by Kyle Baughman
Theology is, for me, a Trojan Horse. I allowed it through the gates and trusted much too quickly, when suddenly its peaceful presence turned savage; the doors fell open and it revealed its nature.
Theology is a force that ravages, that confronts and tears down.
This week, my wife and I were lying in bed, lamenting over Ferguson as its horrors still unfolded, praying together and speaking the cries of the prophets. Yet they seemed to die in the darkened room, unanswered prayers that hoped, that begged for something to change, that something would be done. Against the darkness, we levied the words of Amos:
“Therefore, because you who hate the poor and take from them tariffs of grain, you who have built houses of hewn stone…you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate…Seek good and not evil, that you may live…Hate evil, love good, and establish justice in the gate.”
And then we fell quiet. In silence, we shifted; each of us turned away, and my wife spoke her hurt: “Where is God? Why isn’t God helping?”
Had she known that she was bringing this wooden horse into my fortress, she probably would have turned her lament inward. But the damage had been done. The soldiers of Troy were now waiting patiently in the town square of my stirring mind. “Where is God?” And so, the door swung open, and my mind was torn asunder.
Theology, no matter its pedigree, is only so much mental masturbation if we don’t attend to how its propositions take form in the material world. I often grow frustrated with the metaphysics of theo-talk, the ink that is spilled to argue creatio ex nihilo or that dogs do not fly because angels hold them to the earth. When one invokes the name of God, the most obscure notion has consequences. What matters in theology is how its claims are lived out in the world, how they affect those who believe them. A theology may lead some to feed the poor, and some to oppress them, and still others to despair that hope will ever come.
Theology has power. It names the unnamed God. It defines, and so determines.
And in the midst of our questions about God and the streets of Ferguson, a host of voices rush to battle in my mind. Most come for battle fully armed, swords drawn, shields gleaming. They proclaim their God of distance, letting the world run its course, or their God of power, ready to fight evil and let the chips fall where they may. They cite their texts of warfare and genocide and they do their damage, looting my constructs about a loving God. My city in ruins, they move on, looking for the next great battle by which to win glory, and I am left alone in the rubble. And then a single figure comes, walking slowly, and he sits and mourns beside me. He says, “Only the suffering God can help.”
“Only the suffering God can help.” So wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man who lamented his own attempts at stopping the evil wave of Hitler’s Reich. He was a man who spent the remainder of his life in Tegel Prison witnessing the horrors of the concentration camps before his execution in 1945.
Only the suffering God can help. It stings my ears, yet I know it to be true.
Gary M. Simpson did well to point out that the weight of the statement lies at the beginning: only. Bonhoeffer determines that the only possibility of hope is found in no other theology, no other god than the one defined by suffering. And Bonhoeffer’s continued faithfulness in the face of imprisonment and death is warranted only by the image of the God who suffers alongside him.
This is cruciform theology. It is a theology centered on the point where the possibility of God and the inevitability of suffering were merged into a singular moment, a singular event. Bonhoeffer sees in Christ and his crucifixion a demonstration of what is required of God. God must suffer. God must bend beneath its weight. Bonhoeffer rejects the boasting of omnipotence or the tidiness of deus ex machina as trappings of an imperialist god, modeled on imperialist power – a god whose reputation and abilities must be inflated and held distant if God is to be preserved. Instead, he holds fast to a God who suffers.
But how can it be that only a suffering God can save us? Surely a god who descends the mount with sword unsheathed and fire in his eyes is able to triumph over evil! But… what does that god know of me? What does that god know of Ferguson? What does that god know of pain except as a provocation for retribution?
Not many of us have known power. Not many of us have triumphed in warfare. Not many of us have had the privilege of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. How can we identify with a god like that? How can such a god identify with us? Instead, this world is ripe with stories of people who never knew strength or joy, people who are marred with stories of pain and defeat. What does Superman have to do with anyone but himself? To rally around the omnipotent figure is only to grovel for his good favor, in the hopes that he will stay, in the hopes that he will remain on our side. We share nothing with him, and he shares nothing with us.
I have suffered. I have been wounded. I have lost and have mourned, and I bear witness to countless others who have shared in the same.
The suffering God is a God who is capable of empathy and identification. The suffering God is ever-present in the hurt and the pains of this world. We all suffer. We all hurt. And in the face of a suffering, crucified God, we find ourselves looking at one of our own. We bear scars, as does he. He lost his name; so have countless others. Empathy and compassion are the real fragrance of the gospel.
