A Thinking Reed

Category: Atonement

  • An end to sacrifices

    I just finished reading James Alison’s Undergoing God, and the more I read of him the more I like him and think he’s onto something important. Alison, to recap, is a student of anthropologist/literary theorist Rene Girard, who has proposed a rather daring new interpretation of Jesus’ death on the cross.

    For Girard human selves and human desire are structured by what he calls mimesis, which means that we learn to want things by seeing other people want them. The problem is that mimesis all to often takes a rivalrous form: I want what you want which creates competition and potentially conflict.

    This conflict can threaten to unravel the fabric of human society, but societies have found a way to defuse that conflict, at least in the short run. They do this by means of what Girard calls the scapegoat mechanism. When rivalrous conflict gets out of hand, the members of a group will settle on someone who becomes the focus of the group’s “wrath.” This someone – the scapegoat – is “expelled,” often murderously, and this expulsion restores harmony by creating the feeling that the source of conflict has been banished.

    What Girard argues is that the history of myth and religion repeatedly display attempts to cover over these expulsions of the innocent. The myths and rituals of sacrifice to appease god or the gods invest the scapegoat mechanism with sacred legitimacy. Thus we invest the victim with sacred power and authority, since the expulsion is that which reestablishes harmony. We cover up our crime of killing the innocent by turning it into a “necessary” part of a divinely ordained order.

    However, says Girard, the Bible “unmasks” this sacred lie by presenting the victim as unambiguously innocent. The death of Jesus, as recorded in the gospels, most clearly reveals the mendacity of the scapegoat mechanism. When the Roman and Jewish authorities come together to kill Jesus the gospels leave no doubt that it’s an act of murder, even though it’s rationalized by various parties as a means of restoring order (see especially Girard’s excellent I See Satan Fall Like Lightning).

    Alison elaborates Girard’s line of thought in more explicitly theological terms. He contends that Jesus’ death and resurrection defeat the powers of violence and scapegoating by displaying those powers’ ultimate impotence. God, who comes to us in Jesus, is completely “other than” the death and violence according to which we have structured our life together. Jesus’ death, for Alison, doesn’t satisfy God’s wrath, but shows a God of unconditional love who is willing to occupy the place of utmost shame and weakness in order to break down our stony hearts. He absorbs our wrath.

    One of the reasons I find Alison’s approach is so appealing is that it shows the gospel as something genuinely new and radical. God isn’t caught up in the same economy of payback and tit-for-tat that we seem to be. He has nothing to do with that retributive scheme. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are an intrusion of a fundamentally different order into the one we have built for ourselves. And this intrusion, which is followed by the gifting of the Spirit, allows us to learn to participate in this new way of being.

    Jesus, who comes to us as the “forgiving victim,” enables us to live in a way that doesn’t depend on defining ourselves over against others. And doesn’t depend on sacrificing others to our desire for security. When we live with the understanding that God is unconditionally for us, we can gradually learn to let go of the fear that makes violence and sacrifice seem necessary in the first place.

    As an anthropologist and student of texts, Girard seems to see the implications of his theory being primarily for human society, ethics, and politics. And Alison more or less follows him here; the “new creation” that we’re being invitied to participate in seems chiefly characterized by transformed relationships between human beings. As a gay Catholic, Alison deploys these insights to powerful effect in thinking about how the church has victimized gay people but also about how all Christians can begin to live together in ways that don’t depend on defining “in” and “out” groups.

    Important as this work is, I’d also like to see this line of thought developed in a way that takes into account our relationship with the non-human world. After all, if God is the creator of all that is, his redemptive action presumably has implications for the entire world, not just us. Moreover, it’s no secret that the victims of sacrifice have often been our non-human fellow creatures. The scapegoat was originally, after all, a goat. Is there good news for him here too? And for us with respect to our felt need to dominate the non-human world?

    It’s more than a little ironic that we in the “enlightened” modern world subject animals to suffering and death on a scale that might well have made priests of the most blood-soaked cults of the ancient world blush. For us, animals have long represented both the “base” part of our nature (instinct, lust, violence) and, paradoxically, pure unspoiled nature. Consequently, we project both our fears and desires onto them, investing them with a kind of mythical power. At the same time we reduce them to commodities in our industrial systems of food, entertainment, and science. On a Girardian reading, we inflict violence on them because it’s what we think we have to do to get by in this world, to suppress our fears of our own violence and to assuage our fears of death and of being victimized.

    But if Girard and Alison are right, then the death of Jesus shows us that there is no “necessary” violence. Because God loves us unconditionally, and because that love has the last word in a universe seemingly characterized by confict, enmity, and the struggle to get ahead and be on top, we can learn to let go of the need to secure our place in this world by means of violence. We don’t need to sacrifice animals to the “gods” of appetite, safety, health, and science. We can trust that God will hold us in being and that we can even occupy the “place of shame” without losing ourselves. Moreover, as the theologian Stephen Webb has argued, we can be free to make friends with the animals. Just as Jeus is the agent of reconciliation among humans, he is the agent of reconciliation between humans and the rest of creation.

