Seán Ó Conaill: In 2025 why are we still stuck with an inadequate theology of the cross?
“The biggest source of stress for most humans is fear of the negative reactions of other people.”
So declared neuropsychologist Ian Robertson in the Irish Times (April 15th 2025). He was lauding the golfer Rory McElroy’s resilience in recovering from a series of devastating mistakes in the US Masters final round on Sunday April 14th – at last to win the only major golfing title that had eluded him.
‘Fear of the negative reactions of other people’ is surely the chronic insecurity we all feel when faced with any public test – that tendency to doubt our own value that the philosopher Alain de Botton calls status anxiety.
Surely it is to that same fear that Jesus was alluding when he said: ‘Be courageous, for I have overcome the world.’ (John 16:33)
That Jesus acceptance of crucifixion was therefore a divine act of solidarity with all humans who face any test of character seems obvious. And yet the Catechism of the Catholic Church requires us to believe that Jesus’ crucifixion was required by God the Father simply as ‘satisfaction’ for the offence caused by our human sinfulness – an explanation that dates back to St Anselm of Canterbury in 1098.
Meanwhile we Catholics wait endlessly for a ‘reckoning’ on the cover up of clerical abuse by the church’s supreme teachers, our bishops – who in Ireland had been, according to themselves, misgoverned by fear of loss of reputation (i.e.by ‘fear of the negative reactions of other people’) if the fact of clerical sexual abuse of children became public knowledge.
Unexplained also is the failure of the Vatican ‘visitators’ to Ireland in 2011-12 to investigate the culture of deference to clergy by Irish civil servants that enabled the abuses described in the Ryan Report of May 2009. Instead of facing that issue they chose to pillory five priests who had been vocal in calling out church injustice.
Surely the evidence is mounting for an understanding of Christian moral cowardice that links it with an inadequate medieval theology of the cross – an understanding that St Paul, for one, knew nothing of when he assured the Christian Romans that by their baptism they had joined Jesus in the tomb – from which they too would rise again (Romans 6:3-4)?
How could it be argued that on the contrary when faced with a supreme moral challenge, and the fear of rejection that so often goes with that, we must consider ourselves utterly alone and unaccompanied by God?
The Catholic Catechism of 1994 was completed before the challenge of child protection in the church was first addressed squarely by bishops. It surely needs to be updated to acknowledge the Gethsemane of any individual faced with ‘fear of the negative reactions of other people’ in the church – the ultimate test of integrity (i.e. ‘holiness’) in ‘blowing the whistle’. That Jesus is truly alongside us in such moments is surely the most important meaning of the cross.
Mass attendance in Ireland was high when the poorest were suffering degradation in church-run institutions, so ‘bums on seats’ – religious performance – is not the ultimate index of the health of the church. We are always tested by the world to be courageous witnesses to the dignity of the weakest. Our ritual sacrifice, the Mass, should inspire us to actual sacrifice on behalf of others in the world outside.
Our theology of the cross – and our understanding of Atonement – needs to rise to that challenge.
“‘Fear of the negative reactions of other people’ is surely the chronic insecurity we all feel when faced with any public test – that tendency to doubt our own value that the philosopher Alain de Botton calls status anxiety. Surely it is to that same fear that Jesus was alluding when he said: ‘Be courageous, for I have overcome the world.’ (John 16:33)”
Trans folk betrayed by the newfangled UK Supreme Court (consisting of 10 Lords and 2 Ladies) have a long battle to overcome “fear of the negative reactions of other people” — but the only fear that the women who pushed for this absurd judgement recognize as valid is physical fear of predatory men, rather than the much deeper existential fear of social exclusion, which these women are championing, as they bond together in rejection of their trans brothers and sisters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjRTs8xU3uE
I just noticed that I was born in the same month (June 1949) when the first volume of “Le deuxieme sexe” sold 22,000 copies in one week. De Beauvoir’s distinction of sex and gender has been central both to feminism and to thinking about trans folk for the last 76 years. I doubt if the Lords of the Supreme Court have read it. Their judgement could turn out to be the first step in wider public education on this issue, as the backlash takes form and as the victorious women watch the consequences of the judgement play out in real life.
