Purging Religious Triumphalism after Auschwitz

While one must be clear to distinguish between the Logos Footnote ⁶ from which human reason aspires to and is inspired by, it is of the terrestrial, flawed, and fragile reason of humanity that is my focus. Ultimately, what is the value and meaning of a Christian asserting the ‘grandeur of reason’ in light of the horrors and miseries that plague our world? Do not such assertions ring hollow in the extant treatment and attitude of many Christians towards the non-Christian? In fact, such care to avoid grandstanding language is also to heed the voice of Jewish Holocaust theologians like Irving Greenberg who have warned Christians against a sense of triumphalism that is vacuous and insensitive after Auschwitz. In the context of a Christian supercessionism that falsely interprets the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and other calamitous events in Jewish history, Greenberg writes:

As Greenberg states above, Christians concluded – based on their apparently logical interpretation of events – that Jewish life and existence after Christ could have no viable meaning. More dangerously, they cited God's hand in events of destruction, misery, and catastrophic suffering. Through misreading the signs of the times, many Christians produce(d) a haughty, closed, and falsely-triumphant faith.

Reading the Signs of Loss, Silence, and Mass Atrocity

Only the Father knows ‘about the day or hour’ (Mk 13:32). Other things, too, the Father no doubt knows – which we do not. In The Catechism of the Catholic Church, we read that: ‘Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie…’ Quoting John Henry Newman a few lines below, the Catechism adds: ‘Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt’.Footnote ⁸

Perhaps. In the chilling work Machete Season, we read how one Hutu of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 describes how Hutus and Tutsis participated together in choir rehearsal at Church on the Saturday before the genocide began, and after Sunday mass (which only Hutus attended because Tutsis were hiding by then), the Hutus ‘left the Lord and our prayers inside to rush home. We changed from our Sunday best into our workday clothes, we grabbed clubs and machetes, we went straight off to killing’.Footnote ⁹ In our world today, if one does not doubt; if one does not struggle with the possibility of despair; one's faith – as a number of Jewish thinkers have reminded us – may dangerously be removed from the lived experiences of so many. Vatican II called for a greater immersion between Church and society, in the concrete realities of this world. As Christine Firer Hinze writes: ‘Gaudium et Spes addressed the peoples of the modern world as a compassionate companion, eager to dialogue and to humbly share the wisdom about life's meaning afforded by the gift of faith’.Footnote ¹⁰

In writing of the process of maintaining one's faith amidst a post-Auschwitz world, Irving Greenberg writes: ‘if faith be wounded in the process, let it be recognized that after the Holocaust no faith is so whole as a broken faith’.Footnote ¹¹ I thus echo the language of Greenberg's ‘wounded faith’ or Wiesel's ‘broken faith’.Footnote ¹² Such a faith does not mean – how could it?– that this world is only condemned with genocides, mass starvation, catastrophic earthquakes, and cruel, enervating diseases. If such were the case, what precisely does one have faith in or for? In his encyclical Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict gives the title ‘Faith is Hope’ to the first section of the main body of the encyclical, and points out how faith and hope seem ‘interchangeable’ in many biblical passages.Footnote ¹³ Such hope, according to Benedict, is borne by a faith in the risen Jesus that ‘offers’ us redemption.Footnote ¹⁴ And yet, faith and hope must also be clarified. On one end of the spectrum, recall Dostoevsky's comment in The House of the Dead: ‘No man can live without some goal to aspire towards. If he loses his goal, his hope, the resultant anguish will frequently turn him into a monster’.Footnote ¹⁵

We also, however, are painfully cognisant of how hope and faith are often manipulated by others to prevent necessary action in the present. One chilling example is a quotation from Tadeusz Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen: ‘We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers’.Footnote ¹⁶ Any discussion of faith and hope needs to address both these polar positions but must not allow the manipulation of faith and hope in some instances to annul their necessity and value. Therefore, while the temptation to despair must (always?) be overcome and false hopes identified, one dreams and hopes and endures because of the flashes and lasting encounters of the beauty and goodness of this world; a beauty that can overwhelm as much as the ugliness; a beauty for which words are often lacking, enveloped in the sublime as much as in banal act of kindness.