  • Paul Zahl’s theology of grace

    Another newish book that I picked up almost on a whim is Paul Zahl’s Grace In Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life. Zahl was until recently dean of Trinity Episcopal Seminary, is a determined low-church evangelical and vocal opponent of revisionist moves on same-sex relationships. Despite some disagreement there, I’d read his Short Systematic Theology (and he means short – it’s less that 100 pages) and was intrigued enough to want to read more.

    I’d describe Zahl as a kind of Episcopal version of Gerhard Forde. He is proudly “long on grace and short on law.” This book is an expostion of Zahl’s theology and its application to daily living that is rigorously grace-centered. He defines grace simply as “one-way love,” the love of God for human beings who have done nothing to deserve it.

    Zahl unabashedly embraces the Law-Gospel hermenuetic in his approach to scripture. The law is the perfect picture of what human life should be, but it is unable to produce the obedience it demands. If anything, its demands incite rebellion. Consequently, the law takes the form of accusation: an accusation we experience in all the pressures and stresses of life as demands press down upon us:

    What the law requires is exactly what men and women need in order to be wise, happy, and secure. But the law cannot pull this off. The problem with the law is not its substance. The problem with the law is its instrumentality. The law is not up to the task it sets for itself. If the law says, “Jump,” I sit. If it says, “Run,” I walk. If it says, “Honor your father and mother,” I move…to Portland. If it say, “Do not covet” (Romans 7:7-8), I spend all day on the Home Shopping Channel. (p. 35)

    Only grace, God’s one-way love, can get us out of this jam. God’s unilateral forgiveness takes away our guilt and anxiety about not being able to measure up. And, as a bonus, grace produces the “fruits” of love that the law couldn’t. “The one-way love of grace is the essence of any lasting transformation that takes place in human experience” (p. 36).

    One of the interesting things Zahl does is attempt to rehabilitate the theory of substitutionary atonement in a way that speaks a graceful word rather than a judgmental one. He has, he says repeatedly, a very low anthropology and a very high soteriology. Human beings are bound, curved in on ourselves, and unable to do anything to release the load of guilt and judgment from our shoulders. Only Jesus’ substitutionary death on the cross releases us from this curse:

    The atonement of Christ on the cross is the mechanism by which God’s grace can be offered freely and without condition to strugglers in the battle of life. Grace is not offered by God as a fiat. We all wish that the innocent had not had to die for the guilty. We wish that a different road, a road less traveled in scars, had been taken. But we have been told that this was the necessary way by which God’s law and God’s grace would be resolved. It had to be resolved through a guilt-transfer, making it “possible” — the idea is almost beyond maintaining — for God to give the full scholarship to the candidate least qualified to receive it. (pp. 117-18)

    Not eveyone will be convinced by Zahl’s defense of penal substitution (I’m not sure I was), but it does preserve something that I think other atonement theories often miss. Too often, especially in liberal theology, the atonement is reduced to an example, or a way of life, which deprives it of its once-for-all efficacy that lifts the burden of guilt off the shoulders of poor sinners. Zahl’s surprisingly convincing defense of the un-free will and total depravity are the counterpoint to the all-sufficiency of Christ’s atonement. If the cross of Christ is just one more demand (“Live a life of radical justice and self-sacrifice!”), then it does nothing to free me from my sins and self-will.

    The more original part of Zahl’s book may be his application of the idea of grace to relationships, in family, society and church. One-way love, not law and its threats and demands is the natural “fruit” of our justification. The image of fruits is particularly important in understanding the dynamic here. You don’t get a plant to produce fruit by pulling on its branches. You have to nourish its roots, in this case with the living water of grace.

    In families the theology of grace takes the form of loving acceptance, not heaping demands on each other. Zahl applies this to relationships between spouses, between parents and children, and between siblings. He argues that many of the troubles that plague family life, from resentment, to control, to competition, are outgrowths of a legalistic approach to life together. Paradoxically, he says, the relativization of the nuclear family by Jesus actually constitutes its salvation:

    The end of the absolute claim of the nuclear family, for which grace strictly calls, emancipates the nuclear family from the very nerve of neurosis, which is the projection upon human beings of what belongs only to God. The grace of God releases the possibility of non-demanding love among men and women who are united by human blood. This is the salvation of the famous nuclear family. (p. 186)

    Zahl applies his theology of grace in particularly striking ways to social ethics. Zahl, a student of both Moltmann and Kasemann, jettisons the “two kingdom” ethics identified with traditional Lutheranism and comes to some surprising conclusions for someone identified with the “conservative” wing of Anglicanism:

    “What is grace in relation to war and peace? It is to support no war ever under any conceivable circumstances, and it is peace in all things, the passive peace of Christ-like nonreactivity, bound ot the never-passive operation of the Holy Spirit” (p. 203).

    “Total mercy, complete exoneration, and unconditional release: those are the marks of grace in relation to criminal justice” (p. 211).

