Violence always transforms. That’s the first thing and the first meaning. Every dramatic play and every movie which has violence in it tells you this. The world is different after triumphant violence. Peace has returned, so now we can get on with our lives while continuing to tell the heroic story. This is also supposed to be the case in what we call reality. The Second World War is the all-time textbook example. The allies destroyed a lot of very bad people, the world was started over and everyone was happy. Right? Well now you come to think about it, no, not really.
Apart from the fifty odd million people killed it’s not at all certain that things were started over. If WW2 grew out of WW1 we could say the Cold War, and all its proxy battles from Vietnam to Afghanistan, grew out of WW2. This is what Girard is talking about in Battle to the End. The pairs of dueling rivals just keep getting bigger and more apocalyptically armed, the next one inheriting the legacy of the last, until we blow ourselves to kingdom come.
It is clearly possible to see things played out mechanically that way. But there is also a peculiar contemporary dimension which I think Girard did not pay enough attention to and yet fits entirely with another of his categories. We now have a war against terrorism and it is by definition a faceless enemy. The character of terrorism is that it can strike anytime anywhere, but it does not possess clear territory with a state, an army, industrial infrastructure etc.
It’s as if violence has learned its own lessons and rather than hurtle down a dead end street has morphed once more in order to preserve itself as a human way of being. Instead of containing itself within big national or imperial systems more and more it is a free-floating global entity, without boundaries, hidden within the soul of the individual.
Every suicide bomber who detonates him or herself has no knowledge of whether that bomb kills anybody let alone whether the event was militarily or politically effective. The suicide bomber does not belong to a traditional this-worldly cause with its organization, its tactics, its battles, its experience of victories and defeats and living to fight another day. Sure, there is belief in some ultimate historical victory and in the meantime there is also the whole thing of going to heaven and its boundless pleasures, but none of this is able fully to explain the critical lack of this-worldly perspective in the individual fighter. It does not seem to explain the Islamic women and neither does it explain the lone-wolf mass murderers of our own society, the public place shooters who kill colleagues, strangers and then themselves, or fly a small plane into an IRS building. We hear of these incidents almost weekly and people readily make the link between political terrorists and what these people are doing. What ties them all together is the transcendence of violence itself.
Violence has escaped the containing power of the state and the cyclical rhythms of war and peace. It has become a steady-state of human affairs which infects everyone at one degree or another. The apt Girardian concept is permanent sacrificial crisis, a situation where violence takes over the mimetic human creature so literally he or she becomes possessed by it. He has nowhere to go except a terminal explosion. In the past the way out was the scapegoat, discharging all the violence on one blameworthy figure. But now that figure is always resurrected, declared innocent by one side or the other, or the individual experiences himself as the real and ultimate victim. And so the only way of discharging the violence, of ending the unwinnable argument, is to go out yourself with the final blinding flash. And that is to be infected with the transcendence of violence.
In such circumstances the state devotes itself more and more to invigilating every individual in its range, which means wire taps at home, drones abroad and security everywhere. It is an infinite and doomed program but it is the one meaningful thing the state can do in its traditional role of containing violence. It means also, however, that the state is reduced more and more to a double of the terrorist, prepared also to use the same methods: assassination, torture, bombing outside of declared war, justification of illegal acts. And this could well mean—contra Girard—that the final apocalyptic showdown is not so much between two state-sized super-armed adversaries but between the asymmetric symmetry of state versus citizen. This is the famous Orwellian nightmare and it’s just as possible as Girard’s more Napoleonic vision.
“Transforming violence” can also mean, therefore, that the role of violence itself is being transformed. It is morphing before our eyes, creating a strange inhuman kind of society where cameras watch our every move and nevertheless in-flight bombers still elude detection, where there are metal-detectors in primary schools and yet the next stranger you meet can carry a hidden grudge that will end your life. What then does it mean to be a Christian in these circumstances?
It is to bring about the third meaning of “transforming violence” where violence is the object of transformation not the subject; where violence is not itself the pathway of change, but the pathway to be changed. It is a question of challenging and changing the deep character of the human, a construct rooted in violence, into something wonderfully new, a creature rooted in love. In our present moment of history this is anything but an abstract idea and it changes the meaning of Christianity radically, from a heavenly other-world salvation to a profound and revolutionary option for this one.
It is as easy to understand Christian transformation of violence as it is to grasp the possibility and effect of forgiveness. In some ways forgiveness seems like not doing anything: it is not holding something against someone, it is non-retaliation, non-violence. But to do this “not” from a faith perspective allows, at the same time, something enormously active to take place. It allows the living Spirit of love to flow into a situation, at first imperceptibly, but then more and more unmistakably. Forgiveness in Christ is not a moral act. It is an ontological one. It turns the world on its head and in the process green shoots of new creation, of a completely different mode of relation, begin appearing before our eyes.
This today is the most intensely political act anyone can make. It is the most intensely re-creative. And the great thing is that it can happen anywhere, in any situation, from the most trivial domestic situation, through workplace tensions, up to the level of national and international politics.
And yet if Christians really took this seriously the day may quickly come when the practice of radical forgiveness could be seen as an act of treason.
Tony B.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Taking Jesus Seriously #3
02/04/10
• How does God judge the world?
• Is judgment necessary? Is judgment violent?
• Does God reject anyone?
• Is judgment human or divine?
In the 12th century BCE, the first historical Hebrew event–the Exodus–takes place. The Old Testament God of Moses (Yahweh) is portrayed as a God of justice. But this justice was not punitive. Rather he intervened on behalf of those deprived of justice in order to bring justice. He sets them free and gives them land. The fundamental judgment of God was an act in favor of the powerless and the poor.
The Old Testament has three main genres: the Law (Torah), the Prophets and the Wisdom books. Wisdom literature is common to many cultures, incorporating deep human reflection on the way things are and drawing on nature for examples. The book of Proverbs is one of these books. Proverbs 4:14-19 admonishes us to avoid the path of the wicked - “for they cannot sleep unless they have done wrong…for they eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence.” People’s fundamental sustenance becomes violence. They have embraced a retaliatory way of being. Killing becomes our food.
Mimetic desire
Rene Girard is an established thinker who has proposed the theory of Mimesis (imitation). In this theory the object of our desire is always mediated through others. We are informed about what is desirable by seeing what others desire. Desire is a general word for the huge lack or void inside humans, and seeing what others want and get fills the lack or void with the sense of what it wants or needs to get. Desire is at the heart of who we are and it is mobilized at root by imitation. Girard’s terms “mimesis” and “mimetic desire” reflect the imitative nature of human desire. We have advanced beyond the other animals because we are so adept at imitation.
About fifteen years ago neural science discovered mirror neurons which are themselves a feature of motor neurons. These neurons in our brains fire up when we see others doing something – in particular when the one we are watching grasps an object. The very same neurons that fire up for the person grasping the object also fire up in the observer’s brains as she watches. When we see someone score a goal on TV so many of the same neurons in our brains are firing – it feels like we just scored the goal! This is a useful survival skill – for example it teaches us what is good and safe to eat. But it also fuels mimetic desire. As we watch someone grasp an object, our mirror neurons fire up and we perceive that object as desirable. In a primitive situation we would move to take that object and conflict would quickly result. Animals control this urge through the instincts of dominance and submission. They may clash as rivals, but usually one will back down before blood is spilt. Humans have overcome these natural instincts. Laws with their threats of punitive violence have in some measure taken over this function of instinct. However, laws are never enough to completely suppress mimetic desire and rivalry. In fact the more people fight, the more we imitate this and the more we see fighting as desirable.
