| Christians who undergo trauma like sexual abuse, domestic violence, or torture may experience God as one who afflicts them for inscrutably providential purposes. Such senses of an oppressive divine countenance may suggest not that God intended the creaturely events that triggered suffering, but more compellingly that divine providence is somehow at play in the spiritual dimensions of trauma. This study examines some possible Christian theological readings of trauma-related senses of divine affliction.; After describing why Christian theologians might resist attending to testimonies about religious experience (especially amid trauma) as revelatory sources for theology, chapter one explores several ways of construing the spiritual effects of being sinned against, employing concepts like concupiscence, tremendum, abjection, han, and trauma. Although Christian theology has developed fewer resources for naming the spiritual dimensions of being “sinned-against” than it has developed for naming sin, chapter two identifies two biblical discourses that do shape Christian readings of providence amid affliction: rhetoric of divine opposition to idolatry (God acts iconoclastically to upset one's idolatrous creaturely bearings), and rhetoric of divine incarnation (God is authentically present only in healing and anger against injustice). Theologians wield rhetoric of idolatry and incarnation differently depending upon whether they interpret divine countenance in trauma at face value, unmask it as a false perception of God, or regard it as revelatory of the divine, but readable only through an unfolding process of hermeneutical struggle.; Chapters three through five examine Martin Luther's readings of divine affliction in his commentaries on Genesis and Isaiah. Developing his theological claims through a participatory reading of scripture that conflates scriptural narratives and Christian experience (ch. 3), Luther portrays divine affliction variously as a reflection of divine punishment, of satanic or sinful illusion, of divine purgation or pedagogy, or of divine game-playing (chs. 4–5). Chapter six engages contemporary theological sensibilities related to trauma, 20th-century theologies of the cross, and Simone Weil's writings on God and affliction in order to constructively engage Luther's most contentious option: might senses of divine affliction by the traumatized reflect divine purgation or iconoclasm, converting the traumatized away from idolatry towards a cruciform yet resurrection faith?... |
