Coming Closer to the Cross: New Feminist Perspectives on the Passion of Jesus1
Marian RonanOver the past thirty-five years, feminists have been among the most vocal critics of the cross of Christ as a symbol of violence and victimization. In 1975, even before she became a feminist, Dorothee Soelle strongly criticized what she perceived as the sadism of Jurgen Moltmann’s theology of the cross, as expressed in his classic work, The Crucified God.2 In the decades since then, some feminist theologians have built on Soelle’s objections because the cross seems to them to represent a God who demands the victimization and abuse of human beings. It is worth noting, however, that Soelle herself never rejected the cross as a symbol of the sorrow and suffering of the oppressed.
In my own country, the United States, theologians Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock have been two of the most passionate and articulate feminist critics of the cross as a symbol of violence and abuse. In their 2001 book, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, Brock and Parker tell their own stories to illustrate the ways that the cross has been used to
1 This article is the revision of a talk delivered in Zurich, Switzerland in January, 2008, sponsored by the Protestant Academy at Boldern. Special thanks to Tania Oldenhage, then director of theological programs at Boldern, for critical comments on that talk.
2 Dorothee Soelle, Suffering (Minneapolis: Augsburg/Fortress, 1975); Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God : The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). Even in the original edition of Suffering in which she critiqued "Christian masochism," Soelle retained the cross as a figure through which Christians come into solidarity with all those who suffer. Glenn R. Bucher, Review of Suffering by Dorothee Soelle, Theology Today 33.3 (October 1976). http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/oct1976/v33-3-bookreview2.htm (Accessed June 6, 2009). The title of another of Soelle’s books, Stations of the Cross: A Latin American Pilgrimage (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) suggests that Soelle still found the cross an important figure for Christians nearly twenty years later.
encourage victimization.3 When she was a child, Parker chose not to speak out about the horrors of being sexually abused by a neighbor because Jesus had accepted his suffering in silence. Also during childhood, Brock tried her best to silently accept the sometimes violent discrimination aimed at her as an Asian American in order to be like the uncomplaining Jesus. For Brock and Parker, devotion to the cross, based in the Christian doctrine of the atonement, legitimizes, if it does not outright cause, violence and abuse.
Now I want to be very clear in saying that Proverbs of Ashes is a beautifully written and moving book. It is virtually impossible to dispute that the doctrine of the atonement, as Brock and Parker learned it, contributed mightily to their own suffering and victimization, and to the suffering and victimization of many other women whom they encountered in their ministries. Proverbs of Ashes is, in many ways, a brave and much-needed denunciation of the misuse of the cross, and of the suffering and death of Jesus which it stands for.
However, even as they offer their brave and articulate critique, Brock and Parker also choose to make much broader claims about the cross and the Christian theological tradition as a whole. Like a number of other feminists, they find the cross, and the medieval doctrine of the atonement associated with it, the source of virtually all the violence and militarism of the second Christian millennium. They therefore advocate abandoning the cross and focusing exclusively on the resurrection of Jesus as the center of the Christian faith. They elaborate on this position in their 2008 book, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion
3 Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive
and Empire.4
I find Brock and Parker's efforts to expel the cross from Christianity and to divorce the suffering and death of Jesus from his resurrection deeply troubling. To explain why, I need to tell you a few things about myself and about the immigrant American Catholic community in which I grew up. During the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, millions of poor European Catholics—from Germany but especially from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe—emigrated to the United States in search of a new life. Though their sufferings were by no means as great as those of African-Americans and Native Americans during the same period, or as those later incarcerated and killed by the Nazis, many of these Catholic immigrants did suffer considerably, laboring for pitiful wages, living in filthy tenements, dying young, denied education and respect. One thing that helped these destitute immigrants to survive and find meaning in their lives was the suffering of Jesus, his mother Mary, and the saints who had gone before them. Historians of American religion have documented the significant role played by the Catholic theology of suffering and accompanying devotional practices in the process of meaning-making in immigrant Catholic communities.5
In bringing to your attention the ways in which devotion to the crucified Christ and his sorrowful Mother helped my immigrant forebears to find meaning in their Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
4 Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).
