We weren’t saved by a state execution
– an interview with Rita Nakashima Brock
and Rebecca Ann Parker by Mary E. Hunt

Feminist theologians and longtime friends Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker are the authors of Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us (Beacon Press, 2001). Their book is a theological personal reflection on the claim that Jesus’ death saves. Searching for a life-affirming theology leads them each into deep, personal examination of the ways theological ideas affect a person’s life – and about how life shapes theology. They’ve been accused of wanting Christianity without the cross. They deny this charge, although their theology of the cross makes a radical departure from any theology of atonement, even those found in liberation theology.

Rebecca Ann Parker is an ordained United Methodist minister in dual fellowship with the Unitarian-Universalist Association. She is president and professor of theology at Starr King School for the Ministry at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. Rita Nakashima Brock is a research associate at the Harvard Divinity School. She is author of Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power. They are interviewed here by Witness contributing editor Mary E. Hunt, co-founder of WATER (Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual) in Silver Spring, Md.

Mary Hunt: I want to start off by saying how much I appreciate your book. It’s a powerful read and a wonderfully well-written memoir and theological reflection. I read it with some trepidation because I have been critical of similar books in which I felt that I knew too much about the authors and their difficulties. This is a problem of memoir, I think. But here I felt that as a reader I benefited from the very, very hard work that you had done – both in the writing of the book and also in the therapeutic and other kinds of work that you’ve done around these issues. How are other people reacting to the book?

Rita Nakashima Brock: I am grateful for the responses we’ve gotten. In writing such personal material we did not want to do true confessions – or even to write in a therapeutic way as victims. We wanted to show how life is the basis for theological reflection and to write in a way that would invite people to reflect on their own lives and their own theology. And that’s been the response that we’ve been getting.

One of the most fun reactions that we got was from my fundamentalist sister-in-law who sent us a letter thanking us for the book because it got her all excited about what she thought theologically. And so, in response to us, she was busy reading a bunch of books herself!

Rebecca Ann Parker: We also got a letter from a friend – someone who’d left Christianity, but was still trying to understand his relationship to it – who was so moved by the book that he read the second half of the book listening at the same time to the Bach St. John’s Passion. We so appreciate this reader’s creativity in listening to our book and listening to an artist’s interpretation of the death of Jesus at the same time. That kind of multi-layered processing is part of what we were hoping to inspire.

Mary Hunt: In the book you explore or model a theological method of which a lot of people in the theological academy, at least, are very suspicious because they can’t put a name to it. They don’t understand that human beings function on so many levels at once. You could make a methodological claim that would be very helpful for people who are struggling with these issues in the day-to-day work in pastoral ministry.

Rebecca Ann Parker: Yes. One of the things that happens in pastoral ministry that our book witnesses to is that theological reflection happens at the intersection between life experience and people’s experiences of their religious tradition. It’s very important to us not to just witness from life – to tell the stories of our lives – but to tell the story of the interaction between our life experience and traditions of Christianity as we’ve encountered them.

Mary Hunt: How did you weigh the pros and cons of so much self-revelation?

Rita Nakashima Brock: Well, Rebecca and I didn’t start out to write a book like this. We started out to write a book of theology, one not just for experts, but for everyone who thinks theologically. We had been using our own stories in third-person form to show that these ideas have an impact on human life and need to be reflected upon in that way. The more we struggled with how to do this, the more we faced into the fact that the stories were our stories and we needed to claim them because they really help people see how we got to the theology. So the point of telling all this personal stuff about our personal lives was to show how the theological conclusions we had reached really were grounded in our own lives and experiences. And we reflected intensely on that experience. Our book doesn’t just report raw experience. It’s really thought-through experience.

Mary Hunt: Some of the violence that you describe is so horrible that, as a reader, my gut reaction was to want to protect you, both as those little girls and as grown women. The question that came to my mind is how can we help one another in such situations?

Rebecca Ann Parker: The book offers a non-violent view of salvation that doesn’t valorize suffering or violence. The idea that "Jesus died for us" ends up sanctioning violence. The alternative to that theology is to say that, in the presence of violence, part of what saves us are the steady witnesses – the human beings who are willing to face into the realities of violence without mystifying it or denying it. We help one another when we refuse theology that moves us away from showing up, facing violence and stopping it. Steady witnesses are not confused about what stopping violence requires.

