neo-paganism or a
religion of human ethics’ not unlike 19th century liberal German theology,
they are certainly disconnected from any understanding of the God of
Christianity. They attempt to understand atonement using human experience,
but a truly scholarly as well as Christian accounting of the atonement would
need to deal with the Trinity as well as the Incarnation. In order to
understand the meaning of the suffering of Christ one must see Him as the
second person of the Trinity, the Incarnate Son of God whose will is
identical to the will of the Father. Speaking metaphorically, the Father did
not push the Son out the door of heaven; the Father is not a malicious being
insisting His Son be tortured. As J.S. Whale states in his book, _Christian
Doctrine:_
If Jesus is an unambiguously human martyr and no more, the gospels are a
monument to a vast illusion, the Gospel is a mistake, and the extinction
of the Church is only a question of time. But if Jesus really is the
Word of God Incarnate, the problems of soteriology ultimately involve
insoluble problems of the Trinity and the Incarnation which no
theologian worth his salt has ever minimized or neglected. (94)
Another doctrinal issue that has not been dealt with in the book is the very
being of God. Is God’s otherness, that is, such qualities as perfection,
omniscience and omnipotence, such that we cannot assert the same kind of
moral judgments about some of God’s actions that we would assert about
humanity’s actions? Or another way of thinking might be that since God is
other than we some of His actions may be incomprehensible to humans. That, I
believe is called mystery! It may be that we only want to understand or know
God on human terms, by human definitions and experience, but that is not
only un-philosophical it is also unbiblical. ‘ For My thoughts are not your
thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,’ declares the Lord. For as the heavens
are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My
thoughts’.” (Isaiah 55:8,9)
Brock and Parker’s main point, that the human suffering they see outside of
and in the midst of the Church is due to the doctrine of the atonement, is
not really substantiated in the book. They have made no hard and fast
connections. However, some of the advice given by priests and clergy in the
book certainly can be shown to cause undue suffering to the violated. A
woman is stabbed to death after she allows her abusive husband to return
home believing that is the will of God. Another, woman, abused by her
husband, is told by her priest, ‘If you love Jesus, accept the beatings and
bear them gladly, as Jesus bore the cross.” (21) Parker construes from this
that it is the sacrifice of Jesus that causes all misery in the Church.
Revealing her own abuse as a child, (her neighbor raped her), Parker makes a
false assumption. She writes:
I recognized that Christianity had taught me that sacrifice is the way
of life. I forgot the neighbor who raped me, but I could see that when
theology presents Jesus’ death as God’s sacrifice of His beloved child
for the sake of the world, it teaches that the highest love is
sacrifice. To make sacrifice or to be sacrificed is virtuous and
redemptive. (25)
There is a great deal missing in Parker’s understanding of the cross. The
Son is not only in agreement with the Father in His obedience to death on
the cross, but they are both, with the Holy Spirit, as one God, speaking the
truth about judgment, human sin and righteousness. (John 15:18-27; 16:5-11)
Unredeemed humanity will not speak that truth because of sin. The focus of
that truth, that humans are sinful and cannot overcome evil by themselves,
can only be seen from the cross. In deed, such truth can only be spoken by
the God who crosses the unfathomable gap of human alienation by means of the
cross. And, within the cross and its meaning of atonement and redemption,
victims embraced in the love of Jesus Christ, can speak truth to their
oppressors. Indeed must speak truth to their oppressors for the sake of the
oppressor’s redemption. That is, it is the Holy Spirit who speaks of sin and
urges the sinner to repentance through the witness of the Christian.
We see this kind of witness to the truth of sin in the story of Paul and in
his writings. When Paul was lawfully able to protest against the beatings he
received, he did. Note Acts 16:37 & 22:24-29. He cast the demon out of the
captive girl at Philippi because she was hindering his ministry, so an act
of mercy was also an act of self-defense. (Acts 16:16-18) In Cor. 13:3 Paul
writes, ‘and if I give all my possessions to feed the poor and if I
surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me
nothing.” Jesus, quoting from the book of Hosea, asks, ‘But go and learn
what this means: I desire compassion, and not sacrifice, for I did not come
to call the righteous, but sinners.”’ (Matthew 9:13) In the Scripture love
and sacrifice are two different things. Love requires truth. The women used
as examples of the abused in this book needed to speak the truth about their
husband’s beatings and should have removed themselves from their control.
Christ’s great sacrifice on the cross for the sins of the world and a woman
allowing herself to be beaten to death have nothing in common. Brock and
Parker’s rejection and misunderstanding of the cross is seemingly what has
cast such dark shadows over their spiritual journey.
In an attempt to live up to the demanding morality of 19th Century liberal
Christianity, without the salvation of the cross, Parker is lead astray and
hurt. As an adult she endures an abortion for the sake of her marriage and
husband considering this an acceptable sacrifice of love. In the book her
detailed attempt to return to the child who knew that the presence of God
sustained her in the midst of rape is heart wrenching. The work of
psychotherapy as well as art are helpful, but how much more helpful they
could have been with the knowledge that the resurrected personal Savior was
walking with her. Brock, who admits that she found help in a pastor’s
ministry because of his belief in the work of the cross, still rejects that
work. Of his faith and her reaction she writes:
Denver’s theology, with its focus on saving souls, was the core of his
generous, loving spirit. He believed salvation was a gift from God,
given freely through Jesus’ death on the cross for sin. . . He gave me a
way to be Christian that broke through my isolation, that helped me
believe that well-being and joy were the elements of a faithful life,
that my spiritual search to overcome the lingering effects of violence
was a worthy quest. I flourished in his love. (67)
And yet she rejected the witness of Denver and his Christ. Brock and Parker
choose to place their faith in the goodness of presence in others rather
than the biblical Christ. Brock, using the analogy of the presence of people
who prayed for her without knowing her, writes of her faith, ‘And this is
how I can speak of God: a presence gradually unfolded by life in its
richness and tragedies, its devastating losses and its abundance; a power
calling us into a fullness of living; a passion for life, for good and ill;
an unquenchable fire at the core of life, glimpsed in light and shadows.”
(233) Additionally, the authors write in their ‘postlude”:
Jesus death was not unique. The torture inflicted on Jesus had been
visited on many. It continues in the world, masked by the words
‘virtuous suffering” and ‘self-sacrificing love.”
. . . Jesus resurrection and the continuation of his movement are not
triumphs, but a glimpse of the power of survival, of the embers that
survive the deluge. (250)
Seeing human survival as a way of knowing the presence of deity the authors
suggest that salvation against violence begins with witnesses, love and
mourning. (250) However, the action and their faith are not attached to any
solid foundation, only to human experience. But, it is God who has spoken,
who has entered into our world in Jesus Christ, who has suffered for the
sins of the world. Not as an example of how to sacrifice for others but as a
real healing balm for the sinful and hurt souls of humanity. The meanings of
the cross can only be known in the knowledge of the Incarnate One, Jesus
Christ.