I, therefore, write of a fractured faith because of two opposing realities.Footnote ¹⁷ The first is the certitude of my faith in a loving and merciful God who asks each one of us: ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ (John 6:67) and ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ (Mk 10:51). At the heart of both Gospel quotations are the responsibilities we have to establish the reign of God on earth, even amidst doubt, failure, and uncertainty. In the first quotation, Jesus’ Bread of Life discourse is rejected or not understood by the majority. For a moment, Jesus seems alone, floundering in irrelevance. Like Jesus’ birth in a manger, the scene is haunting if one reflects on the notion of a vulnerable God. And yet, it is a vulnerability that calls for a response, and asks if we, too, will not go away. The second quote reveals the importance of our need for God. Here the blind beggar Bartimaeus asks Jesus for sight (and mercy). Once Bartimaeus can see, he immediately follows Jesus, giving us a hint, as Ched Myers argues, that more than physical sight is sought.Footnote ¹⁸ Most importantly, we need to know what to ask for – another aspect of our human responsibility to discern what is essential despite conflicting and competing interests. In both passages, Christ – as victim and liberator – is the conduit through which answers are given.

The second reality is the crushing fact that Christians, in the name of Christianity, have abused so many souls and bodies. How, and whether, these two realities (the problem of theodicy) can be resolved is a cross my faith continues to endure. Thus, my theology springs ultimately from the cry of the cross – but a cry that reverberates in an empty tomb with its stone rolled away. Whether my ‘fractured’ faith is substantially different from the ‘wounded’ or ‘broken’ faiths of a Wiesel and Greenberg, therefore, remains an open question.

Recall how Thomas will not believe in the risen Christ unless he ‘see[s] the mark of the nails in his hands, and put[s his] finger in the mark of the nails and [his] hand in [Jesus’] side’ (John 20:25). While the disciples at Emmaus recognise Jesus in the breaking of the bread (Lk 24:30), Thomas recognises Jesus through his wounds. Thus, scars and wounds remain visible, even after healing, even amidst or after resurrection. Reflecting on this passage, we can get a further image of the possibility for a living, dynamic faith that remains fractured. Bartimaeus’ faith, indeed, healed him. He could see. But a faith no longer in need of healing is a faith either supernatural or unknowingly blind.

Instilling (if not Finding) Doubt and Faith in Catholic Social Teaching

In the next two sections I want to situate myself within Catholic social teaching and within the biblical tradition. I will then seek to examine how and why the two criteria below (in light of the two realities discussed above) are essential in order to develop a meaningful relationship of faith and reason, and thus, a dynamic, integral Christianity. Obviously such a task requires systematic and comprehensive treatment, so it can only be sketched in here. The first criterion is the following: Christian theology is called to a sustained turning to the words and silences of the marginalised and victimised. The second criterion is that this turning must be accompanied by a Biblical and Christian tradition that is challenged and cleansed through dialogue and partnership in solidarity with the non-Christian OtherFootnote ¹⁹.

Because the notion of the fragility of reason and a fractured faith may seem ‘new’ or antithetical to Catholic tradition, I want, albeit briefly, to locate my position as a post-Auschwitz and post-Vatican II Catholic. Writing of the neoscholastic approach towards faith and reason in pre-Vatican II encyclicals, David Hollenbach notes that for Johann Baptist Metz: ‘modern Catholic social teaching before the Council did not seek to mediate between faith and society but rather to defend the Christian tradition against the corrosive currents of modernity… Faith and reason were not seen envisioned as interacting or transforming each other. In the same way, Church and society were not seen as in dialogue to the mutual benefit of both’.Footnote ²⁰ Amidst our mutiglobalised and multipluralised world, where faiths and reasons and views of God or the Absolute coalesce and collide, there may be elements of our faith that cling to the rock of certainty. But even this certainty will need to be nuanced and developed further below in light of the criteria above.

