The Way We (Don’t) Talk About Sin Is Hurting Us

The ways we talk about sin (and the ways we avoid talking about sin) are hurting ourselves and each other - read more on KateRaeDavis.com

The previous posts in this series may have seemed pessimistic. Starting a conversation on the human condition with sin and failure to receive God’s gifts seems like cynicisms. Humans are capable of great acts of reconciliation, compassion, and love. Christians have a long history of working to extend love to others just as God extended it to us. Why focus on the dark side when light exists?

Sin may seem irrelevant to who we are called to be. But sin remains a vital category not only in Christian theology but in human development. It’s happy to focus on salvation and redemption and grace. But salvation stories are meaningless without knowing what it is we’re being given grace in response to, or what we’re being saved or redeemed from.

Sin is anything that keeps us from being fully alive in our humanity.

Sin is anything that keeps us from loving others in their full humanity. So sin is always part of the Christian conversation. It’s the backdrop that makes noticing light possible.

Whenever salvation or grace is preached, what is implicit is the notion of salvation from a state of being, or grace with regards to a tendency. The word ‘sin’ may not be used, but its presence is assumed when we use the words like salvation, redemption, and grace.

It’s really easy to forget that salvation was extended to us in the midst of sinfulness. I know that I forget about what my life used to be like. And that forgetfulness is a great risk to ourselves. When we forget the ways we harm others and ourselves, we tend to return to those ways.

So sin is a diagnosis, a vocabulary, a name, a narrative for the ways in which we fail to live into our salvation, the ways we fail to live in grace, the ways we fail to be fully human. Without a solid understanding of sin, our attempts to move toward health, wholeness, and holiness do more harm than good.

Sinful behavior is contrasted with interpretations of Christlikeness.

When people are urged to be more Christlike, the qualities that define “Christlikeness” are interpreted from scripture.

Let me repeat: they’re interpreted from scripture. They’re not just from scripture. The stories are interpreted, and then they’re applied to our lives and world today — which is also an act of interpretation. If those interpretations are limited, the grace and salvation preached will be similarly limited.

And let’s be honest, interpretations are always going to be limited. Each human — whoever is doing the interpreting — has a very particular worldview. Each human is only able to see the world from their own stance. If they’re really good at listening, maybe they can imagine a few different perspectives.

There is no entirely objective “view from nowhere.” There can be no fully sensitive, diverse, informed “view from everywhere.” Unless you’re God.

And here’s the issue: to whatever degree an interpretation is limited, it holds the potential to be destructive.

So it’s a problem that only men have been allowed to participate in theological conversations in recent, erm, millennia. Women’s experience has been largely silenced.

This silencing is especially noticeable in conversations about sin.

Many of the “deadly sins” are from places of privilege.

Gluttony assumes you have access to food, greed assumes you have access to resources, pride implies you have a sense of self and agency.

But these sins just don’t really apply when you aren’t in a position of power. I’ll focus on pride, since it’s the one that the Western world largely speaks of it as if it’s the root of all sin. Pride assumes you have access to conversations and are allowed to “take up space” — and so you should be quieter, humbler, relationally “smaller” to make room for others and to submit to others. Great, if you’re a man with markers of privilege and status.

Less great if you’re a woman who has limited access and is already so relationally “small” as to be nonexistent. For generations, women have heard from preachers and pastors to be humble and to submit to others. If she’s having a fight with a friend, be humble and sumbit to your friend. If she’s being abused at home, be humble and submit to your husband. Sex against your will? Be humble and submit.

This isn’t working.

Or rather, it’s working in the sense that it functions to uphold the current power structures. It’s working, right now, for straight white men.

The problem is diagnosed as pride and the solution only perpetuates the pain, and the church insists that the problem is still pride. That’s crazy. That’d be like your doctor insisting that you need to be leeched because you have a blood disease — when your issue is that you’re bleeding out. It’s time to re-evaluate the problem and get a new diagnosis.

Maybe the thing that is supposed to save us — humility and submission — actually is itself the sin. And maybe recognizing that is really good news because it opens up the possibility of salvation.

That’s been true in my life. And I found that my liberating experience is shared by others who had internalized our culture’s value of humility and submission (or in other circles, “self-giving” or “self-sacrifice”). Those others are mostly women and people of sex and gender diversity, which is telling — we’re the people that didn’t have voices in theological conversations about sin and pride.

We need to start by recognizing that sinful behaviors do not vanish upon baptism or speaking the Jesus prayer.

Even in dramatic conversion experiences, people aren’t entirely freed from sin. I’m certainly not.

Sinful behaviors persist because sin is not only a behavior, but also a state that preconditions all behaviors.

It is not enough to be converted to a new way of life once. We must be converted freshly every day – at times it feels we must be converted every hour – and continuously re-oriented toward the goal. The goal, by the way, is love of God and neighbor.

We must know the character that we hope to develop or else we labor in vain. Roberta Bondi says “we must not simply aim at love in general; we must have a little knowledge of the qualities that lead to the love we want…In the same way, we must also know what we are to avoid.”

We can best move toward the goal of love if we can anticipate the blockages we will face. We need to develop language and sight for areas to which we have been blind.

We name sins, we confess the truth of our reality, not to make us more lovable or more acceptable in God’s sight. We confess our particular sins as a step forward in our freedom to love.

Thanks for reading! To never miss a post in the series — or any post ever — sign up to have a weekly summary of posts delivered right to your inbox:

In the comments:

Have you ever been told to “be humble / submit / self-give / self-sacrifice” and felt something inside yourself — hope, agency, safety — wither? What did it do to your relationship with God? with the Church?

June 14, 2016June 10, 2016

Is Scripture Fiction?: Salman Rushdie, St Paul, and the Fictions that Hide

Salman Rushdie, St Paul, and the Fictions that Hide - Is scripture fiction? - read more on KateRaeDavis.com

I recently heard a conversation between Salman Rushdie (author of The Satanic Verses) and Paul Holdengraber (interviewer of NYPL fame).

Rushdie spoke about the letters he wrote to his parents as the start of his career writing fiction:

I was a very bad letter writer. Actually, I now have a lot of letters, because my parents saved them, and so I’ve inherited them. And they’re full of apologies for not having written. All of the letters begin with, I’m really sorry I haven’t written. And then, the usual kinds of fake explanations for why I haven’t written, how busy I’ve been at boarding school, or university. In many ways, those letters were my first works of fiction, because I was very unhappy at boarding school. But I didn’t want my parents to feel that, because my mother certainly felt very sad that I was sent away from home, and wished that I hadn’t been, and my father was spending all this money and taking all this trouble to give me a foreign education in England. So I would make up how happy I was.

The idea of letters as living in the genre of fiction struck me. I think we’re taught that there’s a hard line between fiction and nonfiction, between what’s true and what isn’t. And we’re taught that genres and formats have definite places they live. Letters, we believe, are firmly in the realm of nonfiction, usually somewhere near memoir.