In this scenario mimetic rivalry ends in killing. Because desire for the same object is mutually reinforced it comes to blows and the blows to murder. Mimetic desire and rivalry escalate until they can only be discharged through killing. If we add in one further crucial aspect of Girard’s thought we get the final picture. In group situations—and thinking back to primitive groups at the very dawn of humanity—one individual is quickly singled out to be the victim of a crisis of violence. When two fight all are attracted to the fight and in a flash it is a battle of all against all. But a weaker individual, younger, more vulnerable, or simply different, even more beautiful perhaps, is quickly singled out as the enemy of all, the cause of all the terrible anger, the one to blame. This individual becomes the group victim. In the Bible this person is called the scapegoat. Once the scapegoat is cast out, killed, then order returns – until the cycle of violence begins again. Sacrifice is just a ritualized form of this process that keeps order by discharging our violence onto a formally chosen victim, human or animal.
Jesus stopped the sacrifices in the temple. He thus became the target of the political and religious interests of his time – the Pharisees, Sadducees and the Romans. He willingly stepped into the role of the scapegoat. In doing so he holds up a mirror of the whole blind system so that we can see how we are trapped in this cycle of violence. At the same moment he offers the forgiveness and of love and so he breaks that cycle.
Judgment in this light is self-inflicted
This is what judgment is. It is not Jesus, the willing victim, paying off an angry God. It is not the Protestant doctrine of substitutionary atonement or the Catholic doctrine of satisfaction. It is instead encountering absolute forgiveness, the irrational forgiveness of the enemy. It is realizing that we are loved by God without reserve. There is no one outside the circle of God’s love. This holds the whole human system up to an “unforgiving” light—there is no place for it to escape. In the short run this makes the human system more angry and dangerous. It inflicts judgment on itself by its continually redoubled violence, seeking to restore itself. But at the very same time and by the very same crisis the nonviolence and love of God become more and more evident, the only way forward. It is this experience of “judgment” in the midst of the world that changes us, that sets us free. We enter into a direct relationship with a God of love. God becomes our object of desire, or God’s own desire fills us, God’s self-giving love for the other. This is the meaning of “go and sin no more.” If God were to use threats or punishment then we would remain within the same human system of violence.
Mt 25:31-46 has the well-known passage of the final judgment. There are two scenes of judgment. The first is the semi-mythical description of the nations being gathered and sorted like sheep and goats. The second is the judgment spoken to and by the Son of Man (the human one). According to the Human One judgment takes place now in this world. It is not something to be decided in the hereafter. It is about how we relate immediately, in the here and now, to those around us – the weak, the abandoned, the hungry and persecuted. Judgment becomes a present lived experience based on our actions—“whatsoever you did to the least of these you did to me”. For example, decisions we make today about universal healthcare in this country, or about providing healthcare to resource poor nations, have direct consequences. We bring down free-floating anger (judgment) upon ourselves if we refuse. People deprived of access to healthcare in this country will become more desperate, violence then spirals upwards. Denying adequate medications to treat HIV in sub-Saharan Africa breeds resistant strains of illnesses associated with HIV – like drug-resistant TB. These ultimately threaten all of us because we are all connected. The parable, therefore, describes in advance the consequences of the revelation of the victim. Because of Jesus, the Human One, it becomes more and more difficult not to see the victim and if we insist on doing so we redouble the violence in the world (endless fire) which threatens to engulf us. Paradoxically at the very same moment, even as the fire grows, the love of God becomes clearer and clearer.
• We come together in peace
• Peace in our hearts, peace in our earth, peace to our enemies
• How does God judge the world?
• Is judgment necessary? Is judgment violent?
• Does God reject anyone?
• Is judgment human or divine?
In the 12th century BCE, the first historical Hebrew event–the Exodus–takes place. The Old Testament God of Moses (Yahweh) is portrayed as a God of justice. But this justice was not punitive. Rather he intervened on behalf of those deprived of justice in order to bring justice. He sets them free and gives them land. The fundamental judgment of God was an act in favor of the powerless and the poor.
The Old Testament has three main genres: the Law (Torah), the Prophets and the Wisdom books. Wisdom literature is common to many cultures, incorporating deep human reflection on the way things are and drawing on nature for examples. The book of Proverbs is one of these books. Proverbs 4:14-19 admonishes us to avoid the path of the wicked - “for they cannot sleep unless they have done wrong…for they eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence.” People’s fundamental sustenance becomes violence. They have embraced a retaliatory way of being. Killing becomes our food.
Mimetic desire
Rene Girard is an established thinker who has proposed the theory of Mimesis (imitation). In this theory the object of our desire is always mediated through others. We are informed about what is desirable by seeing what others desire. Desire is a general word for the huge lack or void inside humans, and seeing what others want and get fills the lack or void with the sense of what it wants or needs to get. Desire is at the heart of who we are and it is mobilized at root by imitation. Girard’s terms “mimesis” and “mimetic desire” reflect the imitative nature of human desire. We have advanced beyond the other animals because we are so adept at imitation.
About fifteen years ago neural science discovered mirror neurons which are themselves a feature of motor neurons. These neurons in our brains fire up when we see others doing something – in particular when the one we are watching grasps an object. The very same neurons that fire up for the person grasping the object also fire up in the observer’s brains as she watches. When we see someone score a goal on TV so many of the same neurons in our brains are firing – it feels like we just scored the goal! This is a useful survival skill – for example it teaches us what is good and safe to eat. But it also fuels mimetic desire. As we watch someone grasp an object, our mirror neurons fire up and we perceive that object as desirable. In a primitive situation we would move to take that object and conflict would quickly result. Animals control this urge through the instincts of dominance and submission. They may clash as rivals, but usually one will back down before blood is spilt. Humans have overcome these natural instincts. Laws with their threats of punitive violence have in some measure taken over this function of instinct. However, laws are never enough to completely suppress mimetic desire and rivalry. In fact the more people fight, the more we imitate this and the more we see fighting as desirable.
In this scenario mimetic rivalry ends in killing. Because desire for the same object is mutually reinforced it comes to blows and the blows to murder. Mimetic desire and rivalry escalate until they can only be discharged through killing. If we add in one further crucial aspect of Girard’s thought we get the final picture. In group situations—and thinking back to primitive groups at the very dawn of humanity—one individual is quickly singled out to be the victim of a crisis of violence. When two fight all are attracted to the fight and in a flash it is a battle of all against all. But a weaker individual, younger, more vulnerable, or simply different, even more beautiful perhaps, is quickly singled out as the enemy of all, the cause of all the terrible anger, the one to blame. This individual becomes the group victim. In the Bible this person is called the scapegoat. Once the scapegoat is cast out, killed, then order returns – until the cycle of violence begins again. Sacrifice is just a ritualized form of this process that keeps order by discharging our violence onto a formally chosen victim, human or animal.
Jesus stopped the sacrifices in the temple. He thus became the target of the political and religious interests of his time – the Pharisees, Sadducees and the Romans. He willingly stepped into the role of the scapegoat. In doing so he holds up a mirror of the whole blind system so that we can see how we are trapped in this cycle of violence. At the same moment he offers the forgiveness and of love and so he breaks that cycle.
Judgment in this light is self-inflicted
This is what judgment is. It is not Jesus, the willing victim, paying off an angry God. It is not the Protestant doctrine of substitutionary atonement or the Catholic doctrine of satisfaction. It is instead encountering absolute forgiveness, the irrational forgiveness of the enemy. It is realizing that we are loved by God without reserve. There is no one outside the circle of God’s love. This holds the whole human system up to an “unforgiving” light—there is no place for it to escape. In the short run this makes the human system more angry and dangerous. It inflicts judgment on itself by its continually redoubled violence, seeking to restore itself. But at the very same time and by the very same crisis the nonviolence and love of God become more and more evident, the only way forward. It is this experience of “judgment” in the midst of the world that changes us, that sets us free. We enter into a direct relationship with a God of love. God becomes our object of desire, or God’s own desire fills us, God’s self-giving love for the other. This is the meaning of “go and sin no more.” If God were to use threats or punishment then we would remain within the same human system of violence.