To return to the context of Vatican II for the moment though, David Hollenbach incorporates the term ‘dialogic universalism’ to describe the Council's approach in Gaudium et Spes in situating itself amidst the tension of universality and particularity. Commenting upon the interaction of rational discourse and the concrete and specific milieus of the one(s) engaging in that discourse, Hollenbach writes: ‘This dependence of rational inquiry upon tradition is evident not only in ethics and theology but in other domains as well. At the same time, a dialogically universalist orientation is fully committed to respect for the dignity of those outside the communal tradition of the inquirer, in this case, those who are not Christian’.Footnote ²¹

Reason, thus, remains both muddled and energised by the cultures that help to condition it. Then, though often grudgingly at first (and sometimes after the expenditure of much pride and claimed superiority), one's rational discourse is encouraged to listen to and observe (and begin to absorb) the insights, challenges, and questions of the Other. In the midst of encountering a non-Christian's joys and sorrows and his or her human and divinely-inspired words and deeds, the certainty of one's faith, rightfully pauses and hesitates. The fragility of our humanity, and hence of reason, confronts us. Consider two distinct, but pertinent, examples: in the first instance – and despite some theologically challenging notions – how can we not react accept with appreciation when the Sufi Rumi sings: ‘Lo, I am with you always means when you look for God, / God is in the look of your eyes, / in the thought of looking, nearer to you than yourself, / or things that have happened to you / There's no need to go outside. / Be melting snow. / Wash yourself of yourself’?Footnote ²² In the second instance, silence seems to be the Christian's best and most compassionate response when hearing the Tibetan nun Beri Laga say that she survived her torture and captivity at the hands of the Communist Chinese because of her Buddhist faith: ‘I had prayed night and day to the Three Jewels to come through the ordeal; and my faith kept me going’.Footnote ²³

What Hollenbach refers to as ‘Dialogic Universalism’ may be the best way to make the Church and Catholic social teaching relevant in light of such voices – even as one seems faced with a sense of vulnerability, ambivalence, and appealing, but opposing, truth claims. It is for this reason that Catholic theologians, in particular, must try to retrieve or further analyse the roles that theological doubt, protest, and licit (as well as ‘illicit’) theological dissentFootnote ²⁴ have played in the history of the Church, in the development of Church doctrine, and in the Christian interaction – and judgement upon – the Other.

The Bible and a Stuttering Faith

Despite containing stories of loss, failure, and turning away from God, the Bible, ultimately, resonates with hope and God's aim to heal and embrace humanity in God's perfect, encompassing love. Such an eschatological and soteriological frame thus encapsulates and influences how one reads the scenes of loss and failing. And yet, because of my demand that we remember the stories and victims of loss and atrocity in this world, one could say that my Biblical position situates itself particularly in solidarity with the cantus firmus of the cross; amidst the cries of the women of Jerusalem who were said to ‘eat their children’ according to Lamentations; and by the side of the unnamed Syrophoenician woman who was chased away by the disciples, and initially turned aside by Jesus in her quest for her daughter to be healed.

Theologically, of course, we refer to such a stance as the preferential option for the poor, especially as Jon Sobrino continually defends itFootnote ²⁵, though I would also add some of Stephen Pope's clarifications.Footnote ²⁶ Regardless, when present amidst mass atrocity and at the sight of such rejection and suffering, words tend to falter and felicitous phrases become fragile and brittle. As Levinas writes: ‘The language of the Old Testament is so suspicious of the rhetoric which does not stutter that its chief prophet was ‘slow of speech and tongue.’ There is undoubtedly more to this than just the avowal of being limited in this defect: there is the awareness of a kergyma which does not forget the weight of the world, the inertia of men, and the deafness of understandings’.Footnote ²⁷ In this interweaving of faith and reason, we can perhaps refer to the stuttering certitude of faith, or as noted above, a fractured faith because one acknowledges that all theology should be said in fear and trembling. Such a position is exemplified in an example from the provocative tradition of piyyutim in the Jewish liturgy. Such are hymns or poetic embellishments spoken or sung before or after a standard liturgical piece of liturgical praise. In one example Anson Laytner writes that:

As Laytner argues, a theological position that does not address or remain in constant tension with these poles – expressing to God their ‘doubt and anger as well as their praise and thanksgiving’Footnote ²⁹– contributes to the perceived conflict of faith and reason. A faith that acknowledges these tensions strengthens the reason it informs. And yet, do not the Gospels laud a faith that will move mountains and walk on water? It is the individual's faith that is a key catalyst in his or her being healed by Christ. How then can I contend that a fractured faith is better aligned with the Christian ethos?