But I imagine Rusdhie isn’t alone in this practice of lying in letters. I imagine many of us have glossed over the ugly parts of our life for the sake of conveying overall well-being. Or scribbled a note on an office birthday card that spoke of more affection than we truly feel. Or have written a less-than-sincere “So happy for you!” on the facebook wall of your friend who just got engaged to someone who provokes feelings other than happiness.

I imagine that we frequently write fiction under the guise of sincerity.

But what really struck me was the implications of that realization on the letters of arguably one of the most famous letter-writers in history: St Paul. He wrote many of the letters that have since been canonized as Christian holy scripture. Depending on which scholars you talk to, he wrote eight to ten of the 27 books that comprise the New Testament.

And I have to imagine that there is some level of fiction in them.

Paul’s letter to the Philippian church comes to mind. While writing it, he’s in prison. Prison, in Paul’s day, was even more harsh than modern day prisons — there was no concept of “human rights” for prisoners. And yet, Paul claims that he rejoices for his imprisonment, for God uses even these circumstances for the advancement of the gospel.

Which … it might be true that he, in his moments of reflective calm and acceptance, understands his imprisonment that way. But it also really sucks to be in prison and uncertain of whether you will be alive or dead next week.

Perhaps, like Rushdie, Paul wrote the happiest version of his life he could, for the sake of the church, for the sake of their hope in Christ.

Although, unlike Rushdie, Paul doesn’t completely avoid the reality of the hardships — he doesn’t pretend he’s not in prison, doesn’t pretend prison is a happy place to be. Paul acknowledges that hardship exists, but frames that hardship in a larger narrative that extends beyond his discomfort.

Ultimately, we see adult Rushdie doing this in a way that his child letter-writer wasn’t able to. In the interview, he frames his hardship in the larger narrative of his father’s care for him, the trouble his father went to for his sake, the benefits of the British education.

Perhaps framing one’s hardships in the context of a wider narrative is not the mark of a saint, but a pastoral task, an interpersonal task. Perhaps finding the happy points is a very human tendency when communicating with those who love us and are far away. The challenge is to balance the reality of the grief with the perspective of the larger narrative in which our grief exists. The challenge is to come to hope.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed it, please hit the starred ‘like’ button below; it would mean a lot to me as it helps others see it. Or, use the social media buttons to share it wherever you hang out online.

Discuss in the comments:

When do you tell fictions as though they’re truth? Or when do you suspect others’ do?

How can you tell the difference between truth and fiction on social media?

June 9, 2016June 8, 2016

How to Understand Relationship With God

What relationship do you mean to evoke when you say “God”?

I don’t think any of us mean the bearded old guy on a cloud. At last not on purpose.

We’ve moved away from rulership metaphors, for the most part. Which makes sense. “King” and “Lord” don’t carry a lot of metaphorical weight with people who elect their political leadership.

Many Christians are moving away from the parental imagery of Father (and of Mother, for that matter). Blame it on Freud, but we’re in an age of psychological awareness. As large groups of people work on to articulate the ways in which their parents fall far short of divine behavior, it will continue to get more problematic to evoke parental imagery for God.

So we’re left wondering: how do we understand this divine, invisible, felt force that moves through the cosmos? What metaphor or analogy can we use for something beyond all understanding? What language can we put to something so profoundly experiential?

The Good Gift Giver

I’ve settled on one image that feels right and true: God is the giver of good gifts.

Throughout scripture we read that God gives strength, wisdom, and all that is good. For just a short list, see Psalm 29:11; Psalm 85:12; Proverbs 2:6; Matthew 7:11; James 1:5; James 1:17. That list could be really long. The act of giving is an essential characteristic of God and is made incarnational in Jesus.

Kathryn Tanner writes about God as the giver of good gifts. She recognizes that the God-made-flesh moment is what unites humanity and God. Tanner says that in this uniting work, “God gives everything necessary. … God contributes all the elements. … God gives completely to us.”

Sacrifice is no longer required of humanity. There is nothing to sacrifice. In a great reversal of expectations, God has provided and offered all the elements of sacrifice as a gift to humanity. You could even go so far as to say that it is impossible for us to truly sacrifice to God, for “God needs nothing but wants to give all.” The Christian God is “a God of gift-giving abundance.”

Receiving Gifts

I struggle with this conception of God as the giver of everything.

If God provides every aspect of the sacrifice needed for my atonement, what is left for me to give? It’s not that attending church services or spending time in daily devotions is insufficient, it’s that it’s unnecessary to the atoning project. How do we participate in a relationship if God has done all that needs doing?

I think the first step for us is to recognize the goodness of the gifts.

And then to respond with gracious receptivity and surrender. To offer, as Tanner says, “the return to God of prior gifts on God’s part to us … as an appropriate act of thanksgiving.”

Our response to God’s gifts is to return those gifts for the purpose of God. As Ignatius phrased it in prayer:

“Take and receive, Lord, my entire liberty, my memory, my understanding… All that I am and have you have given to me, and I give it all back to you to be disposed of according to your good pleasure.”

Gifts are received and returned to God when we use the gifts to the pleasure of God. I think this takes the form of using the gifts to the service and benefit of humanity (but that’s a topic of its own lengthy post).

There are a thousand examples of gifts being given back in ways to please God. A gift of innovation that is used to restore creation; a gift for joy and laughter that is shared to bring joy to others; a gift for organizing resources used to care for those in need.

Not Receiving Gifts

And then there are ways in which we don’t accept and return God’s gifts.

We refuse rather than receive. We misuse rather than return. That is, we sin.

Sin is shorthand for what keeps us from relationship with God. In this image, sin is shorthand for the ways in which we fail to receive or use God’s good gifts.

Refusing Gifts

We refuse gifts because of blockages.

Perhaps we’re unable to receive because our hands are full of what has been handed from elsewhere.

Perhaps our hands are forcefully closed or our arms will not risk outstretching to receive.

Or we have been handed stones in the past and we won’t risk asking for bread again.

Or we have been socially conditioned to view ourselves as unworthy of good gifts.

We refuse gifts because of blindness.

Perhaps we don’t notice what is offered.

Or perhaps we don’t recognize that the gift is good.

Or we don’t believe it’s freely offered, suspecting hidden strings attached.

Or perhaps we’re distracted.

And in all of this, God remains the giver. Tanner is adamant: the “gift is still being offered even as we turn away from it in sin.”

Misusing Gifts

When we successfully receive a gift, our participation is not done. Sometimes we misuse the gifts that have been given to us.

