I’ve been reading James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes, and he has an interesting take on the relation between forgiveness, sin, and the wrath of God.

Alison, as readers may know, is a follower of Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic violence and uses it as a key to understand what’s going on in the gospel stories, especially regarding Jesus’ death.

The heart of Girard’s theory is that human psychology and culture is driven by a desire-based rivalry that threatens social peace. All our desire is other-directed in the sense that we learn to desire something by seeing someone else desire it. But this creates the conditions of rivalry, which threatens to turn violent. To defuse this violence, the community will unite and turn on a scapegoat – a victim – and, having spent its violence on the scapegoat it enables social peace to be restored.

The paradoxical result is that the scapegoat is identified both as the source of conflict and the means by which peace is restored. Consequently, myths grow up that invest the victim with divine properites. And in the process, these myths occlude our complicity in the violence and victimization that we (mistakenly) believe to be necessary and justified.

However, according to both Girard and Alison, the Bible gradually reverses this view by proclaiming the innocence of the vicitm and stripping the scapegoating mechanism of its mythical and religious shroud, exposing it for what it is: human violence directed against the other. This process culminates in the crucifixion of Jesus where an undeniably innocent man is put to death “for,” or, on account of, our sins. The scapegoating mechanism is revealed for the evil it is in the machinations of the various parties who collude to put Jesus to death as a threat to social peace.

Alison’s particular emphasis is on the way that the Resurrection makes a new situation possible. Jesus returns from the dead, not as an aggrevied victim seeking vengeance, but as the forgiving victim. He is thus able to break the cycle of desire and scapegoating by making a new individual and social reality possible. Since, for Alison, human selves are formed by an other, Jesus provides us with a new self that makes a pacific (non-rivalrous) mimesis possible.

This picture of what’s going on in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus leads Alison to deny that there is any violence or exclusion in God. Death and violence are human realities (though they’re not essential to being human: hence original sin), and we tend to project these on to God. But what Jesus reveals is a God for whom, according to Alison, death and violence aren’t even realities, properly speaking. And this leads him to rework the notions of wrath and judgment.

Alison argues that this new revelation only made possible by Jesus’ death and resurrection has a subversive effect on existing religious categories and language. So, in the New Testament we see a gradual process of purifying the image of God from traces of violence. Paul, Alison thinks, usues much of the traditional language (wrath, sacrifice, etc.) but in a way that ironically inverts its meaning, as Alison attempts to show in a discussion of Romans:

[T]he content of the wrath of God [for Paul] is itself a demystification of a vindictive account of God (whose righteousness has just been declared). For the content of the wrath is the handing over by God of us to ourselves. Three times in the following verses the content of the wrath is described in terms of handing over: 1:24; 1:26; and 1:28. That is to say, the wrath, rather than being an act of divine vengeance, is a divine nonresistance to human evil. However, I would suggest it is more than that. The world “handed over” (paredoken) has in primitive Christian sources a particularly subtle set of resonances. For God is described as handing over (paredoken) his own son to us in a text no further from our own than Romans 8:32. The handing over of the son to us and the handing over of ourselves to sin appear to be at the very least parallel. The same verb (paredothe) is used in 4:25, where Jesus was handed over for our trespasses and raised for our justification. I would suggest that it is the handing over of the son to our killing him that is in fact the same thing as handing us over to our own sins. Thus wrath is life in the sort of world which kills the son of God. (pp. 126-127).

Alison contends that this comes to clearer expression in the Johannine writings, particularly in the identification in John’s gospel between the judgment of the world and Jesus crucifixion. The crucifixion of the Son of God is God’s judgment upon the world. Alison discusses the story of the man born blind as a way of illustrating this inversion of judgment:

Jesus’ final comment, “For judgment I came into the world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind,” is his assessment of the whole story. In the first place, Jesus has carried out no active judgment at all. The only judgment related in the story has been that of the Pharisees, casting the man out. This is part of the ironic Johannine recasting of judgment: it is by being crucified that Jesus is the real judge of his judges. So because Jesus is the cause of the former blind man’s expulsion, the former blind man shares Jesus’ role as judge of those who have expelled him. It is not that Jesus simply abolishes the notion of judgment or is merely much more of a judge than the other judges: the sense in which Jesus is a judge is a subversion from within of the notion of judgment. The judgment that excluded the former blind man is revealed as the judgment (also discernment) that the expellers are really blind. (p. 121)

What this judgment reveals, according to Alison, is that sin is essentially what he calls the “murderous lie.” We expell and victimize in order to maintain order and security, and then we lie to ourselves about what we’re doing and why we do it. This is why the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus provides the key to making a new way of living possible: the crucifixion, in being the murder of the innocent victim par excellence, reveals the scapegoating mechanism and our complicity in it as the lie that it is. But the resurrection of Jesus as the forgiving victim makes possible a new kind of life that is based on the truth and not a lie. Forgiveness presupposes that there is something to forgive: it doesn’t cover up what was done but makes it part of a past from which it becomes possible to move on in a different direction.

God is then recast as the forgiving victim and wrath is seen as a projection of our violence onto God. In killing the son of God we bring judgment on ourselves, but he returns as if to say “Even if you kill me I’ll keep forgiving and loving you.” There is a kind of double revelation here. On the one hand the crucifixion of Jesus reveals the violent means by which we keep order, that death isn’t something that just happens, but is something that we visit upon others. On the other, it reveals God as characterized by “deathlessness.”

This means, Alison says, that God is “indifferent” to death; it’s as though it’s not even a reality for him. God’s love carries on loving, even through death. And in raising Jesus specifically – the preacher of God’s love and forgiveness – God shows that he loves us. “It was not just that God loved his son and so raised him up, but that the giving of the son and his raising up revealed God as love for us” (p. 118).

So, we have human beings marked by death in that it structures their reality. But we also have God as deathless, as loving through and beyond death. The third piece of the picture is that human life is not essentially entwined by death, but that it’s a contingent fact about us. “If God can raise someone from the dead in the middle of human history, the very fact reveals that death, which up till this point had marked human history as simply something inevitable, part of what it is to be a human being, is not inevitable” (p. 118). The doctrine of original sin has always walked a tightrope in that it posits a primal human sin that has infected the entire race, but denies that this was in any way inevitable or a necessary aspect of human or creaturely existence. What Alison is arguing is that original sin is to be understood “backwards” from the resurrection. That only in Jesus’ death and resurrection do we begin to understand the nature of our predicament and how God acts to free us from it.

This post is already too long, but I’ll try to offer some more thoughts on this once I’ve made it through the rest of the book.