''Theologians Engaging Trauma'' Transcript

Article Theology Today 68(3) 224–237 ! The Author(s) 2011 ‘‘Theologians engaging Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav trauma’’ transcript DOI: 10.1177/0040573611416539 ttj.sagepub.com Shelly Rambo Boston University School of Theology Abstract The following is a panel discussion between four theologians about their recent theological work at the intersection of trauma and Christian theology. This conversation highlights the ways in which current (or recent) studies in trauma have impacted and reshaped the classic questions of Christian faith: Where is God in the suffering? Does God will suffering? Keywords trauma, theology, suffering, feminist/womanist, panel Where is God in suffering? Is suffering willed by God? Although theologians have always grappled with questions of human suffering, the rise of trauma studies in the last decades of the twentieth century has impacted theological work. These theological engagements have expanded the classical questions of theodicy in order to take into account the historical particularities of suffering, the planetary and non- anthropocentric dimensions of suffering, as well as the radically interdisciplinary research taking place in fields such as neuroscience and literature. On February 28, 2011, four theologians gathered to discuss their recent theological work. Serene Jones’s Trauma and Grace and Shelly Rambo’s Spirit and Trauma directly position themselves at the intersection of trauma and Christian theology. M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom and Mayra Rivera Rivera’s The Touch of Transcendence engage, more broadly, themes of suffering. SR—We gather tonight for a conversation between scholars who are addressing the issues that matter most to persons of faith—theological responses to suffering. The panelists represented here share several commitments. First, our work emerges out of Christian theology and is committed to rethinking claims of the Christian faith. Second, our work is informed by feminist, womanist, mujerista, and Asian- feminist theologies. We draw from these resources and understand ourselves in Corresponding author: Shelly Rambo, Assistant Professor of Theology, Boston University School of Theology, USA Email: [email protected] Rambo 225 relationship to these theological legacies. Third, we are responsive to, and shaped by, how people and communities are living their faith in the world. We are attuned to the question, What are people doing and how are they making sense of their faith? Fourth, our work shares an attention to aesthetics, to how language is used and how certain forms of theology function, or ‘‘dance.’’ We diverge in the ways we approach questions of trauma and suffering, and we hope that this conversation gathers us, as well, around these points of divergence. Mostly we aim to bring together our collective wisdom around the subjects of theology, suffering, and trauma. Question: How and why did you enter the study of trauma? SJ—The study of trauma was something I discovered I was in the center of after it had taken me awhile to get there. [Shelly] says it was through me, but [she] handed me a book by either Shoshana Felman or Cathy Caruth, and I was thinking ‘‘What is this?’’1 This was before trauma theory had any connection with systematic theology at all. What I found very helpful about it was that I was hovering in my own work fifteen to eighteen years ago as a systematic theologian between what I was learning from Luce Irigaray about the way in which language, in its patterns and disruptions, both holds relationships of power and constructs identities. And the way that [Irigaray] was then pointing towards my reading of John Calvin and my own way of finding the ways in which the Institutes of the Christian Religion held within its text resonances of the amount of social violence that was taking place in the midst of Calvin’s writing of it. That is something that doesn’t often enter the stage when one thinks about John Calvin. And then at the same time my theoretical framework was becoming more and more Gramscian. In particular, I was working with Fanon and trying to understand his conception of how violence lives in texts. It is very difficult to find a framework in which you can use social scientific materials but you can also use postmodern literary theory and then be boldly theological in your admission of the importance of the poetic and practical. Suddenly, there was this body of literature in which all of those things lived together and were moving together, though not comfortably. It was a relief to discover it, and then I couldn’t stop reading it. Then Shelly and I were reading it together. Then we were reading Karl Barth and figuring out all sorts of things about metaphors of intrusion and invasion, and then Shelly came onto the scene and started moving forward in leaps and bounds with the whole conversation. SR—It was a directed study. I was trying to figure out the link between literature and theology—my two loves. At Yale University at that time, trauma theory was emerging at the intersection of post-Holocaust studies in the English department and the research and clinical studies at the Yale Psychiatric Institute. 1. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1995). 226 Theology Today 68(3) The co-authored book by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony, was a pivotal work that initiated the interdisciplinary study of trauma. I remember as a master’s student going to these brown-bag lunches hosted by the Yale Psychiatric Institute, at which Dori Laub and [other] clinicians were offering open sessions to the public to discuss their clinical work with Holocaust survivors. It was the late 1990s, and they were doing a lot of work on second generation trauma, also known as the intergenerational transmission of trauma. It was early in my theological education. Sitting in on their brown bag lunches at the Institute, I remember thinking that theology needed to pay attention to these dimensions of human experience. I was aware that there were two discourses trying to talk about similar things—in this case, the enigma of human suffering. It was curious how this psychological and psychoanalytic language drove me to theology. It seems so pertinent. It wasn’t an abstract theological inquiry; I was listening to these clinicians speak about children manifesting symptoms of a parent’s trauma that their parents never talked about. What does it mean that experiences somehow transmit without the cognitive narrative aspect to it? The issues of evil and suffering that I always sought after in literature and was always driven to in authors such as Dostoyevsky lifted off the page and had taken on flesh. I thought, ‘‘I have found the link between literature and theology.’’ Serene and I were reading Karl Barth at that time. If you look at the history of trauma studies, that time at Yale University was very pivotal. The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies was instituted. Trauma studies were expanding to include different mediums (clinical discourse, video), as well as different forms of writing (poetry, literature, theory). Question: How do you use the theological tropes of cross and resurrection in your analysis of trauma? SJ—Neither Shelly nor I do much with resurrection in our work. The closest that I come to the trauma of the resurrection is the end of Mark’s Gospel where there is no more than a gesture of it. One of the things I wanted Shelly to talk about is that where I in my work on trauma have been focused on the cross and a little bit on Holy Saturday, Shelly, on the other hand, has actually engaged the topic and displaced it, in a sense. I have not even engaged the topic of resurrection. It’s sort of the ‘‘thing that is to come.’’ I could say that there are all kinds of things I haven’t said yet that I’m still figuring out, but one of the things I’ve found interesting over the years as I’ve read Shelly’s work is what happens to resurrection and what happens to cross in this middle space. Actually, neither one of those moments are half-moments. Are they presented this way in Shelly’s development of the ‘‘middle day’’? I know that is not the way it is being framed, but resurrection is resurrection in its fullness. I wonder if Shelly can talk about where you see resurrection going in all of this. Can you not have it? SR—Since the publication of the book, people have pressed me on this issue, asking, ‘‘Where is the resurrection in your book?’’ And rightly so. I resisted artic- ulating a theology of resurrection partly because I was resisting the triumphalistic Rambo 227 linear progression from death to life. And depictions of resurrection as being new and victorious are certainly at issue in the book. What that stopped me from doing is to think about how I would articulate resurrection given my non-triumphalistic presentation. It really is my next work; it will be on resurrection wounds. It takes up the other half of John 20. Here, I stopped before the Thomas scene, in which the resurrected Christ appears in an unusual way. The present question before me is ‘‘what does it mean that Jesus appears risen, but with wounds?’’ This image pre- serves a Holy Saturday move that I wanted to make, which was to say that life is not victorious and new, but it’s a living-on, a term I take from Jacques Derrida and give expression to through the biblical concept of remaining (menein in Greek).

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