But Is That Theological?

By Mark Lewis Taylor

She reaches for the song that gets her through the day.

They break into a chant, and hold on tight as they are arrested together for protesting policies of torture in front of the U.S. White House.

He captures on video the faces of wounded survivors and images of the dead, burned by U.S. white phosphorous bombings in Fallujah, Iraq - galvanizing international critique of U.S. war-making in Iraq.

The years drag on in the refugee camp, but seemingly futureless youth, take up paint and imagination to color the camp walls in murals of fight and freedom.

These gestures of song, chanting with clasped hands, the video image gone viral, refugee youth painting murals on walls – could these be theological?

One early reviewer of my new book, The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World, found the book’s concepts tough-going, but helpful for answering his religious friends who dismiss his dearest language of devotion and struggle with the words: “But is that theological?”

It’s a question I often hear uttered by guardians of official guild Theology, about those who live under imposed suffering, and who find power for living in their arts – poetry, music, painting, and more - catalyzing their hope amid suffering. Is that theological?

Theologians, too, struggle with the question. What is the theological and theology, anyway? When theologians desire to write about what matters amid the unrepeatable tensions of our age, that desire often takes us to theories, arts and genres that are hardly the usual stuff of Theology.

We are led to reflect not simply on sites of suffering in general - anxiety, guilt, sickness, death. When the worlds of suffering are those of politically-sustained, social suffering, the discourses that matter most are often the popular arts. They often rival the seemingly intransigent forces that weigh heavily upon repressed peoples everywhere, who, nevertheless weigh-in with resilience against the everyday, callous mixes of colonialism, modernity and imperial power.

Go to the “Holy Land” to find the theological, I suggest. You won’t find it so much along the ways of the Jesus Inc. shrines and walkways. You’ll find it more among the Palestinian and Jewish artists yearning to end Israel’s illegal occupation and miles of imprisoning wall.

The land is afflicted by a most unholy occupation, dividing and confining Palestinians, cutting across their lands, ruining hopes for jobs, land, a contiguous state, and, often, threatening dignity itself. Achille Mbembe sees Israel’s apparatus of power in Palestine, backed by the U.S. as “the most accomplished form of . . . late-modern colonial occupation.” Jewish historian, Illan Pape, writes of “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

Yet the theological thrives. Artful gestures of resistance can be seen in the murals of the Dheisheh refugee camp, which I was permitted to visit and photograph. One muralist depicts the overall history, displaying the dates of upheaval that sent Palestinians into the camps or diaspora.

The Israeli caterpillar tractors that raze Palestinian homes are re-imagined as skeletons dealing death, but they too are now dying; they are bony things, confined by their own wall-building addiction. Artists implant these death machines in a cemetery of flowers, portending the death of Israel’s abusive machinations of power.

As in camps and communities of suffering the world-over, it is mothers and children, often together with the aged and the infirm, who suffer most. Yet even they can be conjured by the refugee artist as agents of power. Grasping the uprooted olive trees marking the Nakba,“catastrophic destruction” of homes, lands, and peoples, the mothers shown in the mural draw strength from the land, grasp their children and pose a veritable specter of liberation dwarfing the soldiers who enforce destruction in the name of a gruesome Pax Americana/Israelica.

This art expresses and catalyzes quotidian practices of resistance, in part organized through its Ibda'a Cultural Center (“ibda’a” meaning “creativity”).

It is not the artful gesture alone that liberates. It is the art, intrinsic to a people, that sustains and catalyzes everyday resilience and challenges the powers that would reduce them to mere disposable peoples. That’s the theological.

* Mark Lewis Taylor is Professor of Theology and Culture, Princeton Theological Seminary. He took the photographs accompanying this text on a 2007 visit to Palestine and Jordan. His most recent book is The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Fortress Press, 2011).

Art, Censorship, and the Scandal of the Cross

by Patrick S Cheng

In late November, the Smithsonian Institution ordered the removal of a four-minute video clip from an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery about same-sex love. The video contained, among other things, images of ants crawling on a crucifix.

The video was taken from the film A Fire in My Belly, which was created in 1987 by the late gay artist David Wojnarowicz as a tribute to his fellow artist and lover who had died of AIDS. The film also expressed Wojnarowicz's anger at his own HIV diagnosis, which at that time - nearly a decade before the availability of life-prolonging antiretroviral cocktail medications - was tantamount to a death sentence.*

Over the last month, the art world has been in an uproar over this act of censorship by the Smithsonian Institution. The removal of the Wojnarowicz video occurred after complaints by the Catholic League that the video of the crucifix and ants constituted anti-Christian hate speech. A number of members of Congress also complained about the clip, which undoubtedly hastened the demise of the video exhibit.

This is not the first time that controversial images of Jesus and the cross have resulted in public outcry and censorship. In 1987, the artist Andres Serrano created a work called Piss Christ, which was a photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s own urine.

In 1997, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Melbourne unsuccessfully filed suit to prevent the display of the photograph in Australia at the National Gallery of Victoria. Shortly thereafter, several people physically attacked and tried to remove the photograph, which led to the cancellation of the show.

Recently, an exhibit of a six-foot tall chocolate statute of a nude crucified Jesus Christ by Cosimo Cavallaro was cancelled after outcries by the Catholic League (which described it as “one of the worst assaults on Christianity sensibilities ever”) and other religious groups. The anatomically-correct exhibit, called My Sweet Lord, was scheduled to be shown in a New York City art gallery during Holy Week of 2007.

How should we react, as persons of faith, to these admittedly offensive works of art? In my view, one of the redeeming functions of these works, theologically speaking, is to remind us of the deeply scandalous and offensive nature of the crucifixion.

As St Paul writes in his First Letter to the Corinthians, see 1 Cor 1:23, the cross is a “stumbling block,” or skandalon in the Greek, to non-Christians. In other words, who could believe that the Messiah, the savior of the world, would be tortured, executed, and die a shameful death as a common criminal?

As Christians, we have been desensitized to the horrors of the cross. Instead of understanding the cross as a state-sponsored instrument of execution, the cross has been turned into sentimental jewelry and pious artwork.

Instead of seeing the cross as a reminder of God-with-us in the flesh-and-blood sufferings of the world – a theologia crucis – the cross has been turned into a sanitized symbol of victory and ecclesial triumphalism – a theologia gloriae.

God is perfectly capable of redeeming the horrors of cross; that’s what the Resurrection and Easter Sunday is all about.

Unfortunately, the well-intentioned but misguided belief that Christians are the exclusive “owners” of the cross – and are required to protect it from profanation at all costs – is what often results in incredibly cruel and horrific persecutions such as the Crusades and the Inquisition.

God doesn’t need Christians to act as intellectual property watchdogs. Rather, God calls us to remember – through the cross – all those in the world who continue to suffer in the flesh and blood, whether through hunger, poverty, disease, sexual violence, hate crimes, or state-sponsored torture and executions.

* AZT, the first antiretroviral used was only introduced in 1996.

+ The Reverend Patrick S Cheng is the Assistant Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His book, Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology, published by Church Publishing and available on Amazon, will be released in March 2011.