Mt 25:31-46 has the well-known passage of the final judgment. There are two scenes of judgment. The first is the semi-mythical description of the nations being gathered and sorted like sheep and goats. The second is the judgment spoken to and by the Son of Man (the human one). According to the Human One judgment takes place now in this world. It is not something to be decided in the hereafter. It is about how we relate immediately, in the here and now, to those around us – the weak, the abandoned, the hungry and persecuted. Judgment becomes a present lived experience based on our actions—“whatsoever you did to the least of these you did to me”. For example, decisions we make today about universal healthcare in this country, or about providing healthcare to resource poor nations, have direct consequences. We bring down free-floating anger (judgment) upon ourselves if we refuse. People deprived of access to healthcare in this country will become more desperate, violence then spirals upwards. Denying adequate medications to treat HIV in sub-Saharan Africa breeds resistant strains of illnesses associated with HIV – like drug-resistant TB. These ultimately threaten all of us because we are all connected. The parable, therefore, describes in advance the consequences of the revelation of the victim. Because of Jesus, the Human One, it becomes more and more difficult not to see the victim and if we insist on doing so we redouble the violence in the world (endless fire) which threatens to engulf us. Paradoxically at the very same moment, even as the fire grows, the love of God becomes clearer and clearer.
• We come together in peace
• Peace in our hearts, peace in our earth, peace to our enemies
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Gone Nuclear (or New Creation?)
I just got back from a board retreat planning for the Theology and Peace conference in May. We were reading some of René Girard’s latest book Battling to the End. I just got my own copy and have been reading continuously. Girard has been my intellectual mentor for twenty years and his influence is all over the Wood Hath Hope website. But in this latest book he's gone nuclear. In Paul Simon’s words it’s “the bomb in the baby carriage,” and I mean it—in respect of what it describes, what it projects and its effect on me.
In one way it’s a great book, the greatest since Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. It deals with a rich palette of sources, explains crucial biographical and spiritual things that weren’t explained before, and brings Girard’s intellectual career to a concentration and focus that is in every way apocalyptic.
The key concept is “the duel,” the fight to the death or battle to the end. This of course fits with Girard’s central idea of mimetic desire and rivalry—the more you want something, the more I want it, the more you fight against me, the more I fight against you. But now it becomes a global theme, a matter of global history. The image that comes to me as I read it is of twin clouds: you know the sort, the terrifying locust swarm or demon-filled type that appear in horror movies and bear down on you without hope of escaping. But there are in fact always two of these clouds and they battle each other, with equal power, until local circumstances, chances of time, place and resources, lead to the collapse of one or both clouds. But now—and this is the crucial point—local circumstances are no longer local and resources for violence have reached a point of near infinite availability. So we are very close to the moment when the dueling demon-filled clouds will not self-terminate for lack of resources for either or both but will irresistibly concentrate the whole world in their explosion, the whole human space, annihilating the entire planet. It’s the opposite of the concept of deterrence, where the planetary force of each side rationally neutralizes the other. Here each side mobilizes the other to the point of symmetric global violence—to the end.
Again and again Girard says he does not think we have the wherewithal—the will, the desire, the conversion—to pull back from the brink. But now here’s the really terrible thing: we did not get into this situation simply on our own, by dint of our endless Cain-versus-Abel way of being human. We were brought here also and especially by biblical revelation. Because the Passion of Christ reveals, and so discredits, the age-old solution to mimetic violence which is the scapegoat, the third party we can all blame, it makes rivalries factually worse. They have no place to go, except against each other, again and again and again. Here is a representative statement of this terrible character of Revelation.
"The Passion brings war because it tells the truth about humanity, and deprives it of any sacrificial mechanism. Normal religion, which creates gods, is the one with scapegoats. As soon as the Passion teaches people that the victims are innocent, they fight. This is precisely what scapegoat victims used to prevent them from doing. When sacrifice disappears, all that remains is mimetic rivalry and it escalates to extremes. In a way, the Passion leads to the hydrogen bomb: it will end up exploding the Powers and Principalities [governing human institutions]. The apocalypse is nothing but the incarnation of Christianity in history, which separates the mother from the child." [Italics original, pp. 198-9.]
In one sense I believe this to be true but at the same instant, in the very same measure and heartbeat, the Passion is filled with forgiveness and peace, and that is what makes final and deep sense of this apocalyptic revelation. So here is what I miss in this book, and to a critical degree: an equal and equivalent world history of love alongside the world history of violence. In a couple of places Girard does suggest this—that the Holy Spirit is present in history—but over and over he asserts the crushing force of human violence opposed to the good news of the gospel. The evidence he stacks up and the logic he demonstrates are compelling, but there is just as much possibility of an alternative dossier. Here are some examples.
Various national commissions on truth and reconciliation; apologies by nations or other groups for historical wrongs against races, nations, individuals; the nonviolent collapse of the Soviet Empire; the outpouring of compassion and help for places like Haiti hit by natural disaster; President Jimmy Carter’s humanitarian work and that of so many like him; philosophy itself, its long arc of exposure to Revelation and its deep infection by its themes; the emerging church movement and the way it is affecting the mainline denominations; art, movies and songs where violence, forgiveness and Jesus are key transformative motifs; movement in contemporary theology, especially upheaval around atonement doctrine; developments in the biological sciences, particularly in the area of mirror neurons; Girard’s work itself on literature, novelistic conversion and the central disclosure of the victim, etc.etc.
It’s not a question, however, of seeing which list is longer and more impressive, that of violence or that of compassion. Grace has a strange complicity with sin because it is always a matter of forgiveness. Where sin abounds grace abounds the more, where hatred is, only there perhaps can love be authentic, and where violence abounds compassion is multiplied. The issue then becomes as much theological as historical and it is when we come to this path of thinking that my objections to Battling to the End are more than just a matter of rhetorical emphasis or historical aesthetics.
Christian theology derives from the gospel which is first and foremost a proclamation of the death and resurrection of Jesus. There is very little resurrection in this book, and because of that there is no sacramentality at all. The Resurrection has to be real event in time and space otherwise we are all in our sins, the victim is not vindicated, and it’s all a lie which makes everything worse, just as Nietzsche said. The Resurrection cannot just be a doctrinal concept, an article of the creed, still less a figment, a mythical elevation of Jesus. There has to be a real break in the human sign system, and within that a break in the actual biology of death, for the archaic mode of humanity to be made into something truly new. Anyone who has read Girard attentively knows that the actual death of the victim is everything. It is what founds human culture. For that to be broken open and destabilized would necessarily require a qualitative eruption of life in the midst of murderous death. Without the resurrection the gospels would be a Greek tragedy and the final word would have been the chorus-style remark of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, “we had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel (but really he messed with forces too big for him…).” The Burton Mack/Dominic Crossan style reading of the gospels—where the disciples fooled themselves and others into the resurrection—is from a Girardian point of view simply impossible. You cannot think outside of the guilty scapegoat because the guilty one who brings peace is the event of thinking itself.
