I.

Five years have passed since I left the church that raised me. It was not all bad memories, though the most meaningful moments weren’t the regular services either.[1]

While I was in high school, every Thursday evening, a group of friends met me at an old church building to read and study the Bible together. It was a dingey building, ignored by most everyone else in the church, the once-used building that the church had outgrown decades ago, having since become a megachurch. But it was a special place to me. It was where the biblical texts came to life. There I felt the freedom to read, question, and be questioned by these texts. And despite the smallness of the room, I felt immersed in the biblical worlds. The priestly creation hymn of Genesis; John’s confession that God is enfleshed in a person from the countryside of Palestine — these stories brought me face to face with the reality unleashed by God.

In that forgotten room I learned that the biblical texts are filled with symbols that point to the love of God. Jesus is the symbol of God’s unique presence in the world. Of course, Jesus is both a symbol and more than a symbol. But he is symbolic insofar as his life points to a transcendent love that preceedes the beginning of all things, a love that brings all creaturely life into existence, and a love who so adores creation that it would take up flesh and bone, become human, and preach a message of freedom to those ensnared in a world a violence and hate. This is a love unconquerable by death.

Symbols invite interpretation of the world. Their graphic imagery gives meaningful shape to everyday life. They etch themselves into consciousness so thoroughly that when we encounter a symbol a whole set of meanings is invoked. Our world, put simply, is experienced as symbolic.

But the meaning of symbols can be redirected, their truly liberating significance lost. The church I grew up in was a megachurch founded during the late 1960s during a time of tremendous social turmoil. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated a few years after the church was founded. And in Colombia, Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church met in Medellín to discuss what relationship the gospel had to the economic oppression of the poor, a conversation that would be fundamental to the development of a movement known as liberation theology. But I don’t remember these movements within Christianity being significant to the theology of the church. What I remember is a theology that invoked symbols like God’s salvation, the Holy Spirit, and the cross all the while being indifferent to much of the injustice around us. I remember fellow congregants expressing unabashed support for Donald Trump; and I remember mostly indifference toward police violence against black life. The reality of God’s salvation, it appeared to me, made no claim on the racism and racist violence in which I was raised.

Stretching two stories tall, my church placed a cross at the front of their building and cast light on it at night so that you could see it from the road. The cross marked the building as a church. But it also signified more than that. To me, the cross signified an American Christianity indifferent to the injustice, an indifference gave way to callousness and allowed nationalist sentiment to flourish.

II.

Today what many see when they encounter Christian symbols, especially of Jesus and the cross, is an indifferent and unjust Christianity. Due to a history of injustice and misuse, the symbols of Christian faith have been ruined for so many. The result of that ruin is what can be described as a symbolic devastation. In the experience of symbolic devastation, we can lose sight of a symbol’s liberating meaning and the symbol itself becomes silent. There is a temptation to abandon the symbol altogether.

The reason for symbolic devastation of Christian symbols arises from the fact that these symbols have a long-cemented history of misuse. In the Americas, Christian symbols have been called upon to justify all manner of wrongdoings: from conquest and indigenous genocide in the colonial era, to White nationalism in the early American era and today, and to the suburban megachurches who aspire after wealth and middleclass stability while ignoring the violent history of the past which made possible our present moment. At this point, the misuse of Christian symbols carried across this history has become a genuine, even if mutilated, tradition, a foul collective habit of appropriating the stories of Israel and Jesus to advance land conquest, capitalist greed, and cultural destruction. Normalized and internalized, the interpretive practice of abusing Christian symbols is the reason for devastation that so many of us experience.

One consequence of symbolic devastation has been more public conversation around the need to “deconstruct” the Christian faith. Christian leaders and intellectuals have both lauded and critiqued the usefulness of deconstruction. Ultimately, however, I see the call for theological deconstruction as an outcome of symbolic devastation. The question is not whether one should deconstruct the symbols of Christian faith, but how to recover an encounter with the liberating meaning of Christian symbols after symbolic devastation has left us with nothing but silence.

To put it another way, deconstruction is an option; symbolic devastation is not. We do not choose to be devastated, rather we undergo it. Deconstruction is the necessary step afterward, where we try to understand why and how symbols are used to give religious credence to the unjust world we continue to build.

So far, I have described what appears to be a rather linear process: symbols at first are not devastated and then become devastated. But perhaps it is better to think of the process as occurring differently depending on our relationship to the symbol.

For some, the devastation is all one knows. The symbol does nothing but signify and justify the violence in which we all live, move, and have our being. This is the case for intellectuals such as Franz Fanon who claims that the church represents nothing more but “the ways of the colonizer.” We could read Karl Marx in this way, who believes that religion is nothing other than an ideological justification behind the unequal social order that the bourgeoisie have built. Illuminating as these two figures are, they are resigned to religion’s liberating possibilities.

