Leaving Emmaus: A New Departure in Christian Theology

"Like the two traveling companions walking on the road to Emmaus, leading them from a well-known path to an unfamiliar realm in which they encounter the Risen Christ in a communal breaking and sharing of bread, Anthony Baker invites theologians and communities of faith to ‘leave home’ and undergo a process of metanoia in order to realize together who God is. By becoming attentive to the diversity of testimonies that reveal the challenging, nourishing, transforming, and liberating Good News about God within us—even in our corporeal world embroiled in crisis—we can attain this urgent theological discernment and practice."

—Ángel F. Méndez-Montoya, Full-time Professor and Researcher, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City

"The humane breadth of Christian belief has rarely been displayed better than in Leaving Emmaus. Deeply grounded in the historical tradition, the concerns of human life are never far away, both encountered in literature and the arts and seen in compassionate attention to some of the most pressing social challenges of our day. The range of scriptural discussion is fascinatingly wide. I do not know of a more creative teacher of theology than Anthony Baker."

—Andrew Davison, Starbridge Senior Lecturer in Theology and Natural Sciences, University of Cambridge, and Fellow and Dean of Chapel, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

"Mirroring a superb, tenacious, rugged tour guide for the iconic Grand Canyon National Park, Dr. Anthony Baker uses the lucid, passionate language of ‘disrupted contemplation,’ to engage theology as faithful transcendence and testimony. He superimposes constructive over classical systematic theological categories framed in everyday language. Leaving Emmaus—grounded in autobiographical, experiential questions and reflections of a faithful life of family, colleagues, world events, scripture, history, novels, and plays—names large-scale, systemic failures, as it focuses on faithful transcendence. Luke 24 forms the biblical background for the volume. By mapping ancient and contemporary theologies, the text focuses on helping students learn to think theologically while exploring personal and communal contextual testimonies. Engaging categories of theology, spirit, Trinity, creation, human beings, the God-human, sin, sacrifice, church, prayer, and last things, Leaving Emmaus challenges readers to an inspiring encounter from an interdisciplinary perspective. Such an encounter involves retelling testimonies that move one toward freedom, hope, and transcendent love. This text is a must-read for those interested in thinking in new ways about theology as prophetic praxis and pragmatic pedagogy."

—The Rev. Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Ph.D., Scholar, Consultant, Poet, and Performer

Leaving Emmaus

A New Departure in Christian Theology

Anthony D. Baker

Baylor University Press

© 2021 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover and book design by Kasey McBeath

Cover art: Unsplash/Taneli Lahtinen

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Baker, Anthony D., 1975- author.

Title: Leaving Emmaus : a new departure in Christian theology / Anthony D.

Baker.

Description: Waco : Baylor University Press, 2021. | Includes

bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "Explores doctrinal

systematics through the lens of contextual experience and language

theory to depict Christian faith as an ongoing series of encounter and

testimony"-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021025020 (print) | LCCN 2021025021 (ebook) | ISBN

9781481316040 (paperback) | ISBN 9781481316057 (pdf) | ISBN

9781481316644 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Theology, Doctrinal--Popular works. | Spiritual formation.

Classification: LCC BT77 .B25 2021 (print) | LCC BT77 (ebook) | DDC

230--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025020

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025021

For Stephanie

Contents

Preface

On Losing and Finding the Faith

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Thinking with the Witnesses

1. Theology

2. Spirit

3. Trinity

4. Creation

5. Human Beings

6. The God-Human

7. Sin

8. Sacrifice

9. Church

10. Prayer

11. Last Things

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Subjects and Authors

Index of Scripture

Preface

On Losing and Finding the Faith

Perhaps Christians have, in various ways, always failed to live up to our biblical and theological vision in one way or another. Still, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries seem particularly replete with such failures.

For example: the ancient branch of the church that has spoken most loudly and most consistently about protecting the vulnerability of unborn children has proved itself astonishingly untrustworthy when it comes to protecting young people in its care after they have come into the world outside the womb. The Roman Catholic Church is not the only Christian institution guilty of sexual abuse and other abuses of power, of course. At the same time, the depth of Catholicism within world cultures, alongside many cases of reluctance to issue hierarchical condemnations, make these abuses the most visible public witness to the failures of Christianity in our times.

