Should Safety Be The Measure?
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Should Safety Be The Measure?
Two quick thoughts about Josh Butler and the rising tide of abuse theology.
Don’t have near the blogging time I’d like today, but I have accumulated two items for your consideration. First, I did get the Butler book in the mail yesterday after a bout of postal confusion, and I have that Theology in the Raw podcast into my queue but I haven’t managed to listen to it. And you know what, I’m not going to even provide any excuse except the usual one that the world is basically on fire. But as an amuse-bouche for my whole project of reading the book, let me offer up the Woke Preacher Clips from the podcast. Here’s a taste of what those exchanges are like:
And this is how that segment wraps up:
And, as one might expect, I saw a smattering of tweets in response. A lot of people continue to disagree with Butler on some essential points, but maybe without the same level of heat as before. And then there were several people who feel that there is nothing Butler is going to be able to do to redeem himself. What he has done is unleash a torrent of misogyny upon the church from which there is no healing. I would cut some tweets in here but it looks like I’m blocked.
As I think I have asked before, to what degree might a person be wrong in the business of being a Christian? Those that are trying to anathematize Butler should consider their doctrinal paradigms more carefully. There are absolutely guardrails to the Christian faith. You can’t deny the Trinity or the divinity of Christ, for example. You can’t be “affirming” of homosexuality and all its attendant colors of the rainbow. You can’t deny the authority of the scriptures. But within the realm of the non-essentials, people have to be allowed to read the Bible and try to work things out.
Which brings me to my second item. One contentious issue that should be up for debate—rather than a settled matter—is the place of trauma as an interpretive paradigm or guardrail for Christian doctrine and practice. In that vein, you should read this whole thing. Ehrett puts into reasonable and coherent words the swirling malaise of discomfort I’ve been feeling about the privileging of trauma over all other matters in Christian discourse. For me, this is the money quote:
Two consequences, at least, seem likely to follow from uncritically importing van der Kolk’s framework into Christian contexts: a radical critique of the traditional Christian language of sin, and a downplaying of the Christian hope of final redemption. To speak from within just one branch of the Christian tradition: it is a mainstay of Lutheran pastoral theology that the function of Christian preaching is to “kill and make alive,” where the preaching of the Law “kills,” and the preaching of the Gospel “makes alive.”
Skipping a bit, he goes on:
But for Lutherans, the severity of the Law constitutes an ineradicable dimension of preaching as such. The upshot of this commitment is that when the Law is preached, one should not be left feeling safe, in the sense of existential security. Rather, the Christian should be startled into an awareness of their inability to merit salvation on his own terms. This aspect of Lutheran preaching—and any other preaching that proceeds from a similar standpoint—is decidedly hard to square with van der Kolk’s account of mental health as “felt safety.” Is hearing the preaching of the Law bad for one’s mental health? Is it traumatic in itself? Why shouldn’t pastors just preach the Gospel alone, and avoid the possibility that anyone is pressed into an “unbearable” awareness of their need for salvation? Numerous Christian writers have invoked theories of trauma as precisely the catalyst for doctrinal reinventions along these lines.
Is “safety” the norm by which all other norms must now be measured? Because that is quite an important thing to consider if it is. And what about those who still want to think about “misogyny” and “abuse” in biblical terms rather than purely psychological ones? It should be possible to discuss these issues without having to be accused of being for something like the wrecking of the lives of women. No one is for the abuse of women—except for bad people like some of the weirdos on Twitter. Josh Butler isn’t destroying the lives of women by writing and thinking about the stuff he’s writing and thinking about. The measure should be—is what he is saying true? Does it come out of the scriptures, or has he tried to put it in there himself?
Because—bear with me—things that are untrue aren’t good for women. A world of complete safety that insulates you from the troubling, but ultimately healing, Word of God isn’t good for you.
Sob, I have to rush to the next thing. Have a nice day!