The Sovereign is in the Ground
On Death, Ecology, and Hunchback Messianism
About the author: Gavin Chase (he/him) is an editor and former educator from Chicago, Illinois. He is currently an M.Div. candidate at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he researches the intersections of religion, society, and ecology, engaging both constructive theologies and post-supersessionist hermeneutics. In addition to his studies, Gavin works as an associate editor for the Center for Barth Studies’ God Here & Now Magazine as well as tends chickens at Princeton’s Farminary Project. He and his wife Katie reside in Princeton, New Jersey with their daughter Robin.
And am I born to die?
To lay this body down
And must my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown?
And must my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown?
The quiet alerting tune of Doc Watson’s “And Am I Born to Die” fills the air at the seasonal harvesting of farm chickens. Together with my fellow farmhands, beneath our breath, we hum along acknowledging this sobering but important act that is the processing of chickens. Harvesting ought to elicit gratitude and, in most cases, should be a joyous and happy occasion. In this moment, however, I cannot help but reckon with the deep pain accompanying my gratitude at this harvest and become aware of death’s reality. The loss of life here elicits tremendous somberness. And yet, equally, there is wondering whether power and glory are hidden in the very meaning and experience of death—that when one comes to the end of their life, there is a sovereign definition in the act of decay. A self-giving, perhaps. Particular to these chickens, there is the giving of selves for furthering other life—my body and the bodies of others.
To lay this body down—words that become (or will become) a reality for all living things. The processing of chickens makes me aware of my eventual death and the death of others. Conversely, in equal measure, this gives attention to the good message so many of us profess: God laid God’s body down in death as the sacrificial act for others to have life. Could it be that God’s willingness to die, that death itself, becomes the emblem of sovereignty—of love’s fullest definition that the whole of creation partakes in as well? Does the humdrum task of harvesting chickens, their death, give fuller meaning to how we understand power and glory?
In her recent work, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public, Catherine Keller renders the possibilities of moving beyond dominating constructions of power, namely the political theologies that make exceptions (à la the famous Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology)—meaning the notion of sovereignty which allows for and even becomes operative around totalitarian definitions of power.1 For Keller, the exception is the curation of an androcentric myth of being that “whites-out” any reality of the inevitable death and suffering that marks the temporality of the material.2 In the cases when theology steps into the periphery of society—making it unnoticed and deemed invisible—Keller argues that a political theology of omnipotence (all-powerfulness) still makes its presence known even in the claims of “victimhood.”3 Examples of this can be seen in the plight of the Christian Right as silent majority or with the Stop the Steal campaign that takes on the posture of being victim to injustice while conversely enacting a political theology of domination.
The limits of domination theologies are evident when confronted with the reality of crucifixion and the humiliation of Christ’s death. As many in the theological academy reflect on the recent passing of German liberation theologian, Jürgen Moltmann, his theological lifework of engaging divine in-breaking into the world has currency in the discussion of moving beyond hegemonic renderings of political theology. In his book The Crucified God, Moltmann states, “When the crucified Jesus is called ‘the image of the invisible God,’ the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this. God is not greater than he is in this humiliation.”4 It is not enough to say that God merely enters the experience of death and suffering as a result of incarnation, but the very act of death as sacrifice becomes a central visible feature of God’s very nature. The death of God in Jesus is not merely a means of God’s activity but encompasses the fullest definition of divine sovereignty itself.
It is time that sovereignty becomes acquainted—flipped on its head, one might say—with a touch of reality: some things suffer, but all things die. What if, Catherine Keller imagines, the messianic construal of sovereignty is not an omnipotent or totalitarian Other but a weak god—that when one is deemed so unworthy as to be left hunchbacked in darkness, it is in the process of becoming hunched and decay where the most sovereign work is being done? She names this “hunchback theology,” or messianic (weak) power that finds meaning in the decomposition of self into creaturely becoming with others.
This entails the abandonment of the anthropos (the human) as the central figure of dominance—making no exceptions, even for God—and a sobering turn to an eco-political rendition of sovereignty which “dims into an indiscernibility between divine and creaturely figures of animacy.”5 Here, merely deploying incarnational language—or a weak God in the person of Jesus—does not take Keller’s hunches far enough. The ecological sensibility poses that humanity has no solace in vicarious suffering with only one divine person but instead with all creaturely things in an ongoing interdependent contraction. She wonders, “As [hunchback theology] pulls us down closer to the earth, is it beginning to tune to our animal kin, our creeping and crawling, rarely erect companions?”6 This “intercarnational”7 key strikes a chord, not of sovereign discovery in a self-sufficient composition, but in a decomposition where perpetual decay is in concert with different becomings—making harmonies in the rubble. She offers the peculiar image of God in (the) ruins of medieval churches where wildflowers grow in the cracks and no “forbidding potestas” occupy a seat in the decrepit structure.8
Hidden underneath my kitchen sink at home sits a small stainless steel compost bin where food scraps go after meals. Occasionally, the top will be uncovered to put in remnants of veggies and other greens. But most of the time, it is left in the dark and dry space of the cleaning cabinet. It is in this place where, when left over a significant period and given the right ratio of carbon and nitrogen, the scraps in this small container have the potential to turn into life-giving fertilizer for future plant life. In this process, the interdependent activity of creaturely things showcases a different power.