Instead something happened to the Emmaus disciples that changed their sign system from outside and inside all in one go: the victim was in fact alive… And at some level, which is impossible to describe empirically but not to experience, the event is objective. It is a real transformation of the space-time continuum, one in which death and murder, murder and death, no longer rule. Resurrection is not a pagan resurrection, a human transference of immortality and transcendence because of the scapegoat effect (Girard seems even tempted to think of it that way because of what he calls distance—cf. pp. xv & 102—but that’s a more subtle discussion for somewhere else). It is a real reversal of death and the kingdom of death, the only thing able to reconstitute our sign system, our thinking, toward forgiveness, self-giving, love: in other words the proclamation of the gospel.
Sacraments are the realization of human space in which this transformation is experienced. Sacraments say again and again this really happened in our world and to our world. They are real stuff that feels totally different, water, oil, bread, wine, people, touch, place, time, the concrete witness of a transformed universe. They are the leaching of Resurrection into our lived world. They are a bio-semiology of life and love in the midst of history. Battling to the End takes place in a world without sacramentality and so history is doomed. Yes, there is mention of the Roman Catholic church, but that seems only to come at the intellectual level, as some kind of privileged guardian of a truth betrayed. What about the billions and billions of meals in our world into which the Resurrection has leached, the Big Macs, the New York pizzas, the Sushi, the burritos and the curries, the dips and the ice cream? Of course they are all mixed up with human culture, consumerism, greed and violence, but none of them either can be totally alien to the new humanity of Jesus. The disciples at Emmaus were probably eating the first century Palestinian equivalent of a Big Mac—it wasn’t a church they were in. Jesus, the new human, simply made their meal a gesture of the humanly new and because of that no meal is ever the same again.
None of this is to say that Girard is not possibly right, that we will not eventually blow ourselves to smithereens. But even if we do—and Girard’s book may be read positively as an eleventh hour warning that may work negatively to stop us—that will not change the fact that we are sitting right now on top of a new creation, experiencing the Resurrection of the truly human one in many, many subtle shifts of our human system. As Paul says nothing present, and nothing to come, neither power, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. The accent falls on the “in” and the meaning of God’s love is right here and now. The resulting spiritual attitude is one of intense hope, not world-weary despair. And what after all is more likely to bring the world to a true change of heart: an implacable logic of violence, or a boundless table of life?
In one way it’s a great book, the greatest since Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. It deals with a rich palette of sources, explains crucial biographical and spiritual things that weren’t explained before, and brings Girard’s intellectual career to a concentration and focus that is in every way apocalyptic.
The key concept is “the duel,” the fight to the death or battle to the end. This of course fits with Girard’s central idea of mimetic desire and rivalry—the more you want something, the more I want it, the more you fight against me, the more I fight against you. But now it becomes a global theme, a matter of global history. The image that comes to me as I read it is of twin clouds: you know the sort, the terrifying locust swarm or demon-filled type that appear in horror movies and bear down on you without hope of escaping. But there are in fact always two of these clouds and they battle each other, with equal power, until local circumstances, chances of time, place and resources, lead to the collapse of one or both clouds. But now—and this is the crucial point—local circumstances are no longer local and resources for violence have reached a point of near infinite availability. So we are very close to the moment when the dueling demon-filled clouds will not self-terminate for lack of resources for either or both but will irresistibly concentrate the whole world in their explosion, the whole human space, annihilating the entire planet. It’s the opposite of the concept of deterrence, where the planetary force of each side rationally neutralizes the other. Here each side mobilizes the other to the point of symmetric global violence—to the end.
Again and again Girard says he does not think we have the wherewithal—the will, the desire, the conversion—to pull back from the brink. But now here’s the really terrible thing: we did not get into this situation simply on our own, by dint of our endless Cain-versus-Abel way of being human. We were brought here also and especially by biblical revelation. Because the Passion of Christ reveals, and so discredits, the age-old solution to mimetic violence which is the scapegoat, the third party we can all blame, it makes rivalries factually worse. They have no place to go, except against each other, again and again and again. Here is a representative statement of this terrible character of Revelation.
"The Passion brings war because it tells the truth about humanity, and deprives it of any sacrificial mechanism. Normal religion, which creates gods, is the one with scapegoats. As soon as the Passion teaches people that the victims are innocent, they fight. This is precisely what scapegoat victims used to prevent them from doing. When sacrifice disappears, all that remains is mimetic rivalry and it escalates to extremes. In a way, the Passion leads to the hydrogen bomb: it will end up exploding the Powers and Principalities [governing human institutions]. The apocalypse is nothing but the incarnation of Christianity in history, which separates the mother from the child." [Italics original, pp. 198-9.]
In one sense I believe this to be true but at the same instant, in the very same measure and heartbeat, the Passion is filled with forgiveness and peace, and that is what makes final and deep sense of this apocalyptic revelation. So here is what I miss in this book, and to a critical degree: an equal and equivalent world history of love alongside the world history of violence. In a couple of places Girard does suggest this—that the Holy Spirit is present in history—but over and over he asserts the crushing force of human violence opposed to the good news of the gospel. The evidence he stacks up and the logic he demonstrates are compelling, but there is just as much possibility of an alternative dossier. Here are some examples.
Various national commissions on truth and reconciliation; apologies by nations or other groups for historical wrongs against races, nations, individuals; the nonviolent collapse of the Soviet Empire; the outpouring of compassion and help for places like Haiti hit by natural disaster; President Jimmy Carter’s humanitarian work and that of so many like him; philosophy itself, its long arc of exposure to Revelation and its deep infection by its themes; the emerging church movement and the way it is affecting the mainline denominations; art, movies and songs where violence, forgiveness and Jesus are key transformative motifs; movement in contemporary theology, especially upheaval around atonement doctrine; developments in the biological sciences, particularly in the area of mirror neurons; Girard’s work itself on literature, novelistic conversion and the central disclosure of the victim, etc.etc.
It’s not a question, however, of seeing which list is longer and more impressive, that of violence or that of compassion. Grace has a strange complicity with sin because it is always a matter of forgiveness. Where sin abounds grace abounds the more, where hatred is, only there perhaps can love be authentic, and where violence abounds compassion is multiplied. The issue then becomes as much theological as historical and it is when we come to this path of thinking that my objections to Battling to the End are more than just a matter of rhetorical emphasis or historical aesthetics.
Christian theology derives from the gospel which is first and foremost a proclamation of the death and resurrection of Jesus. There is very little resurrection in this book, and because of that there is no sacramentality at all. The Resurrection has to be real event in time and space otherwise we are all in our sins, the victim is not vindicated, and it’s all a lie which makes everything worse, just as Nietzsche said. The Resurrection cannot just be a doctrinal concept, an article of the creed, still less a figment, a mythical elevation of Jesus. There has to be a real break in the human sign system, and within that a break in the actual biology of death, for the archaic mode of humanity to be made into something truly new. Anyone who has read Girard attentively knows that the actual death of the victim is everything. It is what founds human culture. For that to be broken open and destabilized would necessarily require a qualitative eruption of life in the midst of murderous death. Without the resurrection the gospels would be a Greek tragedy and the final word would have been the chorus-style remark of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, “we had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel (but really he messed with forces too big for him…).” The Burton Mack/Dominic Crossan style reading of the gospels—where the disciples fooled themselves and others into the resurrection—is from a Girardian point of view simply impossible. You cannot think outside of the guilty scapegoat because the guilty one who brings peace is the event of thinking itself.
Instead something happened to the Emmaus disciples that changed their sign system from outside and inside all in one go: the victim was in fact alive… And at some level, which is impossible to describe empirically but not to experience, the event is objective. It is a real transformation of the space-time continuum, one in which death and murder, murder and death, no longer rule. Resurrection is not a pagan resurrection, a human transference of immortality and transcendence because of the scapegoat effect (Girard seems even tempted to think of it that way because of what he calls distance—cf. pp. xv & 102—but that’s a more subtle discussion for somewhere else). It is a real reversal of death and the kingdom of death, the only thing able to reconstitute our sign system, our thinking, toward forgiveness, self-giving, love: in other words the proclamation of the gospel.
