A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • The smiling God

    I don’t usually write about Joel Osteen and his ilk because a. evangelicalism isn’t really my milieu and b. it seems a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But if you like that sort of thing, Slate‘s review of Osteen’s new book is worth checking out.

  • The end of the world as we know it (3)

    (See here and here for previous posts.)

    The third part of The God of Hope and the End of the World is Polkinghorne’s attempt to construct a positive theological vision out of biblical insights, but one informed by what scientific cosmology tells us about the nature and destiny of the universe. The resurrection of Jesus, in its illustration of the principle of continuity/discontinuity, provides the key to understanding the future of the cosmos as a whole. Polkinghorne takes seriously the biblical promises that God will redeem the entire creation, not just human beings. He envisions a transmutation of the material cosmos into a new cosmos that parallels the transmutation of Jesus’ dead body into his glorified raised body (Polkinghorne suggests that part of the significance of the empty tomb is to be found here; matter is not to be discarded, but taken up into something new).

    Eschatology is concerned with hope. What can we hope for in a world in which it appears that human aspirations, both individual and collective, are destined for ultimate defeat? “Hope,” says Polkinghorne

    is the negation both of Promethean presumption, which supposes that fulfillment is always potentially there, ready for human grasping, and also of despair, which supposes that there will never be fulfilment, but only a succession of broken dreams. Hope is quite distinct also from a utopian myth of progress, which privileges the future over the past, seeing the ills and frustrations of earlier generations as being no more than necessary stepping stones to better things in prospect. (p. 94)

    But what is hope’s positive content? It’s the conviction that “all the generations of history must attain their ultimate and individual meaning” (p. 94). But the only thing that can guarantee this kind of meaning is “the eternal faithfulness of the God who is the Creator and Redeemer of history” (p. 94). Polkinghorne says that a “thick” eschatology requires an equally “thick” theology and Christology. “To sustain true hope it must be possible to speak of a God who is powerful and active, not simply holding creation in being but also interacting with its history, the one who ‘gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (Romans 4:17)” (p. 95).

    This is a robust, “supernaturalist” eschatology, wherein God will act to bring about a new creation that will supplant the old. Polkinghorne’s background as a physicist may give him a more cosmic perspective here. Theologians frequently seem to reduce eschatology to concerns with human destiny, sometimes even to political aspirations. Polkinghorne distinguishes his view from a fully “realized” eschatology that doesn’t privilege the future over the present (a view he attributes to Kathryn Tanner; I’m not sure if this is right since I find Tanner pretty obscure on that point), as well as from the concept of “objective immortality” favored by some process theologians. Both of these options condemn the lives of countless beings to permanent incompleteness. “Actual eschatological fulfilment demands for each of us a completion that can be attained only if we have a continuing and developing personal relationship with God post mortem” (p. 100).

    Polkinghorne thus stakes out a position between a fully “realized” eschatology and a strictly “futurist” one which he calls an “inagurated eschatology.” The pledge of God’s future victory of sin, death, and suffering has been given in the resurrection of Jesus, but the final consummation is still in the future. We can to some extent participate in that future now by being incorporated into Christ’s body through his church and the sacraments. Ethically, this means that follow the way of the crucified and risen one, even though we can’t see exactly where that way is leading us. But we can be assured that “our strivings for the attainment of good within the course of present history are never wasted but will bear everlasting fruit” (p. 102).

  • The end of the world as we know it (2)

    The key principle that Polkinghorne uses to construct his eschatological vision is that of continuity/discontinuity. If God is going to bring new life out of this fated-for-death universe, it must be both continuous with what has come before and discontinuous in overcoming the frailties, limitations, and evils of the present universe. The paradigmatic expression of this principle for Polkinghorne is the resurrection of Jesus: it is both the same pre-Easter Jesus who has been raised, but he has been raised to a new kind of life that is qualitatively different from earthly life.

