WHEN I was studying theology, back in the 1980s, one of my lecturers confessed that he was a fan of the belief that, on the cross, Christ was Victor. He backed it up by citing the book Christus Victor by Gustaf Aulén. He was a fan of that, too.
Since completing my Ph.D. on St John’s Gospel, in the late ’80s, I have long been interested in this way of looking at the cross. There is, after all, an anomaly in John. In contrast to Mark, Matthew, and Luke, John does not include any stories about Jesus as delivering someone from unclean spirits.
Why does he omit this tradition? The answer is that John understood the death of Jesus as in part the supreme miracle of deliverance. In John 12.31, as he foresees his impending return to the Father, Jesus declares, “Now is the prince of this world driven out.” “Driven out” is the same Greek verb used in the Synoptic Gospels for Jesus expelling unclean spirits. If Palm Sunday marks Jesus’s triumphal entry, Good Friday, therefore, marks his triumphal exit. John omits the exorcism stories because he wants to portray Christ as victor at Calvary.
But is this the only way in which John understood the cross?
AS SOME may know, I am a victim of John Smyth. Smyth — an Evangelical QC, acting judge, and Mary Whitehouse’s barrister — groomed and abused me over a period of five years. As I embarked on my theology degree in 1983, I was, therefore, a recovering victim of abuse. This meant that, during lectures on the cross, I did not view Calvary merely through a doctrinal lens: I viewed it through a psychological one as well. I saw Christ’s Passion in the light of my trauma.
Let’s take the portrait of Jesus as Christus Victor. Although I was interested in this idea, I also came to react against it. If you see Calvary as a king triumphing over his enemies, then no end of crusading, colonising, and controlling can be justified in his name.
In the years after I finished my degree, as I embarked on a Ph.D. studying the Passion narrative in St John’s Gospel, I more and more understood John’s understanding of the death of Jesus in a far more integrated, healthy, and balanced way than I had before.
Yes, I noted that there were elements of John’s story that could justify the Christus Victor interpretation, but I also realised that there were other narrative details that pointed to a far more pastoral portrait. There was, for example, the picture of Jesus as being abused throughout John’s Gospel — verbally, emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually. As I studied and wrote about this theme, I became more and more convinced that, in John, Jesus the Victim is a stronger and more pervasive picture than Christ the Victor.
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, I began lecturing at the Department of Biblical Studies at Sheffield University — this while I was serving a four-year curacy in the city. It was during these years that I came across a brilliant student, Helen Orchard, who was studying the theme of Jesus the victim in John’s Gospel.
As she wrote up her findings for her doctoral thesis, she asked me to look over her work. This was not only an honour: it was a “Eureka” moment in my life. Here, at last, someone had done the heavy lifting of researching and revealing this vital but much neglected idea of Jesus as victim in the New Testament. Helen went on to have her groundbreaking work published as Courting Betrayal: Jesus as victim in the Gospel of John.
IN RECENT years, I have been working in what spare time I have had to help support victims of church abuse. There are many — far too many — of us victims and survivors. While our testimonies are varied, they often contain two storylines. The first is the trauma of the abuse itself. The second is the reaction to it by those to whom our stories are told. This nearly always involves a familiar trope: silencing the victim and protecting the religious institution.
In my case, the abuses that I suffered at the hands of Smyth were one thing; they were terrible. But the cover-up of these abuses by the many clergy who knew about Smyth’s activities was, in some ways, even more injurious. Victims are often re-traumatised by such distancing, denial, and deflection.
In my own case, the Church of England’s independent review of Smyth’s abuses and of the cover-up of the abuser and abuses was more than four years late when it was published (News, 15 November). When you learn that there are at least nine serving Anglican bishops who knew what happened and did nothing, perhaps it is no surprise. The response of institutions to victims is all too often one characterised by the acronym D.A.R.V.O.
Deny
Attack
Reverse
Victim
Offender
Institutions such as the Church are, I am afraid, notorious for re-victimising people who want the truth told and justice done.
In a sense, John’s story of the death of Jesus warned us long ago that this would be the default setting of religious hierarchies. These will nearly always prefer to protect the tribe rather than the traumatised. Didn’t Caiaphas say, in John 11.50, that it was necessary (i.e. politically expedient) for one person to die on behalf of the nation? In other words, wasn’t it preferable for an innocent victim to take the rap if it meant that the religious hierarchy got to hold on to power?
I BELIEVE that teaching Jesus as Victim is one of the most critical responsibilities that church leaders, theologians, and others have today. In recent years, there has been a growing body of work looking at Jesus’s Passion — particularly his public stripping in the presence of an entire male cohort — as an act of sexual abuse.
There is some controversy here, but I will say this: when a psychiatrist was enlisted, back in 1982, to examine Smyth, he described him as someone with a sado-masochistic personality, and that his crimes had sexual undertones. Smyth required us to be naked when he assaulted us. None of us was permitted to look round at him while he was thrashing us. When these floggings ended, Smyth would be naked, too, stroking and even kissing those of us he harmed. I, therefore, find it hard to be dismissive of those who see undertones of sexual abuse in the Passion.
For the countless victims of religious or spiritual abuse, perhaps the greatest comfort that we can derive from the Passion is that God, in Christ, has embraced the experience of abuse. All victims of abuse — including political versions of abuse such as police brutality and state-sponsored violence — can take comfort from the truth that Jesus is the Divine Victim who has endured what we endure.
But this is not the end of the story. Good Friday is, of course, followed by Easter Day. How does the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Divine Victim, bring comfort to survivors of abuse?
The answer can be found in the insistence on the part of some of the New Testament authors that God’s resurrection of Jesus is the divine vindication that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Son of God. Both Peter and Paul insist on this. This, I suggest, offers a hopeful blueprint for the redemptive stories of survivors of abuse. Survivors might see it as the divine pattern: vindication following victimisation.
Victimisation consists of the original trauma of being abused, and the additional trauma of the victim’s being blanked while trying to report to religious authorities (this is often referred to as re-traumatisation). Vindication refers to the victim’s being at last validated as a truth-teller, and to the dispensing of justice where feasible.
Vindication, in this sense, can be an Easter Day experience. The experience of being believed and of receiving at least some kind of justice can be life-giving for victims. Church leaders need to understand this at an empathetic level. They need to show that they understand us by their actions, and not just claim to be “victim-centred and trauma-informed”, to use the current buzz words on episcopal lips. In short, if the Church is serious about being an Easter people, it must make sure that every victim’s story has a vindicating arc.
I HAVE tried in this article to show how some understandings of the cross can be weaponised for oppression, others for liberation. As James Cone wrote in his masterful book The Cross and the Lynching Tree: “The cross can heal and hurt; it can be empowering and liberating but also enslaving and oppressive.” This Easter, my prayer is that we would learn to pivot from Christus Victor to Jesus the Victim.
As we navigate these days when stories of abuse and their cover-up are in the foreground, maybe this more empathetic way of looking at the Easter story will provide us with a new kind of via dolorosa, one in which all of us — whatever part we play in stories of church abuse — can find it to be a truly therapeutic journey.
May his wounds heal ours this Easter time.
Dr Mark Stibbe is a full-time author. His book, My Father’s Tears (SPCK), presents a love-based model of the atonement.