Sacraments are the realization of human space in which this transformation is experienced. Sacraments say again and again this really happened in our world and to our world. They are real stuff that feels totally different, water, oil, bread, wine, people, touch, place, time, the concrete witness of a transformed universe. They are the leaching of Resurrection into our lived world. They are a bio-semiology of life and love in the midst of history. Battling to the End takes place in a world without sacramentality and so history is doomed. Yes, there is mention of the Roman Catholic church, but that seems only to come at the intellectual level, as some kind of privileged guardian of a truth betrayed. What about the billions and billions of meals in our world into which the Resurrection has leached, the Big Macs, the New York pizzas, the Sushi, the burritos and the curries, the dips and the ice cream? Of course they are all mixed up with human culture, consumerism, greed and violence, but none of them either can be totally alien to the new humanity of Jesus. The disciples at Emmaus were probably eating the first century Palestinian equivalent of a Big Mac—it wasn’t a church they were in. Jesus, the new human, simply made their meal a gesture of the humanly new and because of that no meal is ever the same again.
None of this is to say that Girard is not possibly right, that we will not eventually blow ourselves to smithereens. But even if we do—and Girard’s book may be read positively as an eleventh hour warning that may work negatively to stop us—that will not change the fact that we are sitting right now on top of a new creation, experiencing the Resurrection of the truly human one in many, many subtle shifts of our human system. As Paul says nothing present, and nothing to come, neither power, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. The accent falls on the “in” and the meaning of God’s love is right here and now. The resulting spiritual attitude is one of intense hope, not world-weary despair. And what after all is more likely to bring the world to a true change of heart: an implacable logic of violence, or a boundless table of life?
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Taking Jesus Seriously #2
Here is the summary of our discussion from Week 2 that took place 01/28/10.
-Linda
• How do we read the Bible as truth?
• Should the Bible be read from a historical-critical standpoint?
• Is every part of the Bible equal?
• What does the Bible reveal about God, about us?
• Has the Christian message been corrupted?
The Bible is not a single document but a collection of books. “Bible” comes from “ta biblia” – the books. Unlike other religious texts (eg the Quran, the Book of Mormon) which claim vertical transmission straight from God, the Jewish-Christian text was written over 1000 years with numerous authors and editors. It should not be read from start to finish as one long narrative because that is not how it was written. For example the first chapter of Genesis was one of the last pieces to be written. The Bible is a text created and received by community. You can’t know definitely what is the correct translation or right meaning – it has to be shared and understood in a conversation by a community.
So how is it such a collection of evolving texts are now interpreted in such a monolithic way – often with a single, narrow meaning? It is because the Bible has been interpreted legally…
Most human societies depend on laws, the sanction of law (police, punishment, the price you pay). A legal reading promotes order, control, - keeps chaos at bay.
There is law in the Bible – the first five books of the OT are the Torah which means “the teaching’ or “the law”. Some of these books contain a lot of laws – particularly those relating to ritual and purification (Leviticus for example). But in the NT Jesus figures as a man who deliberately breaks some laws – the Sabbath, purity and temple laws. And Paul is always going on about how only faith and not the Law can save you. So how did the Bible get to be understood legally?
For 300 years early Christianity was an unlicensed, unofficial movement. In the Western Christian tradition, while Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the big figures that shaped it were lawyers like Tertullian, Ambrose and Augustine. They were riding the wave of Christianity’s increasing success – now the pathway to privilege.
Augustine especially found a way to mesh the original counter-cultural message with the paradigm of Empire.
Augustine also had to explain how after 300 years the world was still as messed up as ever. He did this by saying that God has chosen some for salvation, others not – predestination. Humanity is a massa damnata a “damned lump” – and God chooses individuals out of this for salvation. There is no sure way of knowing who has been chosen – but you can be certain you aren’t going to be one of the saved if you don’t go to church and obey church law.
This doctrine was accepted in various forms also by Aquinas, Luther and Calvin. God emerges as all-powerful and judgmental, like the ultimate emperor with the power of life and death.
In the 12th Century Anselm addressed the question of why Jesus had to die. Anselm emerges from the era of chivalry, knights and the crusades. God’s honor and justice had been offended. Because God is infinite, the least sin against his honor causes infinite offence. The only way God’s honor can be appeased is if God himself, as Jesus, dies as an infinite compensation of honor. This belief is still held today by most Christians. That Jesus died because of a legal demand of the Father.
So how do you read the Bible? What does it look like if you de-legalize and de-imperialize it?
There is a rift in the Bible – not between the OT and NT but a rift that occurs on every page. God is trying to change us. Humans have structured their culture in violence. This is the easiest way to create order – through fear, division and law. We are very familiar with it – it is the way the world has always worked. God has handed over humanity to humanity. God has given us total freedom to do it this way. But God does gently intervene in history– showing us a different way. We are not a “damned lump” but God’s creation. This message of slow evolutionary challenge and change is a silver thread that is woven throughout the Bible – more evident in some parts than others.
The Flood narrative (Gen 6:1-15) is an example. There is a variant of a flood story in many cultures. What makes the Bible version different is that the flood does not arise because of an arbitrary act of the gods – but because God sees the violence and destructive desires of humanity. The focus on injustice is the silver thread.
Another example: the Joseph story from Genesis has the gospel message of conversion, non-violence and forgiveness at its heart even though it is found in the OT.
The prediction of the second coming of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel talks of a time when the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the skies and the people will mourn. They will understand the violent path they have been on is not the way to true humanity.
The Bible does two things – it holds up a mirror to ourselves – shows us who we are. In these passages we can be seen to create God in our own likeness. However, the Bible also carries the silver thread of the gospel message – that seeks concretely to change the reality of who we are. From violence and destructive desire to the new creation of love.
-Linda
• How do we read the Bible as truth?
• Should the Bible be read from a historical-critical standpoint?
• Is every part of the Bible equal?
• What does the Bible reveal about God, about us?
• Has the Christian message been corrupted?
The Bible is not a single document but a collection of books. “Bible” comes from “ta biblia” – the books. Unlike other religious texts (eg the Quran, the Book of Mormon) which claim vertical transmission straight from God, the Jewish-Christian text was written over 1000 years with numerous authors and editors. It should not be read from start to finish as one long narrative because that is not how it was written. For example the first chapter of Genesis was one of the last pieces to be written. The Bible is a text created and received by community. You can’t know definitely what is the correct translation or right meaning – it has to be shared and understood in a conversation by a community.
So how is it such a collection of evolving texts are now interpreted in such a monolithic way – often with a single, narrow meaning? It is because the Bible has been interpreted legally…
Most human societies depend on laws, the sanction of law (police, punishment, the price you pay). A legal reading promotes order, control, - keeps chaos at bay.
There is law in the Bible – the first five books of the OT are the Torah which means “the teaching’ or “the law”. Some of these books contain a lot of laws – particularly those relating to ritual and purification (Leviticus for example). But in the NT Jesus figures as a man who deliberately breaks some laws – the Sabbath, purity and temple laws. And Paul is always going on about how only faith and not the Law can save you. So how did the Bible get to be understood legally?
For 300 years early Christianity was an unlicensed, unofficial movement. In the Western Christian tradition, while Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the big figures that shaped it were lawyers like Tertullian, Ambrose and Augustine. They were riding the wave of Christianity’s increasing success – now the pathway to privilege.
Augustine especially found a way to mesh the original counter-cultural message with the paradigm of Empire.
