Sure, it can include the Cross. Crux est mundi medicina - the Cross the the world's medicine.

Viewed from one perspective, Christ's death is "sadistic." But viewed as God offering himself up on the Cross - NOT poor little Jesus being tortured by the mean ol' God the Father - it is also "gracious, benevolent and merciful." The author seems to view the Crucifixion as an afterthought to the life of Jesus Christ, and I don't believe that it is.

Bill Dilworth
Providence, RI

Let's see--there are at least two major problems with this argument (even in its excerpted form here)
1) Augustine makes quite clear that the education he received as a child was a classical Roman education with no Christian influences; his father was not a Christian during his childhood.
2) Among the many possible interpretations of the cross, the one I find most compelling throughout the history of the Christian tradition that sees the cross as the result of Christ's love for the world, as the collect prays: "he stretched out his arms in love on the hard wood of the cross"

Jonathan Greiser

I suppose if you stop at the cross, it's a problem. But come the Resurrection, and as Julian of Norwich put it, the Cross can be seen as the birthing bed upon which Jesus suffers to bring new life to the world.

It seems to me that the solidarity of Christ with human suffering has been a source of great comfort and strength. To see this as an excuse for further brutality (which I acknowledge some have done) is to miss the point of what "sacrifice" means.

Of course it would include the cross. No cross, no Christianity.

Geez, people, dismiss-a-difficult-challenge-with-platitudes much?

There's a whole world out there that HATES Christianity for God-given (ethical) reasons!

Your platitudes aren't going to persuade them. ENGAGE.

JC Fisher

Much good sense in Dr. Condren's words:

Enlightened theologians examine theologies not only for their internal logic or truth status but also for the effects of truth: the healthiness or otherwise of theological stories. They urge that we develop theologies of redemptive love rather than redemptive violence, especially in the light of the legacies of child abuse and religiously inspired political violence. . . .

Many theologies were formulated when humanity had few tools to understand how bodily trauma and brutal child- rearing practices fed the vicious cycle of shame and served the demands of empire –- religious or political. Toxic narratives lead to toxic outcomes. The time for such ignorance has long since passed.

There are those in this discussion community who insist over and over that all teaching today must have some continuity with medieval speculations. As if that were an age of true Christianity. But our understanding of our world, and our situation in it, are very different now. We don't live in a world of states, but in a world of flux.

"No cross, no Christianity," Dr. Carroll? I suspect you're right. If Christianity is only about redemptive suffering, if all we have to offer God is our pain and failure, that day of masochism is ending. We aren't fallen creatures, we are organisms at our present stage of development and knowledge. As I've said often here, surely the past 2,700 years of theological speculation has some elements of value. I hope we can find them, build on them, and move on.

Murdoch Matthew

(Yes, 2,700 years -- it does seem that our tradition traces to some anthology building and myth making in sixth century Babylon. No evidence for Abraham, Moses, even David's kingdom. The enormous, and validating, sweep we have attributed to our narrative apparently is fictional.)

[Gary is my spouse -- couldn't get blogger to take my sign-in]

Just a thought -- in Jesus, according to the doctrine of the Incarnation, God experienced the human life of a Jewish male. I know that sounds sufficient to the boys, but does it really cover the feminine experience?

I favor an approach that stresses compassion/mercy rather than violence, but to think one understands can be a violent appropriation of meaning. A redemption which would make sense of all the suffering and abuse in the world would be, on a certain level, horrific.

The text urges the development of a new theology but it is not clear this can ever be realized. The reader must decide to take or not take the call, if it is a call. That there currently is no healthy theology is perhaps because of the difficulty of breaking with the cross as redemptive and also the problem with redemption as a notion. How can one be completely healthy after abuse? Denial is possible as is giving up. Most people find a way in-between.

French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy says Western culture is post-tragedy in that there is no longer a belief that things can make sense in the end. The Holocaust and the other atrocities of the twentieth century make this very questionable.

Moving away from the cross makes some sense.