What Keller’s hunchback theology offers is a reimagining of sovereignty that situates power in the weakness of those ecologically and socially deemed other—the undesirable, disabled, and strange. Keller ushers toward an eco-political theology that reckons with the inevitable wreckage of life, marking the fullest, mysterious meaning of “sovereignty.” She conceives not of a solitary or confined suffering but one that impacts the processes of Life in its plurality.
Perhaps her critique of the incarnation’s limits has the potential of leaving Christendom in the rubble—a move that could turn toward seeing wildflowers bloom in a humbler portrayal of the Palestinian Jew Jesus.
Throughout the gospels, when Jesus is perpetually perceived to become the valiant messianic figure who will stand up to fight the sovereign powers of the lands, he counters this image by proving himself weak and seemingly insecure: “My hour has not yet come,” Jesus tells his mother during the wedding at Cana (John 2:4). And as Jesus’s closest friends think they are attuned to this “hour” of sovereign be-coming throughout his ministry, they become perplexed and eventually flee as the hour for the Son of Man to be glorified is a crucified God whose dead corpse eventually gets put into the earth (John 12:23; 17:1).
God is ruined. But was this not God’s “providential” plan?
Herein lies a paradox to earthly powers. Moltmann writes, “The God of freedom, the true God, is . . . not recognized by his power and glory in the history of the world, but through his helplessness and his death on the scandal of the cross of Jesus.”9 Conventional theological renderings of soteriology—depicted in the linear process of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection—have the potential of undercutting the sovereign implication of death and dying. Oftentimes, death does not get its full due because all things die. As Moltmann’s work espouses a theology of creaturely participation in the helplessness of Jesus, the vicariousness of the Messiah’s death for the whole of creation must also not be overlooked. This is the mystique, the glorification of becoming dead.10
The person of Jesus does not make a counterclaim to counter-exceptionalism. Jesus—God and world coalesced—glories in his own death because he knows that his decomposition, his self-giving, will distribute life to others.
In God of the Oppressed, James Cone quotes Moltmann saying that “Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present.”11 The Christian message is one of a hope, a resurrection, which in-breaks into our broken world, offering the gift of life to the weary and oppressed. But is this in-breaking resurrection a loud triumphalism unassociated with the realities of death and decay, negating any sovereign meaning to the things left hunchbacked in the dark? I am unsure—but bringing together the curiosities of both Keller and Moltmann, I do not think that to be the case.
For even in his resurrection, when Mary first encounters the messianic figure, Jesus is mistaken to be the gardener in a burial site—a ruinous place where dead things rot (John 20:15). Jesus is hunched down toward the ground, attentive to the microbial life of the earth and tending the wildflowers in the cracks. Herein lies an account of the resurrection with meekness as the central key to power and glory—a sovereignty without audition calling others to the same.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018), 131. Keller evokes Walter Benjamin’s “Theologico-Political Fragment,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 2007), where Benjamin marks the messianic power as emblematic in the corporate temporality of the material cosmos.
Keller, Political Theology of the Earth, 133.
Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation & Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1973), 222.
Keller, Political Theology of the Earth, 134.
Keller, Political Theology of the Earth, 134.
Here I am pulling from Keller’s language in her work, Intercarnations: Exercises in Theological Possibility (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017).
Keller, Political Theology of the Earth, 135.
Moltmann, The Crucified God, 212.
Here, I think it is important to address the potential dangers of romanticizing a political theology (a sovereignty) in death. In giving sovereign meaning to the physical and ecological reality of creaturely death, I do not wish to discredit the devastating immediacy of particular deaths, namely when death comes about as a result of mishap, murder, and genocide. As the atrocities of occupation and genocide continue to unfold on Palestinian bodies and land in Gaza, it is precisely the problematic of the totalitarian logic (engendered in the nation-state of Israel) that turns a blind eye to suffering and the evils of militarism. Stating “the glorification of becoming dead” does not glamorize death. Glory is situated in the Palestinian Jewish Messiah, who says, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the [land]” (Matt. 5:5). To the many lives lost to violence, land theft, and genocide, may this imagining of sovereignty give honor to their names. For it is in the un-forgetting of their memory which offers a fuller and truer picture of power and glory.
James Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 139.