    In terms of physical continuity, Polkinghorne attempts to isolate some of the fundamental aspects of the universe. He sees the cosmos as essentially a process, a self-evolving spatio-temporal cosmos that eventually gives rise to intelligent, self-aware beings. This cosmos is also characterized by a deep relationality: everything from quarks to human beings find their identity in relation to other parts of the universe; it is imbued with information: patterns and wholes exert genuine causal effect on what happens; and it displays a deep intelligibility and transparency to mathematical reasoning. Polkinghorne’s suggestion is that these deep features of the present universe reflect the will of the Creator and that we can reasonably expect them to persist in some way in the new Creation.

    Hope for a new creation, though, can only be rooted in the faithfulness of God. Consequently, it’s important to discern what we can of the divine nature and character if we are to have hope for the future. In a survey of the biblical material that manages to be both extremely concise and comprehensive, Polkinghorne paints a picture of a faithful, loving deity that emerges from the Old and New Testaments. The Bible, for Polkinghorne, is not “a conveniently divinely dictated handbook in which to look up the answers, but it is the record of the persons and events that have been particularly open to the presence of the divine reality and through which the divine nature may most transparently be discerned” (p. 53). In God’s faithfulness to Israel, in its growing eschatological expectations, and preeminently in his raising of Jesus from the dead, Polkinghorne discerns a God who, because of his loving faithfulness, will act to bring about a state of affairs where God’s presence is made immediately apparent to God’s people and in which the sufferings and limitations of this present life are overcome.

  • The end of the world as we know it (1)

    One of the things I usually make a point of doing when we’re visiting my wife’s family in Indianapolis is to make a trip to Half Price Books. They sell both used books and remainders, and it’s rare that I can’t find some gem at low, low prices. (They also have HPB in California, but I’ve yet to find any on the East Coast.)

    Anyway, when we were there over Christmas I picked up John Polkinghorne’s The God of Hope and the End of the World. Polkinghorne, the physicist-turned-Anglican-priest, offers here a meditation on eschatology in the 21st century. His contention in that Christian theologians need to engage with the picture of the destiny of the cosmos delivered to us by modern science: cosmologists are able to predict with a high degree of certainty that the physical universe will end either in a “big crunch” — where the universe essentially collapses back in on itself — or will continue to spread out indefinitely with entropy reigning as everything decays to low grade radiation. More locally, our sun will eventually go nova and destroy any remaining life on earth (assuming we have avoided man-made or biological catastrophes).

    Even though these events are billions of years in the future, Polkinghorne says, they still call into question the ultimate significance of the universe. If the cosmos is destined to end with a bang or a whimper, it seems to threaten a kind of ultimate meaninglessness. The human prospect will long since have come to an end and all that will be left is, at best, a dead cosmos. Polkinghorne thinks that a credible eschatology has to take this rather bleak picture seriously. His book is part-apologetic, part-constructive theology as he attempts to show how sense can be made of the biblical promise that God will create a “new heaven and new earth.” In this series of posts I’ll highlight some of what I think are Polkinghorne’s more fruitful and intriguing reflections.

  • Real food

    Via Jeremy, a review Michael Pollan’s new book at Slate. Laura Shapiro defends Pollan from charges that he’s a mere “lifestyle guru” uninterested in political changes that could actually change the way we eat. That Pollan is interested in motivating political change should be clear to anyone who’s read his articles over the past year in the New York Times.

  • Catch-all blog update post

    Sorry about the dearth of posting: a confluence of extreme busyness, travel, and computer issues has put a cramp in my blogging style. Although one perk is that I’ve been forced to detach from the various teapot-sized tempests roilling the blogosphere, which is always a benefit of time away from the computer.

    We’re in Indiana visiting the in-laws for Christmas and enjoying some much needed R&R. In my free time I’ve been reading C. S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. This is a marvelous little book in which Lewis delineates the worldview that underlies the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Sometimes I think Lewis has (unjustly) gotten a reputation as something of a shallow thinker due to the popular nature of his apologetic works, but in this book his incredible erudition is on full display, though tempered with his lucid and homey prose.

    I’ve also been catching up on my magazine reading – that is, actual printed matter. I recommend this interesting article from Mother Jones on Ron Paul’s online following, as well as the current issue’s cover story (which doesn’t seem to be online yet), detailing the environmental consequences of China’s amazing economic growth. Also, Jason Byassee has a provocative article on pornography and “Christian eroticism” in this month’s First Things that is well worth checking out.