    “A theology of grace invites a non-romanticized preferential option for the poor. The picture of this is probably soemthing like a moderate, non-ideological, and non-utopian form of socialism” (p. 217).

    “Just as this theology opposes the use of war in every case, it opposes the construction of malls in every case. One can imagine the construction of a “mall” that buys and sells in a normal and necessary way. One can imagine instances of a market that buys and sells, provides, and distributes. But the mall as we now know it is the “green tree” under which the firstborn of the Canaanites were sacrificed” (p. 222)

    Finally, Zahl addresses grace in church. Here he’s at his most provocative, openly avowing a “low” or even non-existent ecclesiology. Ecclesiology is trouble, both because it is secondary to other more important topics, “such as the saving inherent in the Christian drama” (p. 226) and because it actually does harm to the extent that it “places the human church in some kind of special zone — somehow distinct from real life — that appears to be worthy of special study and attention. The underlying idea is that the church is in a zone that is free, or at least more free, from original sin and total depravity than the rest of the world, but the facts prove otherwise” (p. 226).

    To say we have no ecclesiology is not just a negation. To have no ecclesiology is to have an ecclesiology. What sort of ecclesiology is this? It is a noble one. It puts first things first. It puts Christ over the human church. It puts what Christ taught and said over the church. It puts grace over the church. It puts Christ’s saving work and the acute drama of the human predicament over the church. It puts the human hope of change over the church. It places the Holy Spirit over the church. (p. 227).

    The besetting temptation of the church is to elevate itself as an institution to a place of special prestige or power. In the impressiveness of its historical claims, or the purity of its doctrine, or the beauty of its liturgy it can become deceived into thinking that it’s an end in itself and has its foundation in itself. According to Zahl the church is properly seen as “a pneumatic, Spirit-led movement, always, like mercury in motion. Church is flux. A systematic theology of grace puts church in its right place. Church is at best the caboose to grace. It is its tail. Ecclesiology, on the other hand, makes church into the engine” (p. 228).

    Zahl calls this an “eccleisiology of suspicion,” which denies that there can be any “original sin-free zones” in this world. Those who put their faith in the church rather than God are bound to be bitterly disappointed. “A theology of grace, with its ecclesiology of suspicion, is the tonic and antidote to the church behaving badly” (p. 231). In a time when the church has been behaving badly (on all sides at different points), this strikes me as something that needs to be heard.

    Another noteworthy aspect of this book is that Zahl writes clearly and simply, with an almost whimsical tone. His text is littered with pop cultural references to old sci-fie movies, popular music, and even the plays of Tyler Perry, as well as examples drawn from everyday life. One is forced to wonder why more theologians can’t write like this.

    Despite some disagreements here and there, my overwhelming impression of this book was that Zahl is preaching a theology of grace that is desperately needed in the church and the world. This thirst for grace may be indicated by the fact that the book carries glowing blurbs from Peter J. Gomes of Harvard University and J. Ligon Duncan of the conservative Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Liberals and conservatives have both embraced different forms of “political correctness” — whether that means fealty to the Millenium Development Goals or opposition to gay marriage and abortion — which threaten to overshadow the gospel of God’s forgiving grace. But Zahl argues persuasively that this the only meaningful possibility for genuine human transformation.

  • Alison on sin, wrath and the “deathlessness” of God

    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.

  • Predestination with a human face

    Marvin has taken back up his series on “essential tenets of the Reformed faith” with posts on divine sovereignty and predestination. I commend the second one in particular. Though, I suppose you’re either destined to read it or not. 😉

  • Calvin on the Atonement and God’s wrath

    One of the problems with penal substitutionary theories of the Atonement, at least as sometimes presented, is that, on the one hand, they present God the Father as being unable to be reconciled to humanity until his wrath is spent, but on the other hand, the Bible is very clear that the work of Christ is initiated and carried out by God the Father and the Son, not the Son acting on the Father as it were.

    John Calvin, who is often regarded as one of the fathers of this understanding of the Atonement writes (in my heavily abridged version of the Institutes):

    Before we go any further, we must try to see how God, who goes before us in mercy, was our enemy until he was reconciled to us by Christ. But how could he have given us that unique seal of his love — the gift of his only begotten Son — if he had not already freely embraced us in his favour? (p. 129)

    What Calvin goes on to say seems to me to be that God has to make us understand how horrible our sin is, and that part of the reason why Jesus has to be crucified is to show this. “If it was not stated clearly that divine wrath and vengeance and eternal death hang over us, we would be less aware of our condemnation without the mercy of God, and less likely to value the blessings of salvation” (p. 129).

    But what’s not clear to me is whether Calvin is saying that God is truly merciful but has to “put on a show” of being wrathful in order to impress upon us the awfulness of our sins. Or is he actually saying that Jesus’ death propitiates God’s wrath, objectively speaking? This seems to be implied by what he says later about the “guilt which made us liable to punishment was transferred to the head of the Son of God” (p. 131), but if so, then it seems to me that he hasn’t really addressed the apparent contradiction of God being our enemy but also acting to reconcile himself to us (and it’s interesting that Calvin says that God is was reconciled to us (p. 129), whereas Paul says God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Is this significant?).

