Good Friday

I didn't begin this month intending for the site to go to full-blown religious mode, but it just so happens that my abstract academic interests and the baggage of my previous life sometimes converge into the present reality of Silentio. Today, being Good Friday and all, is no exception. I had no intention of writing anything about it or Easter, as I don't really 'celebrate' either -- with the minor exception being that I sometimes lie around my ass a little more than normal. Credit Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser, though, for sucking me back into the religious mix. His column in today's Guardian is well-worth reading, even if you're, say, a Sikh, a foxhole atheist, or a conservative, Republican-voting Christian -- the latter, admittedly, will undoubtedly encounter more cognitive dissonance than the others, but so it goes.

There are two ways of understanding the theology of Easter: one is structured around the notion of retribution; the other around the notion of forgiveness. As theological literacy becomes increasingly necessary to decode what many of our world leaders are really saying, this distinction is crucial. Easter has its hawks and its doves.

The Easter of the hawks insists that sin always has to be balanced, or paid for, with pain. It's the theological equivalent of the refusal to be "soft on crime". From this perspective, Easter is the story of Jesus paying off the debt of human sin with his own suffering and death. As the popular Easter hymn There is a Green Hill Far Away puts it: "There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin." Retribution is a moral necessity because through it the scales of justice are righted. Sin must be paid for with blood, just as crime must be paid for by punishment. On the cross Jesus is taking the punishment that is properly ours.

[. . .]

But the problem with the Easter of the hawks is much more than theological. The idea that human salvation is premised upon the torture and murder of an innocent life is one that has systematically weakened the capacity of European culture to set itself against cruelty. The glorification of pain and blood as the route to salvation has gone hand in hand with an obnoxious aesthetic of sadism. The "Christian" idea that pain and guilt must be in cosmic balance has led generations of Christians to support the death penalty and oppose prison reform.

It is no coincidence that places where this sort of theology has flourished - in 17th-century England and 21st-century America - are places where justice has been, and continues to be, expressed through the scaffold or the electric chair.

Now, if you, my theologically-inclined friends, are looking for theological justification for the good Reverand's coments, you're looking in the wrong column -- hell, with the Guardian you're looking in the wrong paper entirely! But I think he's hit on a very valid example of a point that too many conservatives try hard to either ignore or deny: that 'doctrines', be they theological or political, are imbedded in and have profound social and psychological implications. (An aside: For me, this network of implications is really what theology -- albeit, not necessarily religious belief or conviction -- is all about; or at least is what is most interesting about it.) His payoff paragraph is too good not to quote in its entirety:

Despite this alternative tradition, the punitive voice of Christianity continues to exert considerable influence on public policy, not least in the US. Here a retributive doctrine of the cross is the key link between fundamentalist Christianity and rightwing politics. It's a cultural context that makes possible the question of whether torture is a legitimate means of interrogating terrorists. It's a context that encourages the belief that the tragedy of 9/11 has to be paid for with the blood of another. It's not blood for oil, as the posters say. Worse than that -- it's blood for blood. This is the theology that underpins the moral convictions of the White House. And it's one Christ died opposing.

The last sentence is very much dependent upon one's perspective of the New Testament, but give me any day a liberal faith I don't necessarily believe over a fundamentalist one that I can't help but find frightening and threatening.