All of Life is a Trauma Response
The incarnation is a peacemaking act
The development of Christianity was trauma-based. .
The Fight response
The Jews of the time of Jesus were a people-group with a history of trauma; from their enslavement in Egypt, to the captivity of the ten northern tribes in Assyria, to Babylonian captivity. Trauma specialists tell us that trauma is not what happens to you but is the story that develops in you as a result of what happened. The Israelites’ story told them that their law was the covenant that God had made with them to keep them from trauma, their suffering was a direct result of disobedience to God’s laws. God’s benevolence and protection depended upon keeping the law. They made meaning of the randomness of their suffering by narrating it within a system of order. Their scriptures promised them that obedience would protect them from disease, bad harvests, and would assure victory over their enemies. They would be God’s victorious people. To disobey the law would result in terror, consumption, plagues, wild beasts devouring their children and starvation so severe they would devour their own children as well (Leviticus 26: 16-31 NRSVUE). The first-century Jewish people believed that they were subjects of the Roman Empire because they had not been sufficiently faithful. This interpretation gave them a way to make sense of their suffering. Acceptance of blame and keeping pure gave them a feeling they could control their outcomes and thus reduce trauma. It was likely that any citizen in the Roman empire was a victim of or a witness to trauma and violence. Public and violent persecutions; crucifixions, beheadings, burnings, and being fed to wild animals in the coliseum, left a lasting imprint on how Christian thought and practice developed and has been lived out in the world since that time.
One response to trauma was to fight. The fight response is a response to powerlessness that involves pushing back with power. It is understandable why Christians would be compelled to fight. The early church had risked much for their faith. Many had given up families, social connections and had risked persecution to convert to Christianity. It would have been important to feel that the sacrifice had not been in vain and thus important to defend their conversion with perceived proof, whether intellectual or spiritual. It is easy to see how living surrounded by threats would result in orienting oneself to life as a battle against one enemy after another.
One such fight was the defense of truth. Rather than a release of power and knowledge of good and evil, apologists have been fighting for centuries to give credence to Christianity through debate. Christians, rather than accessing grace by abiding in the weakness and vulnerability of Christ crucified, attempt to prevail through a demonstration of superior strength of knowledge.
The early church also made much of the fight over who was saved and who was a heretic – a fight that has continued to the present day. We do not see an approach to the knowledge of good and evil, in which power through knowledge is relinquished but rather we see a reliance upon knowledge and dogma to limit and define who might be saved or lost.
The fight response was not just directed outwardly toward heretics and persecutors, but also toward oneself. In the early church, Christian asceticism often manifested as a fight against one’s own humanity and the quest to gain power over the impulses of the body - abstaining from sleep, bathing, sexuality, food and any other kind of human desire including grief, pleasure, and even laughter (Athanasius). They abstained from speaking, joking, and laughing, and were encouraged to think of themselves as wretches and worms who are on trial before God (Benedict).
Even today, we see the leftovers of this fight response persisting in Christian practice and apologetics, purity culture, dogma and shame around our imperfections persist. Fights over correct belief contrast starkly to the apostle Paul’s example to “know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.” (I Corinthians 2:2-3. NRSVUE)
Fights against the flesh contrast starkly with Christ who embraced human flesh both in the act of his incarnation, and throughout his ministry as he embraced flesh that was seen as unclean. Rather than fighting against his humanity, Christ entered into it with all its desire, and chaos. Christ ate, drank, laughed, and cried with heretics and sinners. Christ did not see the body and its desires as a battlefield to be fought against, but as something to be loved and embraced. The incarnation is a peacemaking act, first demonstrating God making peace with the human body by becoming a human body, and then secondly by calling us to extend limitless grace to the other regardless of how offensive and unclean they may seem.
And that is the task for us – to release the fight response and make peace with unknowing, with different ideas, and with all kind of bodies and the things they do. Including our own.