    It could well be that I’m just missing enough of the text that the argument isn’t spelled out more explicitly. Any Calvin-philes out there want to clear this up? Is the wrath for Calvin our perception which God alters by offering his Son, or does the Son objectively “satifsy” the wrath? Or both?

  • Scapegoats, sacrifice, and the “violence” of God

    In addition to the other books I’ve been juggling, this weekend I started reading James Alison’s Raising Abel, which carries the subtitle “Recovering the Eschatological Imagination.”

    Alison is a great writer and offers some startling insights that bring new life to seemingly obscure theological concepts, but here I want to think a little bit about his Girard-inspired reimagining of God.

    For those who don’t know, Rene Girard is a literary critic and anthropological theorist who has been very influential in certain theological circles. Girard’s most well-known contibutions revolve arround his account of human desire, violence, and scapegoating.

    Girard holds that all human desire is mimetic, that is, we desire something because we see someone else desiring it. Our selves are “socially constructed” in that we model ourselves after others, prior to even being aware of it.

    But it’s easy to see how the process of mimesis can breed conflict. If A and B both desire some good which only one can possess, competition and conflict are ready to hand.

    In Girard’s account, the way that conflict and the “war of each against all” is defused is by (subconsciously) directing the violence it creates against an innocent person – the scapegoat. But in order to hide the murder human beings tell stories about why it was necessary for this person to be expelled from the community in order to maintain/restore order. Thus, the way human beings run thing is inevitably tainted by violence against the innocent.

    Girard has applied these insights to the Gospel stories, arguing that in the New Testament we see, for the first time, a scapegoat who is recognized to be innocent. Thus the “scapegoating mechanism” is unmasked and the possibility of living non-violently is made a reality.

    Alison picks up on these Girardian themes and applies them more generally to the biblical story. For Alison, the revelation that comes to us in the Bible, albeit gradually and piecemeal, is that of God as entriely without violence.

    Though there are certainly passages aplenty that seem to involve God in violence, Alison argues that the overall trajectory, culminating in the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, is toward a vision of God who is utterly “deathless,” that is, has nothing to do with death and violence.

    And Jesus, in living a human life whose imagination is utterly possessed by this vision of God, makes it possible for us to live without reference to death. The reason this is so important is because all our violence is aimed ultimately at securing ourselves against the threat of death. Only when that fear is dispelled (by Jesus’ resurrection) can we begin to live non-violently.

    As I discussed briefly here, Alison sees this “Girardian” reading of the biblical text as having revolutionary implications for our understanding of Atonement. In some accounts of the Atonement the death of Jesus is taken to “satisfy” God’s wrath.

    There is some difference of opinion about whether God’s “wrath” should be understood as a personal anger against sin or more of an impersonal “force” – the inevitable consequences of human sin. But Alison contends that God has nothing to do with wrath.

    “Wrath” in Alison’s telling is our violence. We falsely attribute the violence that seems necessary to maintain order and security to the divine will. To say that Jesus experienced wrath is really to say that, in living a life of love perfectly infused with the vision of God, he fell afoul of our violence, the way by which we maintain order in this world. As I quoted Alison previously:

    God was entirely without vengeance, entirely without substitutionary tricks; and that he was giving himself entirely without ambivalence and ambiguity for us, towards us, in order to set us “free from our sins” – “our sins” being our way of being bound up with each other in death, vengeance, violence and what is commonly called “wrath”.

    In large part, what the death of Christ accomplishes is a change in our perception. Instead of thinking that the death of the “outsider” is necessary to maintain good order (which is identified with the will of God), the manifest innocence of this victim allows us to see that God is without wrath and that order of death and violence by which we run things here is our creation.

    It’s difficult to deny the power in Alison’s revisioning of traditional theological motifs, however I do worry that, in applying the Girardian interpretive grid to the Bible, he ends up seeing a God that fits the Girardian spectacles. In other words, is the Bible really saying what he says it’s saying? I, at any rate, find it tough to expunge the New Testament of more traditional renderings of “sacrifice” and the idea of God’s wrath.

    Part of what’s going on here is a broader argument in contemporary theology about whether there is any “violence” in God. Much of the criticism of “Anselmian” atonement theologies (often bearing little resemblance to what Anselm actually said), for instance, insists that they picture a God who inflicts, or at least approves of, violence.

    Of course, “violence” is a loaded term and it might be more helpful to talk about “force” and when force may or may not be justified. Also, in some circles, the concept of violence has become absurdly inflated to the point where any exercise of power or influence is deemed “violent.”

