Shūsaku Endō – Forging Ploughshares

Is Homelessness Inherent to Christian Faith?

‘A tree which flourishes in one kind of soil may wither if the soil is changed. As for the tree of Christianity, in a foreign country its leaves may grow thick and the buds may be rich, while in Japan the leaves wither and no bud appears. Father, have you never thought of the difference in the soil, the difference in the water?’ [1]

Shusaku Endo’s Silence

I lived for a year in Kagoshima, near the port where Francis Xavier first landed in Japan and inaugurated the period known as the Christian century in Japan (1549-1650). In an obscure area near Kinko Bay there is a long low stone wall and a golden statue of Xavier, which must be sought out to be found. This presumably marks the spot from which Xavier would begin to evangelize his way northward for one year, as the first of a series of missionaries. Japan was one of the most rapidly evangelized countries in all of Asia, with the Christian population numbering some 300,000 by the end of the century. Three hundred kilometers to the north, in Nagasaki, are the statues of the 26 martyrs, which marks the end of the Christian century and the beginning of one of the harshest and most “successful” persecutions in Christian history.

Shasaku Endo’s novel, Silence (quoted in the epigraph) builds upon several historical facts in addition to the above: the Japanese persecution is the most pervasive, brutal, and enduring on record; a Jesuit priest Cristovao Ferreira apostatized under torture; another Jesuit named Chiara (upon whom the character Rodrigues is based), hoping to make amends for Ferreira, entered Japan as part of a group of ten and all ten were captured and apostatized; Inoue was a Japanese magistrate set upon eradicating Christianity; the pit torture, hanging victims upside down in pits of excrement and opening a slight wound in the forehead, hanging sometimes for days and even weeks, was an effective and excruciating means of torture. The translator of Endo’s novel includes this description of the torture:

The victim was tightly bound around the body as high as the breast (one hand being left free to give the signal of recantation) and then hung downwards from a gallows into a pit which usually contained excreta and other filth, the top of the pit being level with his knees. In order to give the blood some vent, the forehead was lightly slashed with a knife. Some of the stronger martyrs lived for more than a week in this position, but the majority did not survive more than a day or two.[2]

Burning proved to be too quick and seemed to only encourage more martyrs. Richard Cocks describes seeing “fifty-five persons of all ages and both sexes burnt alive on the dry bed of the Kamo River in Kyoto (October 1619) and among them little children of five or six years old in their mothers’ arms, crying out, ‘Jesus receive their souls!,”[3] Killing and burning became something of a spectacle as tens of thousands would gather to watch, and many would subsequently convert. Thus the authorities devised various forms of excruciating torture. It was after six hours hanging in the pit that Ferreira apostatized, and this was significant as he was the first missionary to do so. Despite crucifixions, burnings, water-torture, and hanging in the pit, no missionary had apostatized until 1632. Being the acknowledged leader of the mission and the fact that he began collaborating with his persecutors, Ferreira’s apostasy proved a shock to the Christians.

Endo adds a twist to the story, in that he has Rodrigues apostatize, not due to his own tortures, but in order to save others. Inoue, in the story indicates that if he is willing to trample on an image of Christ (fumie) he can save his flock from torture – and in the story, Ferreira assists Inoue and had also apostatized under these conditions. After a long period of resistance, Rodrigues tramples on the fumie when Christ calls out to him: “‘Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.’ The priest placed his foot on the fumie. Dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crew.”[4]

The problem concerns literal interpretation from Japanese to English, which also entails several levels of cultural awareness. In the English the trampling is an imperative, but as Matthew Potts notes, “There is a sense of a quiet willingness to suffer indignity in the Japanese that softens the English’s annihilating command for erasure.”[5] The voice in Endo’s novel is on the order of a Japanese mother assuring her child that there is no end to indulgence (amae). Christ’s identity, like that of a good Japanese mother (Takeo Doi’s point), in Potts description, can “accommodate effacement.”

The inquisitor, in suggesting that the act is only an outward formality and in no way impinges upon continued private belief, taps into a long history in Japan of an inward (ura, honne) and outward (omote, tatemae) self. Wearing a mask, in Doi’s estimate, is a requirement of Japanese society. The inquisitor and his translator require, not inward, but only outward conformity: “Give up this stubbornness! We’re not telling you to trample in all sincerity. Won’t you just go through with the formality of trampling? Just the formality! Then everything will be alright.’”[6] Martin Scorsese’s inquisitor goes to some lengths to explain that it is a simple lifting and movement of the foot.

Outward conformity and inward secrecy are not simply the lot of Japanese Christians, but are the burden of every Japanese according to Yukio Mishima (Confessions of a Mask), Natsume Sōseki (I Am a Cat), and in Doi’s analytic approach. The problem is then, whether this is simply an intensification of Japanese cultural requirements which, under this definition, require secrecy, mask wearing, and what western Christians might dub hypocrisy.

