What is Christian Martyrdom?

⁶ Though he was God,
he did not think of equality with God
as something to cling to.
⁷ Instead, he gave up his divine privileges;
he took the humble position of a slave
and was born as a human being.
When he appeared in human form,
⁸ he humbled himself in obedience to God
and died a criminal’s death on a cross.

Phil 2:5-11 (NLT)

The free abdication of our privilege of living is a second, necessary feature of martyrdom. Any death that is compelled by some external force or pressure cannot be counted as a true martyrdom. Martyrdom is not done reluctantly, at least not in the end (obviously there can be some natural hesitancy in the process of decision making). But where or when there is psychological or social manipulation, or religious fear-mongering, there there cannot be genuine martyrdom. Again, the first criteria for martyrdom being love, not fear, entails that any handing over of oneself for destruction be a voluntary act, not one born out of coercion or manipulation.

Ultimately the point of Christ’s own martyrdom was freedom: freedom for the world.

It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.

Gal 5:1

Any act of martyrdom that is conducted out of love (for truth) and carried out voluntarily ultimately has freedom as its aim. The telos of any act of martyrdom is this, and this alone: to testify with one’s own life to the truth out of love. In doing so, the Christian demonstrates most concretely and to the greatest degree the real nature of freedom. Freedom is not found in anything of this world, or in the attaining of any amount or type of this-worldly good or wealth. Ultimate freedom is found in the liberation of the human soul from the bonds of sin, to the glory of God and, to be sure, to the hope of eternal life. The martyr sees this and knows it. He understands what Paul, also martyred for truth and love, understood when he wrote this to a church in (modern day) Turkey:

Therefore, if you have been raised with Christ, keep seeking the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. ² Set your minds on the things that are above, not on the things that are on earth. ³ For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴ When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory.

Col 3:1-4

It is over this last point, this idea of martyrdom being about freedom, that most secularists stumble. This is inconceivable to many of a pagan mind: both ancient and modern.

It is in the free abdication of life for the sake of being free that many secularists and pagans misunderstand Christian martyrdom. They falsely assume that Christians literally hate life, or their lives, or the good things of life, and, like Gnostics, long to die or escape life, and, as such, seek every opportunity to do so.

Ancient pagans expressed this false idea about Christians hating life quite vociferously. In his most famous passage, on Nero’s persecution of Christians in Rome, the historian Tacitus, put it this way:

Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.

Tacitus, Annals, 15.44 [emphasis added]

Modern pagans like Michael York imply the same about the Christian disposition toward life in the here and now when they describe their own Pagan ideas:

The burden of paganism is its necessity to accept the pleasurable without guilt or intimidation. The hedonic is for the pagan the gift of her gods, one to be celebrated and enjoyed. There is no denial or austerity unless these are directed toward a particularly sought goal—such as initiation or shamanic trance. In general, the pleasurable—whether sensual or intellectual—constitutes the raison d’être for living the pagan life. A puritanical god that forbids and rejects this-worldly pleasure is one that the pagan will in turn reject.

Michael York, “Pagan Theology” in The Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, 295

This pagan interpretation of not only sublimation of the pleasurable for a higher good, but also the greatest example of it: martyrdom, is understandable given Jesus’ own teachings. In many places, Jesus teaches directly about how we must “hate our lives.” For example, in Mark 8:34-38, Jesus says explicitly:

³⁴ And He summoned the crowd together with His disciples, and said to them, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. ³⁵ For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it. ³⁶ For what does it benefit a person to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul? ³⁷ For what could a person give in exchange for his soul? ³⁸ For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.”

There are too many examples of Christian sublimation, both in dominical red-letter teachings, as well as in the rest of the New Testament, to deny that self-denial and a real rejection of the world is not part of the Christian life. It is. However, we cannot identify this “hatred of the world” with a hatred of God’s creation, which is, as York points out, a gift to be celebrated and enjoyed. Hatred of the world is not hatred of what God has made.

Clement of Alexandria on the Martyr’s Relation to the World

The 2nd century Church Father, Clement of Alexandria, a Greek philosopher prior to his conversion to Christ, articulates the right understanding of how the martyr “hates the world.” It is not disgust with the world that motivates the martyr to be open to death. It is actually a form of love for the world that drives her. The difference is in one’s evaluation of good things by degree and not by kind. For the martyr, the most relevant things are the nature of the soul and of the body. For the point of decision is whether or not to sacrifice the body for the sake of truth, which relates to the soul. Clement puts it this way:

The soul of man is confessedly the better part of man, and the body the inferior. But neither is the soul good by nature, nor, on the other hand, is the body bad by nature. Nor is that which is not good straightway bad. For there are things which occupy a middle place, and among them are things to be preferred, and things to be rejected. The constitution of man, then, which has its place among things of sense, was necessarily composed of things diverse, but not opposite — body and soul.

Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, Book IV.26

The soul and body are both good; but not entirely good. And while the soul is the better part and the body inferior, this doesn’t mean what pagans often think it does, namely, that the body is without value. However, both body and soul are corrupted by sin, and, ultimately, it is this corruption that the Christian righty hates. Here the pagan refuses to acknowledge what we all know to be the case: that the world is not the way it is supposed to be. As such, the pagan must accept corruption, and the pain it brings, as if it is all part of god, i.e., of nature. On an authentically pagan view, even cancer cannot be judged as “malevolent.”

The Christian, however, can hate the corrupted world without hating physical nature as such. The physical nature that will emerge when God reconstitutes the world at the end of time, to include our physical bodies, is not something the Christian dreads. Physicality as such, unlike in various Gnostic traditions, is not the problem. Bodies, as such, are not evil. After all, God created a physical world for us and our physical bodies. Thus, the Martyr does not hate the material world. He only sees the world in its right place. This is so much so the case, that for anyone who thinks they can “seek out” death, Clement has a strong warning. In commenting on Jesus’ words in Matthew 10:23, where Christ says to flee persecution, Clement remarks:

He [Christ] does not advise flight, as if persecution were an evil thing; nor does He enjoin them by flight to avoid death, as if in dread of it, but wishes us neither to be the authors nor abettors of any evil to any one, either to ourselves or the persecutor and murderer. For He, in a way, bids us take care of ourselves. But he who disobeys is rash and foolhardy. If he who kills a man of God sins against God, he also who presents himself before the judgment-seat becomes guilty of his death. And such is also the case with him who does not avoid persecution, but out of daring presents himself for capture. Such a one, as far as in him lies, becomes an accomplice in the crime of the persecutor.

The Stromata, Book IV.10

Anyone foolhardy enough to seeks out persecution and not avoid its dangers is, according to Clement, abetting evil. For every martyr is also a human person and, as such, made in the image and likeness of God. The Christian who in any way tempts their oppressors to kill them is him or herself partially responsible for their persecutor’s wickedness. One does not rashly present one’s own life  “before the judgement-seat” and simply get away with it. Thus, we do not hate the world so much as to not love life. That is why every true Christian is radically pro-life, from conception to natural death, to include his or her own life.

For many pagans today, however, any form of sublimation is itself a great transgression: a sin against the life instinct and the hedonic impulse. While Paganism may have its many sacrifices, there cannot, in principle, be such a thing as pagan martyrdom. The only reason for the pagan to embrace death being that life itself has lost its savor. Of course, if the pleasures of life fail to satisfy the pagan, that should at least arouse curiosity as to why.

In sum, the Christian martyr is the man or woman who, in virtue of not loving the material world more than God or his or her own soul, testifies to the truth out of a motivation of love and for the sake of demonstrating to the world where true freedom lies, namely, in the eternal places with God, our Creator, and the Son, our Savior.