    But, even with all these qualifications, it still remains to ask whether the Bible and Christian tradition attibute “violence” to God (understood as some kind of opposition, exclusion, or expulsion) or whether God is characterized simply by unconditional acceptance. In his book Free of Charge, contemporary theologian Miroslav Volf writes about how the events in his homeland in the former Yugoslavia convinced him of the reality of God’s wrath:

    My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love. (Volf, Free of Charge, pp. 138-9)

    Volf goes on immediately to point out that, of course, we can’t exempt ourselves from being subject to God’s judgment without inconsistency. The perpetrator isn’t “the other,” but all have sinned and fallen short. And therefore all fall under just condemnation.

    However, contrary to what some modern critics maintain, a properly “Anselmian” account of redemption is more restorative than retributive. Human beings, according to Anselm, are made for felicity with God, but sin necessarily cuts us off from that. Our sin mars God’s creation and so we properly fall under God’s wrath, as Volf says.

    But God doesn’t want to punish us, according to Anselm. Punishment would be a decidedly second-best outcome, and Anselm’s God never does what is second-best. So God, in order to bring to completion his intentions for creation restores fallen humanity in the person of Jesus. This restored humanity is no longer the object of God’s wrath and the same goes for any who are incorporated into it (by “pleading Christ’s sacrifice”).

    And yet, there is no question that God opposes those things which distort or destroy the proper ends of his creatures. The difference is that God will go to whatever lengths are necessary to see his creation brought to fulfillment. So, it is perhaps possible to speak of God’s “violence” in that God will exclude from creation all that which threatens to destroy it.

    Whether or not this is a pernicious form of violence is, of course, disputable. But it seems to me that “non-violence” shouldn’t be an a priori axiom that dictates the shape of theology, but rather theology should shape our understanding of violence and when, if ever, violence is justifiable.

    I’m not sure Alison is guilty of this kind of “a priorism” (for starters, I’m only half-way through the book!), but it does seem to be a danger for theologians when they use an interpretive scheme to sift what counts as a genuine revelation of God.

  • Subverting sacrifice

    In comments here Rick Ritchie and I were discussing the ways in which the Christian story may or may not subvert or transform conventional notions of “sacrifice.”

    Part of what I find so appealing about Christianity is the way it turns upside-down our “natural” expectations about the meanings of things like power, glory, love, etc. Instead of a God who lords it over us from a distant heaven above, we’re shown a God who comes down to us in the form of a “suffering servant.” Sometimes we forget what a radical concept that is and try to shoehorn this story into more conventional “religious” categories. This is what I at any rate understand Luther to be getting at when he talks about the “theology of the cross.”

    Anyway, my thinking and reading on the matter has led me to the same conclusion when it comes to the question of “sacrifice.” The “religious” idea of sacrifice is that we humans provide something satisfying to God in order to get into his good graces. This can be understood in “primitive” terms (literal sacrifices – human or animal) or in more “refined” ethical terms (we’re good so God rewards us).

    But Christianity turns this on its head in a number of ways: God initiates the sacrifice by coming to rescue us from our sin and folly, much like the gracious father who rushes out to embrace his prodigal son. And God, rather than demanding sacrifice from us as the “price of admission” to his love, actually sacrifices himself. He “takes our place.” Rather than insisting that sinners be made into saints before entering into fellowship with them, he enters into fellowship with them resulting in their sanctification (Anders Nygren says this is the essential difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, but I’m sure that’s not entirely fair), paying the price for creating the possibility of fellowship himself.

    Now, clearly certain Christians have tried to apply the standard “religious” idea of sacrifice to what happens in the death and resurrection of Jesus. That is, God is pictured as requiring a sacrifice before he can forgive our sins, and this sacrifice is provided by the death of Jesus. But, as many have pointed out, since this sacrifice originates in the will of God and in God’s love for us, it’s far from clear it was “required” in the sense of a prerequisite for forgiveness.

    Moreover, is this “religious” view of sacrifice sufficiently radical in appreciating what God does? I’ve been meaning for a while to dig into the work of Catholic theologian James Alison. He came up again in a sermon I heard this weekend, and yesterday I finally sat down and read his article “Some thoughts on the Atonement.” Alison, building on the thought of Rene Girard, contends that God’s work in Christ subverts and explodes what he calls the “Aztec” view of sacrifice (i.e. what I’ve been calling the standard “religious” view), and that this radical reconfiguring of sacrifice is presaged in the rite of Atonement from Leviticus.

    I can’t do justice to Alison’s argument, but I think what he’s getting at, if I understand him, does capture some of the radical topsy-turvyness that I’ve been talking about. Alison talks about the story of David handing over the sons of Saul to the Gibeonites to be executed as an expiation for their father’s sins against that people. He continues:

    The interesting thing about [this story] is that it reminds us of what we often forget: the language of expiation. Here King David is expiating something, offering propitiation to the Gibeonites. In other words, the Gibeonites have a right to demand vengeance. Can you remember where this passage comes into the NT? St Paul seems to know about this: “What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?” (Rom 8:31-32) Do you see what St Paul is playing with there? St Paul is saying that God, unlike King David, did not seek someone else as a stand-in sacrifice to placate us, but gave his own son to be the expiation, putting forth the propitiation.