On the other hand, is not the trampling an extreme example of the kenotic outpouring of the love of Christ (which is the argument of Ferreira in trying to convince Rodrigues)? Every Christian, like his Master is called to lose himself, but in this instance this losing is absolute: one must be willing to give their soul for love of the other. Ferreira argues, ‘Christ would certainly have apostatized to help men.’ ‘No, no!’ said the priest, covering his face with his hands and wrenching his voice through his fingers. ‘No, no!’ ‘For love Christ would have apostatized. Even if it meant giving up everything he had.’[7] One must ultimately be willing to relinquish everything in order to follow Christ, according to the priest.

As Patricia Snow remarks, the novel creates an unresolvable dilemma, “If it is always and everywhere difficult for human beings to hold in their minds seemingly contradictory tenets of Christianity, Silence makes the task feel impossible. Mercy is pitted against truth, love of neighbor against allegiance to God.”[8]

In Snow’s opinion this is not really the problem of 17^th century Japanese Christians but reflects modern peculiarities: “What this means is that the deeply disturbing, polarizing drama at the heart of Silence is an anachronism. It is a projection of the modern mind, a hallucination of an anxious, confused, and codependent imagination.” She notes, what Endo himself seems well aware of, that death of God theology is in the air in the time Endo is composing Silence. Ferreira (Endo) “is speaking not the language of seventeenth-century Jesuits, but the language of Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton, twentieth-century Death of God theologians who believed that not only Christ but Christianity must die, that it is not finally Christian to be Christian, and that in the name of Christian charity, Christians must reject Christian truths.”[9] Snow may be correct about the anachronism; in fact Endo would probably agree, as he describes his own struggle with nihilism.

Endo’s personal struggle may have been with a similar sort of “Christian” nihilism but he see his faith as a rescue from this darkness: “For a long time I was attracted to a meaningless nihilism and when I finally came to realize the fearfulness of such a void I was struck once again with the grandeur of the Catholic Faith.” Though Endo finds comfort in his Catholicism, it is not too far removed from the modern non-religious form of the faith. “This problem of the reconciliation of my Catholicism with my Japanese blood … has taught me one thing: that is, that the Japanese must absorb Christianity without the support of a Christian tradition or history or legacy or sensibility.”[10] This no tradition, no history, no legacy, sensibility is not simply Japanese but modern. In fact, the Japanese inherit this precise sense, not because they are Japanese, but because they are modern.

The Japan Endo projects into the Tokugawa period, with its mud-swamp qualities, its inherent mask wearing, and its native soil poisoning the Christian tree, is very much a modern sensibility. There is not a “Japanese” ethnic identity, Japanese uniqueness, or even a sense of Japaneseness, prior to the Meiji restoration. The ideology crafted in the Meiji Restoration unifies the disparate religions, dialects, and clan identities, under State Shinto. “Japanese identity” is not a “naturally” occurring or universal phenomena but is an ideology which required its own missionaries, forced adherence, and forms of punishment. The goal of this formation of a national or ethnic identity was to ward off the Christian west and to make of Japan a colonizing power like Great Britain and the United States. In other words, modern ideology is the stuff making up Endo’s mud swamp, and not the peculiarities of being Japanese.

This seems problematic for Matthew Pott’s argument: “I would like to suggest that what the critical analyses of this novel have neglected to recognize is that Rodrigues has not really been asked here to renounce his moral integrity or his religious faith. What he has been asked to reject in this climactic scene is his ethnicity. What he is being forced to abandon is his whiteness.”[11] This certainly does not fit the 17^th century nor does it really work even as an anachronism, as non-Japanese can never become Japanese under the modern ideology, no matter what they relinquish, no matter what name they take, no matter the color of their skin. The ideology is militant in its advocacy of Japanese uniqueness: the Japanese language is unique, the Japanese brain is unique, the Japanese body is unique, the Japanese islands are unique, and Japanese nature is unique. This modern ideology of uniqueness was non-existent in the Tokugawa period, but is precisely the ideology that would make of Japan an anti-Christian mud swamp. It was this sense that was missing in the rapid turn of 300,000 Japanese to Christianity and in the underground church’s survival of 200 years of persecution.

Certainly, Christians in Japan understand the struggle Endo describes in his novel, of feeling homeless and divided between being Japanese and Christian. As Endo describes it, “Japan is a swamp because it sucks up all sorts of ideologies, transforming them into itself and distorting them in the process. It is the spider’s web that destroys the butterfly, leaving only the ugly skeleton.”[12] After more than twenty years in Japan, I understand the eroding effects Japanese culture, Japanese nationalism, and Japanese identity may have on the Christian faith, but I felt Endo-like homelessness most intensely upon my return to the United States. I no longer recognized the peculiar faith produced by the soil and water of this country: the political nationalism, the insipid preaching, the shallow music, the consumer mentality, and outright hostility toward the depth of the gospel.