    Other highlights of the trip so far: hanging out with my brother-in-law and his wife, a trip to Half Price Books (yea!), and taking in a civic theatre production of Joseph and the Amazing Technocolor Dreamcoat.

    Here’s a few of the notable links I’ve come across in the last couple of days: Wayne Pacelle on Animals and Christmas, two posts on Scripture from Elizaphanian, Marvin writes about stopping global warming, Christopher on recapturing the joy of the Christmas message and Christian living and in defense of the Virgin Birth.

    I’m looking forward to the Christ Mass tonight at a local Anglo-Catholic Episcopal parish – the same one we attended last year. For a variety of reasons I’ve had a hard time getting into the spirit this Christmas, but I think this will be just what the doctor ordered.

    I hope everyone reading has a verry Merry Christmas!

  • Evil empire?

    P.J. O’Rourke reviews a new book on Starbucks that offers some counterintuitive facts:

    Clark is frank about his bias: “Starbucks diminishes the world’s diversity every time it builds a new cafe, and I can’t help but feel troubled by this.” But when Clark looks at whether the towering Mount St. Helens that is Starbucks, with its volcanic eruptions of store openings, has buried the competition, he has the grace — not given to every pundit — to look at what he’s actually seeing. Clark informs us that in 1989 there were 585 coffee houses in America. Now there are more than 24,000. Fifty-seven percent of these are what Clark calls “mom and pops.” “Paradoxically,” he writes, “the surest way to boost sales at your mom-and-pop cafe may be to have a Starbucks move in next door.”

    This actually makes sense. Starbucks stimulates an interest in “gourmet” coffee where it didn’t previously exist. In my neighborhood, for instance,there are at least six cafes, only one of which is a Starbucks. Which is good for me, because I don’t even like Starbucks coffee that much. (I agree with the line O’Rourke quotes about it tasting like it’s been through “a fire that has been extinguished by a fire brigade.”)

  • 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.

  • Alterna-nomics

    I finally got my hands on a copy of Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy and I’m tempted to call it my non-fiction book of 2007. It manages to be both troubling and hopeful as it paints a bleak picture of what our present obsession with “growth” is doing to us and to the planet, while holding up examples of alternatives to full-speed-ahead globalism that actually seem to work.

    McKibben has written about environmental issues for years, publishing the first popular work about global warming back in the late 80s. But here he offers a critique of our entire modern economic system and its effects on body, soul and environment. His argument is actually very straightforward: conventional economics which seeks growth as its ultimate aim is failing us for three reasons. First, it breeds inequality, something which has acheived fairly staggering proportions. Second, it’s bumping up against the physical limits of the planet, both in the effects its having on the environment and its depedence on resources that are rapidly dwindling. Third, it’s not making us happy.

    It’s this last argument that offers a somewhat novel twist on an assessment that will be familiar to many. To critique go-go capitalism for creating inequality or ravaging the earth is nothing new (even if we still haven’t really accepted it). But the idea that all that stuff isn’t making us any happier flies in the face of some of the most fundamental assumptions of our political and economic system.

    His contention is that, for a long time, More and Better have come as a package deal. As we get richer we get happier. Someone who shares a tiny room with five other people, doesn’t get enough to eat, and works long hours of drugery isn’t likely to be happy. So, an increase in wealth can make a real difference for someone like that. The problem is that we in the prosperous West have largely overshot the point of diminishing returns: more isn’t better anymore. In fact, there’s evidence to suggest that Americans, for instance, are less happy on the whole than they were in, say, the 1950s despite tremendous increases in wealth.

    I tend to agree with Caleb Stegall who, in his review in the American Conservative, lamented McKibben’s reliance on the trendy new “science” of “happiness research,” but I suspect that McKibben is drawing from deeper wells than that. Virtually our entire religious and philosophical heritage has told us that riches aren’t the path to lasting happiness and satisfaction, and, in fact, are often obstacles to it. If “happiness studies” provides some measure of empirical verification of this tried truth, great. But I don’t think much in McKibben’s argument really hangs on it.