A gift can be used for purposes other than for what was designed or intended. Like a kid who asks for a water gun that is then used to torment the neighbor girl, sometimes gifts aren’t used as they were intended. Not that I’m speaking from personal experience or anything…

A gift can be used in its right function (the gun shoots water), but for ill purposes (torment instead of fun, surprise instead of consenting play). In a spiritual sense, a gift might be used for ill ends such as personal glory, self-promotion, or financial prosperity rather than for the good of others.

Or, more subtle but perhaps equally sinister is the person who claims that their gifts originate within their own self. The person who refuses to acknowledge that there was any gifting involved.

Or, a gift can be misused through its destruction in inappropriate sacrifice.

Justin Martyr writes: “We have been taught that the only honor that is worthy of [God] is not to consume by fire what he has brought into being for our sustenance, but to use it for ourselves and those who need.”

Martyr’s words remind me of a story of an African man who heard of Jesus’s sacrifice and that no other sacrifices were necessary. So he stopped sacrificing his animals, and was better able to feed his community. He laughed, “Jesus saves…the chickens and the goats!”

The sacrificial misuse of spiritual gifts often occurs through misunderstanding the purpose of gifts. Women, I think, are socially conditioned to destroy what is given. Women with gifts of leadership or prophecy or any number of things are told to “sacrifice” for the sake of being a good wife/mother/Christian. She is being lied to about the essential nature of her sex and about the appropriate use of her gifts.

Systems of Sin

When gifts are refused or misused, we tend to focus on individual choice. Or perhaps we’re generous — we speak in terms of predisposition, family patterns, and circumstances.

But at least as important as the individual is the reality of the wider system.

We all live and move within layers of systems. Often unknowingly, or unquestioningly. Family systems, yes, but also cultural norms, socializations (what is “polite” or “proper”), societal roles. And these systems are influenced by religious teachings, traditions, doctrines, and ways of interpreting scripture. All of these influence how and whether we respond to the gifts of God.

In a systemic sense, we are all complicit in the sins of the individual, because we have created a context in which sin may be a reasonable or beneficial option.

That might sound far-fetched, or like too much guilt. But consider, for instance, the sin of murder: we’ve created a context in which weapons of many sorts are readily available. In the US, we’ve even come up with legal terms we view as sacred: Self Defense. As though the text reads, “Thou shalt not kill, unless in the circumstances that murder is a countermeasure in order to defend the health and well-being of oneself or another.”

We’ve created a context in which murder is reasonable.

And even if we question that norm, we are complicit. At least, I am, every moment that I’m not trying to change the system.

If that feels extreme, consider the sin of theft. We’ve participated in circumstances in which people starve and won’t be fed. This is true even if our participation is through a lack of action to change anything — I haven’t welcomed to my dinner table any young adults who have aged out of the foster system or mentally ill persons with no home to return to. So I’m complicit.

Grace

Madeleine L’Engle:

“It is no coincidence that the root word of whole, health, heal, holy is hale (as in hale and hearty). If we are healed, we become whole; we are hale and hearty; we are holy. The marvelous thing is that this holiness is nothing we can earn. …It is nothing we can do in this do-it-yourself world. It is gift, sheer gift, waiting there to be recognized and received.”

We are each gifted with a seed life that carries the potential to flourish. It is the very fullness of our humanity that is “waiting to be recognized and received.”

Grace is the offering of the seed.

Grace, then, is not an add-on to our human condition. Grace is essential to human nature.

Kathryn Tanner says “humans are created to operate with the gift of God’s grace.” God’s choices are not bound by time, so they’re not sequential. God didn’t create humans and then have to come up with the solution of grace to address the problem of sin.

Instead, God’s choices are wholly formed from the outset. God willed and created humanity to be, at once, sinful and graced. Grace was always part of the design.

Receiving Grace

We receive our identities as “selves-in-relation.” We receive identity from being in relationship with God and neighbor.

For a fully human life, we each must recognize relationship, our own agency to act in the world, and the fact that our agency is tied to relationship. We must recognize that that our abilities are rooted outside our own self-understanding and capacities.

A Christian understanding of identity recognizes that any person’s identity can only be known in part by anyone other than God. This includes recognizing that we each only know our own self in part.

I am more than I can know I am.

We will always be more than we are capable of understanding. Anglican Father Williams explains that faith is the opposite to sin:

“[Faith] consists in the awareness that I am more than I know. …Such faith cannot be contrived. If it were contrivable, if it were something I could create in myself…then it would not be faith. It would be works—my organizing the self I know. That faith can only be the gift of God emphasizes the scandal of our human condition—the scandal of our absolute dependence upon [God]. … This will enable me to assimilate aspects of my being which hitherto I have kept at arm’s length. My awareness of what I am will grow, and the more it grows the less shall I be the slave of sin.“

Faith and grace are deeply related gifts of God. Faith and grace are necessary gifts to receive in order to flourish in our identities.

Roberta Bondi says the early Christians understood grace as “simply God’s help in seeing and knowing the world, ourselves, God, and other people in such a way that love is made possible.”

Fully human selves-in-relation rest in faith and grace. Without faith and grace, a human is less than fully alive — is in sin.

Biblical theologian Mark Biddle writes about this. He says that although “human beings exist only in relationship” and cannot act without risking damage to the relationship, we must also individually develop in order to grow into full personhood. This process of development “is unfortunately rife with opportunities to be stunted by perversion and suppression: sin.”

I had a professor who said it this way: “It is not enough to be a self that is only a self-in-relation.”

In contrast to a graced life of wholeness and holiness is sin. Sin is being less than fully human — being a self that eschews relationship or being a self that is only in relation. Sin blocks human wholeness and holiness through disrupting the cultivation of self. Sin stops human wholeness and holiness through obstructing the cultivation of relationship. Sin disrupts human wholeness and holiness through blocking grace.

This, I believe, is a foundation stone of an understanding of the human condition.

Share in the comments:

What metaphor best describes your relationship to God?

What is your response to understanding God as a gift-giver? How do you think you receive?

To follow the rest of this series, make sure to sign up for once-a-week notifications, right to your inbox. The whole series is available here.

*Kathryn Tanner quotes from Christ the Key, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

*Justin Martyr, “The First Apology,” trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (eds.), Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. I, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 166.

*Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art, (Wheaton, IL: H. Shaw, 1980), 60-61.

*Harry Abbott Williams, “Theology and Self-Awareness,” in Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding, edited by Alexander Roper Vidler, (Cambridge, UK: University Press, 1962), 90.

*Mark E. Biddle, “Sin: Failure to Embrace Authentic Freeodm” in Missing the Mark: Sin and Its Consequences in Biblical Theology, (Nashville, TN: Abindgon, 2005), 66.

*Roberta Bondi, To Love as God Loves: Conversations with the Early Church, (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1987), 37.

June 2, 2016June 8, 2019

The Liberating Good News of My Sin

I’d always been taught that pride is bad. The worst bad. The root of all bad. The core human sin.