As William Cavanaugh points out, “Endo is misunderstood if this struggle is limited to a Japanese context.”[13] God in Christ had nowhere to lay his head, and was ultimately reviled and crucified. Resolving this original homelessness may be the continual temptation of Constantinian Christianity, colonial Christianity, national Christianity, American Christianity, or simply institutional Christianity. The issue of effacement of Christ is always at stake in Christianity’s encounter with culture and the attempt to fill in his features (give him a home) through cultural rootedness.

[1] Shusaku Endo, Silence: A Novel (p. 138). Lulu.com. Kindle Edition.

[2] Silence, 9.

[3] Silence, 9.

[4] Silence, 208.

[5] Matthew Potts, “Christ, Identity, and Empire in Silence” The Journal of Religion

Volume 101, Number 2 April 2021, 193.

[6] Silence, 189.

[7] Silence, 206.

[8] Patricia Snow, “Empathy Is Not Charity,” First Things, October 2017

[9] Snow, Empathy is Not Charity.

[10] Silence, Translator’s Introduction, 14.

[11] Potts, 200.

[12] Silence, from the Introduction, 13.

[13] William T. Cavanaugh, “The God of Silence: Shusaku Endo’s reading of the Passion,” Commonweal, March 13, 1998, 10.

Marginalization and Restorative Justice

A guest blog by Jonathan Totty

In the parlor of a grandly decrepit Episcopal Church, we began to create a community of people becoming whole, integrated, healed. Like moribund flesh, as individual worshippers bound together by the felt need to allow the Protestant Episcopal Church to submit her doctrines and liturgy, along with the Holy Scriptures, as opinions to be considered by rational minds, we endured the malaise of mainline protestant decline. As a community of Christians, though, we grasped for the potency of ancient ideas reborn toward a politics of friendship, which constitutes the politics of God’s eternal community. Nothing loves death as much as itself. Busy and isolated people merely experience the decline and fall of humanity, whereas life manifests in relationships wherein minds meet, and hearts synchronize in desiring the good. So, we made our prayer, “Come Holy Spirit, come and renew the face of the Earth.” Against the odds of modern life, an eclectic group of folks met in a parlor, oddly resembling an undertaker’s lounge, to study and discuss articles, books, films, and lectures collected around the idea that Jesus’ incarnation, life, death, and resurrection establish a just and peaceful way of being human in the world.

We, a priest, a literature professor, an engineer, an attorney, a scientist, a social worker, and several folks who work in healthcare—about twelve of us in total—meet Sunday mornings, regularly, to discuss the Bible, the history of the Church, doctrines, but this time we met more purposefully and more committed to developing a robust self-understanding about Christian identity. As the priest, my parishioners delightfully surprised me by their willingness to commit to a rigorous course of study. We replaced what had amounted to a Sunday School hour with a course complete with syllabus, lectures, and course readings. Our materials included varied sources such as Pope Francis’ Laudato Si, Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s Silence, writings about the Bible by the feminist theologian Susanne Scholz, and a lecture by Rowan Williams the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Our goal was to develop a self-understanding about Christian identity, derived from the witness of Jesus’ self-sacrificing life and death, that fosters peace and justice while opposing violence and oppression. My parishioners met my ambitious proposal with eager minds and supple spirits open to encountering God.

Throughout eight weeks of Sunday morning discussions, we became God’s beloved community, followers of Christ, people awakened to the forces, the principalities, and powers of demonic and human origins, and people committed to inculcating Christ’s spirituality of peace and justice within our own lives. We became a community by listening to diverging views and understanding the biases and social locations informing each other’s thoughts, opinions, and theories. By listening to one another, we developed a theological stance of openness, open even to meeting Christ in the other. We embodied the theology we hoped to understand. A theology of Christian identity resides within us; the Holy Spirit makes Christ’s life come alive in us by God’s grace infused within our person. Thus, a Christian identity does not exist as an impersonal standard of measure, rather Christian identity resides in Jesus as the one who reveals the Father by his kenotic incarnation and sacrificial death. In Jesus’ resurrection, God promises that our own creaturely personhood abides in the life of God. Consequently, we discovered Christ in ourselves as we recognized Christ in each other.