5 See especially Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 202‐204.
sometimes very difficult lives, I do not mean to suggest that the effects of what some scholars call the “Catholic grammar of suffering” was unambiguously good.6 Scholars of American Catholicism have shown that devotion to the crucified Christ and his sorrowful Mother inspired immigrant Catholic women to assume more than their share of the burden of holding together their families and communities. My point is not to deny that the valorization of suffering sometimes contributed to the suffering of these women. What I want to stress is that at other times it helped women, and men as well, to find meaning in their suffering.7
I would make a similar argument about the role of the cross in the struggle of African Americans for civil rights in the United States: while the Ku Klux Klan enforced racism by burning crosses on the lawns of black people in the American South, African American Christians sang their hearts out with love for the crucified savior who shared with them their extraordinary suffering. That the cross is a multivalent signifier, and at this time in history, inscribed in the very heart of the Christian faith, seems lost on those who advocate its unambiguous abandonment. It’s hard, sometimes, not to wonder if these calls are not based in the assumption that the only kind of suffering in the world is the suffering of individuals who could escape it by changing the way they think.
6 James Terence Fisher, The Catholic Counterculture in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 80–81.
7 Orsi, Madonna, 204-217. Also relevant is the discussion by Nigerian theologian Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator of the positive function of Our Lady of Sorrows in the difficult lives of Catholic women in Africa. He writes, "As one of the Christian mothers explained to me, Mary knows what it takes to be a mother in Africa. She knows the pain of child bearing in dire poverty, the heavy hand of infant mortality hanging over the celebration of childbirth, the daily grind of raising a child almost entirely on her own, and the agony of losing an only child, even watching it die of hunger and starvation. An African woman knows more hardship, pain, and suffering than her Western counterpart." Theology Brewed in an African Pot (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009), 94-95.
Catholics who emigrated to the US from Europe did not remain poor forever, of course; a few of us began to move into the American mainstream before World War I, and by the 1950s, as a result of the post-World War II economic boom, white ethnic American Catholics in large numbers moved out of the urban ghettoes to the suburbs and joined the middle class. I am a scholar today in large part because of this upward mobility. What’s interesting to me about these developments is that as immigrant Catholic families moved into the American economic mainstream, they increasingly shifted from identifying with the suffering and death of Christ to identifying with his resurrection. One of the most well-known Catholics in the United States in the 1950s, Bishop Fulton Sheen, proclaimed on his weekly network television show that resurrection had succeeded suffering and death as the heart of our Catholic faith.8 It’s possible to interpret the Second Vatican Council as advocating a similar shift in emphasis from Christ’s death to his resurrection, as part of the Church’s new, modern emphasis on human dignity and worth. Many Catholic churches built in the US in this period in fact included a palpable symbol of this transition from death to resurrection: behind the altar, at the front of the church, the traditional figure of Christ’s suffering body on the cross was replaced by Christ’s resurrected body. In fact, sometimes in these modern churches, there was no cross at all, just a resurrected corpus suspended behind the altar.
In a certain sense, the experience of my own Irish-American Catholic family can serve as an example of this progression from suffering to success in the larger postimmigrant Catholic community. My father was a first generation Irish immigrant who
was orphaned at the age of nine and put out of his home at fifteen because the unmarried aunts who had taken him in could no longer afford to feed him. My mother’s family had been in the United States several generations longer, but they, too, were poor, and devastated especially by a series of contagious diseases rarely experienced any more in the United States and Europe. When, after the war, my parents were able to buy their own tiny row house and began saving money to send their children to college, they simply could not believe their amazing good luck. It was difficult for them to understand why my brother or I would ever be unhappy about anything.