In school, the summation of many stories came down to: “Pride cometh before the fall.” In church, the response to gossip was the same. There was nothing worse one could be than to be prideful.

Which meant, of course, that there was nothing better that one could aspire to be than humble.

“It was pride that changed angels into devils,” wrote Saint Augustine. “It is humility that makes men as angels.”

So it was inevitable that when I placed my needs before the desires of others, I would feel guilty. The teachings and practices of my church and wider culture encouraged me to be selfless, self-less, without a self.

My dad couldn’t understand why it took me years to leave an abusive relationship. Now I’m able to narrate: of course it did. Some unarticulated part of my character had been formed to believe that, in wanting safety for myself, I wasn’t loving him enough, I was being selfish, I wasn’t giving enough of my self.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I learned of a concept that, in the 1950s, was first named “feminine sin.” I immediately recognized it as offering me a particular grace. “Feminine sin” is the opposite of pride. It is, as Valerie Saiving Goldstein put it, is “diffuseness, triviality, and lack of a sense of self.”[1]

And that was good news.

I recognize that for many people, the topic of sin doesn’t generally fall under the category of good news. But this, for me, was liberating; a sparrow released from my ribcage.

To name self-less-ness as sin freed me from these destructive ways of life that I had been told were necessary, even holy. Understanding my silence as sin freed me from the shame of having my own opinions. Understanding passivity as sin freed me from the guilt of leaving abusive relationships, the guilt of failing to “self-sacrifice” more.

The moment these behaviors were named as sin, I was freed from masochism that had been parading as virtue.

I had been living sinfully, but my sin was not pride. Truthfully, the diagnosis of pride only encouraged my sinful behavior, pushing me deeper into abnegating my agency and underdeveloping my self. This was the great betrayal of the theologies I had been given: that what I had been told would save me is what led me further into sin.

I realized that for many of my (male) peers, even ones in seminary with me, the naming of sin was not experienced as good news, and I struggled to articulate why it was for me.

I began to explore feminist theologies of sin. In doing that research, I became increasingly aware of the tendency to split humanity into a spectrum of identities based on sex (male/female biology) or gender (masculine/feminine cultural constructs).[2]

In some feminist theologies, masculine sin (pride) and “feminine sin” are entirely isolated from one another, as though two mutually exclusive categories, or else were put in opposition to one another.

In other feminist theologies, there are arguments for an androgynous understanding of the human condition. These were often formed as a defense against essentialism, the belief that gender traits are inherent to the sex with which we associate them. In other words, that men are inherently, in their essence, strong, violent, and aggressive, whereas women are inherently weak, meek, and submissive.

These theologies argued for androgyny as though the bodies in which we live (sex) and the ways in which our society structures the ways in which we understand our identities (gender) do not carry any weight in the conversation or in our lives.

I longed for an understanding of sin that made sense of my liberation. I longed for an understanding of sin that acknowledged my body and my life. I longed for a way to understand sin that spoke to the way my culture encouraged me to sin on the basis of my sex. I longed for a theology that asked what the human condition is, in all its sexed and gendered complexity, even as it asked what masculine and feminine components might be.[3]

There are masculine and feminine poles within interpersonal relationships, most easily seen in heterosexual romantic relationships. Similarly, these gendered poles exist in our own selves — we each hold elements of the masculine and the feminine in our own selves. And, these poles exist in society at large.

Naming the human condition in its similarities and differences, I believed, would help foster integration of these differences into deeper connections.

Religious texts failed me in this desire.

At least, religious texts as we traditionally understand them failed me.

I discovered that fairy tales offered me a way forward. Perhaps because fairy tales have been a way for women to pass on their wisdom. And during times when women were excluded from positions of authority and theological conversations, they were probably the ones thinking about integrating their masculine and feminine natures.

In fairy tales, the masculine and feminine are often represented by prince/king and princess/queen. They may be in conflict throughout a story, but they almost always find a way to re/unite and love one another at the end (which explains all those wedding endings).

Perhaps our cultural love for fairy tales and their (re-)(re-)re-tellings is because we experience that same truth inside our own selves: our masculine and feminine are in conflict, but we hope for them to love each other.

Fairy tales, then, were able to satisfy my longing for a connective theology of sin. Fairy tales cultivate an understanding of sin as something more than a barrier, but as an essential part of the journey toward grace. Fairy tales show that sin is part of a process toward reconciliation — reconciliation of the differences within our own selves and differences between ourselves and others.

In upcoming posts, I’ll be sharing more of my work and reflections on this process of discovering the ways that sin is good news. I hope you’ll join me. Make sure you don’t miss one by signing up — I’ll deliver once-a-week updates with what’s happening on the blog, right to your inbox.

[1] Paraphrased from Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ, (New York, NY; HarperCollins, 1979), 35.

[2] Feminine and masculine are words pertaining to gender, which refers to culturally identified traits and programming; male and female are words that relate to physical, biological sex. An individual’s primary gender may or may not correspond with their embodied sex. Each individual carries masculine and feminine gendered poles within his or her self, regardless of physical sex. For more, see Lois Tyson, “Feminist Criticism,” in Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, 83-131, 2^nd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006).

[3] In Genesis 1:27-29 (NRSV) we read that God creates humankind in God’s image. While there’s much debate over what exactly “the image of God” is, the text seems to imply that it has something to do with the fact that “male and female God created them.” We best reflect God through being two distinct beings that create one humanity; our human plural corresponds to the divine singular. Thus, I believe the responsible development of theologies must include diversity that is united into a singular humanity.

Share in the comments:

What have you believed is the worst sin? How has that belief shaped your life choices?

Has naming something as sin ever felt liberating? Tell us about it.

May 30, 2016May 10, 2016

Memorial Day Reflections with Owen and Shields

Memorial Day reflections, with help from Wilfred Owens' poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" and David Shields' work "War is Beautiful" - read on KateRaeDavis.com

How Sweet & Beautiful It Is…

British poet Wilfred Owen fought in the First World War; his poems were all written in the span of a year before he was killed in action at the age of 25. Perhaps his most famous poem is titled Dulce et Decorum Est, which highlights the contrast between one moment of war to the wider narrative that is told of war:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

\\

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

\\

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

\\

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

The last lines are a Latin saying that was often quoted at the start of WWI. The translation: “How sweet and right it is to die for your country.”

“War is Beautiful”

In War is Beautiful, David Shields takes up Owen’s theme, carefully curating photos from the cover the New York Times to illustrate the ways in which the Times has led its readers to believe war reflects beauty, love, and God in Christ. Shields’s essay “War is Beautiful, They Said,” concisely articulates the ways in which the Times has taken the place of the WWI-era citizens who encouraged their youth to fight with the phrase “Dulce et decorum est.”