Or again, many churches fail to protect those whose nontraditional relationships to their own bodies or the bodies of others make them vulnerable to social alienation and hate crimes. Some Christians have organized or made common cause with violent protests against persons who identify as queer or who embody nonnormative genders or sexual desires; others have simply failed to note the vulnerabilities of these communities as the sort of human voices that call for Christian habits of justice and compassion.

Further, baptized Christians around the world openly refuse to welcome orphans and widows seeking asylum from violence in their countries of origin, a violation of one of the clearer mandates of the New Testament (Jas 1:27). In his pastoral letter The Church’s Mission amid the National Crisis, Archbishop Oscar Romero once wrote about the temptations to idolatry that draw Christians away from faith in God toward an absolute valuing of wealth, property, national security, or parties and organizations. The idolatry of wealth, he suggested, subordinates vulnerable lives to one’s projected net value; the idolatry of political parties subordinates these lives to a strategy for achieving and maintaining power; and the omnipotence of . . . national security regimes, the total disrespect they display toward individuals and their rights, the total lack of ethical consideration shown in the means that are used to achieve their ends, turn national security into an idol, which, like the god Molech, demands the daily sacrifice of many victims in its name.¹ The recent rise in the United States of an intellectual Christian nationalism is evidence of the success of all these idolatries, and the concomitant failure of a collective Christian imagination.²

This nationalism continues to have a devastating effect on the soil, water, air, and living things of the planet, as demonstrated for example in the recent—though brief—exodus of the United States from the Paris Accords, and the protectionist attitudes around the deforestation and runaway fires in the Amazon region.³ A planet filled with fragile environments and vulnerable creatures is not, currently, finding a safe haven among the followers of the one in whom all things hold together (Col 1:17). Pope Francis summarizes this modern Christian failure: An inadequate presentation of Christian anthropology gave rise to a wrong understanding of the relationship between human beings and the world.⁴ Far from defending the endangered creatures and dying places of our world, that is, Christians have understood our own humanity in such a way as to aid an acceleration of these beings’ harm.

A quarter of a century ago, the largely Christian Tutsi people of Rwanda were being slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands in the towns, homes, streets, and even churches of Rwanda. And they were killed by the largely Christian Hutu people who were their neighbors and, in many cases, fellow parishioners. Never before have Christians killed one another in the very spaces where they had worshiped together for generations. What makes such a crisis of identity possible? What story is powerful enough to make people forget their baptisms in the very places where they happened?⁵ The answer to these questions is complex, and no one has dug more deeply into these complexities than the author who asked them. At the moment, we can at least note this as an astonishing failure of Christianity, and one with effects that will continue for generations.

Rowan Williams has written that there can come a point when the language of faith that is developing at any point in history can provoke a degree of crisis: is what is emerging identical to or at least continuous with what has been believed and articulated?⁶ Though he meant this in reference to new paradigms of theological writing, we might extend the point to the broader life and culture of the entire faith community. We have come to such a point in Christianity now, when the terrorizing actions of Christians seem to suggest that a completely different religion is emerging. It is indeed a crisis.

We might call this a crisis of witness. Christianity is at its heart a life of testimony, a witness, a public proclamation. Today, the crisis is that it is in danger of becoming a proclamation of the predatory habits of priests and of the neglect of orphans.

Whether or not these are good reasons to turn from Christian faith (and though I hope they are not, I take that consideration to be one of pastoral theology, only answerable by individuals and communities who struggle to have hard conversations that take their experiences into account), I want to suggest that these are not reasons—or net yet reasons—to turn away from Christian theology. When Saint Paul wrote to the churches in Rome and Corinth, he wrote most often not in response to Christian successes, but failures. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you (1 Cor 1:11). There were public trials that showed Christians to be those who hate rather than love one another; rumors of gatherings in which they ignored the hungry among them; reports of Christians finding their fundamental identities in politicized parties rather than in their baptisms; stories of church members engaging in sexual practices that were destructive to families and the community.