Others stagger back and forth, carrying within them a dimming hope that struggles against what appears to be a history of the symbol’s signification of violence. Here we are not resigned, but we understand those who have resigned. The struggle is navigating the murkiness of a symbol that simultaneously points toward love and toward violence. Stagger one way, we can recover the symbol; stagger another way, and the liberating meaning of the symbol is lost.

In this sense, it is helpful to imagine the experience of symbolic devastation as a death of meaning. One grieves a loss. The symbol becomes a linguistic corpse. It is silent. And terrifying though this experience is, for those for whom the symbol died, there is also no going back. Devastation stretches outward from the symbol and takes hold of the person. They wonder if the symbol will ever be meaningful to them again. If it is to mean something, the previous interpretation is no longer sufficient.

III.

The experience of symbolic devastation finds expression in Mary who, as the Gospel of John tells us, approached Jesus’s tomb at dawn just a few days after his crucifixion. Jesus was her beloved teacher; and more than that, he represented the arrival of God’s reign in her world. To see the crucifixion of Jesus, then, was to witness the literal and actual death of the enfleshed symbol of God’s love. Having witnessed the brutality of the Roman empire, as it exerted its full power to expose the fragile humanity of Jesus, Mary saw her hopes and dreams come to an end. Who for her was a symbol of new life, she now believed to be a silent corpse. I imagine her weeping in the dark just before daybreak.

Many of us find ourselves in similar kinds of graveyards. What were once powerfully evocative symbols are now silent; they lie before us like corpses. They no longer speak. We tremble and weep before the possibility that there might never be a return to the fullness, a return to the reservoir of meaning that these symbols point to and that we base our lives upon.[2] Can these symbols mean something new? Can they speak to us again?

I believe they can.

My name is Colton Bernasol, a friend and essay contributor for World Outspoken. I am a follower of Jesus, somebody who believes that Jesus’s teachings, way of life, crucifixion, and resurrection reveal the presence of God in our world. And I have experienced symbolic devastation, losing the liberating meaning of Christian symbols as they have been used to justify the injustice in the world. Over the next few weeks, we will be exploring the theme of symbolic devastation. How do symbols get devastated in the first place? What does it feel like to experience the death of the meaning of the symbols we cherish and that frame our world? And how might we re-encounter the liberating meaning of these symbols after their silence?

To answer these questions, we will need to journey with two theologians who wrote and reflected in contexts that are both similar to and different from my own.[3] But before doing that, we need to go back to 1492, in the first moments when European explorers and colonizers arrived on the shores of the Caribbean and made their ways to the Americas. For it is there that we consider one symbol in particular – the cross – so that we might trace the origins of the devastation we experience today.

Why does Symbolic devastation occur? How might we name its causes? And what does it look like to interpret Christian symbols “otherwise,” so that their liberating meaning might be rediscovered and encountered? Join me every two weeks as we work through these questions together. Find these episodes on the Mestizo Podcast feed or read the transcripts on the World Outspoken website. Though the silence of symbolic devastation is real, we can trust in the story of Mary, who, facing the silence, heard her teacher’s voice after death. Let us move forward knowing that the God of justice – Israel’s God, the one revealed in Jesus – is the God who speaks even after devastation.

Blessings until next time.

Episode Credits:

Writer and Host: Colton Bernasol

Music by Lucas Manning

Producer: Lucas Manning

Executive Producer: Emanuel Padilla

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About Colton Bernasol

Colton Bernasol is an editor and writer from Plainfield, Illinois, a Southwest suburb in the Chicagoland area. He graduated from Wheaton College with a BA in Philosophy and Biblical/Theological Studies and from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary with an MA in Theology and Ethics. He writes at the intersection of religion, society, and culture. Currently, he lives in Chicagoland with his wife Anna. Sign up for his newsletter, Provisional.

Footnotes

[1] These podcast episodes draw on and adapt research and writing I’ve done for my master’s thesis. See Colton R. Bernasol, "Theology After Symbolic Devastation: Method in the Liberation Theologies of Juan Luis Segundo, Jon Sobrino, and M. Shawn Copeland." Order No. 29162635, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, 2022. http://turing.library.northwestern.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/theology-after-symbolic-devastation-method/docview/2675665905/se-2.

[2] This metaphor comes from philosopher Paul Ricoeur.

[3]A correction: in the podcast I mistakenly said that I would look at three theologians. While I do that in my thesis, in this podcast series, I will only be looking at two.