But there were, of course, things for us to be unhappy about; there are things for everyone to be unhappy about. And in our case, there was the particular impact of the extensive damage my parents had sustained from early deprivation and loss, now firmly repressed beneath our growing economic security and the success projected for my brother and me. Perhaps the American inability, in the years since World War II, to understand and respond effectively to suffering in other parts of the world is, in part, a similar repression of the suffering of earlier generations.
One thing that helped me survive and eventually work through the repression of loss in my own post-immigrant family was the crucifix. For although post-immigrant American Catholicism and even Vatican II theology may have advocated, at least in part, leaving the suffering savior behind, it wasn’t really possible for Catholics to do so. The crucifix remained there, behind the altar in most churches at every Mass, and at the Stations of the Cross during Lent, and in the Gospel, read to us week after
8 Fisher, Catholic Counterculture, 81
week. This suffering savior became my companion through years of emotional struggle and depression. Some feminists may believe that the companionship of the suffering Jesus inspired me to cling to my suffering, but as for me, I am grateful to have had a companion who, I was quite certain, understood what I was going through. Identifying with this crucified savior also made me part of a community, the church, that was, practically and symbolically, much, much, larger than my own tiny, damaged nuclear family.
Given that this was the case, I suppose it's not surprising that I have recently published a book about the significance of the cross in the lives and work of other post-immigrant Catholics who grew up, like me, in the United States after World War II.9 In this book I explore the ways in which, sometimes despite their greatest efforts, these Catholics were unable to repress suffering and loss—not only the losses suffered by immigrant parents and grandparents, but also those that marked the years during and after the Second Vatican Council. For as soon as we post-war American Catholics began to achieve the American dream our parents had labored to attain, that dream exploded before our very eyes, in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.; in the Vietnam War and the conflicts over it in our community; and in the struggle to integrate into American society African Americans and other people of color, something some of us white-ethnic Catholics, to our shame, opposed violently.
In my book, I trace the ways that the cross, and in fact, the crucifix, appears and
9 Marian Ronan, Tracing the Sign of the Cross: Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
reappears in the writings of three politically progressive American Catholics of my generation, and one former Catholic: novelists James Carroll and Mary Gordon, feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway, and gay Hispanic essayist and commentator Richard Rodriguez. In researching this book I discovered that the crucifix plays a somewhat different role in the works of each of these four American Catholics, but only one of them, the former Catholic priest and novelist, James Carroll, is in the least inclined toward rejecting the cross, in his case because he judges it to be a symbol of Catholic anti-Judaism.
Especially striking, among the works of these four writers, is the use Donna Haraway makes of representations of Jesus’ suffering in her critically acclaimed feminist philosophy of science. Now in point of fact, most of Haraway’s readers would be astounded to find Haraway included in my book, since Haraway makes clear in her writing that she no longer considers herself a Catholic (though she does acknowledge Catholicism as an important part of her upbringing). But, as we shall see, it's easier to renounce Catholicism than to eradicate certain distinctive Catholic/Christian figures from one's thinking.
Already in the 1980s, Haraway had become famous for her essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in which she uses the hybrid cyborg—part machine, part organism—to represent the fragmentation and boundary crossing of the postmodern period.10 Some critics argued that by highlighting the cyborg, Haraway was rejecting the human in favor of