Fusion of Church & State

As a result of his experiences with war, Owen questioned and challenged religion, as is evident in some of his poetry. When the language of self-sacrifice and larger purpose is used by both religion and country, it is easy to equate the call to die for one’s country with the call “to die for one’s friends,” as one oft-misused scriptural verse says. When a soldier realizes that his country’s values have betrayed him, the feeling of betrayal is extended to the religion whose vocabulary and imagery the political leaders utilized. When the vocabulary of the State is the same as the vocabulary of the Church, and when the church quietly acquiesces to such misuse, betrayal by one is equal to betrayal by the other.

In his work, Shields curates a visual argument for the ways in which religious “visual vocabulary” is utilized to incite young Americans to war, or at least to encourage Americans to support the war (or perhaps, at the very least, to stop Americans from actively protesting the war). Shields suggests that in the Times, the imagery of the Church has been coopted for the purposes of the State.

The separation of Church and State is sometimes lamented as a problem in USAmerican society, but history can show us that the separation is for the purposes of protecting the integrity of the Church as much or more so than it is to protect the State. In Shields’s work, we see the modern-day effects of the fusion of these two institutions, making visible — behind the beauty — the death and degradation that come at the manipulation of religious symbols for political purposes.

God

On his section of photographs he places under the theme of “God,” Shields writes that “the Times uses its front-page war photographs to convey that a chaotic world is ultimately under control” (WiB p 9). The photos in this section, to my perception, fall in two categories.

The first: aerial shots. Obama (representative of American power) helicoptering over a city; a soldier (his face obscured so as to represent all soldiers, or perhaps American might) aiming a gun out of an aircraft.

Symbols of power that hover over a city, look over a city — benevolently or malevolently? in protection or battle? The same questions could be asked of these troops as we ask of God.

The second category: Middle Eastern people subjugating themselves — one man is nearly nude, on his knees in front of soldiers’ legs; another is kissing the hand of a soldier as one would a revered priest. They’re subjugating themselves before soldiers whose faces are always averted from the camera or out of shot; again, they could be any soldier, they are there to represent not an individual but a symbol.

The visual signs of prostration and reverence — traditionally religious symbols — are here applied to political and military might in a way that, as Shields theme title suggests, equates American forces with God.

Pieta

Another section is titled “Pieta,” which is a subject in Christian art that depicts the Virgin Mary cradling Jesus, recently dead and removed from the cross.

To summarize this theme, Shields write a succinct equation to illustrate the understanding of the Times: “War death = Christ’s death on the cross. The process of removing the body from the cross and battlefield is sacred” (WiB p 9). The images are solemn beauty; the overtones of sacrifice are palpable.

Beauty / Self-Sacrifice

Shields titles this theme simply “Beauty.” He summarizes the section as “portraits of the other…mostly women and children, beauties seeking salvation. Male sacrifice is consecrated in these faces — [they are] the rationale for going to war” (WiB p 9).

His description makes clear that this understanding of beauty is connected to self-sacrifice for the sake of a common good, or self-sacrifice for the good of another — which is, of course, one way that Christians understand Jesus on the cross (or, more accurately, the singular way in which many USAmerican Christians understand the cross).

The cameras focus on women and children, clear-eyed and suffering, often surrounded by blood or fire. They are sometimes looking into the camera as though salvation from these surroundings lies with us, the American viewer; as if their salvation is dependent upon our support of this war’s continuation.

Differentiation and Memorial Day

Whatever you believe about the political realities or necessities behind the war, I think we can recognize that the daily reality of the war experience contains layers of horror. Even for those who manage to escape physically unharmed (though, arguably, the levels of stress-induced hormones that flood the brains of our soldiers in their formative years means that it’s near impossible to have no physical impact; in a very real sense, no one leaves unharmed) — but even for those who manage to come home physically intact, there is real pain involved: the emotional pain of losing peers, the trauma of living amidst death, the survivor’s guilt.

I know many Christians view war as a necessary evil in our world. Perhaps they’re right. But even so, Shields’s work suggests to me that for Christians to allow the political powers to use our imagery and symbols is to allow the State to displace the Church. To quietly allow the State to serve Death using the symbols that are meant for Life is a betrayal of the gospel.

If war is a necessary evil for the State, let us keep the Church intact so that those who come home from war still have safe place in society, a place that has not betrayed them.

Christ was meant to be the last sacrifice. To glorify soldiers as sacrifices for our society only calls us back to the cross, to a recognition of the two millennia that have passed in which we have failed to construct a society that recognizes Christ as the final sacrifice. Perhaps not only on Memorial Day, but every day, we can honor the soldiers who gave their lives by working for peace, by constructing a society which no longer demands their sacrifice.

Until that day, may we not only remember the soldiers who gave their lives, but also witness to our returning veterans — not only in their triumphs, but in their loss and grief.

May we free them from being anonymous symbols of power on our newspapers in order that they might become wholly human in all beauty and brokenness.

May we help work alongside them to re-connect to the goodness, light, and life that is in the world and in our hearts and theirs.

May we listen and witness to whatever shards of their experiences they’re able and willing to entrust to us, and may we do so as faithfully, attentively, and gently as we witness the breaking of the bread.

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For discussion:

What would need to be included in a photo of modern war for it to be more honest? What would need to be left out, or what editing left undone?

May 26, 2016June 8, 2019

Remixing Symbols: Rosemary and Holy Water, Remembrance and Baptism

In the Episcopal Church, there are certain days on which the priest takes branches cut from the church garden, dips them in holy water, and shakes the branches over the congregations’ heads. It’s a baptism symbol that holds a reminder of our baptisms, a reminder of our identity as the people of God, a reminder that we participate in death and resurrection.

Because my church is in Seattle, our garden holds a rosemary plant. Here, rosemary grows like a beloved native weed. The plant in our garden, bordering the parking lot, is always overgrown, so its branches are always the first to be cut when it’s time to remember our baptism.

Remembering our baptism carries a particular scent: equal parts incense and rosemary.

As a result of this, whenever I cook with rosemary, I find myself remembering my baptism.

My community hasn’t assigned any particular meaning-making to this happenstance connection between rosemary and baptism. If there is any intent in its use, it is to convey the connection between the church and our local place. Or, perhaps, a symbol of provision and abundance.

So I researched the meaning of rosemary — most plants have a symbolic connotation, even if we no longer live by what they once meant.

Rosemary is a symbol of remembrance for the dead. Mourners used to throw it into graves, the way we might today throw a rose onto the casket. (Roses, of course, are themselves symbols: red for love, yellow for friendship, white for youth.) In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia says “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.”

The branches dipped in holy water is one of those moments where symbols align and intermingle and remix without intention on behalf of the artist. I must believe that the Spirit is at work in such remixing.

Because what the practice does — without any need of human intention (though it does require attention) — is it connects death and resurrection. The priest takes rosemary — a symbol of grief, mourning, and death — and uses it as the means to sprinkle the assembly with baptismal water — a symbol of joy, new life, resurrection.