The cross as question, as a question about state executions and injustice, but not the cross as assurance or symbol for an economy of salvation, I could support.

Gary Paul Gilbert

"They urge that we develop theologies of redemptive love rather than redemptive violence, especially in the light of the legacies of child abuse and religiously inspired political violence."

For some time, I have thought that we need to begin to move away from Augustinian theology, as much as it has shaped the thoughts of the Latin Western Church. I have recently been reading Augustine's City of God, and his discussions about sexuality reflect such a profound contempt for the conjugal act, that it borders on pathological. We know that the young Augustine fathered a child out of wedlock and later "put away" his child's mother. I have wondered if his own strong belief that the sexual organs steal away our rationality and force us to act against our wills amounts to an "explanation" post hoc of his prior, later-repudiated actions. Inasmuch as so many of his ideas regarding original sin, fall and redemption are tied up with his perverted views of sexuality, it should give us pause to simply continue to accept the "nicer" bits of Augustinian thought. Certainly, the Churches of the East have not had this obsession with Augustine and have had a significant distrust for his thought (considering as well that he was the source of the non-Nicean idea of the double procession of the Spirit that the Western Latin Churches grafted onto the Nicene creed).

I have lately also been reading, along with Augustine, the "Great Catechism" (AKA the Catechetical Oration) of Gregory of Nyssa. For Gregory, it was the incarnation of the Logos restoring and "improving" the nature of humanity that was the central saving act. The cross was seen more as a necessity that Jesus live a fully human life, including death, with the resurrection the promise and "preview" as it were of our humanity restored and "divinized" by the incarnation of the Logos. (see our present collect for the Second Sunday after Christmas day: O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature; Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ... ) For some time, I have thought that a theological system that started with or emphasized this view was a more satisfying narrative than our western strong emphasis on the concept of penal substitution. I do, however, think that Gregory's ideas need "work." His views of natural evil, for example, do not ring quite true to me and seem to skirt with clever grammar the real problem of Theodicy.

Beyond that, I have only meditated and speculated. I have often felt that the first and second creation accounts of Genesis may have lessons and certainly a mythic cultural heritage common not to just Judaism and Christianity but to other ancient near-Eastern religions, and they ought not to be totally jettisoned, yet we have before us the physical witness of the universe itself as revealed to us by scientific exploration that paints a very different view of cosmology and the origins of life and humanity. A "real" theology for the 21st century and beyond would not simply "graft on" these new ideas to the old theologies but would engage them in honest and, if necessary, radical ways. (What, for example, should our theology make of intelligent non-human primate species such as Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis who, at least for a time, were our contemporaries? Did they also "fall?") When I am very speculative, I find some appeal in an idea of a sort of process panendeism. The exalted view of God as the sum of all perfections would, for us, be a sort of "future" reality. (With the present state that of "seeing in the dim mirror" or the "treasure in clay pots.") It could be tied up with the ideas of a future fulfillment of the Reign of Heaven. We would be, in a view like this, not fallen humans from a prior perfection but "works in progress" as it were, drawn to a future consummation in the fully realized heavenly Kingdom. Creation around us would be not simply a reflection of the divine perfection fully realized or fallen, but rather less like quantities than vectors that point to this future consummation. If I accept the idea that, from a divine perspective (or 4-5 dimensional universe point of view), "time is an illusion," then the heavenly kingdom, from a "divine perspective" could be both "not yet" for us and at the same time "always has been" and "always will be." We could find reference back, I think, to some of the kingdom parables such as the parable of the yeast or the tiny seed becoming the great tree for these "becoming" perspectives, but dropping, perhaps the "supernaturally invasive apocalyptic" elements of Paul and the Apocalypse of John (and others).

BTW someone recently told me (source not verified) that Pope Benedict is particularly fond of Lutherans among protestants as their theology is so strongly Augustinian (having Luther as an Augustinian monk as its source.) Loop back to recent papal pronouncements touching sexuality and child abuse, etc.