10 Donna J. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–108.
technology.11 But even before these criticisms were published, Haraway had shifted her attention from the cyborg to the broken human body, in particular, the crucified body of Jesus, as well as the bodies of the Suffering Servant of Second Isaiah, and the American ex-slave, Sojourner Truth. For Haraway, these broken bodies represent the fragmentations and fusions that are, as she suggests, the scourge and hope of our time. Haraway begins the title of her essay with the phrase Pontius Pilate used to present Jesus to the crowd before his crucifixion, “Ecce Homo.”12
Donna Haraway continues this unexpected engagement with the crucified Christ in her 1997 book, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium: FemaleMan© Meets_Oncomouse™ 13 The “modest witness” of the book’s title is a participantobserver who is swept up into the technologically altered reality of our time. One of the figures whom “modest witness” engages in conversation is Oncomouse™, a rodent into which a gene that produces breast cancer, an oncogene, has been transplanted. This trait makes the Oncomouse highly marketable for research purposes. A painting of the Oncomouse appears on the back cover of Haraway’s book. In it, the Oncomouse™ is clearly human, with human arms and legs, but she is also clearly a rodent. On her head is a crown of thorns, a visual reference to Christ’s
11 Sharon V. Betcher, “Putting My Foot (Prosthesis, Crutches, Phantom) Down: Considering Technology as Transcendence in the Writings of Donna Haraway,” Scholarly Presentation, Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Orlando,Florida, November 1998. Jill Marsden, “Virtual
Sexes and Feminist Futures: The Philosophy of ‘Cyberfeminism,'" Radical Philosophy 78 (July/August 1996): 6, 9, and throughout.
12 Donna J. Haraway, “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Posthumanist Landscape,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 86–100.
13 Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@SecondMillenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_Oncomouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997).
crucifixion. Of this Oncomouse Haraway writes:
S/he is our scapegoat; s/he bears our suffering; s/he signifies and enacts our mortality in a powerful, historically specific way that promises a culturally privileged kind of salvation—a “cure for cancer.” Whether I agree to her existence and use or not, she suffers, physically, repeatedly, and profoundly, that I and my sisters may live. In the experimental way of life, she is the experiment. S/he also suffers that we, that is, those interpellated into this ubiquitous story, might inhabit the multibilliondollar quest narrative of the search for the “cure for cancer."14
Haraway clearly does not incorporate into her work this representation of the crucifixion in order to justify victimization, but rather, to illustrate the ethical ambiguity of medical research and the ways in which many of us are complicit in the suffering of laboratory animals and the scientific exploitation of the wider environment.
At this point, you may be thinking that although what I have written thus far is not uninteresting, it basically describes engagements with the cross by a few writers of the same generation, all from the same, albeit highly influential, country. Yet a number of other writers and researchers are also proposing new perspectives on the cross in our time. One of these is a young feminist religious studies scholar, Jennifer S. Hughes. In 2005, Hughes completed an ethnographic study of the very long relationship between the inhabitants of Totolapan, a small community in the mountainous regions of the Mexican state of Morenos, and a particular crucifix, the Cristo Aparacido, or Christ Appeared.15 Hughes’s book is called The Biography of a
14 Haraway, Modest_ Witness, 78.
15 Jennifer S. Hughes, The Iconography of Suffering: Biography of a Mexican Crucifix. Ph.D. dissertation. (Berkeley, CA: Graduate Theological Union, 2005). The material in this article is drawn from Hughes's dissertation, but her revision of this study is forthcoming: Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press).
Mexican Crucifix. From interviews with the inhabitants of Totolapan as well as historical research, Hughes traces the history of the Cristo over five hundred years: its delivery in 1543 by a mysterious messenger to a community of indigenous people who had been recently converted to Christianity; the theft and transport of this Cristo from Totolapan to a dominant Augustinian monastery in Mexico City in 1583; its celebrated return to its original dwelling place two hundred fifty years later; and its interaction with liberation theologians and charismatic Catholics in the 20th century. In this process, Hughes draws out and interprets the lasting vibrancy of the cult of the crucified Christ for the faith of the people of Totolapan, and by analogy, for the wider Mexican Catholic community.