Exemplary faith never remains free of some doubt, as embodied by the tax collector whom Jesus praises at the expense of certain scribes and Pharisees. We may also think of Jesus’ agony in the garden (Mk 14:33–6) or Mother Teresa's private spiritual strugglesFootnote ³⁰– and all of our dark nights of the soul. Such a faith is humble and other-focused. Most doubt is in regards to oneself; not Christ. This doubt and humility are essential aspects of approaching and living out the certitudes of one's faith in openness and meekness.

It must, however, be asked: Is not a Christian's faith whole because of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, so that it is inappropriate to speak of a fractured faith within Christian teaching? As Benedict writes in Spe Salvi: ‘Redemption is offered to is in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present’.Footnote ³¹ While Christians claim that the hope for healing has been revealed in an intimate and particular way through Jesus, is it more theologically rich and spiritually honest – in light of the ongoing horrors of our world – to speak of the hope for healing but to highlight how we remain in a world that is essentially unredeemed? As Didier Pollefeyt writes: ‘Christians need to learn to live with the Jewish belief in the ‘No’ to Jesus for the sake of their own Christology. The way Jesus will come as the Christ and the Redeemer of the World will depend on the way Christians represent him in the present’.Footnote ³² Following Christ should make us attune to the sick who need to be comforted and the lost who need to be found. It is the love of Christ that leads one to reconsider the notion that Christ has already healed us in this life so that we need not doubt or gripe any longer. Christ's call to heal the Other necessarily calls us to listen to the Other and witness how healing and liberation remain flawed or illusive for so many. The reign of God may be among us, but so, too, are the silent and desperate cries of the marginalised. Such awareness tempers any triumphalist religious language.

The Presence of the Suffering Victim

After much refining, theological and philosophical formulations must always be re-addressed in the presence of the suffering victim. While this is not the occasion to critique Greenberg's well-known working principle regarding theological statements amidst the burning childrenFootnote ³³, it is crucially within this context that one must reflect upon the relationship and role of faith and reason.Footnote ³⁴ It is the encounter with absence, void, loss, and horror that undermines and pummels any sustainable notion of the grandeur of reason. While exceptions – stories of healings and miracles – can and need to be proclaimed, theologians must continually refer to those forgotten, the anonymous poor as Sobrino again reminds us of.Footnote ³⁵ Yes, Jesus finally healed the Syrophoenician woman's daughter, but other children that day – and many days since – were not so fortunate. As should be evident by now, any discussion of faith and reason must enter the perilous world of theodicy and anthropodicy and must sit with the women and the babies from the Book of Lamentations and with voices like Joseph Bau, who in his holocaust testimony, Dear God, Have you ever Gone Hungry?, writes how [Camp Kommandant Amon Goeth] caught a boy who was suffering from diarrhea and was unable to contain himself. He forced the boy to eat all of the excrement before killing him’.Footnote ³⁶ Bau does not know the boy so he is unnamed. We know such stories, ironically, are as numerous as the stars in the sky and sands of the seashore. They speak of a different type of covenant, among or between people or forces that constantly seek to belittle and wear down the ‘certitude’ of our faith.