All so true, Séan and Joe.
Digressing now, I wonder where you both stand on the theology of the Resurrection, physical, spiritual or what?
I was twice in Emmaus in the 1980s.
Our pilgrimages were led by my great friend, sadly no longer with us, Davie Gemmell (Mgr Gemmell). Davie also came to Belfield and celebrated our wedding Mass when Fiona and I married.
Anyway, at Emmaus Davie made much of the fact that the disciples recognised Jesus in the Eucharist and I just could not buy that given that they had walked with him for several miles.
And then when the apostles/disciples were locked in the upper room in fear of the Jews suddenly Jesus is among them.
Now, my Emmaus experiences were when I was still innocently accepting everything I had been taught/brainwashed about our faith since I was a child but I still sensed that there is something not right about this.
This has made me remember my friend Davie again on this Easter Sunday.
Davie died suddenly in Barcelona watching Celtic play.
He was such a good friend, a wonderful person and an extraordinary priest.
God rest his noble soul.🙏🙏
Paddy, thanks for your question — which made me discover that I’ve already written next Sunday’s sermon: https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/resurrection I follow 1 Cor 15 on the resurrection — with all its enigmas. The natural (psychical) body is a seed that is raised as a spiritual (pneumatic) body. To use the language of Easter Week 1916, it is “changed utterly”.
I was as ‘swithery’ on the bodily Resurrection of Jesus as anyone until my own life depended literally upon prayer and some kind of rescue / resurrection.
Not enough is usually at stake for us as educated and literate people in this era for us to place ourselves completely in the existential circumstances of those who followed Jesus and then had to cope with his crucifixion.
And yet to read e.g. the account of Thomas’ reactions to the news of Jesus’ return in John’s Gospel is to be faced with a stark choice. Either that account is a very deliberate and conscious fabrication, and therefore deeply dishonest, or those who wrote it were fully and truly convinced that the events recounted had truly happened. There are no other options.
Why would there even be an ACP website today if the first Christians had not held that conviction and convinced successive generations that it was true?
That ‘fond memory’ can compile myths is certainly possible, but who would be willing to stake his own life on a myth knowingly fabricated? It simply never rings true for me that e.g. Ignatius of Antioch could have gone confidently to die in Rome (possibly in the Colosseum) in the second century – and written letters that clearly echo creedal formulae – had he had the slightest doubt in a material bodily resurrection of Jesus.
However in the end it is my own experiences of rescue from truly desperate circumstances, and then of restoration and transformation, that make me a believer. We never voluntarily enter the valley of the shadow of death, but, if we do ever go there, what we can experience then will have a far greater impact than any sceptical text ever read.
For me none of the works of the Jesus seminar sceptics has come close to capturing the utter singularity of Jesus of Nazareth – and I use that word ‘singularity’ deliberately. That everything in space and time truly arose originally out of nothing whatever is for me far, far more difficult to believe than that Jesus did live and did die and did truly rise again, materially – and I pray the Creed in that belief.
“And yet to read e.g. the account of Thomas’ reactions to the news of Jesus’ return in John’s Gospel is to be faced with a stark choice. Either that account is a very deliberate and conscious fabrication, and therefore deeply dishonest, or those who wrote it were fully and truly convinced that the events recounted had truly happened. There are no other options.”
Sorry, Sean, you are reacting just as I did as a 19 year old when a German man shared his problems with the contradictions in the Resurrection narratives. Ground zero in this vast modern discussion is Samuel Reimarus’s demolition of the tale of the guards at the tomb in the 18th century. Dealing with such problems, the Vatican talks a lot about “literary genres” (such as midrash). John knows the importance of giving Jesus concrete historical location and his Gospel contains many anti-docetic details — but even these are selectively planted for theological purpose. John builds on Mark, but not fearing to correct him, e.g. in the rendering of the agony in the Garden — John 12 has Jesus say that he will NOT beg the chalice to pass, and in the Garden he stupendously causes the cohort come to apprehend him to fall on their knees three times.
