The Broken Christ as Epistemological Departure

In this post I would like to examine how Christ, his brokeness on the cross and his approach to brokenness in his time, challenges our assumptions on happiness, suffering, sin and judgement.

Christ on the cross is an utterly broken being—gone are triumphalist visions the apostles had for him for Christ didn’t come as a military or political leader—He came to suffer and die. God, in sending His son, calls us, in the spirit of John 8.1-11, to move towards an epistemology of the broken Christ.

In this broken Christ of the cross we are given a new way of understanding the world.  In the broken body of Christ we discover a new way of knowing and interpreting the world.

Our Christian brotherhood is not a ‘happy’ affair. There are things that please us and seem natural that are sinful. Building a Christian character is not the result of following ones passions, it is the result of Christian practices that become habit and form character.

As a later writer, Franciscan Saint Bonaventure, would emphasize in his thirteenth-century Journey of the Mind to God, “Since happiness is nothing else than the enjoyment of the Supreme Good, and the Supreme Good is above us, no one can enjoy happiness unless he rises above himself (McMahon, 2007, p. 120).

Christ in His ministry approached sinners differently than the church in His time did. When we see a sinner through the broken Christ we encounter someone not to be condemned and stoned but someone to be lovingly accepted, forgiven and called out of sin. We know what sin is yet understood through the broken Christ our view of sinners is reframed from that of the stoning crowd to that of the saving Christ and we are called to approach sinners with forgiving grace and a gentle voice calling them out of their sin with kindness, grace and compassion.

Beyond contemporary notions of happiness and towards Christian notions of discipleship I’d like to turn to the notion that it seems awfully cruel for God to create desires in us that cannot be acted out on. But where did our ideas of what constitutes happiness or even our right to ‘happiness’ come from? Does Christ really want us to suffer? Doesn’t Christ want us to be happy?

This early Christian way of understanding and responding to evil and suffering differs markedly from the response offered by contemporary theodicy. It stands in contrast to the assumptions that enlightenment thought has taught us to adopt in response to experiences of evil and suffering. A key aspect of the enlightenment was its turn towards the individual followed by a subsequent emphasis on personal happiness and self-fulfillment as an achievable human goal. Attaining and maintaining happiness has become a primary goal and ultimately a human right. Evil and suffering are perceived first and foremost as a threat to our personal happiness and well-being.  Those of us who share such assumptions about life’s telos are not impressed with the suggestion that our present life is insignificant when compared with eternity, or that we may have to struggle together against evil and suffering. We assume that life should be pleasant and make sense in the present and that God should be judged, not by his future promises, but by God’s actions in the present world (Swinton, 2007, p. 38).

I think that our American or dominantly Western views of happiness are hedonistic (although this outlook goes back to the Epicureans). The main idea of hedonism is to seek happiness and define the purpose of life as the search for happiness.  Or, hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure as a matter of ethical principle and happiness as constituted in pleasurable emotions.  If this is the case then Christian ideals are misconstrued. The cross is a mistaken symbol that ought to be marginal and inconsequential. The Gospel’s message of self-negation is mistaken and the call to discipleship (to take our cross and follow Him) that Jesus gave his listeners misconstrued God’s real plan for our lives today. Was Jesus misguided or are we today misguided?

This notion that suppressing an innate desire is counter to God’s will (which demands a reimagining of Christian morality) is a poison within the church and we know the source—our culture has taught us that suffering is evil and the lack of suffering and the presence of pleasure is happiness. This ideology is something we should move away from- our quest for explaining away all suffering and construing a theodicy of avoidance serves only for the purpose of misguiding church members as to what to expect of themselves, their lives and the lives of others.

Our push as a church should be away from contextually removed and abstracted philosophies on the nature of evil in relation to suffering as we see within Christ and Christianity no “solution” for the problem of evil but rather the creation of communities which make it possible for us to absorb suffering and keep suffering, a human condition, from becoming evil or something which separates us from God. We can start by beginning to know the world through the epistemology of the broken Christ.

Without this epistemological framework we are faced with people who come away from questions on how they should relate to their innate desires assuming that Christ must want them to be happy therefore Christ would not afflict them with urges that could not be acted on.  Indeed, Christ did not create the suffering of the world—Christ suffers alongside us, more than us, on the cross where He died broken and feeling alone even. We often feel alone and abandoned but we should know that God is along us even as He was along Christ on the cross.

My next post will explore how we can create communities that can absorb suffering.

Works Cited

McMahon, Darrin M. (2007). Happiness: A History. New York: Grove Press.

Swinton, John. (2007). Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil. Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.