Augustine also had to explain how after 300 years the world was still as messed up as ever. He did this by saying that God has chosen some for salvation, others not – predestination. Humanity is a massa damnata a “damned lump” – and God chooses individuals out of this for salvation. There is no sure way of knowing who has been chosen – but you can be certain you aren’t going to be one of the saved if you don’t go to church and obey church law.
This doctrine was accepted in various forms also by Aquinas, Luther and Calvin. God emerges as all-powerful and judgmental, like the ultimate emperor with the power of life and death.
In the 12th Century Anselm addressed the question of why Jesus had to die. Anselm emerges from the era of chivalry, knights and the crusades. God’s honor and justice had been offended. Because God is infinite, the least sin against his honor causes infinite offence. The only way God’s honor can be appeased is if God himself, as Jesus, dies as an infinite compensation of honor. This belief is still held today by most Christians. That Jesus died because of a legal demand of the Father.
So how do you read the Bible? What does it look like if you de-legalize and de-imperialize it?
There is a rift in the Bible – not between the OT and NT but a rift that occurs on every page. God is trying to change us. Humans have structured their culture in violence. This is the easiest way to create order – through fear, division and law. We are very familiar with it – it is the way the world has always worked. God has handed over humanity to humanity. God has given us total freedom to do it this way. But God does gently intervene in history– showing us a different way. We are not a “damned lump” but God’s creation. This message of slow evolutionary challenge and change is a silver thread that is woven throughout the Bible – more evident in some parts than others.
The Flood narrative (Gen 6:1-15) is an example. There is a variant of a flood story in many cultures. What makes the Bible version different is that the flood does not arise because of an arbitrary act of the gods – but because God sees the violence and destructive desires of humanity. The focus on injustice is the silver thread.
Another example: the Joseph story from Genesis has the gospel message of conversion, non-violence and forgiveness at its heart even though it is found in the OT.
The prediction of the second coming of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel talks of a time when the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the skies and the people will mourn. They will understand the violent path they have been on is not the way to true humanity.
The Bible does two things – it holds up a mirror to ourselves – shows us who we are. In these passages we can be seen to create God in our own likeness. However, the Bible also carries the silver thread of the gospel message – that seeks concretely to change the reality of who we are. From violence and destructive desire to the new creation of love.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Here Are The Questions!
The following are the questions that the group meeting at Health Pathways last Thursday came up with. We will start next Thursday with the first batch. Please note the time of the meeting has changed from 6.30pm to 7.00pm.
1. How do we read the Bible as truth?
Should the Bible be read from a historical-critical standpoint?
Is every part of the Bible equal?
What does the Bible reveal about God, about us?
Has the Christian message been corrupted?
2. Can Christianity make exclusive claims—e.g. Jesus is the only way to salvation—without being necessarily violent?
How can you be passionate and committed about Christian belief and not cause offense in a pluralist world?
How can you respect other traditions and not water down your own?
Has Christianity lost its voice?
3. How does God judge the world?
Is judgment necessary? Is judgment violent?
Does God reject anyone?
Is judgment human or divine?
4. What does the Bible teach about life after death?
What does death mean? What is resurrection? Is it real?
If resurrection has already taken place why is the world still suffering?
Is creation still a work in process?
5. How is it possible to be an authentic Christian in this culture?
Is Christianity compatible with consumerism and militarism?
To what extent should Christians remove themselves from/ remain a part of culture?
What does it mean to love the world if Christ loves me?
6. Is there a purpose to life beyond the fleeting years of life?
What is my purpose?
What is our purpose?
7. How should we pray?
Did Jesus teach ritual for worship of God?
1. How do we read the Bible as truth?
Should the Bible be read from a historical-critical standpoint?
Is every part of the Bible equal?
What does the Bible reveal about God, about us?
Has the Christian message been corrupted?
2. Can Christianity make exclusive claims—e.g. Jesus is the only way to salvation—without being necessarily violent?
How can you be passionate and committed about Christian belief and not cause offense in a pluralist world?
How can you respect other traditions and not water down your own?
Has Christianity lost its voice?
3. How does God judge the world?
Is judgment necessary? Is judgment violent?
Does God reject anyone?
Is judgment human or divine?
4. What does the Bible teach about life after death?
What does death mean? What is resurrection? Is it real?
If resurrection has already taken place why is the world still suffering?
Is creation still a work in process?
5. How is it possible to be an authentic Christian in this culture?
Is Christianity compatible with consumerism and militarism?
To what extent should Christians remove themselves from/ remain a part of culture?
What does it mean to love the world if Christ loves me?
6. Is there a purpose to life beyond the fleeting years of life?
What is my purpose?
What is our purpose?
7. How should we pray?
Did Jesus teach ritual for worship of God?
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Christmas #3
Here is the third of the three Bible Studies that took place in December on the theme of Christmas. It is a little late - but still timely! -Linda
Christmas #3 12/17/09
There is a third biblical reference to the birth of the Messiah apart from the nativity accounts of Luke and Matthew. This is the extremely dramatic account found in the book of Revelations 12:1-17. It is a nativity story that takes place on the cosmic level. Cosmic elements are already present in the Lukan and Matthean stories – the star leading the wise men, the angels on high. In the Revelations story however the cosmic is more than an element, it is the main theme.
The central figure is a woman clothed in the sun, the moon at her feet and crowned by the stars. The crown symbolizes her majesty and authority. The stars are often interchangeable with heavenly bodies and with angels in the Scriptures, and hint at great spiritual status. The woman is the heroine of the story. The child, the messiah, is quickly caught up to heaven and so it is the woman who is at the heart of the drama. Who is this woman? She is presented as the mother of the Messiah, but while associated with Mary this figure is not Mary. In this way she is similar to the woman in John’s Gospel – who initiates his first sign at the wedding at Cana and stands at the foot of the cross. She is identified with Mary yet is something more. In John she also represents Woman Wisdom from the Old Testament. The woman in Revelations is a cosmic figure that represents the mother of the Messiah but also something more. She is the new creation, the new earth. She is the transformed human space and the whole cosmos crystallizes around her.
She suffers birth pangs – an image of the messianic transformation of the Earth that will be preceded by travail. Things will get worse before they get better. After the birth she is pursued by the dragon who wants to destroy the child (echoes of Herod). The child is swept up to safety and the woman is left to confront the dragon who is the personification of violence and lies. The dragon cannot touch the Messiah so instead goes after his new creation. The woman does not fight back – she flees to the desert where she is nourished by God.
What kind of place is the desert? It is a space with no human systems or organizations. It is an image of free space in history. The wilderness is where the new creation finds protection from the forces of violence and deceit. In the desert Satan cannot triumph. The new creation remains in the desert. She is nowhere, but she is safe. She is nurtured in the wilderness for 1260 days. This works out to be 3 ½ years. If seven is considered to be the perfect number then this represents perfection broken in two. It is symbolic of a bad time. It is a situation of difficulty and peril and yet also a time of hope.
War breaks out in heaven. It is a war over who controls the world – violence and lies vs. love. Satan is driven out of the heavenly sphere. In Luke 10:18 Jesus says “I watched Satan fall from Heaven like a flash of lightning”. Heaven is no longer a place of violence in the cosmic realm. Satan has been driven out by the Word (the gospel), by the blood of the lamb (the non-violence of the lamb who died without retaliation) and by the self-giving of martyrs (not clinging to life even in the face of death). With the death and resurrection of Jesus, violence has been removed from God. Human order no longer depends upon our fear of the divine. In Jesus, violence is revealed as human, not divine, in origin. And so the battle transfers to the earth and brings chaos in its wake.
