MÁRTÍROK, ÁLDOZATOK, TÚLÉLŐK. VIZSGÁLÓDÁS A SZENVEDÉS ÉS IDENTITÁSFORMÁLÓDÁS KÉRDÉSÉBEN
MARTYRS, VICTIMS, SURVIVORS. INVESTIGATING SUFFERING AND IDENTITY FORMATION

Summary/Abstract: Modernity was dominated by the image of winner, while postmodernism can be associated with victimary thinking. Being a winner, among other things, meant that the person had the strength and the ability to put the other at his service. History was primarily the story of winners, or a story from the winner’s point of view. The defeated had to suffer not only the punishment imposed on him by the winner, but they could not count on the recognition and sympathy of the broader society. The postmodern observed the neglected victims for the first time by questioning the earlier dominant metanarratives. As the claims of authority were abandoned, the voice of the victims became louder. This led to an interchange between the role of winner and victim. Slavoj Žižek observes that „the ideology of victimization penetrates intellectual and political life even to the extent that in order for your work to have any ethical authority you must be able to present and legitimate yourself as in some sense victimized […] and the fundamental right becomes the right […] to tell your story; to formulate the specific narrative of your suffering.” This switch in the dominant image of our society has to be analysed. In the article below, we do it by presenting what Christian tradition teaches about suffering, based on the definitions and examination of David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, and Elizabeth Castelli. The answer to the above-mentioned question is solely limited to the examination of martyrdom as a special form of suffering. Driving from the Christian tradition on martyrdom, we can recognize some dangers in our societal discourse and dominant ethical values. We shortly present some aspects of what it means to be closed into the victimary discourse and identity, and some possibilities of liberation presented by the theologies of Jürgen Moltmann and Miroslav Volf.

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