The Voice of the Victim

What if: our historical moment is not unlike that moment just before the flood?

Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. (Genesis 6:11)

The catalog of violence among us is obvious:

• the school shootings as some prefer their guns to our children;

• our public rhetoric is now at the edge of violence, or beyond the edge;

• our refusal to host desperate immigrants, so that they die in risky, courageous efforts at escape;

• the wide-eyed violence of police brutality;

• the unrestrained exploitation of creation, etc., etc., etc.

What if: our current calamities are not unlike that of the flood when Holy Hiddenness mandated the earth to deathliness?

And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth. (Genesis 6:13)

The flood story is not a winner. The ark should not be noticed in a positive way, but as a massive failure on the part of Holiness who could manage to save only one family and sparse representatives of other species.

The flood narrative is a paradigmatic tale that recurs concretely and historically in the life-work of Jeremiah. The prophet lived at a moment of the collapse of his social order, the failure of social institutions, and the abandonment of Israel by the God of Israel. Jeremiah was left to bring that reality to speech amid a society that much preferred denial.  He gave voice to the violence that “official Jerusalem” wanted to disregard:

Also on your skirts is found 

the lifeblood of the innocent poor,

though you did not catch them breaking in.

Yet in spite of all these things you say,

“I am innocent.” (Jeremiah 2:34-35)

It was easy enough to spill the lifeblood of the innocent who are characteristically without protection or social leverage:

Violence and destruction are heard within her;

sickness and wounds are ever before me. (Jeremiah 6:7)

If you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place. (Jeremiah 7:6-7)

It is recurringly the “innocent blood” of the powerless that is the measure of corruption and violence:

For whenever I speak, I must cry out,

I must shout, “Violence and destruction!” (20:8)

Jeremiah is surrounded by conspiracy theorists, who whisper,

“Terror is all around!” (20:10)

The prophet nonetheless can still imagine a reversal of that dismaying practice:

Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place. (Jeremiah 22:3)

The single remedy to such systemic violence is simply a determined resolve for “righteousness and justice” that refuses violence to the powerless, and that would not shed innocent blood. Jeremiah sees his social reality clearly, without distraction by any distorting ideology; he also sees the demanding path to an alternative, namely, the valuing of the powerless.

I have been led to these reflections on social systemic violence by reading Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, by Judith Herman (2023). Herman is already known among us for her conversation-changing book, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1992). In that book she introduced us to a study of “trauma” that has impacted the study of the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. See Juliana Claassens, Jeremiah: The Traumatized Prophet, Ruth Poser, Ezekiel as Trauma Literature, and Refael Furman, “Trauma and Post-Trauma in the Book of Ezekiel,” OTE 33 (2020), 32-59. In her present book she is concerned, more specifically, with the recurring violence and abuse of women. Her accent is on “repair,” upon the rehabilitation of abused women through empowerment for an alternative life. Amid her advocacy, Herman offers two stunning summaries concerning, in turn, violence and non-violence toward vulnerable domestic partners and spouses.

Concerning violence and the exercise of destructive “power and control,” she lists the following elements (p. 29):

1. intimidation;

2. emotional abuse;

3. isolation;

4. minimizing, denying, blaming;

5. using children, with the threat of taking them away;

6. using male privilege;

7. using economic abuse;

8. using coercion and threat.

The intended outcome of such strategies is the disempowerment and therefore the complete powerlessness of women. Women who are so subjected could fully understand Jeremiah’s phrase, “violence and destruction.”

But Herman’s account is not so much focused on diagnoses as it is on restoration. Her book opens with two theses that occupy her book:

If trauma disorders are afflictions of the powerless, then empowerment must be a central principle of recovery. If trauma shames and isolates, then recovery must take place in community. These are the central therapeutic insights of my work, and I believe they have held up well across cultures and over time. (p. 2)

Thus empowerment through community!

The second inventory is her “equality wheel” that concerns movement away from violence toward wellbeing. This wheel includes:

1. non-threatening behavior;

2. respect;

3. trust and support;

4. honesty and accountability;

5. responsible parenting;

6. shared responsibility;

7. economic partnership;

8. negotiation and fairness.

The intent is to define domestic partnerships away from control and violence toward equality and partnership.

A key factor in the disempowerment of vulnerable women (or any vulnerable population including Jeremiah’s triad of “alien, orphan, widow” and the poor) is to deny them speech in the public domain. As long as such speech is denied, such persons disappear from political reality and can be safely disregarded as non-persons. The pressure of silencing is constituted exactly by the elements in Herman’s “wheel of power and control.” (In terms of the public process of silencing, we may notice that voter repression is exactly such an act of silencing.)