After weeks of attending to our surroundings and developing a vantage point for reflection by way of critical theory, we wondered how we might meet the demands of our consciences and the world as authentic followers of Jesus. For it is not only some historians, as Toynbee thought, who “hold that history is just one damned thing after another,” because we sometimes endure life as one damned thing after another. In contrast, the way of Jesus forms a straight and narrow path through suffering, through death, into the bright light of God’s eternal life in which all things cohere. We walk the way of Jesus in prayer, study, and service. When we walk the way of Jesus, we enter the flow of God’s love, which establishes the source and goal of all creaturely life. So, even as we became attentive to the powers, principalities, and forces of darkness, we turned to the traditional practices of the Christian spiritual life as a strategy of resistance. Sin and death hold sway by encouraging despair, whereas the Holy Spirit promises joy subsists in the fullness of God’s presence.

While leading our Sunday morning discussions, I decided the communal life we discovered at Grace Episcopal Church should be shared. So, I shared the materials I developed for my parish with Paul Axton. He, then, extended an invitation for me to adapt the course for Forging Ploughshares under the class title: Marginalization and Restorative Justice. Thus, under the auspices of Forging Ploughshares, I invite you to join a discussion about the Christian identity, and how Jesus’ life in us fosters the just, peaceable, and beloved community of God. The class, Marginalization and Restorative Justice, will create a space of discernment about the mission and life of God in us and in the world as we explore Christian social teaching from both Catholic and Protestant perspectives. By study and conversation will foment a realized and active spirituality, which constitutes an alternative peaceable way of life instead of the violent and oppressive norm. Together we will practice spiritual conversations that teach us a way of encountering God, a way of being formed as disciples of Jesus, a way of inhabiting the Peaceable Kingdom.

Therefore, even as I have described one theological conversation and offered an invitation to another, my ultimate purpose resides in the description of theological conversation. In theological conversation, we live and move and have our being in God as a community. We encounter God in dialogue with others. To be present to another, we must also be present to ourselves. Every conversation marks an opportunity for self-knowledge. Attentiveness to others and to ourselves along with the reasonable and responsible pursuit of truth fosters good conversation. The unqualified and unrestricted Good, which is God, fulfills the implicit question of every conversation, which is the human unrestricted desire to know. Consequently, if we seek the meaning of Christian identity honestly and responsibly, then we will together become Christians. The unrestricted nature of our conversation means our conversation ever and always occurs as dialogue approaching the Word of God. God invites our conversation into the divine life. So, let us dare together to talk about what it means to be Christian, and thereby invite the Holy Spirit to come, come and renew our lives in this world and eternity.

(Register for the Class Marginalization and Restorative Justice here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

Theology After Hiroshima and Nagasaki

“I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad-Gita, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer (often called the “father of the atomic bomb”)

Today, seventy-five years ago, the first atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima and three days later the second bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. Some twenty-five years ago we visited Hiroshima on a trip to Kyushu and on the return trip we drove to Nagasaki by way of the Gotō Islands in Nagasaki prefecture, which were strikingly different than any part of Japan we had visited. Several of the island villages were built around a Catholic church, and to see church steeples towering over a Japanese village was a bit jarring. Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence, is set in these islands, in which Christianity took hold and survived during two hundred years of persecution. Endō’s portrayal, focused on the insecure faith of his characters, may not capture the enduring commitment of the islanders, even when threatened with torture and martyrdom. We knew as we made our way to Nagasaki and ground zero, that Japanese Christians had not only endured one of the longest and bloodiest persecutions but they would be the victims of a martyrdom never before unleashed on humankind. Our first evening, we camped on the beach on Nakadori island before making our way into Nagasaki, and Erin (7 years old at the time), found a bag of kittens that a local farmer had failed to completely drown.

In the Dozaki Church, which had been converted into a museum, was a display explaining how Buddhist prayers offered by a priest downstairs would be redirected by Christians hidden above him upstairs. Hidden Christians venerated Mary by creating statues that could also be taken to represent the goddess Kannon, and they hid crosses inside Buddhist statues that could be used during Christian funerals. The tea ceremony was turned into a communion-like service, by turning the tea cup three times prior to drinking (to symbolize the Trinity) and by folding napkins in such a way as to indicate the silent recital of a prayer. (Considering that the tea ceremony may trace its origins to the communion service in the first place, this reconversion of the ceremony is fitting.)

In Nagasaki we (6 cats, 2 children, and Faith and I) made our way to the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum, itself a testimony counter to Endō’s notion of weak-willed Japanese Christians. Twenty Japanese Christians and six foreign priests were hung on 26 crosses and as they were lanced to death, one of the priests, Paul Miki, preached to the crowd from his cross. The museum contains testimony to the impact Christianity had on Japan, with entire clans taking up the faith, and it indicates that there may have been some ten thousand martyrs of the faith. But of course, it was the “Christian Nation” (the United States), which would martyr more Japanese Christians in a day than had been killed in the 200 years of persecution, which our next stop would symbolize. We could not convince Erin to leave the cats long enough to visit the museum, but maybe it was for the best.