And so I find myself affirming alongside Bonhoeffer: the suffering God, the crucified God is my only hope. It is our only hope, because suffering is the only human experience we all share in common. We all lament together. We see our pain reflected in others, and others see their pain in us. Seeing neighbors battling depression, friends who lose loved ones, systemic social issues that oppress minorities, all draw from us a deep lamentation that unites us with all humanity.
The suffering God is the only one who can truly know us, and who can be truly known. The fullness of God is not found in the warrior arrayed for battle or the splendor of cathedrals. Instead, the fullness of God is discovered to be suffering alongside those who suffer, crying out just as they do. God, then, is the one who is capable of bearing our iniquities, both individually and societally, because God suffers among those who are subject to our evil. God bears the pain of Ferguson, and we cannot help but have a share in it, for the same God bears our own.
Kyle Baughman is a human. He studied theology at Fuller Seminary and enjoys the attention he receives from flirting with several different theo-camps. He hits things with sticks as the drummer for Coyotes in Boxes. You can find him on Twitter @truekyleb.
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by Kyle Baughman
“Oh, my God.”
-the doxology of Kyle Baughman whilst playing board games with OPT editor Sebastian Faust
This post is about Christology, Munchkin and why I can’t play games with Sebastian Faust anymore.
[First, a quick primer on the game of Munchkin. It was created by Steve Jackson as a comedic and satirical take on role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons and his own creations, Melee and The Fantasy Trip. The result is a tongue-in-cheek dungeon game in which you do everything in your power to screw over all of your fellow dungeoneers (I said it first) and progress to level 10, thereby winning the game. It’s beautifully selfish, terribly greedy and ultimately destructive to any relationships you hold dear (screw off Oxford Comma!)]
“Oh, my God,” I exclaim. The move was so clear; if he’d chosen to go forward he would have won the game. And yet, despite all the petitioning and all the confusion, he refused to make the move that would secure victory. Instead, even when chastised, he insisted he simply didn’t want the game to end yet.
How frustrating it is to watch Sebastian Faust play Munchkin!
In a game premised upon destroying your neighbor and traversing the dungeon before anyone else can, where second place means nothing, it is inconceivable, it is humiliating for another person to sacrifice his turn, for him to desire the game to continue with the chances all but certain that someone else will win. Somewhere, high atop a mountain, Steve Jackson is now tossing sleeplessly on his bed made of literal clouds after hearing of someone incapable of playing a game that aligns so perfectly with our American ethos – a form that demands both a winner and a loser. That one would sacrifice his turn for the exaltation of play is nothing but foolishness, nay, a very insult. I hate these types of players; I despise playing with them. Whenever they arise on the field of play, I find myself wanting to quit before they ruin it, or barring that, to use all my wiles and cunning to crush them completely.
I must stop for a moment; my neurosis is clearly on display when it comes to board games.
I’m a purist. There are proper ways to play the game; they were handed down to us by our ancestors. We did not break from a tyrannical Monarchy all those years ago just to have Sebastian decide he didn’t want to win.
When given the chance, always choose to win! The point of winning is to prove your power, to dominate your foes; and to gloat, always gloat. By divine fiat, we, as a community, had established what it meant to play Munchkin in a way that would honor Sir Steve Jackson (knighthood pending). But here, Sebastian had the nerve, no, the audacity to come into my home and play the game the wrong way.
We decided to crucify Sebastian that day, and rightly so. We channeled our outrage against the one who played by different rules. Our righteous indignation said much about the law we love, and the blasphemer who fell under the weight of that love.
In a culture that demands a winner and a loser, Sebastian found himself caught in the crosshairs of ideology and pragmatism. But by rejecting our form of play, he revealed the motivation behind the form. And what did it reveal about my motivation?
Sure, here I could wax on about capitalism and political ideology at play, but that would be side-stepping the truth; the truth is simply this: I am selfish. My assumption in board games is that everybody is out for blood. My appeal was to my own pride, to prove myself the grand warrior half-elf I knew myself to be. But Sebastian, that lowly, lowly dwarf-wizard, was set ablaze that night as a sign to all others at the table that his form of play shall not be tolerated. I was indeed out for blood, but it wasn’t until I saw somebody play who had no intention of blood-letting that my manner of play was exposed, not in the instant, but only after I had crucified him.