Because recovery is empowerment in community, the most elemental act of empowerment is to restore the vulnerable and victims to speech so that they are heard and restored in the public domain. In ancient Israel it was left to the prophets—most especially Jeremiah—to sound the voice of the powerless and to summon establishment figures to notice their existence and their claim on community attention and resources. We may take Jeremiah’s laments and speeches of judgment as ways of bringing victims to speech. More poignant, however, is the practice of lament that permits the victims to voice their own pain. It is for good reason that the grieving figure who speaks much in the Book of Lamentations is a woman who voices and embodies the pain and loss of “daughter Zion.” Thus Jeremiah is willing and able to sound the grief in his world in order to portray what it was like to be maltreated in a world of male ruthlessness. The prophets, of course, were variously resisted and silenced, because the power structure of priests, kings, and scribes did not want the victims to be heard or noticed. Beyond that, they did not want the resources of the community to be shared with such “undeserving” voices from below. So it is in our society, that the victims of social violence in its various forms are readily women, people of color, the poor, and LBGTQ+ persons. Whenever possible, the force of male power is at work to intensify the vulnerability and the risk of such jeopardized populations.

And of course, in our society sits the church with its mandate to be willfully and intentionally counter-advocates. My impression is that the worship of the church is much too often a practice of what Luther has called a “Theology of Glory” in which the happy, wondrous rule of God is reiterated; the liturgy is uninterrupted and never is heard a discouraging word. I do not suggest that the wellbeing of this cocoon of reassurance should be broken by mouthing the judgment of God, for that only plays into the hands of authoritarianism. Rather, I suggest that the church’s work in such a society as ours with its index of silence and violence is to enact always again, “a theology of the cross,” that is, the articulation of those below who are the beloved of God. Thus we may, for example, permit our “theology of glory” to be interrupted by long-running wounds that have been prayed away by our habitual liturgies. And when laments are sounded in the church, we need only ask, “Who is speaking this now?” In response we may be sure that the speaker is characteristically a woman, a poor person, a person of color, or an LBGTQ+ person—someone on the bitter side of social power. Thus the church may initiate and practice such pained speech from below. Or the church may have a more specific capacity to identify, in our own community, those who might be speaking such pain. Preferable to reporting on such pain, it would be best to have, amid the liturgy, the actual carriers of such pain in our community. Such sounding of life experiences of hurt and wound, frequently or regularly, would serve to keep the church’s work linked to the world that God so loved. Such a practice of “the voice of the victim” would mean, in many congregations, a break with our ‘Theology of Glory” that only offers a respite from the world. But real world worship requires and permits something from us. And whenever we hear such a voice from below, we are in the vicinity of a “theology of the cross” wherein we attest that God has cast God’s lot with the vulnerable. I reckon the flood narrative to be a lapse and a failure on God’s part. But I imagine that by the end of the flood story God has embraced a better resolve:

I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations.… I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.” (Genesis 9:11-17)

This is the resolve of the creator God to avoid the wholesale savaging of the earthly population. Better that all should be saved, including the population of victims. The accent in the “theology of the cross” is the confession that God’s suffering love stands in full relationship with victims. This is the story that the church performs when it breaks with a “Theology of Glory”:

We’ve a story to tell to the nations, 

that shall turn their hearts to the right,

a story of truth and mercy,

a story of peace and light,

a story of peace and light. (The United Methodist Hymnal, 569)

This is a story of love wrought through “the path of sorrow” trod. It anticipates the end of evil, war, and violence. That story can be told by the church most effectively when it is narrated by those who have known powerlessness who have come anew to personal power by the recovery of their voices. What a way to think about the church: the place where silence is broken, where the truth is spoken, and where victims are empowered. That gospel tale belongs in the ears of all of God’s people, and most especially on the lips of the victims now come to speech. 

This economy of speech calls to mind for me Psalm 107. In the Psalm, four classic cases of suffering are identified:

Some wandered in desert places. (v. 4)

Some sat in darkness and in gloom,

prisoners in misery and irons. (v. 10)

Some were sick through their sinful ways. (v. 17)

Some went down to the sea in ships. (p. 23)

In each case, big trouble came and rendered them helpless. But in each case, they cried out and God saved them. We may imagine that the work of rescue was accomplished through human agents who performed God in their praxis. And in each case, those newly rescued were enjoined “to thank the Lord for his steadfast love” (Psalm 107:8, 15, 21, 31). Thanks is the celebrative response of those newly empowered for an abundant life so long denied them. The church is surely the venue for such utterances as the Psalm urges. The song has compelling credibility when it is on the lips of those who have newly come to life. This particular form of speech in gratitude is itself an act of empowerment, both for the speaker and for those who hear.

Walter Brueggemann

May 5, 2023