About half the Catholic population of Japan, around 50,000 of a total of 110,000, lived in the Nagasaki parish and were concentrated in Urakami, which was ground zero of the atomic blast. Urakami Cathedral had been erected in 1895 on the very ground where citizens were forced to trample on fumie (images of Christ or the Virgin Mary) so as to expose those who were Christians. The church had been erected to honor the resilience of Japanese Christians and the twin bell towers, completed in 1925, made it the largest cathedral in East Asia. The atomic bomb exploded about 500 meters from the church and incinerated the building. Parish priest, Saburo Nishida, entering the church to receive the sacrament of penance and reconciliation, Curate, Fusayoshi Tamaya, who was hearing confession, along with a dozen Christians inside the church were instantly incinerated. They were among some 10,000 Christians who made up the largest proportion of the 15,000 killed in the immediate vicinity of the blast. In other words, the United States wiped out the heart of the Catholic Christian population in Japan, and the Urakami Church, symbolic of 200 years of persecution, is also the marker of the atomic holocaust. Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who survived both atomic bombs (he was visiting Hiroshima during the first bomb and returned home to Nagasaki and experienced the second) thought the marble head of the Virgin Mary, which endured the Nagasaki blast, was emblematic of Christians destroying Christians. The eyes of the Virgin are black hollows and the side of her face bears the mark, which Yamaguchi thought looked like keloids, which appeared on victims of the blast.

It is all but established fact that the bombs played no role in Japan’s surrender. Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, in his 2005 book Racing the Enemy, provides evidence from primary sources within the Japanese Diet that the War ended due to the entry of the Soviets into Manchuria. American intelligence, which had broken the Japanese codes, was conveying to Truman this same conclusion: the Japanese government wanted to negotiate surrender through Moscow. Truman already knew that the expected early August Russian declaration of war would end Japanese will to fight and American intelligence confirmed this to him. He also knew that assurances that Japan’s Emperor would be allowed to stay as a powerless figurehead would bring surrender, long before a projected November US invasion could begin. The destruction of two more cities made little difference to political and military leaders, after the destruction by fire bombing of the majority of Japanese cities. In the National Museum of the US Navy is a plaque that acknowledges: “the vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military.” The Navy Museum acknowledges what Hasegawa proved and what Truman understood, it was Soviet entry into the war on the same day as the bombing of Nagasaki which moved the Japanese to surrender. Before this, Truman was being advised by most all of his generals the bomb was unnecessary.

William Leahy, President Truman’s Chief of Staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . in being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”[1] The commanding general of the US Army Air Forces, Henry Arnold, indicated his views in a public statement only eleven days after Hiroshima was attacked. Asked on August 17 by a New York Times reporter whether the atomic bomb caused Japan to surrender, Arnold said that “the Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.” According to Admiral William Halsey, “It was a mistake. . . . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.” Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, stated in a public address at the Washington Monument two months after the bombings that “the atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.” General Dwight Eisenhower, stated in his memoirs that when notified by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the decision to use atomic weapons, he “voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” He later publicly declared “. . . it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Even the famous Major General Curtis LeMay, who had innovated new weaponry in the fire bombings of Tokyo, declared publicly a month after the bombing, “the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”[2] Truman’s political advisors overruled the military, and specifically Douglas MacArthur, who would retain the emperor despite the unconditional surrender.

Two Japanese Christian doctors who experienced the bombing of Nagasaki represent the two opposed reactions of Japanese Christians. Nagai Takashi (1908–1951), who would succumb to leukemia caused by the bomb’s radiation, spent his remaining years trying to comprehend the devastation. His wife had been killed instantly in the blast and he lived in a hut in the ruins of Nagasaki. I once heard a young preacher refer to the bright light of the atomic bombs as a light from God, which may be a perverse reading of Nagai but which reflects his attempt to account for the bombs as providential. “Was not Nagasaki the chosen victim, the lamb without blemish, slain as a whole-burnt offering on an altar of sacrifice, atoning for the sins of all the nations during World War II?” Nagai asked.[3] Akizuki Tatsuichirō (1916–2005) a colleague of Nagai, devoted himself to treating survivors, many of whom were Catholics, but could not agree with Nagai’s seeming justification of the bombing. Akizuki would join the anti-nuclear peace movement and though he respected Nagai, he would not succumb to his silent submission. He received multiple prizes for his activities both as a doctor and as an outspoken witness against nuclear arms, and in spite of his sharp departure from the thought of Nagai, he was the first recipient of the Nagai Takashi Award. This dialectic between the two doctors, silent acceptance and angry protest is characterized by a saying which arises with the reactions from the two cities: Hiroshima rages, Nagasaki prays. Japanese Christians would be caught up with trying to reconcile these two extremes.

