Dear Friends in Christ,

Trauma entered the English language in the 1690’s from the Greek—a wound, a hurt, a defeat. Its psychological sense, “psychic wound,” was coined by William James in 1894.

Not until 1980 did it become an official diagnosis as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Vietnam vets organized and demanded attention: “We’re home, and we look okay, but in our minds we’re still in Vietnam.”

A vet I knew in Connecticut heard a car backfire, and he immediately hit the sidewalk pavement. Dismissing this condition as “battle fatigue” or “moral weakness” would no longer suffice.

Later work by Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery, 1992) and Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score, 2014) broadened and deepened understanding.

Hermann noted similarities between the symptoms of the vets and victims of rape and incest. She made the case that trauma is trauma, whether born of war or of private violence. Power, silence, and secrecy maintain and promote suffering.

Van der Kolk showed how trauma resides in the body long after the initial abuse occurred. Nervous and somatic systems store the disturbance. His findings gave millions language for what they had long felt but could not name.

Professor of Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary, David Carr, brought this lens to scripture. After a life-threatening bicycle accident, he began to see how the collective trauma of Israel and the early church had shaped the Bible itself.

In Holy Resilience, The Bible’s Traumatic Origins, he submits that these texts are defined by survival of communal catastrophe. The Psalm of lament, Job’s accusations, Lamentations—these are not failures of faith. They are the literature of people who descended into the fire and wrote from inside it.

Both Carr and the president of Union, Serene Jones, see the original ending of the Gospel of Mark as evidence of trauma. Raw open-endedness—the empty tomb, the young man’s announcement, and the women fleeing in fear and saying nothing.

Resurrection accounts came later.

The second trauma-tsunami was the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE which became the matrix for both Rabbinic Judaism and the nascent Christian movement—both responses of faith to the threat of Rome, embraces of meaning and assurance that refused imperial containment (parallels to Christian Nationalism in our own day).

Mark 16:8 is seen as unprocessed grief, shock, and disorientation. Carr calls Paul “the traumatized apostle,” the man with a past as persecutory agent against Christians and his new identity as apostle of the Christ.

Carr notes that Paul reaches back to Isaiah 53 with the suffering servant texts not as predictive of Jesus but as a prior tradition for understanding survival of catastrophic loss.

In the “honest”(not doubting) Thomas story, the resurrected Jesus invites the disciple to touch his wounds. Just seeing them is enough for Thomas.

The risen body still bears its trauma.

The resurrection does not erase the crucifixion; it passes through it.

The cross became a sign not of humiliating defeat, but its opposite—triumph over death and all of its proxies: shame, empire, violence, exclusion, fear, abandonment, silence, absence, and the list goes on. The Christian movement elevated that which was intended to terminate once and for all into its founding confession and inexhaustible grace.

Your fellow traveler,

—Richard