Paul’s response to these rumors was not simply to settle the disputes or call out the guilty. He did, in fact, turn to these epistolary admonishments, and there is plenty of ethical wisdom and practical advice to be found in these texts. But his letters open and often expend the greatest energy in the re-narration of the gospel. God has given Paul the task of announcing the gospel of his Son (Rom 1:9). For the message about the cross is . . . (1 Cor 1:18); For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ (2 Cor 1:5). We might characterize the form of many of Paul’s letters like this: The witness of your faith does not align with the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Israel’s messiah; perhaps we should start again at the beginning. What is this faith of ours?

If I suggest that a return to the basic questions of faith might be relevant to the failures above, I do not mean to suggest that better theology will stop genocide or these other large-scale failures. Again: the roots of the Rwandan horror are deep, and, like the climate crisis and the abuse scandals and other failings, involve decades and more of political and economic abuses. But they also involve large-scale theological failure. I suspect the apostle never imagined that one or two letters would solve the problems around incest, hunger, and Christian division. What theology can do, at its best, is to invite what the New Testament calls a metanoia, or a turning of the mind and heart, so that people of faith—and people who take an interest in the faith—can begin to imagine that faith differently.

To put the matter simply: we Christians have, in more ways than we can give account for, failed to be people of good faith. The failures are many, and they are dire. And perhaps these failures in the realm of action are corporeal symptoms of a disease within. The faith itself seems to be failing: perhaps what all this is telling us is that we have quite simply lost our faith. Before taking up questions about how to practice a more faithful witnessing to the faith of Jesus Christ—for which there are many excellent resources—perhaps we might turn again to the basic questions. What is this faith? What is the cross of Jesus the Palestinian Jew about? What do we imagine it is to be filled with the Spirit of the risen Christ?

It has been reported that we have failed to protect the most vulnerable among us and have even taken up weapons of violence and committed crimes against them. Perhaps we have not yet heard clearly the good news of the crucified one? In that case, there is no better time to turn, again, to Christian theology.

There is another reason, related to the first though in an oppositional tension, that this moment calls for theology. Theology, again, begins in witness, and if this is part of the disease, it is certainly also part of the healing. Along with being a time of great public failings of Christianity, the twenty-first century is also a time of remarkable witness to God’s compassion, grace, and forgiveness. Christians are gathering to creatively name new practices of care for creation that do not ignore the needs of working-class families who depend on local industry.⁷ Christians are serving refugees and protesting their inhumane treatment at detention centers along the world’s troubled borders.⁸ In the days before beginning the first draft of this book, I read about how members of the Greater Union Baptist Church in Louisiana, one of several historically Black churches recently burned in a spree of hate crimes across the state, gathered in a borrowed space to celebrate Easter. Their pastor, Reverend Harry Richard, led them in prayers for the white man arrested for the crimes, and reminded them in his Easter sermon, You never give up on love.⁹

In many cases the witnessing act has gone beyond public action and words of forgiveness and has taken the ultimate form of Christian witness. On June 17, 2015, nine people attending a prayer service at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, were killed by an angry white man with a gun. Two years later, and closer to my home, twenty-six members of the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, were killed by a young man angry with his mother-in-law. On the same Easter Sunday that the congregation from Union Baptist was praying for their enemy, suicide bombers killed more than 100 worshipers at St. Sebastian’s Catholic Church in Negombo, Sri Lanka, part of coordinated attacks that claimed more than 250 lives, attacks timed to coordinated with the largest gathering of Christians in the year. Watching the news clips and reading these stories, we might recall the words of the apostle: We are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh (2 Cor 4:11).