(See Jörg Frey, Theology and History in the Fourth Gospel; https://www.amazon.com/Theology-History-Fourth-Gospel-Tradition/dp/1481309897)
Ancient sources insist that John is “the spiritual Gospel” and Origen held (in his Commentary on John, Bk X) that the entirety of Chapter 2 of John is an allegory about the Logos coming into the world attended by his powers (though on other occasions he could be heavily literalist, making Jesus heal three different sets of blind men as he entered Jericho so as to wipe out the difference between the literal details).
#5 “Ground zero in this vast modern discussion is Samuel Reimarus’s demolition of the tale of the guards at the tomb in the 18th century.”
How exactly, Joe, does that (or any other) scriptural ‘demolition’ help us to understand the faith that gave rise to the text it ‘demolishes’?
If it cannot do that, how does it help to answer Paddy’s original question – as to the nature of the Resurrection of Jesus that we ourselves believe in?
No modern scripture scholar has conclusive authoritative access to whatever original shared experiences in the post-crucifixion Christian communities gave rise to the texts they critique. By its very nature the existential character of that experience was utterly different from the existential character of modern scholars, who, in the comfort of their libraries, examine those texts. We surely need to bear that in mind when we evaluate what they write.
You yourself have often defended the Nicene Creed so on what grounds do you do so, given that both versions of the creed are structurally centered on the Resurrection claim?
Why not read again what I carefully wrote – which was not that I believe the Gospel of John to be verifiable history in all of its detail but that, taken as a whole, and with reference especially to the Resurrection passages, it is an honest account of what its compilers believed had happened – not a deliberate and dishonest fabrication. Am I wrong about that?
If I am, is it your contention that faith in the Resurrection had no source other than the need of the original Christian community for a myth they could ‘sell’?
You pay no attention whatever to the question of what it was that sustained the faith of Ignatius of Antioch and so many others who were clearly ready to witness to the Resurrection claim by their own deaths. That’s more than puzzling – and far from persuasive.
Reimarus demonstrated the historical impossibility of the story of the guards at the tomb. Not all resurrection stories are equally wonderful — the tiresome anti-Jewish apologetic here can be set aside in our preaching (along with the lavish apocalyptic report of Matt 27:51-3). Matthew may be taking up earlier traditions and may believe in them uncritically; he is the only one of the evangelists to report them. “Either that account is a very deliberate and conscious fabrication, and therefore deeply dishonest, or those who wrote it were fully and truly convinced that the events recounted had truly happened. There are no other options.”
But other options are really needed — I suggested that “literary genre” supplies other options in the case of John (and I would add Luke). I think that when Luke brings in “angels” he is signalling that he is writing in a genre more focused on theological meaning than literal historical fact. He mentions the Ascension at the end of his gospel as if it happened on the day of the Resurrection but has two men in white apparel, “interpreting angels” (a stock feature in biblical narrative), appear at the highly pictorialized version of the Ascension in Acts 1, dated 40 days later.
The Thomas story in John 20 bears the marks of Johannine composition, culminating in a confession that is a climax to a series of confessions in previous stories (in John 6, 9, and 11 for example).
The story deals with the theme of faith in Johannine style. If one is concerned with historicity there is a basic problem: in Mark and Matthew the first appearance of the risen Christ to the apostles is located in Galilee and in Luke and John it is located in the upper room in Jerusalem (Luke alters Mark 16:7) in which the interpreting angel tells the women “tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee, there you will see him as he told you”; Luke writes instead: “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men…” (24:6-7). For Bart Ehrman (whom Sean Freyne called “an inverted fundamentalist”) this would mean that Luke is a forger and liar (just like the authors of the epistles under Paul’s name that are not really by Paul). But it looks as if both Mark-Matthew’s (mountain in) Galilee and Luke-John’s upper room are literary-theological creations, and the latter upstaged the former as more beautiful and profound.