Testimonies that witness these ruptures within history challenge and undermine many of the fundamentals of a Christian's faith, like the power of prayer, the sense of God's active presence within our world, or the belief in Christ's solidarity with victims of oppression – elements that should be certitudes. However, ironically and perhaps tragically, our deep and sensitive listening to the Other calls us to challenge that certitude in the name of that same faith. This is especially the case if one's theological or ethical framework has been complicit or silent in the face of mass suffering and atrocity. A Christian who reads memoirs from the Holocaust, Argentinean Dirty War, Balkan wars, or Rwandan genocideFootnote ³⁷ to name but four historical ruptures – will be constantly reminded of the institutional and individual failures of Christians. As a Catholic Christian, I remain dumbfounded and shamed at how we have treated those with differing views, almost as much as I rejoice and hope in the peace and joy we, through the workings of the Spirit, have brought, and will bring, to the world. Such a focus, which also seeks to unearth many overlooked or unknown tales of goodness and hope, will still likely lead to a merciless onslaught of doubt and silence. Writing of the massacres committed by Christian colonisers in the New World, Bartolomé de las Casas’ A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies cries out: ‘There is no way the written word can convey the full horror of the atrocities committed throughout the region; nor, even if it were to, would the reader credit the excesses that such an account would reveal’.Footnote ³⁸

While it may be easy (and convenient) for those of us who are Christian today to separate ourselves from the cruelty other Christians have unleashed – and are unleashing on others – we must ask ourselves: Are there fundamentals of our faith from Sacred Scripture, Church Pronouncements (or silences), and the writings of some key theologians that have contributed to dehumanising and unjust portrayals of non-Christians? Have such fundamentals implied or fostered the license to mock or destroy a non-Christian's honour, life, and values? The belief of supersessionism, mined by many Christians from biblical and theological texts, would be one example.Footnote ³⁹ Because of a Christian's love and zeal for a faith that nurtures and gives life; because of the outrage one feels at a faith that has been manipulated; because of the acceptance, if not kernel of doubt, that one's faith has contributed to (or failed as an adequate response toward) these atrocities; we are called to a greater examination of our beliefs and practices. We must turn to the Other to listen to her experiences and interpretations of our doctrines and praxis. We must be open to conversion – not to another faith (though this may be valid for some), but to the conversion of our interpretation and practice of that religion. Note, too, that this is not a once-off act, but is part of our continual need for purification. As John Paul II writes in regards to the Catholic Church in Ut Unum Sint: ‘Because she feels herself constantly called to be renewed in the spirit of the Gospel, she does not cease to do penance’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Spiritual Kenosis and Our Response to the Other

In the Regensburg Address, Benedict XVI's called for a rehellenisation of faith and reason. In speaking of a rehellenisation, I cannot help wonder why in this address there is not a concomitant (and ultimately more spiritually and theologically purifying) urging for Christians to immerse themselves in a deeper knowledge of Judaism; and, in our present, globalised Church, to sit at the feet of the churches of Latin America, Asia, and Africa.Footnote ⁴¹ Thus, the calling for a rehellenisation that does not account for why theological positions of complicity or silence in the past have contributed to injustice is futile.

The so-called postmodern challenge of universal truth, identity, and ethics should be both critiqued and embraced – critiqued because they may seem erroneously to attack crucial components of one's Christian identity – and embraced because they can serve as purifiers in better embodying that identity. A Christian should welcome the questioning of any truth claims and listen to arguments that encompass – or flirt with – a radical relativism. Why? Because one's faith, in an act of spiritual kenosis, may even have to empty of itself its professed love and passion for God. Many of us have wounded or killed precisely in a supposed zeal for God. As Levinas writes: ‘Loving the Torah even more than God means precisely having access to a personal God against whom one may rebel – that is to say, for Whom one may die’.Footnote ⁴² It is in the name of our love for the Other and our response to the Other, which for Levinas is characterised by a movement unto God – à-Dieu ’– that may lead us to this spiritual and theological rebellion against God but in the name of our love of God. In reflecting on how a false zeal for God has often led to ungodly acts, one does not have to think of the burning of heretics or the Crusades. Our everyday words and actions of religious pride and hypocrisy often hurt the ones we most love. This emptying, then, is to ensure, precisely, that in one's defense and search for Truth, one's commitment to God is manifest in our responsibility and interaction with the Other. It is an emptying that never loses sight of one's responsibility for the Other.