    In that text, who is propitiating whom? King David is propitiating the Gibeonites by means of Saul’s sons. God is propitiating us. In other words, who is the angry divinity in the story? We are. That is the purpose of the atonement. We are the angry divinity. We are the ones inclined to dwell in wrath and think we need vengeance in order to survive. God was occupying the space of our victim so as to show us that we need never do this again. This turns on its head the Aztec understanding of the atonement. In fact it turns on its head what has passed as our penal substitutionary theory of atonement, which always presupposes that it is us satisfying God, that God needs satisfying, that there is vengeance in God. Whereas it is quite clear from the NT that what was really exciting to Paul was that it was quite clear from Jesus’ self-giving, and the “out-pouring of Jesus’ blood”, that this was the revelation of who God was: God was entirely without vengeance, entirely without substitutionary tricks; and that he was giving himself entirely without ambivalence and ambiguity for us, towards us, in order to set us “free from our sins” – “our sins” being our way of being bound up with each other in death, vengeance, violence and what is commonly called “wrath”.

    I’m not sure I’d go all the way with Alison’s Girardian analysis here, but this is the kind of thing I was thinking of when I wrote that “I wonder how much of that language [of sacrifice, expiation, etc.] has its meaning radically subverted by the event of God becoming incarnate and suffering? For instance, sacrifice is usually understood as humans offering something to God in order to assuage the divine anger. But here God provides the sacrifice, which seems to at least call into question the transactional connotations that the language of sacrifice often carries.”

  • Jesus as sacrament

    It’s not uncommon for theologians to try and explain, or at least illuminate, the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of Communion by making an analogy with the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in the Person of Jesus.

    Whether or not this is a case of trying to explain the obscure by the even more obscure, I’ve been wondering if it might be possible to shed some light on the meaning of the Incarnation by making an analogy with the Sacrament.

    For instance, we don’t think of a sacrament as a transaction whereby we receive a certain amount of something called “grace.” Or if we do, there’s a good chance we have an excessively mechanical, or perhaps magical, understanding of what a sacrament is.

    The Book of Common Prayer defines sacraments, of course, as “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace” (BCP 857). Grace, in turn, is understood as “God’s favor towards, us, unearned and undeserved,” by which God “forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills” (858). The concrete, visible things – the bread and wine and water – are signs of God’s grace, but not in a merely symbolic way. They actually communicate it.

    So could the Incarnation and Atonement be understood in an analogous way? It’s no secret that theological explanations of the Person and Work of Christ have sometimes been excessively mechanical and transactional, and perhaps thinking in “sacramental” terms could help correct that.

    It is sometimes suggested, at least implicitly, that there has to be some transaction (between God and the Devil, or the Father and the Son) before human beings can be received back into God’s favor. And the way this takes place is sometimes couched in equally transactional terms (the paying of a ransom or debt; the receiving of punishment).

    This view seems to imply, much like the magical or mechanical view of the sacraments, that God must inject grace into the world where it was formerly lacking or absent. But what if we were to re-think the work of Christ along the lines suggested by the BCP‘s understanding of what a sacrament is?

    There is no indication, for instance, that God’s favor is absent from us prior to the sacrament. Rather the sacrament is the means by which God has chosen to make his already existing favor effectually present to us.

    Likewise, we could see the entire life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as a sacrament of God’s grace. It’s not as though that grace was absent from the world prior to the Incarnation; the Bible describes Jesus as the lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world. This would seem to suggest that God’s grace was “there” all along, but that Jesus is the “outward and visible sign” of this grace.

    At first sight this might seem to be a merely “exemplarist” view of the work of Christ – that Jesus is a “mere” symbol of some eternal truth about God’s love. But this is no more necessary than viewing the sacrament as a memorial or symbol of Christ’s presence.

    Most Christians historically have seen the sacrament as the means by which God’s love and favor is specially communicated to us and in which God “forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills.” And so, in Jesus God does the very same thing: communicates God’s gracious, forgiving, enlightening, and empowering love to us.

    Seeing Jesus as a sacrament may also give us some inkling as to why the Incarnation was in some sense “necessary.” One of the aspects of sacramental Christianity that I’ve always found especially appealing is that it recognizes our status as fleshly, embodied beings.

    The way we enter into fellowship with God is not by some spiritual “flight of the alone to the alone,” leaving behind the encumbrances of bodily existence. Rather, God graciously descends to be with us in a visible, tangible way, albeit in a way that confounds our expectations of what is proper for the Divine Majesty.

    It may be, as Gerhard Forde has said, that as an abstraction God is always a terror to us. Only when God becomes concrete, through God’s self-enfleshment in Jesus, can we receive grace. This doesn’t necessarily mean that God isn’t gracious “outside” of or “before” Jesus; we recognize that other earthly things can be channels of grace besides the dominical sacraments.

