Seán Ó Conaill – Jaja’s Question: A Blasphemous Theology?
If Catholic clergy cannot explicitly deny that God the Father needed Jesus to die to restore his lost ‘Honour’ are they silently endorsing and embedding this medieval theology? When this question turns up in a recent Nigerian novel Sean O’Conaill can’t resist speculating about Ireland’s responsibility.
“Of course God works in mysterious ways. Look what he did to his faithful servant Job, even to His own son. But have you ever wondered why? Why did He have to murder his own Son so that we would be Saved? Why didn’t He just go ahead and save us?”
This is the young rebellious Jaja, Nigerian son of a punctilious and abusive Catholic father, Papa Eugene – in the novel Purple Hibiscus (by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). Deep tragedy stalks the family. Eugene is trapped in post-colonial status anxiety and is never taught to recognise this malady for the sin it truly is. None of the clergy in the novel can rise to that challenge. Instead Eugene gets the front pew in Church as the model Catholic parent he seeks to be. His family must suffer mutely – until in the end a dam breaks.
Is that truly a disgraceful – even a blasphemous – inference: that God the Father sought and arranged the death of Jesus on the Cross? If so why, still, in the Jubilee year of 2025 can that not be emphatically stated, even in Ireland? As that inference occurred in this instance to a Nigerian novelist born in 1977 and raised in a Catholic family, this inevitably suggests that Irish missionary priests were complicit in its arrival in Nigeria. Even today the Catechism of the Catholic Church of 1994 is most easily understood as verifying it (CCC 615). The abusive patriarch that Adichie describes is by all accounts an archetypal African scourge, so a theology of abusive patriarchy – of a Father God also bound to protect his own ‘honour’ by sacrificing his son – is easily assimilable.
Jesus proves otherwise by showing not the slightest sign of status anxiety himself – in any of the Gospel accounts – but this has still to be seen. Clerical status anxiety insists that St Anselm’s ‘satisfaction’ theology of atonement must remain embedded, the permanent ball and chain that both hobbles mission and empowers reaction. Jesus’ celibacy remains the diagnostic sign of his holiness – not his refusal to join in the endless human game of ‘shame or be shamed’. His claim to have ‘overcome the world’ – i.e. the fear of what people will think – goes unnoticed, even at the zenith of the global attention economy – and so does the origin of all xenophobic victimisation in the status anxiety of the mob.
‘Sshh! Don’t say such things!’ No wonder Irish clergy have a phobia of theology, when the implications of a medieval theory that St Patrick knew nothing about are too troubling to speak about. That the Trinity could be bent instead upon freeing us from all fear of ‘what people think’ will probably be left to the novelists to reveal in the end. Even in Africa now people are reading René Girard – so it needn’t be true that any African clergy arriving here must be trapped in St Anselm’s mistake.
But what exactly are our own young seminarians learning and thinking – and saying – these times, about the reason Jesus died on the cross?
Did Jesus have to die? I am out of my depth here.
What has sprung to mind is one of the more profound moments in Lloyd Webber’s ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’. Jesus is agonising in Gethsemane and he challenges the Father. Part of his prayer goes as follows:
Can you tell me now that I would not be killed in vain?
Show me just a little of your omnipresent brain
Tell me what’s the reason for your wanting me to die.
You’re far too keen on how and where but NOT SO HOT ON WHY.
I was always struck by that passage.
An excellent piece, Seán.
I haven’t really looked seriously at the present catechism (1994) but if it is still using Anselm’s idea of supstitutionary atonement then I am amazed.
I was under the impression that modern scholarship had found it to be completely untenable.
Even leaving the consensus of modern scholars aside, as an innocent, unquestioning Catholic, which I was well into adulthood, I was never convinced that we could or should be held responsible, inter generationally, for the sin of our (most likely mythical) ancient ancestor.
As an exile in Scotland I often brag about the wonderful scholar priests – and lay scholars and women too – that we have at home in Ireland.
And, Seán you must know that there are priests who will say that Jesus did not have to die to save us.
“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matt 10:28)
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.” (Matt 5:38-39)
Teachings such as these by Jesus surely raised the question of what he would do if and when faced with the reality of wrongful condemnation and death – and of how good could possibly triumph over evil if he offered no resistance.
We need to take most seriously the conviction of the early church that Jesus did indeed triumph – without the use of force – that a ‘new creation’ had begun with his crucifixion – and that the Father and the Holy Spirit had revealed themselves in this sequence also, as the necessary guarantors of Jesus’ victory and of our redemption.
The following possibility then presents itself: that the Trinity were – and still are – intent on demonstrating the limits of the power ‘to kill the body’ that has always been wielded by ‘Pharaoh’ – i.e. ‘the kingdoms of this world’, the spirit of earthly domination – to open a horizon to human history that will always lie beyond erasure by that tyrannical spirit.
To put this another way, the purpose of the crucifixion / resurrection sequence was probably to demonstrate that the Kingdom of God cannot be either built or erased by force – that it lives on always in the faith, hope and charity of the people of God – in communion with the ever-present Trinity.
Constantine’s claim after 312 to a divine mandate for the use of force is a challenge to such an understanding – but as far as I know that claim was never verified by the church. It was also implicitly rejected by Dignitatis Humanae in 1965, and we all are well aware of the connection between Christendom and today’s alienation of so many from the Gospel – and the now obvious connection between political power and corruption.
St Anselm of Canterbury at the zenith of the church’s political power c. 1098 was far less aware of the problematic of a church resting on state patronage and the use of force. Instead his retributory theology of atonement helped to buttress that church-state alliance at the expense of a full grasp of Jesus insistence that ‘I and the Father are one’ – and of the call to non-violence. The couplet ‘Christus vivit’ so often used by Pope Francis needs now to be understood as the Father’s intention also.
Death has no dominion!