And seeing him hanging there, dead in the balance of my indignation, I felt rebuked. He allowed himself to be crucified, and for what? One more turn.
This is the reason I get so mad at Jesus.
I enjoy hanging out with Jesus; I just can’t play board games with him.
And if it were only Munchkin with Jesus that was problematic, I would be ok. But I look through the stacks of board games we own, and I must admit it’s all of them, even Clue. Even Chutes and Ladders.
I hate playing games with Jesus because playing games with Jesus exposes the way I play the game.
It’s very easy for me to use Jesus to rebuke the systems and powers of ideology that hurt children in Palestine, that allow villages in Asia to become subservient to American enterprises or that promote the exploitation of West Virginian land, where the benefits of their loss never return to the state. But, it is not so easy when I am sitting across a game board from Jesus, and the same Jesus I wield as a sword against my opponents has shown himself to be the double-edged one.
There’s no new Christology here. Jesus has long been the challenge that Paul faced when he said “I am crucified with Christ.” The moment I am most confident to live and call myself a Christian, there is Jesus…sitting across from me. And he plays by a different rule set. He says:
“Do not resist the one who is evil,” and “give to the one who begs from you” and “love your enemies.”
These are less troubling when sitting in a pew. I can generalize these statements, hold them as tenets that the church should embody. And thus, when the church falls short and acts contrary to what it professes, I can denounce the church and repudiate it. But it’s much more difficult when Jesus is sitting across the table from me.
For, much as Sebastian’s joy was in delaying the end, for the sake of the game, for one more turn, so I see in Christ a willingness that the game not be decided by the present paradigm, and the willing of time, the willing of new opportunity.
I do not know what The Eschaton will look like, or when, or if, those things Jesus talked about will occur. But, what I do know from Jesus’ life is that he plays the game with a willingness that time be made for people to change. And here I see Paul’s note that, in God’s forbearance, God left past transgressions unpunished so that now he could demonstrate a righteous form of play. And here I also see that there was so much potential, so much more that could have been done in that game with Sebastian. So much opportunity for us to share joy, and Sebastian gave us the time by playing as he did.
God hasn’t come in trumpet blasts and with angels descending. I’m not here to argue time or dates, mythology and eschatology, or any of the rest. But perhaps in the silence, the non-return, is the answer to where God is. God desires one more turn. Maybe endless turns. Who knows?
What I do know is that I am alive today. And there is still time for yet one more round of play.
Kyle Baughman is a human. He studied theology at Fuller Seminary and enjoys the attention he receives from flirting with several different theo-camps. He hits things with sticks as the drummer for Coyotes in Boxes. You can find him on Twitter @truekyleb.
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by Kyle Baughman
To preface, let it be known that I absolutely love Disney movies. I carry so many fond memories of my sister and I sitting on our family’s brown 70’s pullout sofa watching hours and hours of the timeless classics put out by the "Juggernaut of NostalgiaTM". In fact, I can bestow upon The Fox and the Hound the superlative “Most Likely to make Kyle Weep Openly in Front of the Cute Girl in School” for having made me weep openly in front of the cute girl in school. Nevertheless, I now find myself revisiting the titans of childhood cinema with a new perspective. I spent my undergrad and graduate level courses exploring politics, theology and philosophy (screw off Oxford comma!) with the result that, upon returning to enjoy so many Disney classics, I found myself conflicted between the ideologies I had gleaned and the cute stories that had always brought me wonder. And now, I get to shatter your childhood too, since the nice folks at OPT have invited me to share my theo-political reflections on one of my favorites.
This post will reveal why Simba is probably the Anti-Christ, who seeks to redirect your fears about the throne he occupies toward vague, external threats instead, and to convince you to devote yourself to the wellbeing of a system that wants to eat your kids.
Probably.
Let’s begin with the scary threat of modernity! Years ago, a bunch of white dudes with money figured everything out, sooooo, modernity. The modern age was ushered in when we began to take seriously the idea that we could figure out every intricacy of how the world works. And while some used this as a means of connecting with the divine (through a rationalist approach to testimony about God and what not), others began to reflect on how this knowledge did not necessitate a god at all. They proposed rather that we were the agents of destiny whose mastery of knowledge made us the modern prophets for a coming eschaton of pure material humanism. We saw the forging of new social theories like survival of the fittest, wherein the organisms best adapted for strength become the kings of the age, and the organisms that “fit best” achieve survival during this age and possible entrance to the age to come.