One of the more fascinating aspects of Hughes’s work is her proposal that the Cristo Aparacedo is not just one Cristo but rather a constellation of figures. Around these figures circulates a many-layered Christology in which the Gospel narrative of Christ’s suffering and death is sometimes significant, but also frequently recedes into the background. While Hughes links the Cristo Aparacedo of the early years with the conquered and brutally exploited indigenous peoples of New Spain, she notes that in more recent years, devotés of the Cristo relate to him with affection and tenderness, as a beloved santo, or patron saint of the local community To illustrate this intimate relation, she tells of observing a woman introducing her grandson not, in this case, to the Cristo Aparacedo, but to the beloved crucified Christ of a town not far from Totolapan:
The grandmother walked easily up behind the altar, carrying the boy in her arms and spoke quietly into the baby’s ear as she gestured to the crucifix in its
glass nicho. After gathering several flowers from large vases, she climbed the small, concealed stairs up to the Cristo. Talking gently all the while to the infant, the grandmother opened the glass door, pulled aside the lace curtain, and stroked the image with the flowers, smiling at the baby. I was struck by the warmth, sweetness, and intimacy of the act. Who could feel fear, or sadness, or apprehension in front of a crucifix after such an introduction?16
Some may interpret this story as the grandmother’s implicit rejection of violence, but it’s hard to perceive it as a rejection of the crucifix. Rather, what we learn from this story is that over the centuries, as Hughes tells us, the themes of suffering and violence have been “rehearsed and reinvented” in relation to the Cristo Aparacedo.
17 For the Mexican Catholics Hughes studies, the crucifix is a multivalent but indispensable figure of their faith. The fact that it may have meant something different to early Christians seems not to concern them greatly.
Another portion of The Biography of a Mexican Crucifix also calls into question efforts by some feminists to replace the crucified Cristo with the resurrected Jesus. In the 1950s and 60s, Don Sergio Mendez Arceo was the bishop of Cuernavaca, the diocese of which Totolapan is a part. He was particularly beloved to the people of Totolapan for returning the Cristo Aparacedo to them after a prolonged absence for restoration in 1954.
Yet Don Sergio was also known for something that had made him far less popular with a number of his people. Because of his commitment to the liturgical reforms that would culminate in the Second Vatican Council, the bishop in the 1950s ordered the complete renovation of the cathedral of Cuernavaca, in large part to curb what he perceived to be excessive and exaggerated devotion to the saints by the local people.
16 Hughes, Iconography, 329.
17 Ibid , i.
The renovation included the removal of multiple side altars each dedicated to a particular community saint, or santo, so as to place more emphasis on the main Eucharistic altar at the front of the cathedral. The bishop also ordered the ornate old retablo or painted wooden scene including Mary, the saints and the crucifix which had been located behind the altar, replaced with a large imposing figure of the risen Christ. Hughes describes this new Cristo for us:
Alive, head raised, eyes open—this is an image of the resurrected, triumphant Christ, not the suffering Jesus. Wounds, blood, nails, and other indications of pain, distress or death are conspicuously absent. This Cristo hovers, unbound, in front of the cross.…18
Although the more educated welcomed it, many of the ordinary people of Cuernavaca rejected Don Sergio’s renovation of the cathedral. Some of them wrote messages to Don Sergio on the back of the offertory envelopes that they found in the cathedral pews, asking him why the church had “profaned the figure of Christ” with this frightening new figure. 19
I do not argue that in their rejection of the renovated cathedral, the people of Cuernavaca were necessarily rejecting the figure of the resurrected Christ in favor of the more traditional figures of the suffering Christ, his mother, and the saints. It actually seems that what they were rejecting was the replacement of the communal santos that gave their lives meaning—including their Cristo—with cold, abstract, modern religious art. But it is also true that the recent controversy over the cross versus the resurrection seems not to have entered into their consideration at all.
18 Ibid., 191.
19 Ibid., 197.
At this point, another question may be occurring to you, as it has to me. For it is hard not to notice that while the feminists whose criticisms of the cross I have highlighted thus far—Dorothee Soelle, Rebecca Parker, and Rita Nakashima Brock— are Protestants, the feminists whose more positive, though not unambiguous, engagements with the cross I have shared with you today are all Catholics, or at least former Catholics.20 To what extent, then, are we dealing here with a renewal of the centuries old conflict between Reformed and Catholic Christians over whether the body of the crucified Christ ought to be present on the cross at all? In many respects, Brock and Parker’s rejection of medieval Christian devotionalism in favor of the more authentic Christianity of the early church can be read as a reiteration of the Reformers efforts to leap back over the Middle Ages to the New Testament period.
