Cage Match Christology

Jesus Christ, tough guy

On February 1, the New York Times reported on an apparently growing segment of the nondenominational Christian world: mixed martial arts bouts. This is not to say that they’ve noticed very muscly men with Christian tattoos climbing into the ring. Rather, this is the story of how some congregations are using mixed martial arts (MMA) fighting to bring 18-34 year old men back into the pews. According to the Times article, the embrace of MMA ranges from showing bouts and talking about combat and fighting as a metaphor for actually training fighters and hosting bloodsport matches. Where to begin?

First, I want to acknowledge that trying to carve out any specifically pacifist Christology is not simple. Those dedicated to finding a Biblical excuse for violence love to point to Matthew 10:34 and Luke 22:36 to state that even Jesus knew that sometimes push would come to shove and if you couldn’t push or shove, you were in trouble. I won’t belabor that argument here, except to say that those two quotes stack up poorly against the reported actions of Jesus in the Gospels and the first few centuries of Christian resistance to militarism.

What is particularly troubling in this new Bloodsport Ecclesiology is its notion of anthropology and specifically masculinity. Rather than expand the repertoire of acceptable “male” behaviors to include such things as charity, forgiveness and gentleness, these leaders are reinforcing the same notions of masculine aggression that have given us generations of homophobia, spousal abuse, child abuse, war and–tautologically enough–MMA itself.

We ought not point to Jesus as an exemplar of only HALF of humanity but of the completion of all of humanity. Yes, there is aggression and affection present in all of us. There was both aggression and affection shown in the Gospel accounts of Jesus. If we follow the Chalcedonian formulation that Jesus Christ was fully human and fully divine both, we must allow for his having had the same aggressive drives as we have. That does not, however, mean that we are called to embrace those drives and pound the daylights out of one another.

Not too much further down the road of that embrace of aggression lies the notion that the victor in any physical confrontation had God on her or his side. Surely, if we believe in Christ crucified we cannot affirm that belief.