Mary Hunt: How conscious do you think the religious justification for violence that you outline was for your perpetrators? Did they see themselves as the Father God who had permission? Is it that easy?

Rita Nakashima Brock: Well, I think it varies. But this theology has been taught for so long as the Western orthodox tradition that people don’t need to make a conscious connection.

Rebecca Ann Parker: I agree with Rita. I think it varies. Theology seeps into life like groundwater and we drink it in. So it matters a lot what’s in the water! But we tell one story of a colleague whose father forced sex on her throughout her childhood and this father explicitly said to the child – to this daughter – that he and God were very close and that God approved of what he was doing. And the daughter heard in church about a God who asked his child to suffer, so when her father said God and I are close and God approves of this, what resource did she have that would give her any leverage against the sort of divinely sanctioned authority of her father to rape her? So in this case the theology was very explicit.

Rita Nakashima Brock: I think the thing that most people don’t know historically about that whole idea that Jesus died in our place and took on the debt of sin is that it emerged most fully in the Crusades. It paralleled what the pope promised the crusaders if they would go out and commit acts of violence. So whether it’s explicitly used that way or not, violence is the subtext of its historical development.

Mary Hunt: If Christianity is to blame in such a primary way, and I have every reason to agree with you, does increasing religious pluralism offer any more safety or do you see strains of this same thinking in other religions?

Rita Nakashima Brock: Well, it’s there in a lot of religious traditions because there are very few religious traditions that aren’t in cultures where warfare and military activity aren’t deeply embedded in the society. You may get different justifications for the use of violence, but the idea that religion can give ideological weight to people who engage in acts of violence isn’t just distinctive to Christianity.

Rebecca Ann Parker: I agree. Christianity isn’t unique in having theologies that sanction violence. And Christianity also has different strands of tradition that, if you will, have a different gospel message. Part of what Rita and I have consistently said is that, to be an active religious person, you have to accept responsibility for the heritage in which you stand and you have to actively sort out what of that tradition is life-supporting and life-giving and what of it does things like sanction violence.We have to claim our authority, as religious people, to make judgments about our heritage. And then we must creatively transform our tradition to advance what saves life.

Mary Hunt: It’s so clear how U.S. people have been able to see that in Islam around questions of terrorism – for example, Muslims use competing interpretations of their own texts. And yet very few Christians in this country have been able to grant that same leeway to their own tradition on things like this. I wonder what kind of advice you would have for local pastors or for active lay people who want to look at not only instances of violence, but what I would call a violent culture — whether religiously perpetrated or not. What might we do?

Rita Nakashima Brock: Well, one of the ways that life is saved is by people who become active in their own theological processes. That they don’t simply passively receive a tradition and adhere to it, but actually think actively about their own life experiences in light of that tradition. The other thing is that it’s also important not to be alone. Violence isolates people and makes them ashamed or guilty. So the other thing is never to do anything in isolation, but to work hard to keep bonds of community going and to keep community alive. We must invest time and energy in making those connections.

Rebecca Ann Parker: Here is one place for people to start: in small covenant groups for theological reflection, where people are able to create an atmosphere of truthful speaking and deep listening to hear the truths of one another’s lives and to grapple with them in the context of their heritage. I was interested that one friend of mine, who is a survivor of sexual violence, started to read the book but then said, "I can’t read this right now, unless I read it in relationship with some other people or with a therapeutic connection, so that I can discuss the material in the context where I can talk about it." I thought that was a very sensible response.

Another important response is to engage very seriously with what happens in liturgy, hymnody and preaching. The kinds of questions that Rita and I raise about the religious sanctioning of violence in Christian tradition go to the heart of some of our liturgical practices. It matters what we say on Sunday morning in the eucharistic prayer about the violence that happened to Jesus.

Mary Hunt: Or what we sing. Or what we say during the Holy Saturday vigil.

Rebecca Ann Parker: Right. It is important to not accept uncritically the traditions of the church and the liturgies, but to engage in transforming them in a more life-supporting way.