The earliest list of appearances of the risen Christ in 1 Cor. 15 refers to neither of these traditions, and I take it as the nearest we can get to literal historicity. John 21 adds a Galilee appearance when John 20 has already closed its story (and is widely regarded as an appendix to the Gospel, by another hand). Lots of questions remain, but you will not find the answer in Raymond Brown or Joseph Ratzinger, both of whom ended their multivolume studies of Jesus by saying that they prefer to defer discussion of the Resurrection until they reach heaven!
I am far from being an apologist for catholic bishops and their cover up of clerical sexual abuse. I wonder though, if a few of these men were shocked, stunned and unbelieving when this shocking sexual abuse allegations came to them. Rather than not coming forward out of fear of personal rejection and the protection of the churches’ reputation they simply didn’t believe what they were hearing. Personal experience breaks open a little room for compassion in this area as I did not believe a teenager who revealed to me that her biological father had been sexually abusing her. I said nothing, I regretfully remained silent. I can’t cast the first stone!
“Stop your ears, therefore, when any one speaks to you at variance with Jesus Christ, who was descended from David, and was also of Mary; who was truly born, and ate and drank. He was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate; He was truly crucified, and truly died, in the sight of beings in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth. He was also truly raised from the dead, His Father quickening Him, even as after the same manner His Father will so raise up us who believe in Him by Christ Jesus, apart from whom we do not possess the true life. But if, as some that are without God, that is, the unbelieving, say, that He only seemed to suffer (they themselves only seeming to exist), then why am I in bonds? Why do I long to be exposed to the wild beasts? Do I therefore die in vain? Am I not then guilty of falsehood against the Lord?”
[St Ignatius of Antioch – 3rd letter, to the Trallians, on his way to Rome for execution – sometime in the 2nd century.]
Here, Joe, is an utterly different register from that which compares texts minutely in search of certitude. What was ‘true’ for Ignatius apparently included his own impending violent death in Rome as well as the ‘raising’ of Jesus – and so to describe that experience of the risen Christ as ‘pneumatic’ rather than ‘material’ seems to fall far short of an explanation of the conviction of those earliest Christians.
And yet I reflect that my own conviction of the truth of the Resurrection is not based upon a ‘material’ experience of Jesus. Wrestling one night with the question of why Jesus submitted to crucifixion I asked myself ‘Could it be that God cannot force us to follow him?’ – and suddenly became flooded with the conviction that this is utterly true. Everything I have written since then stems from that experience – including, of course, the interpretation of Christendom as a mistaken detour into the association of the Creed with state coercion – a mistake from which we are only now emerging.
You can clearly see the Creedal core in that Ignatian passage above. It is that narration that is ‘material’ for its author, because it truly ‘matters’. Repeated in times of ultimate trial it becomes a passport to eternity.
Sean, I think you would feel at home with Bp Robert Barron, who insists on the tone of the Easter kerygma in all its forms as (a) not a bit like mythology, (b) breathing the conviction of faith.
” to describe that experience of the risen Christ as ‘pneumatic’ rather than ‘material’ seems to fall far short of an explanation of the conviction of those earliest Christians.” I am using the word pneumatic in the sense of St Paul in I Cor 15, which is the foundation stone of the New Testament resurrection kerygma. He talks at length of Christ’s pneumatic body (soma pneumatikon), obviously not in some “merely spiritual” platonizing or modernistic sense. Paul’s resurrection conviction is much deeper than a mere barren insistence.
You can see why Raymond Brown, Joseph Ratzinger, and even Robert Barron flee from any attentive exegesis of the resurrection narrations in the Gospel. People go berserk when one suggests that any of the material is not literal materialistic fact.