MDivs & Gabes

post #1

When the table is set to discuss the church’s relationship with the reality of trauma, it’s unavoidable to name how she has always been inarticulate when it comes to the consequences of abuse and harm. From our experience, we’ve witnessed how people from our church often stutter or are taken aback when grief, despair, hopelessness, betrayal, and loss are addressed, especially pertaining to the bodily manifestations and sensations of these consequences. In Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and Jürgen Moltmann’s The Church in the Power of the Spirit, our hope is to observe how the church (mostly the Western church) views trauma and healing, particularly within the church’s collective identity and experience. Our exploration through these two resources helped us see how the church does not choose to remain in Holy Saturday. She idealizes quick fixes and hastens to resurrection. She’d rather cure than heal. She’d rather replace than redeem. How does the church then reconcile Moltmann’s pneumatology wherein he repeatedly claimed that the “eschatological future, which, in the history of Christ, has already begun in the present existence of the church”? (p. 27) with Van Der Kolk’s narration of numerous and vivid experiences of deeply injured children and survivors of war? Why haven’t such questions been raised before, and how cheap have our “hallelujah’s” been whenever we refuse to stay long enough within the three days between Christ’s death and resurrection? Does this picture reflect a dissociative trait of Christ’s bride in response to her own trauma? In intersecting both works, we arrive at the understanding that the study of trauma focuses on people. Autobiographies will often focus on traumatic events with the intended goal of expressing a belief informed by an experience. Similarly, ecclesiology is a collective of people. Here, we seek to understand how recent trauma studies speak to the role of the church as well as the history of the church.

The present church in a post-traumatic society raises the question: how does she operate in light of trauma? Is the church operating and acting on certain wounds that took place centuries ago? The effect of which is rooted in the idea that the church is somehow set aside for the traumatized, and therefore set apart or stands distinct from the traumatized. Can the church then be a haven for the therapeutic practice? Or does the church function as an inherently different entity which may or may not bring healing? However, by viewing the church as separated, congregants, lay-people, and ministers are given the expectations of total therapeutic integration. If the church functions as a non-traumatized institution which brings regulation to a traumatized world, how can those who are dysregulated ever take part in it? Similarly, is someone ever fully “regulated?” Although these are valid questions, and there remain concerns of the therapeutic field, by rephrasing the stem of the problem, there could be a stronger possibility for integration. Is the church herself traumatized? There are two main perspectives of imagining such a diagnosis. Both are beneficial to the intersection of ecclesiology and traumatology.

The first of these views the church as a corporate entity (existing through many generations) and the second considers the church as a multiplicity of people (existing in individual families, denominations, and times). The first functions with a conglomeration of traumas stemming back to the time of Christ. Under this lens, the church experienced persecution and martyrdom, but also the travesties of the crusades and the divisions of the Reformation. Under the second lens, localized traumas have been passed down into specific denominations and local expressions of the church through epigenetics, which the most obvious example of this exists today in the American black church — an area of study that Van Der Kolk devotes a significant amount of his work to.

Overall, our aim is to recount the ways in which the church holds and acts on a collective memory of deep, perpetuating harm, but is unaddressed due to its inconsistency with the hope of a “renewed life in Christ” or the confession of an “eschatological hope” verified by the indwelling of the Spirit. With the voices of Van Der Kolk and Moltmann, we intend to primarily ask how has the church’s own collective trauma been embodied in her separation from the world’s tragedies and other people’s wounds while she disengages from her own.

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Bibliography

Moltmann, Jürgen. The church in the power of the Spirit: a contribution to messianic ecclesiology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

Van Der Kolk, Bessel. The body keeps the score: brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. NY, NY: Penguin Books, 2015.