It was Japanese theologian, Kitamori Kazoh, who would develop the first Japanese theology which seems to reflect the peculiar suffering of Japan and the varied response of Japanese Christians. His book, The Theology of the Pain of God, not only refuses the Western notion that the Father does not suffer, but presumes pain is part of the essence of God, constituting the peculiar nature of the love of God. How can any but a suffering God truly love and how can there be true love apart from suffering? A key verse for Kitamori is Jeremiah 31:20: “Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child? For since I spake against him, I do earnestly remember him still: Therefore my bowels are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon him, saith the Lord” (KJV). Kitamori sees this verse as describing God in a state of turmoil, pain, and suffering. In Luther’s translation the verse describes God’s heart as broken. In the Japanese the phrase appears as, “my insides are in pain.” Kitamori concludes that there is a conflict in God between wrath and love and this produces the pain in which he embraces the sinner.

In this he comes close to the Christ of Endō. In Silence, Father Rodrigues, is repulsed by the apostate coward, Kichijiro, and cannot imagine sharing communion with such a creature. But when he too is faced with death or stepping on the fumie, he realizes the true path to communion with Christ: “How his foot aches! And then the Christ in bronze speaks to the priest: “Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross!”[4] The priest argues, “But you told Judas to go away: What thou dost do quickly. What happened to Judas?” Jesus answers, “I did not say that. Just as I told you to step on the plaque, so I told Judas to do what he was going to do. For Judas was in anguish as you are now.” As Christ explains, “There are neither strong nor weak. Can anyone say that the weak do not suffer more than the strong?” As Kitamori would put it, God does not reveal himself in power and glory but in forsakenness and suffering. Christ speaks to all, sinner and saint, faithful and faithless, as his grace is unilateral.5 Is he deterred by a mud swamp faith, which ebbs and flows with the tide, which comes and goes as circumstance demands and permits?

Theologian, Noro Yoshio, protests that Kitamori does not provide room to fight evil in our political and social life and seems to suggest a passive acceptance of evil and suffering.[6] Shoji Tsutomu, likewise concludes, Kitamori’s theology is confined to the psychological and personal and provides no basis for social praxis.[7] But the fate of two hundred years of unrelenting persecution, the helplessness felt before the power and seeming inevitability of the atomic bombs, may have marked Japanese Christianity with a sensibility of ontological suffering which Kitamori captures. It is the same sort of futility expressed by Endō and, I realize, it accounts for my own theological turn.

Where Christian faith and ethics have been made to accommodate violence, each holocaust, each murder, each slaughter of innocents, will have to be argued on the merits of the case. As with all arguments against the necessity of violence, the particulars of the argument against the justification or necessity of deploying the atomic bombs may fail to convince. The problem, as it should become evident, pertains to a faith that seems to require violence, no matter the argument. There is a form of the faith in the West that seems to require that it enact violence, much as there is a form of the faith in Japan that would accept the inevitability of being subject to suffering. An all-Christian bomber crew from an all-Christian administration guilty of vaporizing, incinerating, annihilating tens of thousands of innocent civilians, including a disproportionately large number of Japanese Christians, and choosing a/the Church for ground zero, shows up the meaninglessness of this form of religion. Of course, the Christian faith as it was practiced by these men seems not to have figured into the decision. Christianity did not cause Truman the Baptist, Byrnes the Catholic and one of Truman’s closest advisors, or Charles Sweeney (pilot of Bock’s Car) a devout Catholic, or any of the long list of Christian advisors and actors to pause or refuse. Truman reported sleeping soundly and never having a second thought. The faith simply served, it seems, to ease the consciences of its adherents. Though the image of Christian slaughtering Christian in genocidal proportions, as in Nagasaki, forever exposed the emptiness of the predominant form of the Western religion, it was precisely their faith that blinded many to this conclusion.

We made it home with our six kittens, but much like my shedding of my received understanding of the Western Christian faith, each of the kittens slowly died due to the substitute milk which provided no nourishment.

[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-the-us-really-bombed-hiroshima/

[2] Ibid. What was the point? Was it Truman’s attempt to intimidate Stalin? Secretary of State James Byrnes, we know, believed a demonstration of atomic power would help the United States dominate in the postwar era – and it was the Soviets, America’s ally, he was most concerned to impress. According to Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard, “[Byrnes] was concerned about Russia’s postwar behavior. . . [and thought] that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might, and that a demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia.” In the event it did not work, as the bombs and Truman’s threatening distrust initiated the Cold War arms race. Truman, baffled by the science, assumed no one else could duplicate the technology. He told Oppenheimer the Soviet Union would never acquire the technology, though Oppenheimer presumed they would shortly have the weapon, which they did.

[3] The citation of Nagai’s passage was taken from his Nagasaki no Kane [The bells of Nagasaki] and is quoted from https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/4258.