Interesting thoughts. Here's another: what if it is the ancient and ubiquitous reality of child abuse and sexual abuse that gave rise to the notions of the fall and the need for a suffering god? To blame religion for these crimes may be the wrong way around.

I agree with Jeffrey about Augustine. The East takes a very different approach, and I find that Process theology provides exactly that forward-moving and deeply engaged understanding of God for which I think many hunger. (Not that hunger is proof of the existence of food, mind. ;-) )

I don't think the argument holds water. The brutality of the Cross notwithstanding, there is child abuse in every religion, not just Christianity, and in every denomination within Christianity, not just Roman Catholicism. It is true that "don't spare the rod and spoil the child"—which is also Jewish, not specifically Christian—has been used as license for people to beat children, but I think the real issue underneath is the undervaluing of children.

Children are seen as something less than fully human. That is to say, people recognize that an adult human has the right not to the beaten, or forced against his will to do whatever YOU want him to do. Also he's big enough to knock you over if you tried something. A child is not seen as having any such right, and crucially, doesn’t have the power.

Children are vulnerable, because they are smaller, they are dependent. They ae not respected. Children are seen as property, not people. This transcends religion and goes to fundamental human rights.

Until there is a recognition of the rights of children, we will be playing catch up with the abuse. And even then, children will continue to be vulnerable--they have to be protected by adults and the law from the adults who will harm them.

There are people in this country who fight against the Convention on the Rights of the Child. They say: this is MY child; no one can tell me how to treat him as long as he lives under my roof. I will spank him if I feel he needs it. That was the same argument used to support wife-beating. This is MY house and MY wife, in MY property. Abuse is about power much more than about any particular theology.

Similarly, the teachers, nuns, monks had power over the children in their charge, and no one to say them nay. We should stop monkeying and address the issue front and centre.

Rita Wallace

Dr. Shy engages the tradition in useful and provocative ways, which is what I ask for and don't do. I always look forward to his and Tobias's comments.

I just want to put a query tag on the ideas of perfection and meaning. If we're working toward perfection, how to define perfection? Plato has much to answer for. Astronomy was stuck with the idea of the circle as a perfect form, until it was noticed that the ellipsis was what generally worked. (An ellipsis is a circle with two centers -- any significance in that?) Paul and the gospel writers seemed to think that perfection was about to be imposed, from without, within the life-times of their hearers, on a demon-filled, disobedient world. (Tough on the peoples of the several continents unknown to them.) I just want to caution, before making perfection a goal, see if you can define it.

My husband has posted, questioning whether things can ultimately "make sense." That may seem outrageous to some. We crave meaning in our lives. We connect dots, whether they want connecting or not. We each take the things that happen to us and connect them usefully, in a narrative that helps us cope day-to-day. Inescapable. But when we look at the world as a whole, or historically, things don't mean, they just are. Meaning is a human construct. How much meaning should we look for?

For what it's worth.

We are story telling creatures - so we try to make sense of random events by picking out parts that make story. Perhaps that is what God was doing in creation - making story out of chaos. What this means for theology is we can write a new story - not one grounded in blood and violence.

As I read these kinds of reflections I am confirmed in a belief that many of the fractures in the current religious scene can be understood as originating from a rejection, by many, of the understanding of passion and sexuality most closely identified in the West with St. Augustine.

I do not for a moment think this fundamentally a divide between East and West. However much trouble our Orthodox friends have with the "Blessed Augustine" on other matters, his views on sexuality do not strike me as being any more out of step with contemporary mores than those of St. Gregory of Nyssa in, say, his Treatise on Virginity.

I don't care to argue such things, but since I am currently re-reading the Confessions I was certainly struck by Ms. Condren's characterization of it as "filled with self-loathing and shame," as well as Dr. Shy's reference to Augustine's "perverted view of sexuality" in The City of God. There is plainly a growing divide between such views and those which find in the Fathers a salutory caution about the capacity of passion, especially sexual passion, to override reason and good will. Any of us, I am sure, could easily name a dozen political figures, from across the spectrum, who might have profited from such a check.