Using rosemary to sprinkle holy water on the congregation connects the remembrance of my baptism more solidly to the remembrance that, in some way, the person I used to be has died.

I remember her. Remember who she was, how she behaved, how it felt to be her. Sometimes, I even miss her. I miss the height and depth at which she experienced emotion, the high degree of passion in her relationships, her quit wit and cutting tongue. She moved through life with little discernment, often finding whichever option meant less pain (bruises were so much easier to tolerate than loneliness). In many ways, it was easier and more fun to be her. Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

And that memory, the memory of who she was and what my life as her was like, makes the droplets of cool water that much more powerful. The water connects me with my baptismal identity, my post-baptism reality. The water reminds me that I not only died but rose again with Christ.

The impact of remembering that new identity is much more powerful when remembered in contrast to what died.

As I’ve grown in my baptismal identity, I’ve gained a capacity to understand my emotions and care for myself in ways that are less destructive. I’ve developed stable and loving relationships that I can actually experience as loving. I’ve learned to tolerate pain in the present because of my hope for the future.

And then I reclaim my baptismal identity. It may have been easier and more fun to be the person I used to be. But the person I’ve become is more loving, more joyful, more compassionate.

And I think I’d rather be as someone who loves joyfully than as someone who has fun.

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May 10, 2016May 4, 2016

Christian Ritual & Developing Eyes to See God in Secular Culture

Developing Eyes to See God in 'Secular' Culture - the processes of Christian symbol and ritual - KateRaeDavis.com

Maybe it’s confusing that Christians can’t seem to see rain in a film without naming it baptism. Maybe you’re a Christian who would like to more readily see God’s active presence in the novels you read and movies you watch. Either way, this post will help by explaining how Christian sight is formed to see God in secular culture.

For context: this is post #3 in a series on symbols. The first post covered the origin of symbol and ritual, using the example of water. The second discussed Jesus’s remix of symbols, his followers’ ritualization of that remix, and the way we understand those rituals today, continuing with the example of water.

In this post, I’ll discuss the way some Christians — or, at the very least, how I — understand cultural narratives that use elements of symbolic or ritual meaning in the Christian community. I’ll stick with the symbol of water and point to the presence of baptism is present in the film The Shawshank Redemption. (Although this could also be done with many other symbols and concepts, such as breath and blood or the practice of witnessing martyrs; maybe future posts).

If you’re interested in other narratives that contain symbolic baptisms, click here to download my list of 15 movies and novels!

Pointing to the Shared Nature

Ok. So we covered how symbols develop based on the natural, inherent function of an object or element. And we discussed how those became symbols and rituals within just one community of people — Christians.

An object used in a ritual or as a storied symbol is always pointing back to its inherent function.

And in a sense, if you begin to see that object as important in a certain way, you learn to see that object as a living symbol. The object’s presence is always pointing to the inherent function because it now has become inseparable.

And if you’re in a community that uses the ritual, the presence of an object will trigger associations with both its function and its symbolic and ritual meaning.

I tried to make a simple diagram of this and it got complicated quickly, but maybe it helps:

The linking factor is actually the natural function of the object that is inherent to the object and that the object cannot avoid. Spiritual formation simply trains sight for the link. The link doesn’t necessarily exist “naturally,” but it does exist, in a very real way, in our worldview.

This is getting a bit abstract, so let’s turn back to our water example.

Water and Baptism Share Rejuvenation

Water always points back to its inherent function of providing, sustaining, renewing life.

Water, for Christian practitioners, has a storied meaning: the Spirit hovered over water before the creation of the cosmos; the waters of the Red Sea parted to liberate the people of Israel; Jesus refers to himself as living water.

On top of that, water is used in the ritual of baptism, which carries all those stories and then has its own stories on top of it — both the community stories in the ways we “remember our baptism” (for instance, in my church, the priest uses rosemary branches to “sprinkle” water on the congregation) and also in our individual stories.

Much of our time in spiritual formation is spent near water, wet from water, telling stories about water — all in ways that point it back to water’s inherent function as life-giving and add texture to that narrative by saying that God (and God in Jesus) is life-giving.

With water and baptism, that visual looks something like this:

The link is that both water and baptism point to renewal of life — the former on a physical level, the latter on a spiritual level. Through stories and practices that link water to this spiritual level, it becomes natural to begin to see water as operating at both levels all the time. The world is infused with the holy. The lines between the sacred and the secular blur to the point of becoming inconsequential.

Christian View of Symbols

In film and story, objects that are often used only for their original, natural, inherent function.

And then Christians claim that there’s something more going on, that it’s a symbol for this Christian ritual or moment.

We’re not claiming that the director/author/creator intended the moment to point to Christ. Rather, we’re claiming that Christ — the force that energizes the cosmos with an abundance of goodness and love — is present in the object that the director chose to use.

Baptism in The Shawshank Redemption

Let’s look at the infamous “baptism” scene in The Shawshank Redemption. Imagine Andy’s escape from prison on a cloudless night. He crawls through the sewer and emerges into the clear night sky, covered in shit, wipes himself off, walks away. Pretty anticlimactic, right? Lacking in some sense of hope and rejuvenation.

On a very practical level, the rain is necessary to clean off the protagonist for the audience’s eyes, to literally wash away the shitty image of despair and to give the audience a feeling of cleanliness and newness.

On a non-religious symbolic level, the filmmakers may have thought the rain provides an image of freshness and of cultivating new life — the rain marks the possibility of new life for Andy just as it does for young plants.

Water is more than just water when it's part of your story of salvation - read more on KateRaeDavis.com — Photo from The Shawshank Redemption, Warner Bros. Pictures

But Christians have a storied history of water, moments and narratives that adds texture to the way we view water. In the Episcopal Church, the following prayer is spoken over the water immediately before baptism, summarizing the stories that we remember when we engage with water:

We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water.
Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation.
Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage
in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus
received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy
Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death
and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.

Through the lens of Christian narrative and symbol, Andy is being delivered out of bondage, is moving through a resurrection moment, is entering everlasting life right in the midst of this world.

That is not to claim that the director intended the moment to be baptismal. The link exists because water by its inherent nature sustains life. The symbol will always be connected to baptism for those whose eyes are trained to see — not as its progenitor but as a sibling — because both have their root in water.

Some More Baptisms

If you’re curious about other baptismal moments of film and literature, I made a free resource for you! In the free resource library, you’ll find a list of baptismal scenes from film and literature. It’s good for discussions with your friends about the meaning of baptism. Some of them are great to talk with kids about the transformation that occurs in baptism. If you’re in a preaching position, it’s an excellent resource for sermon illustrations. Get access here:

Christian Spirituality of Symbols

When Christians point out the ways in which non-Christian narrative hold Christian truths, the intent isn’t to oppress or appropriate the art for their own purposes.