[4] Silence, 171.

[5] Ibid, 191, quoted from Ethan Richardson https://mbird.com/2012/03/the-christ-of-silence-part-two-kichijiro-or-the-judas-everyman/

[6] Yoshio Noro. Impassibiliats Dei (Ph.D. dissertation, Union Theological Seminary, 1955), p. 99. Quoted from https://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item?id=NQ52205&op=pdf&app=Library

[7] Tsutomu Shoji, “The Church’s Struggle for Freedom of Belief– An Aspect of Christian Mission.” in Living Theology in Asia, Edited by John C. England New York: Orbis Books. 1982). p. 56. Ibid.

Resurrection as Escape from the Mud Swamp of the Nation State

Shūsaku Endō, in his novel Silence, portrays Japan as a mud swamp in which Christianity cannot take root. Endō’s mistake, of projecting onto the Tokugawa period (the novel is set in the 17^th century) a “Japanese” sensibility which developed much later with the Meiji period (beginning in the 1860’s), is itself an illustration of the strength of the ideology of the modern nation state. As odd as it sounds, the “Japanese people” with a supposed mud swamp essence (a distinct religion, language, and cultural identity) is a development which arises as Japan seeks to become a unified nation, prior to which identity would have been tied to the local clan and religion (making the country susceptible to both foreign religion and foreign invasion in the estimate of the ruling elites). The manner in which Christianity rapidly inundated 16^th century Japan, one of the most rapidly Christianized countries in Asia, demonstrates that Japan was fertile soil for Christianity (and the Shogun was warned this was the first step in a colonial take-over). The notion that Japan consists of an essence, a capacity for absorbing and reshaping every influence, is a modern development, demonstrated by the fact that the religion was driven underground, not because it could not take root in Tokugawa Japan, but because tens of thousands of Japanese Christians were martyred by a Shogunate fearful of Western invasion aided by subjects loyal to foreign religious powers. It was not simply, as in first century Rome, that Christians posed an internal threat. The links of the religion to colonial powers posed a political and military threat which would eventually give rise to Japan’s pursuit of British-like imperial power.

The ideology which would make Japan a mud swamp, warding off Christianity and foreign domination, was erected as a purposeful imitation of the modern nation state geared to meet foreign power with an equal and opposite force. The invention of the “Japanese people,” constituting a unique religious identity (State Shinto), a unique language (there was no shared language prior to the modern period and the language is still marked by mutually unintelligible dialects), a unique racial identity (Japan is a DNA melting pot of the Asian mainland) is a relatively modern innovation on the same order as the American, the British, or the French people. What is obvious to the foreigner visiting Japan is how the culture shapes individuals so as to forge a “unique” national identity.

What may not be so obvious to the Western, specifically American or U.S., observer is that this identity is a mirror image. The identity and counter-identity have both been forged by the same imperialism, colonialism, patriotism, and nationalism, which constitute the corrosive and overwhelming force of the modern nation state. If Japan is a mud swamp which has successfully warded off Christianity (which it is and has for the most part), it is by virtue of the same power which has shaped Christianity so as to fit modern Western identity. Where we might recognize Endō’s mud swamp, the corrosive effect of those same forces on modern Christianity may be less obvious.

A test, formulated by Paul for the Corinthians, to gauge the distance between the modern American form of the faith and New Testament Christianity is the role of bodily resurrection. The danger is we might imagine Paul is too heavy handed or is being hyperbolic when he suggests it is a choice of either belief in bodily resurrection or belief that the apostles are liars, God is untrue, and a Christianity without resurrection is worse than paganism. Eat, drink and be merry, for death reigns (I Cor. 15:32), he declares. It seems Paul has not considered the more sophisticated notion of disembodied souls going to heaven, which would separate out the earthly kingdoms from God’s heavenly focus. To say resurrection is salvation and that without it Christianity is futile; well, hasn’t Paul forgotten the main point about Jesus taking our punishment so we can go to heaven?

Paul says either embrace bodily resurrection or acknowledge the nihilistic darkness of an empty faith (along with lying apostles, remaining in sin, and being consigned to oblivion (I Cor. 15:12-19)). He offers no room for dualism or for the notion that a disembodied soul going to heaven is Christian salvation. This dualistic division (dividing faith from ethics, history from eternity, material reality from spiritual reality), apparently would mean Christians are left in their sin (even though they acknowledge “Christ died for my sins”). He indicates this is the delusion resurrection defeats.

In the following verses (20-28) Paul equates resurrection with an embodied this-worldly sort of salvation. Christ’s resurrection is defeating the powers (the dominion, power, and authority of this world’s kingdoms, v. 24), it is bringing about the reversal of all that occurred in the 1st Adam, and is the inauguration of a universal resurrection in which the reign of God will be made complete (with the establishment of the kingdom of God – his reign, his people, according to the principle of life). Christ’s resurrection will bring about the defeat of the final enemy and this defeat is in process (I Cor. 15:20-28). How can all of this be true?