Those who reject Augustine out of hand have seldom grappled with him with the care his thought deserves. He made mistakes to be sure, but the simplistic treatment of Augustine present in the article is unworthy of serious consideration. Far more charitable yet still critical readings are possible.

I think that this conversation is impoverished by equally simplistic assumptions of what the cross must mean. It is a moment within the history of the Incarnate Word, which brings into focus what it means for Christ to give himself for others, which he does throughout his ministry.

I agree with you, Ann, that one could tell stories that are not about violence or, I would add, justifying it. Justifying it is almost as bad because it risks glorifying it. For centuries, Christians supported capital punishment, although Jesus had been executed by the Roman State. Perhaps the theologians had done their job too well of justifying such singular horror to the point where people were taught to rejoice in the blood of Jesus. Subordinating trauma and injustice to meaning may simply be another form of violence, one which easily accommodates itself to child abuse and protecting institutional and religious identities.

Likewise, expecting perfection in the future sounds like the same meaning-making machine. If there is process, there will have been no end but only more process.

Telling new stories sounds like a certain Judaism, as if one were running up against a repression of Judaism within Chrisitianity. It is as if process were another name for Judaism.

Gary Paul Gilbert

@ BIll Carroll. I knew that our anti-Augustine love feast would come to a crashing halt, and I was asking myself this morning about what Fr. Carroll would say. Thanks for the counter stroke! In defense, I hope that I am not seen to be rejecting Augustine “out of hand.” I simply feel that we have had too much emphasis on an Augustinian view. There are many ways to talk about the incarnation, redemption, the meaning of the cross, the nature of our existence, the nature/attributes of God. For those who find delight and satisfaction in the Augustinian view, then I wholly endorse that they continue to take delight in his thought. For many of the rest of us, particularly sexual minorities, it is hard not to find much of the bludgeoning club in views derived from Augustine’s pessimistic view of the ultimate depravity and evil of human sexuality as it now exists. The “article” above suggests that we evaluate theologies not simply for their internal consistency but also for the consequences as to how they may be expressed in their application in human society. And I do think that an extreme Augustinian view can be, at the least, psychologically unhealthy. I think poor Augustine needs a break, at least for a while, to let some other ideas breathe. For me, our theology and liturgical life are so packed full of Augustinian thought, that it threatens to suffocate other views that have at least as much merit and worth in consideration and contemplation. There are some other “consequences” of the Augustinian view of original sin and its transmission by sexual intercourse such as the Marian doctrine of the Immaculate Conception that are, in my opinion, further undesirable offshoots of Augustinian theology.

@ Rick Allen (and Bill Carroll) I think that we might agree that there is an ongoing tension in human behavior between our highest levels of conscious thought and our “baser instincts.” St. Paul clearly thought that “the tongue” was the shameful organ in a way similar to Augustine’s view of genitalia. We bear our sexuality however as a result of our process of evolution, I would argue, and the “reptilian” brain that controls much of expression of sexual behavior (along with fear, aggression and other aspects) does at time “trump” the influence of higher thought. Augustine deserves at least the credit (like so many of his time that looked within their own natures for explanations of the world around) for being a fair psychologist. I think, however, that Augustine goes too far. When Augustine starts with the fall in Eden that leads the humans to “know that they were naked” and then cover themselves to lead to the concept of genitalia as “shameful” and a need to call them “pudenda” from the Latin root of “to be ashamed” and then to insist that all sexuality, even “rightly used” sexuality (f you are conservatively oriented) within marriage to have the nature of “lust” and “sin” and to be the evil vehicle through which the poisonous seed of original sin is passed to the poor miserable progeny who repeat the disgusting conjugal act carried away in mind numbing lust certainly does not jive with either physiology, natural history or anything that might contribute to a healthy sexuality. Augustine’s ideal sexual act is that of purely one of the will in which the male “sows the seed” in the female purely for an intentional desire to procreate with no physical pleasure or “lust.” His ongoing discussion about the “loss of control” of our genitals in which we might have done just that before we “fell” in the garden finally ends up with his description of such “wondrous” ways in which persons do control other less “shameful” parts their bodies willfully (and unsinfully) such as the capacity of some persons to wiggle their ears or others to “sing” from passing wind from the rectum “without stink.” To give Augustine his due, I don’t see profound theology or science there.