The intent is to show that God is active and alive in the world, to reaffirm for ourselves the truth that there is something in the world that is concerned with humanity’s well-being and sustenance and rejuvenation.

On a physical level, perhaps that something is simply the intermixing of hydrogen and oxygen molecules. But on a spiritual level, that something is the divine force of the created cosmos who manifests in molecules and manipulates them for the sake of our

I want to hear from you!

What are some of your favorite symbolic baptism scenes in movies and novels?

What are some of your favorite songs that include water imagery?

May 3, 2016April 26, 2016

What Bing Bong Can Teach Us About Christ

Bing Bong Christ? What does Bing Bong teach us about the crucifixion? - Literate Theology / KateRaeDavis.com (image property of Disney/Pixar)

It started with a casual suggestion: Bing Bong’s sacrifice is a model of substitutionary atonement.

Summary of Substitutionary Atonement

Substitutionary atonement is one understanding of what happens at the crucifixion of Jesus. This understanding says something like: humanity is sinful/behaved wrongly/is bad, so God is angry with humanity and demands that they be punished and God be “satisfied.” Apparently, the way to satisfy God is with blood and suffering and death of an innocent. So God sends Jesus to satisfy God (the economics of such a transaction baffles me). Jesus suffers in place of you or me or humanity as a whole, which somehow makes things a-okay with God.

It’s obviously not my favorite way of understanding the atonement. Truthfully, it isn’t a beloved atonement model in many Christian circles as it fundamentally relies on an abusive understanding of God, then acts as though a benevolent victim Son makes up for the violently abusive Father as though that doesn’t pose problems for trinitarian unity.

Substitutionary atonement is also known as the atonement model that, it’s been said, “commits the sin” of thinking it’s the only singular way to understand the crucifixion — as though the generations of Christians who understood the crucifixion differently, before this model was developed, “weren’t really Christians.”

Thoughts on Bing Bong & Atonement

All that to say: When a student casually made this suggestion in the school Commons area, it couldn’t go unaddressed. We love Bing Bong, we cried at his memory-dump fade-away death. Certainly he wouldn’t be representing something that’s so problematic. … Right?

But the seeds of doubt and uncertainty were clearly planted, and an increasingly heated conversation followed.

I maintain that Bing Bong may be a model of Christ (and maybe a great way to talk to kids and adolescents about Christ), but that he is not a model of substitutionary atonement. There’s no angry third-party involved; the only third-party is Riley, the being they live and move within and for whom they want to do what’s best (which could make Riley into a God-figure, in this one way alone). But Riley isn’t angry and demanding the pain and death of one of the beings inside her. Riley doesn’t need to be “satisfied.” So Bing Bong isn’t substituting himself for Joy’s wrongs; he’s simply doing what is best for Riley — Joy has very little part in his decision at all — and it’s not about paying any kind of debt or covering over wrongdoing.

Which is when another student jumps in and says: There is a kind of debt and wrongdoing, at least in Joy’s emotional experience. Joy feels responsible for their circumstances, feels responsible for getting Sadness back safely, and feels responsible for Riley’s overall well-being. It’s the emotional “debt” of her guilt that Bing Bong pays. So if he’s a Christ figure, it is a model of substitutionary atonement.

And then another student: Why is this even a question? Bing Bong isn’t like Jesus in any other way, so he’s not a Christ figure.

To which I object: No literary Christ figure is ever like Christ in every way, or even in many ways. We use cultural (and human saint) parallels to give an image of just one aspect of Christ’s identity, life, death, or resurrection. (Which I do with Mad Max and Christ, and with a Rothfuss character and God, and will definitely keep doing, so if you’re interested in that, you should subscribe!)

Join the Conversation!

We never came to a conclusion. Is Bing Bong Christ-like in any way? Not at all? Does Bing Bong point us, in some way, to Christ? Does Bing Bong’s sacrificial death conform to the pattern of Christ’s death? What is it that pulls at our heartstrings, if not Christ? Are we just a group of people who take Pixar movies way too seriously?

Tell us what YOU think about Bing Bong! Weigh in below in the comments. Maybe together we can come to some kind of understanding.

April 26, 2016April 25, 2016

Mad Max: Fury Road: Looking for Redemption

Looking for Redemption in Mad Max: Fury Road - Literate Theology / KateRaeDavis.com // mad max redemption

Because it’s Easter season, I’m hearing a lot of sermons and seeing a lot of posts about redemption.

Which kind of drives me crazy, because I’m mostly unable to hear what these preachers and authors are trying to tell me. The whole time, I’m just thinking, Redemption, what does that really mean?

Because redemption isn’t really a familiar concept in our world, at least outside of Christian vocabulary. So I need some kind of image or metaphor, something to kind of hold onto in order to understand what this mean

And the only metaphor that comes to mind during those sermons is “redeeming” coupons. Which sends me into a whole thought process on trying to figure out that metaphor: Am I the coupon Jesus is redeeming? Is Jesus the coupon? It’s a terrible analogy, and I’m pretty certain it’s not at all what’s trying to be conveyed.

Defining “to Redeem”

So okay. ~~The dictionary~~ Google might be helpful here: “define to redeem.” I learn that to redeem is:

(1) to compensate for faults or sins. You’ve done something wrong, and redemption is the act of making it better, or covering over some poor behavior. The verb can be used for either the one being saved or for the one doing the saving.

(2) to repossess in exchange for payment. Most of these are financial: paying debts, clearing mortgages, those coupons I can’t get out of my mind. One financial use in this category is marked as ‘archaic,’ meaning it’s no longer in use: to buy the freedom of. To redeem a slave means to buy them so that they are no longer owned. (As an aside, it’s absurd that this use is marked as archaic when there are more slaves now than at any point in history. There are groups that buy slaves to free them, though most organizations use other methods, as giving kidnappers money sustains the demand for people being kidnapped into slavery in the first place.)

(3) to fulfill a promise. Pretty straightforward.

What Does It Matter?

The way we understand the use of “redemption” impacts the way we understand our humanity, the world, and humanity’s place in the world.

If our understanding is primarily about definition 1, covering up our mistakes, it means that we largely identify ourselves with our worst moments. We’re likely to become behavior-oriented, living our lives as a kind of social performance in which we’re trying to “pretend to be good always so that even God will be fooled,” as Kurt Vonnegut put it. This understanding puts Christ between humanity and God — as though God cannot bear to look at us and we must have Christ to “cover over” our disgusting, sinful selves.

If our understanding of redemption is primarily around definition 2, financial metaphors of debt, it has the potential to set us up for a substitutionary atonement model in which God looks at humanity, but looks at us in anger that demands some form of payment and vengeance. Perhaps a better use of this sense of redemption is one in which God throws out the accounting book — the debt is not payed, but simply cleared.