Mary Hunt: I was interested, Rita, in your discussion of your talks with Nelle Morton. Her famous "hearing one another into speech" was based on a woman’s experience of violence. It made me think of that very famous Women Counseling Women conference that was held at Union Theological Seminary in 1973 in New York. Nelle was there. That was where I first experienced a feminist liturgy. It was an exorcism liturgy, an exorcism from rape. Is it safe to say that much of what feminist, womanist, and mujerista theology has been about is not simply women’s oppression but violence against women?

Rita Nakashima Brock: One of the questions feminists are grappling with right now is about whether it is appropriate to universalize anything. If we are attuned to histories of cultural imperialism and racism, how can we talk to each other about our own experiences when there’s so much particularity and difference and conflict among us? But it seems to me that this issue of violence is one of those issues that cuts across culture and class and all kinds of things. Not that violence is the same everywhere, but that there seem to be certain mechanisms in coping with it that can do worse damage. Judith Herman’s book, Trauma and Recovery, has been translated into nearly a dozen languages and is being read in cultures like Japan, where you’d least expect to find a Western book on psychotherapy to appear. And yet people are finding her work on the aftermath of violence to be extremely helpful for survivors of intimate and sexual violence and for survivors of torture in war.

Mary Hunt: In 1973 we were talking about the oppression of women, but I now realize that even the word oppression was coded in a way not to say violence. It was oppression against women. But in fact rape is rape and it’s not oppression, it’s violence!

Rita Nakashima Brock: Well, in writing this book, Rebecca and I didn’t start out using the term violence. It was really through digging into our experience and struggling with the right language that we finally realized that we were not talking here about suffering but about violence. Once we realized that, a lot of other pieces fell into place.

Rebecca Ann Parker: This is an important point, because for all the years that Rita and I and you, too, Mary, have been engaged in working for the freedom of women and women’s rights and for as long as we’ve worked on these theological issues of Christianity sanctioning violence, it was a long, slow process before we came to the simple clarity: We’re not talking about suffering, we’re talking about violence. Theologies of the cross often lump into the word "suffering" all human pain, some of which is not violence, but is just part of life – the suffering of disease, the suffering of the loss of ones we love who have died naturally. But this suffering is not identical to those experiences in which there are intentional acts by human beings that cause other human beings harm. The death of Jesus was a violent event. It was an event of human violence. This is something we have sought to clarify: It is not enough for theology to speak about suffering. Theology must address the problem of violence.

Mary Hunt: A lot of the men in the book were villains. But there were some heroes, too. In fact, there are a lot of men who are going to read this and say, "I didn’t abuse my daughter and I haven’t done this and I haven’t done that." How can we help these men also to see the positive things they can do – such as the listening they need to do to women’s experiences – to unleash creativity for justice?

Rita Nakashima Brock: There are two aspects: I think that often men don’t understand silence in women’s behavior or in the behavior of people who are marginalized. It’s important not to be satisfied with silence, but also not to coerce speech. In the book, Bernard Loomer, from whom I took a christology doctoral seminar in college, could press in a way that compelled me to answer him. And if I didn’t know how to answer him, I felt I could say I didn’t know and that wouldn’t be belittled.

The other aspect is that, along with the expectation that women be silent, there is a huge cultural phobia about women’s anger. Many men, especially, I think, are really frightened of women’s anger. So they dodge by being nice guys or they run away and try to evade it. Anger didn’t seem to frighten Bernie Loomer or make him uneasy. I wrote an angry paper on feminist theology for his class and he not only gave me an "A," but told me to write my dissertation on the same topic.

Rebecca Ann Parker: In our book, Rita tells about a gay man named Glen, who intervenes in a healing way during a discussion about rape which explodes into homophobic anger. The goodness of Glen is that he’s not afraid of anger and he’s able to stay with the process of anger until there’s a breaking open of soul that moves the conversation into a new space.

Rita Nakashima Brock: What I found interesting about that moment was that Glen was present with the anger that was homophobia projected onto him; he could hear the hurt and pain that was behind the anger. He was not patronizing. Being patronizing is another way not to listen. Glen stood his ground in terms of his own dignity and a demand for respect for his personhood, but in a way that placed a mirror before the person, rather than an accusatory challenge. He wasn’t being paternalistic, he wasn’t being nice. He challenged with a kind of love that was transformative.