    But we believe by faith that God has promised to be present, to communicate grace to us in the bread, wine, and water. And similarly we believe that God has specially communicated the divine love to us in Jesus, even though it may well be possible that grace is available to those who have never heard of Jesus, or who, for whatever reason, have been unable to accept the Gospel.

    I assume some actual theologian may have already tried to explain things along these lines. If so, I hope a reader more theologically informed than I am will let me know (as well as if this is total b.s. ;-))

  • Only a suffering God can help(?)

    In an earlier post I mentioned that Keith Ward, unlike many contemporary theologians, has a generally positive view of the influence of Greek philosophy and thought-forms on the development of Christian theology. In his view Hellenistic thought allowed the early Christian theologians to deepen their understanding of Jesus as not only the Son of God but the cosmic Word who holds all things together.

    However, in agreement with many contemporary theologians, Ward thinks that the influence of certain forms of Platonism resulted in a mistaken affirmation of the impassibility of God:

    One of the chief influences of Platonism was that God, the Supreme Good, was generally conceived as immutable and impassible. Being perfect, God could not change, and divine perfection could not be affected by the sufferings and imperfections of the world. This creates major difficulties for any doctrine of incarnation, and especially for a doctrine that holds the eternal Word to be the only true subject of Jesus’ acts and experiences. (Re-Thinking Christianity, p. 69)

    How, Ward asks, can we conceive of a genuine union between a being that is unchangeable and a changeable and changing human being? Moreover, is this view of divine impassibility and immutability “adequate to belief in an incarnate and suffering God”?

    Nicea and Chalcedon produced statements about the person of Christ that most (not all) subsequent Christians have found ot define the limits of an adequate idea of the incarnation of God in Jesus. But many more recent theologians have thought that the Platonic idea of a totally changeless God is not really adequate to the Christian perception of a God who becomes incarnate and who suffers for the sake of humanity. A process of further re-thinking about God is positively mandated by the puzzles the ecumenical councils leave unresolved. (p. 70)

    Ward seems here to be taking sides in the debate over divine impassibility. Many recent theologians of a variety of perspectives and confessions have been willing to throw divine impassibility overboard, to the point where in an article from back in 1986 Ronald Goetz writing in the Christian Century was able to call the idea of a suffering God “the new orthodoxy.”

    Apart from the question of making sense of the union of the divine and human natures in Jesus, much of the value of the idea of a God who suffers has been taken to reside in its effects on the problem of evil and the doctrine of the Atonement. It’s been suggested that theodicy requires God to be the “fellow-sufferer who understands” (in A.N. Whitehead’s phrase), a perspective frequently emphasized by process theologians.

    Regarding the cross, instead of being the place where satisfaction is made, or Jesus is punished in our stead, it’s taken to reveal the solidarity of God with all who suffer. The atonement becomes more of a response to human pain than to human sin, and God is revealed supremely as a God of compassion (“suffering-with”).

    Now, I think this may be good as far as it goes, but I’m not sure it goes far enough. Leaving aside whether or not we can meaningfully speak of God suffering in the divine nature (and I’m not sure we can), it’s not clear to me that the value of a suffering God, morally and religiously, is as great as some have claimed.

    There’s no doubt that sharing in someone else’s suffering can have value, but I think one should be careful about ascribing too much value to suffering as such. Ironically, this is what critics of more traditional atonement theories often argue: that they valorize suffering and are complicit in oppression. But whatever else we might say about those traditional models, suffering is usually seen as instrumentally, not intrinsically, valuable. The sufferings of Christ are praiseworthy because they make possible forgiveness and liberation from sin.

    I worry that to focus too much on the suffering of God can actually exacerbate rather than ameliorate the problem of evil. Is it really better if God is trapped in the web of suffering too? Doesn’t that actually just make things worse? Some process theologians compound the problem by denying the actuality of personal immortality, thus rendering God impotent to redeem suffering, except insofar as it is somehow incorporated into the divine being as a necessary part of realizing certain values.

    In other words, even if we want to affirm that God shares our suffering, the Christian hope has traditionally been one of victory over and liberation from suffering. Again, just as traditional atonement theories are criticized for focusing on the death of Christ to the exclusion of his earthly ministry on the one hand and his resurrection and ascension on the other, the “suffering God” motif can become excessively cross-centered while downplaying the victory over death and suffering that Jesus won and has promised to share with us.

    To his credit Ward doesn’t really do this. He sees the suffering of God as the price that had to be paid to unite humanity to divinity, to take the life of a human being irrevocably into the Godhead, which in turn makes possible our participation in the life of God.

    Recent theology has, probably rightly, been wary of “triumphalism,” but Jesus’ triumph over sin and death is the cornerstone of Christian faith. Certainly God identifies with the victims of injustice, violence, and sin, but he does so in order to lift them to new life.