But there’s more going on in this discussion than a reiteration of the historic Catholic/Protestant binary. One of the most significant recent complications of the supposed opposition between the crucifixion of Christ and his resurrection is precisely the work of a Protestant (United Methodist) theologian, the Asian North American feminist, Wonhee Anne Joh. In her 2006 study, Heart of the Cross, Joh offers a new, hybrid understanding of the cross in light of the experiences and reflections of Asian and Asian North American postcolonial feminists, and particularly those of Korean American Christians.21
Joh begins her Christology by acknowledging the importance of feminist critiques of what she calls “traditional atonement theories,” theories that valorize suffering and
20 Jennifer S. Hughes, a former Roman Catholic, is now an Episcopal priest.
21 Wonhee Anne Joh, Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology (Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 2006).
passivity.22 She proposes nonetheless that the cross is more than this; it points to a radical form of love, one on which she sheds light by means of the Korean concept, jeong Jeong encompasses but is not limited to notions of compassion, affection, solidarity, relationality, vulnerability and forgiveness; written in Chinese characters, it is composed primarily of words for heart, vulnerability, and something “arising.” And though it includes what is normally understood as love, jeong goes far beyond love in its transformative power.23
To clarify for her Western readers the meaning of jeong, Joh contrasts it with the Korean notion of dan, a clean departure or cutting off from systems of oppression and the oppressors who enact them. This is the approach often recommended by Korean liberation theologians as the appropriate way of dealing with han, the historic suffering of the Korean people. Joh acknowledges that this cutting off is sometimes necessary. She argues, however, that dan, in and of itself, cannot effect the healing of han. Such healing requires jeong¸ which includes feelings of compassion even for oppressors. Jeong, we learn, is most clearly recognized, “when we perceive our very own self, conscious and unconscious, in the mirrored reflection of the other,” even, and perhaps especially, in the reflection of our oppressors. 24
Joh draws on the postcolonial notion of mimicry to develop her thesis. The cross not only pays homage to the violence of imperial power, it also mocks and menaces those powers by reflecting back to them the very others they have attempted to
22 Ibid., xiii.
23 Ibid
24 Ibid., xxi.
victimize and control. In terms of the feminist critique of the cross here, we might paraphrase Joh by saying that although the cross has functioned as a sign of violence and abuse, it also mirrors back a powerful transcendence of passivity in favor of compassion and radical inclusion.
Joh further develops this understanding of the cross as an expression of jeong, of radical compassionate inclusion, by drawing on the notion of the abject in the work of the psychoanalytic feminist theorist Julia Kristeva. For Kristeva, the abject is the repellent other that is constantly in the process of being expelled from the rational, controlled patriarchal realm but can never be fully obliterated because it is an inherent part of the entity attempting the expulsion. In describing the Kristevan abject, Joh writes:
As a compromise between “condemnation and yearning,” the abject marks the boundaries and the borders of the self. …the abject haunts the subject as its inner boundary, which unwillingly gets transgressed, so that the abject is “something rejected from which one does not part.” The return of the abject is thus a constant reminder that we are fragmented and furthermore that our problem of the abject is not the Other but within ourselves. 25
The impossibility of drawing a clear line between the abject and the supposedly pure, rational contained self which strives to expel it illumines the central role Joh assigns to the concept of jeong in her theology of the cross. It is essential to extend compassion to the oppressor as well as to the oppressed because ultimately, it is not possible to distinguish between these two. For Joh, the crucifix is a symbol of this imbrication, this ambiguity. On the one hand, it expresses the violent need of the patriarchal and imperial powers to expel the messy, repellent other. This expulsion may well include the
25 Ibid., 90.
reinscription of passivity and victimization by traditional Christian atonement theory. At the same time, the cross celebrates the failure of this attempt at repression: the abject survives in the crucified body of Jesus—recognized and valorized by billions throughout time and space. The crucifix figures the return of the abject even in the face of violent, imperial power. And the abject includes all, since it is impossible to establish a clear boundary between the virtuous and the repellent.