What does this have to do with The Lion King? Ask this man:
And to clarify, the lyrics to the opening of “Circle of Life” are as follows:
Ingonyama nengw' enamabala
I know you’re singing it now; feel free to continue with the lyrics you do know and reflect for a moment on what those lyrics are proposing. The song, as beautiful as we all agree it is, paints a picture that is as equally cocky and hubristic as the modernist aspirations. We all are brought into this world and are working through the processes of growth in the hopes that we may, one day, find our place in the circle of life. And so, we shall join the grand triumphal march of a world advancing day by day.
At this point it may be pertinent to remind ourselves of the storyline to The Lion King. The story begins with a lion named Mufasa who rules a kingdom of non-lions and who has just had a son, the heir to the throne. Mufasa’s brother, Scar, is pissed over being knocked back in the line of succession and therefore proceeds to kill his brother and guilt his nephew into fleeing the kingdom (thereby forsaking his birthright) while he establishes a new dynasty with his hyena henchmen.
What we haven’t mentioned thus far is the fact that lions eat other animals (Google it), which ought not surprise us, but nevertheless does when we consider that the story presumes the rightness, not of a specific lion king, but of an enduring throne whose subjects constitute the king’s menu. Mufasa was not a one-and-done agreement; rather, Mufasa as king was simply the expression of an existing arrangement that validates a form of rule established on violence. We are made to understand that the throne exists and continues to exist whether it is Mufasa or Scar that sits upon it.
Scar certainly represents the fearful chaos that would result from a deviation from the established order, but such chaos is simply the unmasking of the violence inherent in the system; the throne, the underlying arrangement of power that preys upon its subjects, continues whether masked or not. With this in mind, we return to the opening scene of the film: Rafiki (court shaman/false prophet) is presenting Simba to his humble subjects who excitedly stamp their feet and squawk and whinny at the sight of the very prince to whom they will one day have to feed their children.
Here we have the full ramifications of the “Circle of Life” lyrics. The subjects of the kingdom are prey to the kingdom; this is their role, after all. The lowly herbivores have found their proper place in the system, and so long as the circle of life is the predominant ideology underpinning the kingdom, they will continue to praise the throne that demands their young as tithe.
[As an aside I am fully aware that lions have to eat meat and that gazelles are meat and bringing the two sides to peaceful coexistence is a fool’s errand.]
Obviously, this is reminiscent of monarchical rule and the ideology that underlies it. Citizens have found their place in the circle of life and are protected by the throne as long as they operate and obey the ideological superstructure that permits the king to rule. War and industry becomes the means whereby the citizens, like the lowly herbivores, offer up their children to be consumed by the state. So long as the monarch is fed and the system perpetuates itself, the lowly continue to offer themselves for partial consumption in trade for the throne’s protection.
What protection can the throne offer them that is worth such a fearsome trade? Why haven’t the gazelle or zebra rebelled and left the lions to their own devices? Because as legitimate as the fear of the king’s appetite may be, the fear of what lurks beyond the kingdom’s borders is greater. As Mufasa warns Simba, do not venture into the “shadowy place.” Instead of dealing with the dangers at hand in the excesses of the throne, the subjects have sublimated their fear to the shadowy unknown, and convinced themselves of the necessity, even the virtue of the state, and thus nationalism is born.
The fear is no longer that a hyena will show up at your door; the fear is that the king who eats your family will be dethroned, and that in the ensuing chaos, a hyena will show up at your door. Yet, with Scar’s ascension to the throne, this very fear is actualized; his hyenas terrorize the citizenry and the predation of the system is no longer easy to ignore. And instead of undermining the premise of the system, the kingdom continues to exist! The subjects simply long for a king who will restore the old deception, who will return to the contrivance that the throne offers absolute protection rather than enabling despotism. Even so, they cling to the throne; the throne permits the rule, because the throne is the ideology that has defined the subjects’ place in the circle of life.