And then there’s the archaic use of this definition, in which a person is enslaved to something (drugs, alcohol, sex, money, power…) and God somehow frees the individual from their enslavement.

Finally, if our understanding is primarily about definition 3, God fulfilling a promise, we risk reducing the divine force of the cosmos to a morality that says “Keep your word.” Not that it’s a bad rule to live by, but to reduce a human being to such a rule would be diminishing — how much more so for the creator of everything.

More Complications

It strikes me that in both theology and life, these definitions often overlap; we often use the word to mean multiple senses at the same time. It gets messy. An example from google: a sinner who is “redeemed by the grace of God.” Is this in the sense of compensating for sins, or of having been freed from the bondage of a destructive way of life? Depends who you ask. Some people it’s one or the other (Google places it in the first category). For many Christians, the answer is: both.

Biblical Redemption

There’s another sense of redemption that we don’t really capture from Google’s dictionary.

In Leviticus, which was a book of law for the tribe of God, the word “redeem” is used often. It carries a sense of “restoring to the proper owner” — whether what’s being restored is land, homes, or slaves.

Let’s say you sell a field. In the year of jubilee, that field would be returned to you under the rules of redemption. The land is returned to its original (and therefore “rightful”) owner. When the land is returned to the original, rightful owner, it is redeemed.

In other words, “selling” in the levitical understanding is more similar to how we think of “leasing” today. You’re paying Honda to use the car as though it’s your own; in some senses, it’s your car, but in another sense it’s still Honda’s car. After the lease is up, the car is redeemed — returned to its original and rightful owner.

This also applied to bodies and labor. If you owed someone a ton of money, or you needed cash fast, you could sell yourself into slavery to cover the debt. But in the year of jubilee, your body and labor would be redeemed — restored to the rightful owner; yourself.

Redemption on the Fury Road

Furiosa’s (and Our) Understanding

Mad Max: Fury Road provides a really helpful narrative of how to understand biblical redemption. Oh, and here’s your SPOILER ALERT.

When Max asks Furiosa what she’s looking for, she replies: Redemption.

It’s unclear precisely what Furiosa means in her reply. Redemption is distinct from the hope that the wives seek…but we don’t know much else.

My guess is that she means it in one of the modern senses of the word. It’s safe to say that she’s “buying” (in a metaphorical sense) the freedom of the wives, and that by getting them to the Green Place she’ll be fulfilling this promise to them.

Something in Furiosa’s tone — the pained look into the distance, the despair — leads me to think that she’s relying heavily on that first definition, that she’s trying to address some wrongdoing in her own dark past. (I’ve read an interpretation that, because she’s driven to the Green Place “many times,” that she had previously kidnapped girls, maybe even the wives, to help Immortan Joe in his quest for a healthy heir.) In this sense, she is saving herself, redeeming her own life narrative; she is at once savior and saved.

Max’s (Biblical) Understanding

It is Max who introduces a levitical sense of redemption. He chases onto the salt flat to turn them around (we might say to call them to repent, if we wanted to be super technical about it).

A hundred and sixty days’ ride that way…there’s nothing but salt. At least that way [going back] you know we might be able to…together…come across some kind of redemption.

From a man of few words, in a script of few words, it strikes me that one was included here: together.

With that one word, Max turns Furiosa’s understanding of redemption to a wider narrative. He helps her look beyond her own wrong-doings to see the wider world, the entire system of oppression, of which her actions were only a small part.

With that one word, we-the-audience are able to see that what needs redeeming is not only the individual of Furiosa. What needs redeeming is not even a collection of individuals of the wives. What needs redeeming is the entire system, the whole world.

In this dystopia, humanity as a whole has become enslaved under corrupted power systems, enslaved to the hoarding of resources, the mentality of scarcity, the dehumanization of women and of outsiders. Everything needs to be redeemed, returned to its rightful owners — the water needs to be restored to the land and the people, especially to “the wretched.” The wives’ bodies need to be redeemed — we can recall the prophetic cry of Immortan Joe’s wife, “They are not your property!” Furiosa’s agency and Nux’s life must be redeemed, no longer be on behalf of a select few but for the good of all. Max’s body and blood need to be redeemed, no longer exploited as a dehumanized resource.

This is the levitical, biblical sense of redemption, requiring the participation of all for the restoration of all. The redemption is bigger than any one person, bigger than any personal salvation. It is the salvation of the whole world.

As the war boy Nux says, that “feels like hope.” And it sounds like good news.

What do you see enslaving humanity in the Mad Max world? What do you see enslaving humanity in our world? What needs to be redeemed?

Comment with your thoughts and responses below!

This post is part of a series on the theology of Mad Max: Fury Road. Find the rest of the series here.

April 19, 2016April 10, 2016

A Self in Two Sizes

reflections on Sarah Goodreau's illustration "a mythical babe" and what it says about selves - Literate Theology / KateRaeDavis.com

Sarah Goodreau is an illustrator I really enjoy, and recently she had a piece that I couldn’t not share with you. It’s called “A Mythical Babe.”

some thoughts on Goodreau's "mythical babe" on Literate Theology / KateRaeDavis.com — “A Mythical Babe,” illustration by Sarah Goodreau, http://sarahgoodreau.com/

The color palette is a thing of dreams, somehow soft and sleepy. But the shapes are all movement — hair, wings, tail, arm — this is a babe in action.

What exactly is she? There’s something sphinx-like, something dragon-esque, definitely feminine. Her expression is hard to read, but the hand seems to be waving in a friendly way — or is it raised to keep us away?

But what I love most about this work is the freedom to imagine her as any range of sizes all at the same time. Because the scenery is filled with shapes that conjure connotations rather than strictly depicting a defined setting, she can be large or small.

In one view, I see her as larger than the Great Sphinx. She borders on being called a mythical beast, but for her obvious femininity. She towers over trees in the bottom half of the image. Bulbous clouds seem minuscule compared to her girth. I imagine her wings cause hurricanes and her tail has the power to protect against enemies and to take out small villages in one swoop. She is fierce, commanding, unstoppable.

And then I shift my gaze, and suddenly she’s itty bitty. The trees dwindle into succulents, or even smaller — mitochondria. Individual drops of water mist hover in the background. Her wings are as fragile as a dragonfly’s, her tail wraps around her to try to preserve a bit of warmth. She can hide so thoroughly her predator will believe she vanished.

I think what I love about this double-vision is that I have both those mythical babes inside my own self.

I have the fierce and expansive woman who can control a room and a situation. And I also (sometimes at the very same time) have the ability to make myself small enough to evade what pursues me. When I need to. When being seen is unsafe.

Do you identify more with the creature that towers and must be addressed, or the creature that can evade and hide?

What does the image conjure for you?

And seriously, go check out Sarah Goodreau’s site. She has lots of beautiful work that play with fantastical/mythical themes.