"...to insist that all sexuality, even “rightly used” sexuality (f you are conservatively oriented) within marriage to have the nature of “lust” and “sin” and to be the evil vehicle through which the poisonous seed of original sin is passed to the poor miserable progeny who repeat the disgusting conjugal act carried away in mind numbing lust certainly does not jive with either physiology, natural history or anything that might contribute to a healthy sexuality."

For that matter, I don't see that it exactly jives with St. Augustine.

The Old Man, of course, would never have characterized marital intercourse as sin. I assume you're referencing Book XIV of the The City of God, where it is asked, Why are those who engage in marital intercourse, an activity agreed by all to be noble and proper, ashamed to do so in public? It's a pretty interesting question, and I don't know if I've ever heard a more plausible answer than that which St. Augustine suggests.

Admittedly the speculations on procreation without passion have their comic side--I'm not sure that that's entirely unintentional. Still, they don't hold a candle to Erasmus' portrayal of the dilemma of the dignified Stoic realizing to what degree of folly he's going to have to stoop if he wants children.

@Jeffrey Shy It's the author of the article that I'm portraying in that way. In general, I don't turn to Augustine for advise about sex or marriage. I do think he has some real insight into the power of sexuality to become idolatrous, but it is just a particularly pointed example of the power of disordered love, one that strikes close to home for Augustine himself.

Where Augustine is most brilliant has to do with the relationship between the earthly and heavenly cities, the role of God as intimior intimo meo, the tension between history and the eschaton, prevenient grace, etc.

@ Bill Carroll. I can certainly agree that there is a certain poetic beauty in Augustine's concept of the Earthly and the Heavenly cities. While you may not go to Augustine for information on sexuality, there are many that do so. I am sure that you have long ago worked out how much societal and individual harm has been derived from his primary conclusions about the nature of sexuality.

@rick allen. I would agree that Augustine would not have characterized marital intercourse, as would have existed before the corruption of human nature, as sinful. He also clearly states that procreation is not sinful. He devotes, however, a great deal of ink to "lust" (for which other "lusts" than sexual desire receive only passing mention) as a punishment for the original disobedience of the first man Adam (not a metaphorical Adam but a real guy, in a real place doing exactly what the second Genesis creation account says he did). His acquired distaste for the experience of human sexuality plants itself in the sexual act firmly and irremediably. I will admit that he "waffles" a bit as to whether the desire itself is "sin" or something which, if the will is not strong enough to resist leads to sin (as when he discusses the "return" of the sinful desire in subjection to the effort of the will that "calms" the desire). Depending on where you read, he says both, I think. That he believes that there is a fundamental "wrongness" in human sexuality at its very core now as we experience it, is indisputable.
I know that some have seen "humor" in Augustine's discussion about what uncorrupted sexuality would have been like before human disobedience and the punishment of "lust," but Augustine seems to me, at least to be deadly serious about this and even goes so far as to address nameless critics who express skepticism about the possibility that sexuality could have been exactly as he envisioned it would have been. For the lack of taking his description as "humor" I would also reference Book XIV, chapter 16, "Now surely any friend of wisdom and holy joys who lives a married life but knows, in the words of the Apostle's warning, 'how to possess his bodily instrument in holiness and honour, not in the sickness of desire like the Gentiles who have no knowledge of God" -surely such a man would prefer, if possible, to beget children without lust of this kind."