Hope for revolution comes in the least likely of places: the prince is expelled. Simba, emptied of his power, goes and lives among the lowly where he learns to eat bugs (the case for bug liberation will have to be reserved for another post) and participate in a new understanding of the world, living not as ruler but as subject. He feels extraordinary guilt over the death of his father, a return to the throne would be meaningless, because for him, the throne is now emptied of its power. (That Simba internalized his guilt and was changed by it is evidenced by his new life among the herbivores as he renounces the desire to rule or re-create his kingdom.) As Paul Tillich would note, he has acceptance in accepting himself as unacceptable, and so has the courage to be.
And in the absence of Simba’s kingdom, we are tempted to see the birthing of an order; reminiscent of Hebrews 13: a suffering prince who suffers outside the gates of the kingdom that rejected him. But just as we want to start our Jesus comparisons, we meet Nala, Simba’s childhood bestie and Rafiki, false prophet extraordinaire. Nala’s privilege within the system is exemplified when she must be dissuaded from eating Simba’s new mates, Timon and Pumbaa (you know, because she is a lion and lions eat meat). She tells Simba of the regrettable state of affairs in the kingdom as ruled by Scar, and tries to persuade him to seek the throne. After her plea, Simba next encounters the unemployed court shaman Rafiki who makes the same request, and even conjures up the ghost of Mufasa who awakens Simba’s aspirations to the throne. He sets out to reclaim his power, but he is not alone.
Simba, who had learned a new way of life with Timon and Pumbaa that existed apart from the power offered by the throne, now recruits their aid in his quest to attain the very throne that would oppress them. The very throne that vindicates the circle of life ideology which undermines the dignity and worth of the ruled, and subjects them to a violent reality that destroys lives for the sake of perpetuating the system, a system that functions by insisting that the ultimate terror would be the undoing of itself.
The rest of the film shakes out pretty much the way you would expect it to. Simba wins, regains the throne, marries Nala, happily ever after, etc. But in the closing scene, we find that the circle of life ideology and the throne it supports, continues unchallenged as Rafiki lifts high the next heir to the throne and the subjects clamor their approbation.
The ideology of empire is just as strong today as it was in the age of Rome or Victorian England or on the African plains of The Lion King. We are presented a cure for our existential fears by a government that offers to teach us our meaning. We are told that our meaning is admittedly in a system that propagates death, but assured that this is certainly the better end of the bargain, and that the system is noble and good to offer it to us in the first place. Modernity tells us that this is the place where we “fit-best.”
Yet fitting best has, up through the present day, involved maintaining the enterprise of bloodshed and war, and service to masters who survive only so long as we can be convinced that the boogieman (the terrorists, the communists, the savages) lurk just around every corner. Yet should the terrorist(s) occupy the throne, the system into which we have invested so much, we will continue to submit rather than call the whole ideology into question.
And so, the example offered by Simba is one in which the language of the weak becomes co-opted by the throne, and in the end, the kingdom grows stronger than ever with its illusion of a servant-king.
The servant-king, one who descends to walk among the least of these, to humbly serve them and minister to their needs. The concept is thousands of years old. In fact, the Caesars were often called Princeps, meaning ‘first citizens’ and the propaganda intended to depict them as the foremost citizen in word and deed, serving the citizenry as one of its own. It is this very concept that Jesus critiques in chapter 10 of the book of Mark, saying that those who would be great among his followers must truly be the servant of all, unlike the gentile rulers who appropriated the word but had no intention of embodying it.
Chapters before Jesus critiques the propaganda of the servant-king, Jesus was tempted with power over the kingdoms of the world. And according to John the crowds wished once to forcibly crown him king. In both instances, Jesus refused, and he winds up dying on a cross outside the gates that promised him a throne. His rejection of the throne and the presence of his body outside the gates does violence, not to the ones on the throne, but to the throne itself, to the self-perpetuating system of power and violence.
To follow Christ beyond the walls will certainly mean internalizing our guilt and complicity in systems of violence; it will entail a loss of meaning that existed before, when we knew where we fit best in the ideology of the throne. It will require resisting the alluring voices that call us to enter the gates. Nevertheless, when the fanfare erupts as the next prince of death is raised up before the whinnying crowds, we will be among those outside the gate where the true servant-king still dwells.
Kyle Baughman is a human. He studied theology at Fuller Seminary and enjoys the attention he receives from flirting with several different theo-camps. He hits things with sticks as the drummer for Coyotes in Boxes. You can find him on Twitter @truekyleb.
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