It’s possible, of course, to use this argument as a way of absolving oppressors of responsibility for their actions. I am reminded here of the pastoral care offered to imprisoned Nazi war criminals that protected them (and Germans and Catholics more broadly) from confronting their crimes.26 Indeed, Kristeva’s work on the ambiguity of abjection is the sort of theoretical formulation that some conservative thinkers cite when they argue that postmodernist discourses are “ethically relativist.”
Yet I do not believe that this is the only way to understand Joh’s reinterpretation of the cross as an expression of jeong, or radical inclusion. For by forcing American and European feminists to reconsider the cross as a symbol of profound significance to suffering people throughout the world, Joh also makes it difficult for us to dismiss certain aspects of the cross that we may be entirely too eager to avoid. Here I find Jurgen
Moltmann helpful--as does Joh--other problematic dimensions of his Christology
26 See, for example, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2006), and Katharina von Kellenbach, "Schuld und Vergebung: Zur Deutschen Praxis Christlicher Versöhnung." In Mit Blick auf die Täter. Fragen an die Deutsche Theologie nach 1945, ed. Bjorn Krondorfer, Katharina von Kellenbach, and Norbert Reck (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verl.-Haus, 2006), 227312.
notwithstanding.27 For me, this is the case, in part at least, because Moltmann himself, in his theology of the cross, confronts his own identity as a former member of the Nazi army, that is, as a perpetrator—a sinner, to use language liberal US Christians tend to avoid. And as harmful as the traditional language of expiation may be, we must not use this harmfulness to justify our forgetting the massive guilt, not only of former Nazis, but also of those of us who live lives of comfort and privilege in the West.28 We need to be very careful about making absolute distinctions between the oppressed and sinners, especially as the victims of one generation all too often turn into the victimizers of the next. It is also crucial to consider whether some of us use the oppression we have experienced by virtue of our gender to shield ourselves from the oppression of which we are guilty by virtue of our race, nationality, or educational privilege. Joh’s reading of the cross as a symbol of the ambiguity of abjection forces us to remember that we American and European feminists are not just the oppressed whom the imperial powers have attempted to expel. We are also at times those violent imperial forces, attempting to expel our poor, colonial, black or Muslim sisters and brothers.
In concluding these reflections on a new feminist theology of the cross, I wish to make two points. First of all, despite certain historic misappropriations of the cross in the service of abuse and victimization, a not insignificant number of Catholic and Protestant Christian feminists continue to find the cross and representations of the crucified Christ profoundly meaningful in their own work and within oppressed and suffering
27 Ibid., 100.
28 For a discussion of perpetrator identification as an important aspect of contemporary Christian scholarship on the Holocaust, especially in the work of Tania Oldenhage, see Sarah K. Pinnock, "Atrocity and Ambiguity: RecentDevelopments in ChristianHolocaust Responses," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75.3 ( 2007): 499-523.
communities. Secondly, although these studies suggest that the cross is a multivalent signifier, subject to multiple theological interpretations, Wonhee Anne Joh’s postcolonial Christology demonstrates that the very ambiguity of the abjection that the cross symbolizes demands nothing less than a jeong of radical inclusive compassion. In order to move toward such a jeong, white American and European Christian feminists are called to a thoroughgoing analysis of their own cultural and economic context in light of the possibility that the dividing line between oppressor and oppressed, between perpetrator and victim, is not as unambiguous as we may believe. In doing so, we will perhaps be encouraged by Joh’s assertion that jeong brings with it radical transformation.
Marian Ronan is Research Professor of Catholic Studies in the Center for World Christianity, New York Theological Seminary, NY, NY.