It is the case only if the primary enemy is death and an orientation to death deployed by the “dominions and authorities” (human modes of reign and rule) defeated in resurrection. It is only true if the dualism which would split up body and soul, the City of God and the City of man, is not simply a theological or philosophical error but the lie of sin itself.

Resurrection as salvation (as an anti-dualism) makes sense where the “body of death” or the “body of sin” is constituted in a lie that divides (perceived as the self, divided between “body” and “soul”) in which the symbolic order of the law (the soulish, the spiritual) is pitted against the physical body. Sin, in Paul’s picture, is focused on the struggle and sacrifice of life within the “I.” The battle within the “I” is self-destructive and potentially violent – should “I” give way to the ever-present possibility of evil (Ro. 7:21). Sacrifice (masochistic or sadistic violence aimed at gaining life) is inscribed into the sinful economy – it is the agonistic struggle constituting the “body of death” – a Subject engaged in a struggle for life which kills.

Paul’s “body” (σῶμα) is not referring to only the physical body but to the Subject, with sin and death describing the orientation or existential reality of the Subject. Body denotes the full reality which comes with embodiment: humans embodied in a particular environment, the body being that which constitutes them social beings, a being who relates to and communicates with her environment. As in a Wittgensteinian understanding, the Subject is a body such that self-alienation might be experienced as “having a body” rather than “being a body” (Paul’s body out of control, as Bultmann describes it, means a Subject out of control). So, to be joined to the body of Christ in baptism is to close the gap within the self. Sin is an apparent dualism defeated in salvation.

The gap within the self (self-antagonism between body and soul) constitutes a myriad of possible worlds and alternative means of constituting the self through opposed pairs (dualism). John notes this same world order so as to show in these apparent dualisms light defeats darkness, truth defeats the lie, and life overcomes death. The knowledge of good and evil is the deep grammar of sin dependent upon an apparent dualism (Hegel references the fall into the knowledge of good and evil as a cognitive necessity to inaugurate his dialectic). Jew and Gentile, male and female, thought and being, soul and body, East and West, inside (Japanese) and outside (foreigner), all pose the possibility of identity through difference. Or as Paul puts it, the body of death pits “the members of my body” against “the law of my mind” and this makes “me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members” (7.23-24). Sin is a way of being, an epistemology, a world, constituted in what Paul describes as a death dealing lie.

A modern contractual Christianity tied to the lie in the name of Christ (life is in the law because Christ meets its requirements) might favor a Cartesian version of modernity (the discordant dualism of “I think therefore I am”). In this philosophical individualism truth is apprehended within (thought, one side of the dualism, provides being, the other side of the dualism, and thus faith is its own reality). The modern theological conservative might trust empirical apprehension of reality (laws of nature, laws of science, laws of reason, over and against the mind), in which faith is a cognitive affirmation of historical reality. Both, though, begin with a given reality as posited through a modern Western frame of knowledge and modern notions of self (a self divided between empirical reality and inward essence). It is presumed one has access to an already posited reality, and Christian faith, ethics, and truth works within this framework (as I summed it up here). What is obscured is Paul’s third law – the law of sin and death – the divide within the Subject which secures this reality and the resurrection which defeats it.

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death” (Romans 8.2). Paul pictures the “body of sin” as being reduced to the “nothing” from whence it came (Rom. 6.6) through a reversal of the power it exercises. The “body of death” is put to death in Christ for those who have died in Christian baptism. Baptism is the ontological alternative to the “body of death” as the Subject of baptism, instead of being joined to negation and death, is joined to the resurrected body of Christ. This is not a departure from the material body or material reality but the beginning of cosmic redemption (‘the redemption of our bodies’ (8.23) and the redemption of the cosmos (8.21)). This truth cannot be bent by the mud swamp of modernity as it names the lie of dualism, of doing identity in the law, in the state, in human religion, or in modernity.

The modern nation-state constitutes identity through difference in its own dualism (Orient/Occident, Eastern backwardness/Western progress, etc.) and modern contractual theology with its focus on Western notions of individual faith (constituting the modern self), tied to Western notions of democracy, patriotism, and nationalism, is precisely what Japan’s ruling elite sensed – the ideological forerunner to colonization. The question is if an American faith subject to this same colonizing power can escape its grip?

The way of escape is clear: “He has abolished all rule and all authority and power” (I Cor. 15:24) as resurrection is the counter-power to a world built on death. “He has put all things in subjection under His feet . . . so that God may be all in all” (I Cor. 15:27-28) as resurrection defeats the apparent dualism by closing the gap of a failed identity.