In the context of kenosis and the cross, we must not only highlight how Jesus was made vulnerable and susceptible to the abuse of others, but need to show how his emptying reveals a calling to follow his redemptive example – even if such a choice leads to the cross. In the essay ‘Judaism and Kenosis’, Levinas writes that ‘kenosis also has its full meaning in the sensibility of Judaism’.Footnote ⁴³ Referring to a God who is the protector of widows and orphans, he writes: ‘Most remarkably, here, that humility means mainly the proximity of God to human suffering’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Such, of course, has its resonance with the preferential option for the poor referred to above. However, in the essay ‘Judaism and Christianity’, which transcribes Levinas’ discussion with Bishop Klaus Hemmerle, Levinas has less laudatory remarks about Jesus’ kenotic emptiness on the cross. In the discussion, Bishop Hemmerle explains that all that God asks from us is to love and follow him. Referring to the defenselessness of Jesus in the face of evil and suffering, Hemmerle speaks of the ‘no defense of Jesus, which he took upon himself, so that in the innermost depths of his mission he could encounter me without defense’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Free from the acts of injustice and atrocity that characterise his oppressors, Jesus’ non-violent path towards God seems to lead us to the higher and more valuable way. And yet, in the context of the Shoah, Levinas responds: ‘…[K]enosis of powerlessness costs man too much! Christ without defense on the cross eventually found himself leading the armies of the Crusades! And he did not come down from the cross to stop the murderers’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Ironically, Christ's powerlessness meant the cross – and the life of Christ – could be abused and manipulated to commit and even inspire acts of horror and misery. Where is the God of justice? Levinas seems to be asking. More provocatively, he seems to be questioning the moral and spiritual value of Christ as a fellow sufferer with humanity. In the context of theodicy, and the fear that God remains unjustly and immorally detached from the extreme horrors of this world, Jesus’ murder and rejection testify to a God who so loved the world to make himself vulnerable and susceptible to the misplaced and unjust actions of others. Because of a commitment to continue to reveal the most meaningful path for humanity, God would not be silent or impotent when confronting such horrors. Jesus’ life testifies that to God, humanity is worth any sacrifice and suffering. And yet, doubts and theological gaps proliferate.

While Levinas’ challenge (echoing one of the criminals who was crucified with Jesus [Lk 23:32]) is acute, Christians often counter that justice will be served in a postmortem setting. In fact, it is because of my commitment to remember the many victims of mass atrocity and injustice that I refute those who make universal salvation a necessary end to establish an omnibenevolent God.Footnote ⁴⁷ On the contrary, while we must always stress the humanity of every individual (even those who have committed the grossest of crimes against life), we must remember that for Christians, every one will be judged and the memory and suffering of so many will never be forgotten. As Jürgen Moltmann writes (in response to Masao Abe's karmic interpretation of Auschwitz), ‘…I must see [the events of Auschwitz] from the point of view of God's justice. Then, on the one hand, I see a burden of guilt which cannot be carried; and on the other hand, I see the God who will not allow the murderers to triumph over their victims’.Footnote ⁴⁸ For Christians, then, judgement will come; but Levinas’ questioning of the kenosis of Christ also makes us wonder: in the light of the Shoah, will such justice come too late?

In short, all of us are only replete with questions when we contemplate the complex interactions of human choices, acts, responsibility, free will, external and internal restrictions to that responsibility and free will, and the role of justice and a post-mortem existence. Will all the victims be healed? Will this healing ‘justify’ the horrific ordeals many were forced to endure in this life? Will it ‘justify’ the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Shoah? One certainly hopes and prays that healing can be possible for even the worst of those who were left broken and dehumanised in this world. While answers remain fractured, on Cavalry Jesus has shown a non-violent path as a way to face and ultimately defeat evil and injustice. The Shoah has rightly made Levinas skeptical of the value of such a path, and all Christians must reexamine such a profoundly disturbing but viable interpretation.

Such acts of spiritual kenosis noted above are no doubt dangerous and risky. And yet, if we believe the Spirit is leading us closer to living a life that mirrors the Love of God; we must be open to such challenges. We must remain humbled by a faith and reason that are best described as much by their grandeur as their fragility.