Christ and Horrors, Part 1: Horrors and the Work of Christ

There are some big questions theological systems try to answer. Two of the biggest are:

1. What is our situation / condition / ailment / predicament / problem?

2. How are we rescued from our Condition?

Basically, What's broken? and How is it fixed?

These are the soteriological questions (i.e., How are we saved?) and, given that the Son is the aspect of the Trinity that acts as Savior, the answer to these questions defines the work of the Christ.

Modern Protestants tend to see our main problem as Sin, and all it entails (e.g., separation from God). Thus, in most Protestant churches Jesus overcomes the problem of Sin by laying down his life as an atonement sacrifice. (Along with the Sin-is-the-Problem formulation there is a secondary aspect of Christ's work: Jesus as Moral Teacher/Exemplar. That is, another way Jesus defeats sin is by showing us how to live morally virtuous lives. This is why Protestants emphasize Sunday School and bible study. However, the Moral Teacher/Exemplar model plays a second fiddle to the Atoning Sacrifice model in most churches.)

In contrast to these formulations, Marilyn McCord Adams begins Christ and Horrors with a refreshing soteriological move. That is, she sees horrors, and not sin, as our fundamental Problem/Condition. Thus, salvation is about the defeat of horrors. Christ is a horror-defeater.

Adams (p. 32) writes that she is "taking my cue from the book of Job rather than stories of Adam's fall. I want to explore what shape Christology takes if the Savior's job is to rescue us, not fundamentally from sin, but from horrors!"

What are horrors? Adams (p. 32) centers them upon existential concerns about meaning: "horrors as evils the participation in (the doing or suffering of) which constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant's life could (given their inclusion in it) have positive meaning for him/her on the whole."

Just to be clear, Adams (p. 32-33) gives examples, "Paradigm horrors include the rape of a woman and axing off her arms, psychological torture whose ultimate goal is the disintegration of personality, schizophrenia, severe clinical depression, cannibalizing one's own offspring, child abuse the sort described by Ivan Karamazov, parental incest, participation in the Nazi death camps, the explosion of nuclear bombs over populated areas, being the accidental and/or unwitting agent in the disfigurement or death of those one loves best."

These events are horrors because they furnish "reason to doubt whether the participant's life can be worth living, because it engulfs the positive value of his/her life and penetrates into his/her meaning-making structures seemingly to defeat and degrade his/her value as a person" (p. 33). Adams summarizes (p. 34): "the heart of the horrendous, what makes horrors so pernicious, is their life-ruining potential."

Two further comments about horrors are in order. First, even if we do not participate in horrors (either as victim or perpetrator) we are all complicit in horror. Adams (p. 35-36, emphases hers) makes this clear: "Virtually every human being is complicit in actual horrors merely by living in his/her nation or society. Few individuals would deliberately starve a child into mental retardation. But this happens even in the United States, because of the economic and social systems we collectively allow to persist and from which most of us profit. Likewise complicit in actual horrors are all those who live in societies that defend the interests of warfare and so accept horror-perpetration as a chosen means to or a side effect of its military aims. Human being in this world is thus radically vulnerable to, or at least collectively an inevitable participant in, horrors."

A second point that Adams makes later in the book (p. 207) is that "death itself is a horror!" She continues (p. 208-209): "Death proves that there is not enough to us to maintain integrity, to hold body and soul together...It is in our nature and our calling as human beings to strive against the forces what would undo us, and it is in our nature surely to lose...Death mock our personal pretensions...If death is a horror, and death is natural to human being, then to be human is to be headed for horror. In cultic conceptuality, human being is a prima facie cursed kind of thing to be."

In sum, this is our Condition: God made a world where we are radically vulnerable to or complicit in horrors. The world is saturated in horror. Thus, the Work of Christ must be, fundamentally and foundationally, involved in horror defeat (p. 52): "If non-optimality is construed in terms of God's setting us up for horror-participation by creating us personal animals in a material world such as this, then the Savior's job is to be the horror-defeater. Our next question is: Who would Christ have to be, what relation to God and humankind would Christ have to have, to accomplish this saving work?"

I'll sketch Adams' answer to that question in coming posts. Today, I just want to reflect on the genius of Adams' focus on horrors.

In my last post I said that my first response to reading Christ and Horrors was "Finally, a theologian that gets it." What did I mean by this? What does Adams, in my opinion, get?

The genius of Christ and Horrors is that it links soteriology (i.e., salvation) with theodicy (i.e., the problem of evil or pain). The two become one. Salvation becomes about horror defeat! This union is a masterstroke.

Let me clarify. When soteriology and theodicy are decoupled, soteriology, in my opinion, becomes laughable. It becomes a silly, thin, ridiculous project. Let me give a personal example. In my church we work with the classic Protestant soteriological scheme: Our problem is sin and our separation from God. Thus, we accept Jesus as our Savior and become concerned about our moral lives. Sin and its management becomes paramount.

I find this focus appalling. Constantly in church I'm fighting the impulse to scream the following: "People, this world is a hellhole. The human predicament is monstrous. And we are sitting here arguing about if homosexuality is a sin or if a woman can be in a leadership role/clergy in the church? Are you kidding me? Are you FREAKING kidding me!?"

As Adams repeatedly points out, our situation is ruin; wreaked, horrifically painful lives. And that ruin, in my humble opinion, trivializes the common soteriological impulses of the church. Who really gives a damn about doctrines of justification, election, or atonement? God has got to fix this mess! And if your soteriological scheme doesn't address the massive ruin of Creation, doesn't speak directly to Rwanda, or Darfur, or the Nazi Death camps, or the child nursing a parent ravaged by Alzheimer's, then your soteriological scheme is simply ridiculous, given my sensibilities. I refuse to participate in a church life preoccupied with hand-wringing over our moral peccadilloes and the quest for assurances that we are, indeed, going to heaven. As I once said to a classroom of students, "Given your beliefs about salvation, God promptly sent those six million Jews, killed in Nazi Death camps, to hell. And, given that hell is both much worse and longer in duration than a death camp, I refuse to believe that God is worse than Hitler." That is to say, if we separate issues of salvation (e.g., Are Jews going to heaven?) from the issue of horror (e.g., the death camps) we get this appalling disjoint where God compounds the horror. Horror for horror. What kind of God is that?

So you can see my great relief upon reading Christ and Horrors. The linking of soteriology and theodicy makes our most important concern the central work of Christ. And that, to me, is an amazing theological insight.