    Christianity, it seems to me, is ambiguous about power: Jesus relinquishes all earthly power to the point where he becomes a passive object, beaten, tortured, spat upon and finally crucified. But the power of the divine life is such that the bonds of death are unable to contain it. God triumphs over the powers of evil, and ultimately this victory will be consummated when the entire creation is freed from bondage and reconciled with God. So suffering and victimization are just one part of the story, however important. The ultimate promise isn’t simply that God shares our tears but that he will wipe them away:

    Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
    “See, the home of God is among mortals.
    He will dwell with them;
    they will be his peoples,
    and God himself will be with them
    he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
    Death will be no more;
    mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
    for the first things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:4)

    Connecting this back to the work of Christ, it seems to me that suffering with us is at best part of the story. Christ comes to be God with us (Emmanuel) in order to share our condition, but also to transform it. He comes to be in the place of sin and suffering with us, but in doing so he changes the character of that “place.” Not in the sense that we no longer have to suffer or die, but that the character of that suffering, and of our own deaths, is changed. This might be expressed in the Eastern idea of theosis – that God became human so that humans could participate in the divine life.

    In his book Jesus Our Redeemer, the Australian Jesuit Gerald O’Collins writes:

    Simply by itself the suffering which Jesus endured out of love did not bring about redemption. To be sure, many people have found comfort through seeing the crucified Jesus as their fellow-sufferer. He did not suffer on the cross alone but between two others who underwent the same death by slow torture (all four Gospels) and with his mother standing near to him (the Gospel of John). That scene has been applied and appreciated down through the centuries. Like many other soldiers who fought in France and Belgium during the First World War, my own father found himself in a terrain of wayside shrines, representations of Christ on the cross with the Virgin Mary keeping lonely vigil at the feet of her crucified Son. Often scarred and badly damaged by shells and bullets, those shrines gave soldiers on both sides the feeling of Jesus as their brother in the terrible pain and suffering they faced. Jesus had drawn close to them and they knew his presence in their terrifying situation. (p. 192)

    However, O’Collins goes on to emphasize that it is the divine love, not suffering as such, revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, that has value and the power to redeem us. The love poured out through these events has the power to heal us and unite us to the divine life. The divine self-manifestation is itself redemptive, even though in a fallen world it necessarily has a cruciform shape.

    One way of understanding this is suggested by Paul’s dictum that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In Jesus God has entered into the human experience so thoroughly with his forgiving, healing love that there is no “place” we can occupy where God’s love is absent. Not the place of suffering, of guilt, or of death. Hans ur von Balthasar, as is well known, daringly suggested that this extended to the depths of Hell itself. God’s love in Jesus permeates everything such that we can’t separate ourselves from it by anything we do or suffer.

  • July reading notes

    I recently finished a book called Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine by Vincent Brummer. Brummer is a Dutch philosopher of religion in the Reformed tradition and this book is an attempt to give an account of these central doctrines of Christian belief. Brummer starts from the premise that loving fellowship with God is our greatest possible good and that we have nevertheless become estranged from God. He then analyzes the Atonement as the way God effects reconciliation. The subsequent chapters on Christology and the Trinity tease out the implications of this view.

    Brummer heavily emphasizes the existential, personal, and relational aspects of Christianity, such that certain accounts of the Atonement (such as penal substitution) are ruled out as inadequate. This is because they don’t show how genuine reconciliation and restoration of fellowship is made possible by the Cross, but focus on things like paying off debts or removing guilt. It relies on a model of relationships couched in terms of rights and obligations rather than one of loving fellowship.

    In Brummer’s view, the Atonement is God’s act to remove obstacles that prevent us from being reconciled to Him. These obstacles include our ignorance of our own predicament, our ignorance of the divine love and will, our impotance to align our will with God’s will, and our lack of love and delight in the divine will. Brummer relates his discussion of soteriology to all three persons of the Trinity, arguing that they work to restore our lost fellowship with God.

    There’s also an interesting discussion of “social” vs. “Latin” models of the Trinity. Brummer critiques recent social trinitarians for lapsing into de facto tri-theism and says that any form of social trinitarianism that abandons the Platonic assumptions of, e.g. the Cappadocians is prone to this error. He then attempts to defend “Latin” trinitarianism against charges of modalism. My takeaway was that neither of these models is fully satisfactory.

    Currently I’m in the middle of Ronald Bainton’s The Travail of Religious Liberty, a little paperback I picked up at a used bookstore in Georgetown. This is a series of biographical studies from the Reformation and early modern periods of persecutors, heretics, and those who remonstrated for religious liberty, essentially tracing the period from the Spanish Inquisition to the British Act of Toleration. Bainton is probably better known for his book on Luther and his study of Christian attitudes toward war. But this is a little gem, full of fascinating historical detail and theological insights.

    On deck is Keith Ward’s new book Re-Thinking Christianity. This is billed as a sequel of sorts to his Pascal’s Fire (see here for more) and promises to examine the way that Christian theology has changed in significant ways over the centuries in response to different contexts. Part of his agenda, I think, is to construct what you might call a “liberal orthodox” theology, or a theology that is faithful to the central claims of Christianity while being open to insights from secular learning and culture as well as other faiths.