@multiple posters. I would agree that the primary article, from which I have probably strayed significantly, does not do a good job of criticism of Augustine. I do think, however, that it is quite possible to criticize him most successfully. That so much of the "firm" underpinnings of his chains of argument can be picked apart should lead us to question at a most fundamental level the theological conclusions that he derives from them and by association, the ideas that have been established as "essential" Christian dogma. From there, it is quite possible to wish to repudiate many of the practical consequences in human attitudes and behaviors that came and are coming about as a result of his line of argument and theology. Augustine really believed that all future humanity was seminally present in the body of a real first human Adam and that the punishment for disobedience was visited on them in his very person and transmitted subsequently to all of humanity. He is not metaphorical about this but absolutely literal (see for example his discussion about the original need of the first humans to marry their siblings and how he has to reason himself out of allowing that practice to continue beyond the stage when it was "necessary." )
Augustine, Gregory and many other "fathers" of the church, devoted a great deal of time and ink to making the conclusions of Christianity "rational" and believable at a basic level to non-Christian persons in many apologetic works. Are we so arrogant now in our belief as to think that this task is unworthy of us? The arguments and criticisms against Christianity and its most fundamental assumptions have shifted. Is it right of us to just ignore the questions and repeat old answers that, while once quite convincing, no longer hold any power for many reasonable persons? By sheltering our theological discourse from any attempt at coming to terms with a world-view that is vastly different from late antiquity, the mediaeval period or the enlightenment, we simply guarantee that the marginalization process which we are already experiencing will ultimately lead to extinction.

Jeffrey - I hope you will consider developing your thoughts on this for an essay.

Some more thoughts on violence and theology. The Myth of Redemptive Violence

Thank you, Jeffrey! I agree with Ann that you should consider putting together an essay.

Bill, You have sidetracked the main question, which is how to rewrite a tradition which has become irrelevant. Using a value-laden word like "idolatrous" to describe certain kinds of sexuality seems to hark back to the days when neo-orthodox theologians considered anything nonChristian as idolatrous. Karl Barth, for example, no friend of Judaism, wrote that homosexuality is idolatrous because he saw it as being about narcissism and misogyny. Men and women are supposed to complement each other, he said. Without his wife, Nelly, who gave him five children and took care of the home; and without Charlotte von Kirschbaum, his live-in mistress/graduate student/secretary, who did a lot of his intellectual work for him, he would not have accomplished as much.

The world has changed a lot even in the past forty years now that different peoples are in a position to write their own critiques of grand narratives.

Gary Paul Gilbert

Gary,

As ever, this begs all the significant questions. I've decided not to waste too much more time on this running debate.

Apologetics can remove certain objections, but we don't attempt to establish the truth of the faith itself, which is a revealed mystery. In the end, if someone refuses to accept the apostolic faith, the answer is proclamation, not argument. Christianity has never given up on the grand narrative. It's contained in the Scriptures and summed up in the creeds. We can engage it critically, but it is always relevant.

Ann, Thank you for the link to "Tucson and the myth of redemptive violence"
by Carol Bradsen. I think that the belief that violence can be good is rooted in a quick fix mentality which disregards its traumatic consequences.

Gary Paul Gilbert

"For far too long we have put our collective hope as a nation in the myth of redemptive violence. Redemptive violence is the idea that good, that peace, that healing and reconciliation can come from violence. If we want to see a different future, we will need to loosen our grasp and untangle ourselves from this deeply rooted lie. And it will not be easy."

"This begs all the significant questions."

When Carroll announces that he's going to confine himself to the "significant questions," I presume that he means the theological ones of little interest to people outside the trade. Jeffrey Shy has pre-answered him:

Is it right of us to just ignore the questions and repeat old answers that, while once quite convincing, no longer hold any power for many reasonable persons? By sheltering our theological discourse from any attempt at coming to terms with a world-view that is vastly different from late antiquity, the medieval period or the enlightenment, we simply guarantee that the marginalization process which we are already experiencing will ultimately lead to extinction.

I commend one of my favorite theologian's work: Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology.

Also, Farley's The Divine Empathy.