Rebecca Ann Parker: Another one of the good men whose story we tell is Bill, who told me when I was a young minister about his process of recovery from how combat had affected his life. He comes to a transformed understanding of what it is to be a good man. I think it’s very important for men who have gone through a transformation process of claiming themselves – claiming their own lives as a site of God’s presence – to speak about what they know. One of my male friends says our book has stimulated his thinking about his relationship to his children and about what good fatherhood is. It’s so simple in some ways, but I think that men who think about what good parenting is must grapple with the kinds of issues we raise in this book.

Mary Hunt: I was thinking about that, too, around issues of child abuse. I really admired your effort, Rebecca, to figure out the truth with a kind of scrupulous fairness – and I wondered if there was a religious motivation that went into that?

Rebecca Ann Parker: A lot of things came to mind. I am religiously committed to truthfulness – including emotional truthfulness, which has been a struggle for me. Part of what was so helpful to me was the good fortune of working with a very gifted – and wise – therapist. I was able, in going back and reworking the experience of having been sexually abused as a child, to come to know how I actually felt about what happened. Some of that was very difficult to face because part of what I felt was an incredible compassion for the perpetrator. And the depth of compassion I felt was actually problematic! I had to come to see that compassion can bind one into unhealthy relationships. So I don’t think compassion is an unqualified good!

Rita Nakashima Brock: One of the most powerful insights from Rebecca’s story which I really appreciate is the critique of any attempt to universalize one emotion over another as good and others as bad. Love itself has limits. And compassion has limits. And anger has limits, but they all are there.

Mary Hunt: That leads to my last question: What are you working on? What’s the sequel?

Rebecca Ann Parker: Let me answer the second question first. We are working on the anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John. The anti-Judaism issue is complicated because it is linked to why John’s Gospel doesn’t present Jesus’ death as having what is of saving importance about Jesus. John is an alternative, if troubling, voice right there at the beginning of Christianity. It presents a salvation focused on the presence of God and on the commandment, "Love one another as I have loved you." So we’re working on unraveling the complex, troubling way John’s Gospel simultaneously blames Jews for Jesus’ death and offers an alternative to atonement theology.

Rita Nakashima Brock: The other interesting thing about the Gospel of John is that it doesn’t have a eucharist, it doesn’t have Jesus saying, "This is my body broken for you."

Rebecca Ann Parker: No, it has a meal with a foot washing and a speech about love, which is an interesting difference

Mary Hunt: The dinner party Gospel!

Rita Nakashima Brock: Yes, exactly, it has a dinner party! And its picture of baptism is very different from the tradition that sees it as a dying and rising in imitation of Christ.

What we call Christianity was a series of social movements that had a lot of different ways of interpreting what his death meant. The tradition has attempted to harmonize into one voice and one theology a series of different books by different authors. It’s important to pay attention to the different voices and the different interpretations of what Jesus’ death means. In John, he’s a sacrifice to Caesar. In Mark, he’s a political martyr. Paul’s not real consistent about what he thinks the death means except that it’s a puzzle to him. So, I think we must be more honest about the ambiguity of even the earliest recorded voices in the tradition and hear them as a multiplicity of theological voices in dialogue with one another.

Rebecca Ann Parker: For some reason I’m thinking about the story of Peter’s denial – it has a double meaning. Jesus says to Peter, you’re going to deny me. We always read that as, "You’re not going to keep faith with me." But another way Peter – the church – hasn’t kept faith with Jesus is by denying violence. It’s that denial of violence that makes it more possible for violence in all its forms to continue. If the church can tell the truth about the violence that happened to Jesus, it will be more able to resist and redress violence in the world now.

Mary Hunt: That’s right. My view is that people like you and me and others will be seen as apologists in the long run – not as people who tore down a faith tradition, but as people who in a funny sort of way helped to build it up, because they made the foundation much more secure.

Rebecca Ann Parker: Rita and I and other feminists are often accused of wanting Christianity without the cross – and of not having suffered enough to understand the cross. But we don’t want Christianity without the cross. We want Christianity to grapple with the violence that happened to Jesus. Reflection on violence should be at the center of Christian theology. We know it is possible to resist and recover from violence and Christianity also has this saving message.

Rita Nakashima Brock: What saves life isn’t death, but resistance to violence through the work of love and justice.