Praying for enemies, as Reverend Richard called his church to pray, is an act of Christian witness. But the act itself calls for something as well: it calls for theology. Who is the God, and what is the faith that could overcome hatred and the understandable desire for vengeance, and motivate such surprising words? Or at Saint Sebastian’s: what is being made visible in the deaths of these new martyrs? To search for meaning in human violence of this sort is perhaps an unavoidable impulse. News sources will update readers and viewers on what we know, tracing threads of racial, ethnic, and political turmoil, mental health, gun control, and more. Without detracting from these particular kinds of discursive accounts, theology can add something different. The earliest accounts of Christian martyrs focus not on the explanations of the violence, as those first Christians were taught from the beginning to expect to be treated something like Christ himself was treated. Rather, they focus on an experience of faith so saturated with transcendence that human threats and weapons become insignificant. Standing before an angry crowd armed with stones, Stephen gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. For Polycarp in the following century, eighty-six years of experiencing God’s faithfulness led him to laugh at his executioners’ flame, which after a little while is extinguished.¹⁰

The implication in all of these accounts, from Stephen the Protomartyr to the Catholics of Saint Sebastian’s, is that worshipers of the resurrected Christ take risks, lay down weapons, and go to their prayers because something that they encounter in the risen Christ motivates them to live—and perhaps die—differently. The members of Mother Emanuel may not have known a gunman was heading in their direction. Indeed, the gunman himself may not have known where he was heading when he left his home that day.¹¹ But those worshipers were aware that Black churches and Black Christians in the United States are targets of violence, and yet they gathered that Wednesday evening to say their prayers with no guards at the door. Even those worshipers at a relatively safe conservative white church in the U.S. South entered knowing that the world is unpredictable, filled with disproportionate rage, and there are certain risks associated with gathering and kneeling with backs to an unlocked door. Why would humans behave this way?

What I hope to show in the pages that follow is that it is precisely because of what they encounter when they encounter the risen Christ that humans might risk and make such radical witness as this. Their actions mediate this encounter: they make present, in limited ways, the great mystery of love that has caught hold of their lives. The witnessing act has been described by those more qualified to speak than I, for instance by the Amish families of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania,¹² or the words of the pastor and parishioners of Mother Emanuel in solidarity with victims of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh,¹³ or in Father Andrew Siboama’s description of a group of once murderous Hutus and surviving Tutsis drinking banana beer from the same jug.¹⁴ Still, this witness and the account that the surviving church gives can motivate the question that theology must answer: what is this faith that, even failing in so many public ways, can motivate Christians to acts of vulnerability in times of terror? Theology follows such witness, as an attempt to gather it up, and to turn the act, the experience, into witness-made-discursive, the sharable substance of the faith. As Polycarp’s biographer put it, I, Pionius, collected these things, when they had almost faded away through the lapse of time . . .¹⁵ Collecting these things gives an account of the identity of the God and the substance of the faith that sustains these witnesses and these martyrs.

In the Holy Week before that same eventful Easter I spoke of above, stunning and heartbreaking pictures of Notre Dame de Paris in flames filled our newsfeeds. Perhaps the most significant response of the city of Paris, and of the world, was the heartbreak itself. This giant gothic space of worship, under construction when Thomas Aquinas first met Master Albert among the Dominican faculty at the nearby University of Paris, stands as a landmark and a reminder of something premodern, an aging memory of the faith that once mattered deeply to the city. Watching the fire, something seems to have shifted for a moment. Notre-Dame de Paris is Paris itself, one Parisian put it. It’s our roots, our history, our civilization . . . I think of the generations of artists who spent all their lives working on this monument to God, to belief. Another noted that Notre-Dame is not a relic but a living sacred place, the continuity of holy France that in some ways still occupies the imaginations of Europeans more deeply than does the French Revolution.¹⁶ I hesitate to draw too sharp a conclusion from statements such as this, motivated in obvious and understandable ways by the intensity of the moment. It does, however, seem to be worth asking, in light of the worldwide grief at the images of the great church in flames, whether the world still has some reckoning to do with the God of Moses, Mary of Nazareth, and Thomas Aquinas. Before we let it burn, or douse it with water as a historical preservation of our pre-enlightened innocence as a human race, is it worth asking again whether there might be something to the encounter that called up the remarkable witnesses of Stephen, Polycarp, and the people of Greater Union Baptist Church? Perhaps a general cultural readiness to give up on this faith, like the readiness to defend incoherent versions of it, is a sign that, like the church at Corinth to whom Paul wrote, we have not yet heard the full message, not yet encountered the breadth and depths of story of the risen Christ?