Satan, now in the world, tries to attack the woman again. He also attacks her other children – the children of the new creation. Water pours from the dragon’s mouth. This water is a symbol of the building chaos that is trying to destroy the new creation. But the Earth comes to the rescue of the woman. The Earth defends the new creation from chaos and violence. The ultimate image is that the earth will survive. This is later reinforced by the final image of the book of Revelation – a new heaven and a new Earth. Here the new creation finds expression as a city – the New Jerusalem. The image remains feminine but changes from mother to bride. The new creation emerges as the spouse of God who dwells on Earth.
In conclusion – this is a different kind of Christmas story. It is the story of the overcoming of violence – a violence which seeks to reestablish itself time and again. It is a Christmas story for our time – a time of crisis. Like the woman who finds refuge in the desert, we too can find the true meaning of Christmas in the wilderness. In places set apart from the systems of the world – from consumerism, violence and worldly power.
An image of this new creation could be the Christmas tree. Made popular by Prince Albert in Victorian England and having its roots in pagan ritual, it is still a symbol of generative, life-giving creation within our human space. Like the woman of the story it is adorned with lights and stars. It transforms our homes with beauty and light and gives joy.
Christmas #3 12/17/09
There is a third biblical reference to the birth of the Messiah apart from the nativity accounts of Luke and Matthew. This is the extremely dramatic account found in the book of Revelations 12:1-17. It is a nativity story that takes place on the cosmic level. Cosmic elements are already present in the Lukan and Matthean stories – the star leading the wise men, the angels on high. In the Revelations story however the cosmic is more than an element, it is the main theme.
The central figure is a woman clothed in the sun, the moon at her feet and crowned by the stars. The crown symbolizes her majesty and authority. The stars are often interchangeable with heavenly bodies and with angels in the Scriptures, and hint at great spiritual status. The woman is the heroine of the story. The child, the messiah, is quickly caught up to heaven and so it is the woman who is at the heart of the drama. Who is this woman? She is presented as the mother of the Messiah, but while associated with Mary this figure is not Mary. In this way she is similar to the woman in John’s Gospel – who initiates his first sign at the wedding at Cana and stands at the foot of the cross. She is identified with Mary yet is something more. In John she also represents Woman Wisdom from the Old Testament. The woman in Revelations is a cosmic figure that represents the mother of the Messiah but also something more. She is the new creation, the new earth. She is the transformed human space and the whole cosmos crystallizes around her.
She suffers birth pangs – an image of the messianic transformation of the Earth that will be preceded by travail. Things will get worse before they get better. After the birth she is pursued by the dragon who wants to destroy the child (echoes of Herod). The child is swept up to safety and the woman is left to confront the dragon who is the personification of violence and lies. The dragon cannot touch the Messiah so instead goes after his new creation. The woman does not fight back – she flees to the desert where she is nourished by God.
What kind of place is the desert? It is a space with no human systems or organizations. It is an image of free space in history. The wilderness is where the new creation finds protection from the forces of violence and deceit. In the desert Satan cannot triumph. The new creation remains in the desert. She is nowhere, but she is safe. She is nurtured in the wilderness for 1260 days. This works out to be 3 ½ years. If seven is considered to be the perfect number then this represents perfection broken in two. It is symbolic of a bad time. It is a situation of difficulty and peril and yet also a time of hope.
War breaks out in heaven. It is a war over who controls the world – violence and lies vs. love. Satan is driven out of the heavenly sphere. In Luke 10:18 Jesus says “I watched Satan fall from Heaven like a flash of lightning”. Heaven is no longer a place of violence in the cosmic realm. Satan has been driven out by the Word (the gospel), by the blood of the lamb (the non-violence of the lamb who died without retaliation) and by the self-giving of martyrs (not clinging to life even in the face of death). With the death and resurrection of Jesus, violence has been removed from God. Human order no longer depends upon our fear of the divine. In Jesus, violence is revealed as human, not divine, in origin. And so the battle transfers to the earth and brings chaos in its wake.
Satan, now in the world, tries to attack the woman again. He also attacks her other children – the children of the new creation. Water pours from the dragon’s mouth. This water is a symbol of the building chaos that is trying to destroy the new creation. But the Earth comes to the rescue of the woman. The Earth defends the new creation from chaos and violence. The ultimate image is that the earth will survive. This is later reinforced by the final image of the book of Revelation – a new heaven and a new Earth. Here the new creation finds expression as a city – the New Jerusalem. The image remains feminine but changes from mother to bride. The new creation emerges as the spouse of God who dwells on Earth.
In conclusion – this is a different kind of Christmas story. It is the story of the overcoming of violence – a violence which seeks to reestablish itself time and again. It is a Christmas story for our time – a time of crisis. Like the woman who finds refuge in the desert, we too can find the true meaning of Christmas in the wilderness. In places set apart from the systems of the world – from consumerism, violence and worldly power.
An image of this new creation could be the Christmas tree. Made popular by Prince Albert in Victorian England and having its roots in pagan ritual, it is still a symbol of generative, life-giving creation within our human space. Like the woman of the story it is adorned with lights and stars. It transforms our homes with beauty and light and gives joy.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Christmas #2
Here is the second of three Christmas Bible studies - this one focusing on Luke's Gospel....
12/10/09
Luke’s nativity has a different atmosphere than Matthew’s. Luke is the author of the classic nativity story - the shepherds, the stable, the manger. He is the master of spin – presenting a story that would be recognizable and acceptable to a predominantly Greek and Roman audience while hanging on to the key gospel elements.
Luke begins in Chapter 1:1-4 with a formal introduction similar to others of the day. There were no publishers in the ancient world – instead there were patrons. Writers would dedicate their manuscript to an important person who would then distribute it. Luke’s Gospel has this same style – it opens with an introduction to “Theophilus” which means “lover of God”. The name may indicate that this is not a real person but symbolic of the emerging Christian community. Luke is using an accepted and easily recognizable opening to ease his audience into the narrative. He is pitching his story to the educated cultured people of his time to communicate the story of Jesus in a way that they will embrace.
Luke’s Gospel is about political and social transformation. His focus is transforming the human space. It is arguably the most human of the Gospels and is sometimes considered the Gospel of the Catholic Church. It roots Christianity in recognizable human society. Luke places itself in the age of the gentiles – looking to a time when the gospel is communicated through the whole world.
The nativity narrative begins with the temple –with Zechariah and Elizabeth, privileged priestly figures. They bring to mind authority and holiness and immediately set the reader at ease. They are easily recognizable (every culture has temple figures) but Luke links them to Old Testament themes. He repeats motifs from the Old Testament – in particular the stories of Abraham and Sarah and of Hannah and Samuel. These are stories of barren women living in a time when motherhood gave women status and value. Elizabeth’s story fits with this archetype. Her experience (LK1:24) is the same – the childless woman rescued by God.
Luke intertwines the stories of Elizabeth and Mary in 1:26-80. Elizabeth overcoming adversity cues the reader to expect something similar with Mary. Zechariah and Elizabeth are totally legitimate characters (they come from the house of Aaron who was Moses’ right hand man). Intertwining their story with Mary’s gives her credibility and acceptability. The text does not give any background to Mary – her parentage and lineage. She is identified as a relative of Elizabeth’s, but this is unspecified. It is Joseph who can claim the house of David. St. Anne and St Joachim were later identified as Mary’s parents – but this is a tradition from the second century and is not scripturally based. There is a murkiness to Mary’s story and background. Luke builds her up. He portrays Mary’s story as even more amazing than Elizabeth’s– birth by virgin trumps that by old woman!
