Cannibal Christianity

In July of 1845 Sir John Franklin went missing while splashing about the polar regions looking for the fabled Northwest Passage. Inuit hunters later revealed that the crew had abandoned their ice-bound vessels and, on the unsuccessful journey to safety, resorted to eating one another in a bid for survival. Sir John’s widow, Lady Jane, could accept that her husband had died like other men, but not that he had dined on other men. Mortality is one thing, bad manners another. She appealed to celebrity novelist Charles Dickens to defend Sir John’s legacy. Dickens rose to the task in an immoderate and even racist rant which he published in his magazine, Household Words.

Richard Flanagan fictionalizes this historical incident in his novel Wanting. Flanagan conceives Dickens as terrified by any possibility of a crack in the fortifications of Victorian repression. In researching Franklin’s previous expeditions, he discovers an incident where, pushed to the extremes of hunger, the great adventurer had dined on his own footgear. “That,” Flanagan imagines Dickens thinking triumphantly, “was an Englishman. Stout heart, stewed boots, decency dressed up as diet.”

Like most Baptists, I suppose that I would rather eat my shoes - with my socks for an appetizer - than admit to any notion of the “real presence” of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Indeed, I fear I have occasionally allowed my language in the pulpit to become as intemperate as Dickens’ in print. I feel myself justified in this, guided by doctrinal commitments, but Flanagan causes me to wonder whether it might not just be possible that I was also pushed by personal phobias. Did a prior commitment to propriety ever masquerade as devotion to self-evident dogma?

Jesus’ congregation in John chapter six certainly went Dickensian on him when he started talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. You can argue that this sermon contains no direct reference to the Eucharist but the metaphors pass uncomfortably close. To make matters worse, Orthodox writer Frederica Matthewes-Green points out that Jesus “does not use the polite term for eating, phago; he uses the earthy trogo, the word for a cow munching grain.” To be fair, not everyone buys that distinction. Noted Greek scholar A. T. Robertson points out that the text uses both verbs with roughly equal frequency (phago, v.49,40,42,53,58; trogo, v.54,56,57,58) and argues that such usage blurs any sharp differentiation.

Still, it intrigues me. Rather than “decency dressed up as diet,” Jesus gives us a munching and crunching of crucified flesh, table manners that would shock a cannibal - or a cow! However much weight we put on fine shades of synonyms, no one can argue that the original audience missed this point: “Therefore many of His disciples, when they heard this, said, ‘This is a difficult statement; who can listen to it?’” (v.60). Indeed, when Jesus unveiled the menu of the Kingdom Cafe with its daily special of crucified and consumed savior, he cut his market share from at least five thousand to a mere dozen - a 99.76 percent drop in business!

In contrast to Dickens and Franklin, Flanagan portrays Matthina, a Tazmanian aborigine, daughter of a dead chieftain and one of the few survivors of both intentional (warfare) and accidental (disease) white genocide. Struck by her barefoot beauty while doing a native dance, Lady Jane declares, “One might almost say her body thinks.”

Thinking bodies or decency dressed up as diet - the table of our Lord demands that we decide. It has always struck me that in his famous sermon against transubstantiation, my hero C. H. Spurgeon (another Victorian Englishman!) attacked the Catholic position on the basis of science. He proposes to take consecrated wine and get a series of altar boys tanked up on it, arguing that the blood of Christ would not cause drunkenness, so altar boys on a bender would prove the falsity of the transformation. Of the idea of the real presence the great Baptist scoffs, “I should say that you do not expect us to believe you, whilst God allows our heads to be occupied by brains.” But surely a scientist might also offer to execute a series of rabbis and see if any of them rose from the dead, arguing along the same lines against the resurrection. In a faith based on the unaccountable actions of bodies, we should lean lightly on the scientific method.

But perhaps we might - just a little bit - if our bodies do the thinking.

Now, to be sure, Paul warns that the body needs a good beating now and again to keep its thoughts from running amuck. And I’m still too Baptist to gaze on a slice of bread as the priest intones, “Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world.” Still, still . . . . Perhaps this is a time to re-jigger Our Lord’s old parable: If your right hand offends you, cut it off and eat mine. It is better for you to lose a part of your dignity than for your whole properly-fed body to be cast into hell.

This entry was posted on June 29, 2009 at 11:09 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.