In these times, as this ancient faith fails, as it lives, and as we stand in confused grief watching it burn, we might pause for a moment, hold back any conclusive evaluations, and try once more to give an account of God’s reclaiming of the world in the sending of the Son and Spirit to be with us. What was it, again, that came to pass in those days?

Advent, 2020

Acknowledgments

This is a book about the theological language that can sometimes explode out of really good conversations, and it has its source, appropriately, in many such encounters. Most of them happened on the grounds of my theological home in Austin, Texas: Seminary of the Southwest. A student recently remarked that during her constructive theology course she’s pretty sure we talked about Luke 24 every single day. Several cohorts of students have heard, reflected upon, and provided generously critical feedback on the ideas of this book. Two among them, Joe Williams and Brandon Haynes, gave me invaluable assistance in the editing and indexing of the final stages. My colleagues have likewise been generous with their theological gifts. I should especially mention Scott Bader-Saye, as the central idea was born out of some lectures we composed together. Jane Patterson’s groundbreaking work on metaphor helped me encounter the cross in a new way. Steven Tomlinson intervened at a particularly apt moment to help me determine just what sort of book I was writing. A semester coteaching a course on liberation theologies with Rev. Melanie Jones helped me integrate some new material. Sharing life and language with you all is a gift, and I feel that gratitude every day.

The congregation at Saint Julian of Norwich Episcopal Church, where I serve as theologian in residence, gave valuable feedback to a spring forum on these ideas. Rev. Jonathan McManus-Dail, Rev. Miles Brandon, and Ashley Brandon have especially been generous with their time and insights. An invitation from Bishop Duncan Gray to give an address at the Gathering of Leaders led to some helpful conversations, and Alyssa Newton’s critical feedback that day was especially important to me.

A wedding invitation from my friend Angel Méndez gave me the chance to hear a moving theological address from Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez, and Fr. Carlos’ book came out just in time to be a dialogue partner within mine. Andrew Davison has been a cherished theological interlocutor for many years now, and I am always pleased when his wisdom manages to seep into my language. My own theology mentors show up in everything I say and write, and I could not begin to acknowledge my debts to them: Craig Keen, Gene Rogers, Peter Ochs, and John Milbank.

Finally, my family has been supportive with conversation and encouragement in countless ways. Walking through Laumeier Sculpture Park in Saint Louis with my sister Heidi while we talked about heaven and hell. Texts and calls from my son Lev about life, politics, and matters of faith as he encountered the wonders of the wide world. A drive across east Texas, discussing God and science with my daughter Anya. The day my daughter Lola talked me off the ledge about not writing anymore for a while. Mulling over questions of prayer with Steve Ramirez. My parents, who have been walking the road to and from Emmaus since long before I was born. And of course Stephanie, to whom this book is dedicated. You are my Cleopas, and I your unnamed companion, as we travel this road and feel the strange burn of revelation in our hearts.

Introduction

Thinking with the Witnesses

In the preface to his late thirteenth century Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas complains about the way contemporary texts on offer bring students more weariness and confusion than clarity of thought. If I cite him here at the outset of my own brief summa, it is not because I consider my project to belong in the same sentence with that of the Angelic Doctor. Nor is it because I find theological writing today—much, though perhaps not enough, of which fills the pages and footnotes of this book—to be particularly worrisome or preoccupied with the multiplication of useless questions.¹

There is, though, something about the theological teaching of this age that does call for some attention, some redress, some correction even, and it is to this work that I hope the present book can make a contribution. To put it in a single sentence: it is time for theology to teach anew—so that students can learn anew—how to think with the testimonies it summons for its discourse.

Christian testimony or witness is the public acknowledgment of an experience—one with a certain discernible