Unlike Matthew’s nativity, there is no element of scandal attached to Mary in Luke’s narrative. She explicitly states literally “I do not know man” which is translated as “I am a virgin”. Here an angel addresses her as “the favored one” – if anything her prestige goes up. Luke transforms the irregularity of Jesus’ conception into something beautiful and mysterious. Luke’s account of the miraculous conception has elements of both the Greek and Jewish. Nietzsche said that the story is reminiscent of the Greek Gods, such as Zeus, who impregnated mortal women in the guise of a swan, a bull and a shower of gold. Other scholars disagree – in the Lukan account there is nothing explicitly physical – it does not make sense for God to be supplying the y-chromosome. There is also no trickery involved. It involves the consent of Mary. The touch of God is so light and mysterious echoing the movement of the Spirit over the waters at the dawn of creation.
Mary achieves enormous status in Luke. Joseph, so important in Matthew, is a tangential figure in Luke. In Luke’s Gospel it is all about Mary. More than any of the other Gospels, Luke boosts the role of women and shows a concern for women’s issues. He gives Mary a voice – and she proclaims a knockout hymn of praise – the Magnificat (V46-56). Mary’s Magnificat repeats some of the words of Hannah (the mother of Samuel) in 1Samuel 2. The theme of the Magnificat is reversal – the powerful will be dethroned, the lowly lifted up. Mary gets to be the voice of the overturning of the world order. It encapsulates the social reversal that Luke is all about. Luke has set the stage so that by the time Mary makes her revolutionary proclamation you are totally on her side. While Matthew’s nativity story addresses and counters the violence of Herod and worldly power; Luke is about overcoming inequality. This message is reinforced by the story of the shepherds.
Chapter 2:1-20 is the account of Jesus’ birth. The census places Jesus not just in Herod’s Palestine, but in the context of the whole Roman Empire and points to Augustus Caesar as the most powerful person in the known civilized world. Historically there is no record of this particular census. Others took place but not at this specific time. Luke uses the device of the census to connect Jesus to the historical, political world of his time. The contrast is stark - the savior of the world lying in a manger because of the dictates of the worldly emperor. Jesus is born in a byre with the animals, placed in an animal’s feeding trough. His birth is recognized and celebrated by shepherds. The symbolism is strong – of Jesus as the good shepherd, the sacrificial lamb, as the bread of life. But shepherds were also poor, landless people, living on the mountainside like gypsies. They were people remote from culture, living outside the system and its taxation. Yet it is to shepherds that the angels appear. Traditionally it is the temple where you meet God, where God is revealed – Zechariah’s place. In Luke’s story the heavens open and God is revealed in a field to the forgotten and marginalized. If God is in the feeding trough then the temple becomes redundant. Ultimately it is a revolutionary and challenging message that offers hope, presenting the possibility of a different world.
12/10/09
Luke’s nativity has a different atmosphere than Matthew’s. Luke is the author of the classic nativity story - the shepherds, the stable, the manger. He is the master of spin – presenting a story that would be recognizable and acceptable to a predominantly Greek and Roman audience while hanging on to the key gospel elements.
Luke begins in Chapter 1:1-4 with a formal introduction similar to others of the day. There were no publishers in the ancient world – instead there were patrons. Writers would dedicate their manuscript to an important person who would then distribute it. Luke’s Gospel has this same style – it opens with an introduction to “Theophilus” which means “lover of God”. The name may indicate that this is not a real person but symbolic of the emerging Christian community. Luke is using an accepted and easily recognizable opening to ease his audience into the narrative. He is pitching his story to the educated cultured people of his time to communicate the story of Jesus in a way that they will embrace.
Luke’s Gospel is about political and social transformation. His focus is transforming the human space. It is arguably the most human of the Gospels and is sometimes considered the Gospel of the Catholic Church. It roots Christianity in recognizable human society. Luke places itself in the age of the gentiles – looking to a time when the gospel is communicated through the whole world.
The nativity narrative begins with the temple –with Zechariah and Elizabeth, privileged priestly figures. They bring to mind authority and holiness and immediately set the reader at ease. They are easily recognizable (every culture has temple figures) but Luke links them to Old Testament themes. He repeats motifs from the Old Testament – in particular the stories of Abraham and Sarah and of Hannah and Samuel. These are stories of barren women living in a time when motherhood gave women status and value. Elizabeth’s story fits with this archetype. Her experience (LK1:24) is the same – the childless woman rescued by God.
Luke intertwines the stories of Elizabeth and Mary in 1:26-80. Elizabeth overcoming adversity cues the reader to expect something similar with Mary. Zechariah and Elizabeth are totally legitimate characters (they come from the house of Aaron who was Moses’ right hand man). Intertwining their story with Mary’s gives her credibility and acceptability. The text does not give any background to Mary – her parentage and lineage. She is identified as a relative of Elizabeth’s, but this is unspecified. It is Joseph who can claim the house of David. St. Anne and St Joachim were later identified as Mary’s parents – but this is a tradition from the second century and is not scripturally based. There is a murkiness to Mary’s story and background. Luke builds her up. He portrays Mary’s story as even more amazing than Elizabeth’s– birth by virgin trumps that by old woman!
Unlike Matthew’s nativity, there is no element of scandal attached to Mary in Luke’s narrative. She explicitly states literally “I do not know man” which is translated as “I am a virgin”. Here an angel addresses her as “the favored one” – if anything her prestige goes up. Luke transforms the irregularity of Jesus’ conception into something beautiful and mysterious. Luke’s account of the miraculous conception has elements of both the Greek and Jewish. Nietzsche said that the story is reminiscent of the Greek Gods, such as Zeus, who impregnated mortal women in the guise of a swan, a bull and a shower of gold. Other scholars disagree – in the Lukan account there is nothing explicitly physical – it does not make sense for God to be supplying the y-chromosome. There is also no trickery involved. It involves the consent of Mary. The touch of God is so light and mysterious echoing the movement of the Spirit over the waters at the dawn of creation.
Mary achieves enormous status in Luke. Joseph, so important in Matthew, is a tangential figure in Luke. In Luke’s Gospel it is all about Mary. More than any of the other Gospels, Luke boosts the role of women and shows a concern for women’s issues. He gives Mary a voice – and she proclaims a knockout hymn of praise – the Magnificat (V46-56). Mary’s Magnificat repeats some of the words of Hannah (the mother of Samuel) in 1Samuel 2. The theme of the Magnificat is reversal – the powerful will be dethroned, the lowly lifted up. Mary gets to be the voice of the overturning of the world order. It encapsulates the social reversal that Luke is all about. Luke has set the stage so that by the time Mary makes her revolutionary proclamation you are totally on her side. While Matthew’s nativity story addresses and counters the violence of Herod and worldly power; Luke is about overcoming inequality. This message is reinforced by the story of the shepherds.
Chapter 2:1-20 is the account of Jesus’ birth. The census places Jesus not just in Herod’s Palestine, but in the context of the whole Roman Empire and points to Augustus Caesar as the most powerful person in the known civilized world. Historically there is no record of this particular census. Others took place but not at this specific time. Luke uses the device of the census to connect Jesus to the historical, political world of his time. The contrast is stark - the savior of the world lying in a manger because of the dictates of the worldly emperor. Jesus is born in a byre with the animals, placed in an animal’s feeding trough. His birth is recognized and celebrated by shepherds. The symbolism is strong – of Jesus as the good shepherd, the sacrificial lamb, as the bread of life. But shepherds were also poor, landless people, living on the mountainside like gypsies. They were people remote from culture, living outside the system and its taxation. Yet it is to shepherds that the angels appear. Traditionally it is the temple where you meet God, where God is revealed – Zechariah’s place. In Luke’s story the heavens open and God is revealed in a field to the forgotten and marginalized. If God is in the feeding trough then the temple becomes redundant. Ultimately it is a revolutionary and challenging message that offers hope, presenting the possibility of a different world.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