    Part of the problem, McKibben thinks, is that our greater wealth has come at the price of the erosion of our communities. Getter richer has meant working longer hours, being willing to move frequently in order to climb the ladder of success, and generally maintaining tenuous relationships with those around us. A recent Washington Post piece illustrates the point: busy professionals are actually outsourcing the tasks of daily life to professional “lifestyle managers.” McKibben calls this phenomenon “hyper indvidualism,” the way our wealth insulates us from the demands, but also the support, provided by community.

    McKibben recognizes that wealth and its attendant individualism has benefits, but he thinks the pendulum has swung too far away from community. Socialism was a failure, and the market works. But we need markets that are “embedded” in social contexts that tame and humanize them. McKibben’s favorite metaphor for his vision is the farmer’s market, a place where people come to buy and sell, but which is knit together by thicker relationships than those at the supermarket (or on the Internet).

    Localism becomes the key virtue in the alternative economics that McKibben is encouraging us to build. Not only are local economies more ecologically durable (globalism as we know it is probably dependent on what will turn out to be a one-shot binge of fossil fuels), but they enable communities to flourish and individuals to find contexts in which they can be at home. McKibben is at his best as a reporter and storyteller, and much of the book consists of his descriptions of local economies in action: a farmers’ co-op in Vermont, a community department store created as an intentional alternative to Wal-Mart, local radio, Cuban farmers forced to turn to sustainable agriculture once they could no longer depend on industrial subsidy from the Soviet Union, experiments with local currencies, and other attempts to live outside the channels of the global marketplace.

    To me one of the most important chapters is the final one, “The Durable Future.” The moral trump card that defenders of mainstream globalization inevitably use is the poor people of the Third World. Farmers markets and localism may be well and good, they say, but fast-paced industrial growth is the only way to lift the millions and millions of desperately poor people in the world up to a decent standard of living.

    McKibbon concedes that growth is necessary for the poorest people in the world. As we saw before, below a certain point misery and poverty certainly go together. But, he points out, there’s good reason to believe that the earth can’t handle everyone living like Americans. If everyone in China drove a car, for instance, the CO2 emissions from China alone would exceed the rest of the world combined. Not to mention soil erosion, pollution, water shortages, and the rest of the environmental strains that go along with rapid industrialization, which are making themselves felt in China now. It’s also not clear that the rest of the world can even absorb all the goods the Chinese (not to mention everyone else) need to produce in order to “grow” themselves out of poverty.

    Furthermore, growth in the developing world often occurs as a result of mining natural resources and converting peasant farming to commodity farming, both of which have severe negative “externalities” ranging from the degradation of ecosystems to mass unemployment and migration from the countryside to urban slums and shantytowns. Overall it’s far from clear that the tide can rise fast and furiously enough to lift all boats without drowning the people unable to climb aboard.

    Part of the problem is that the West is exporting through its cultural products a picture of the good life that is unattainable by all the world’s people, and which would likely result in diminishing returns in happiness even if it were. But what’s the alternative? McKibben argues that “developing” countries can benefit from a turn to the local just as “developed” ones can.

    What should that development look like? It should look to the local far more than to the global. It should concentrate on creating and sustaining strong communities, not creating a culture of economic individualism. It should worry less about what’s ideal from a classical economist’s view of markets, and far more about what’s ecologically possible. It should aim not at growth but at durability. It should avoid the romantic fantasies offered by the prophets of endless wealth in favor of the blunter realism of people looking out for each other, much as they have over the millennia of human existence. In other words, it won’t be all that different from what we need to acheive in the rich world, though we begin so unimaginably far apart that for a very long time North and South will continue to look very different. (pp. 197-8)

    McKibben offers a variety of examples of local economies in the developing world that depend on intermediate technology, local know-how, community enterprise, and ecological sensibilites. “The point is not ‘Old ways good, new ways bad,” Rather, each locality, instead of relying solely on Adam Smith as filtered through the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, needs to figure out what its mix of tradition and resources and hopes allows” (p. 217). Western models of “development,” operating from decidedly mixed motives, often assume that the goal should be to make poor people just like us.

    At the end of the day, though, the biggest problem is us. We have so much (as a society; there are of course pockets of inexcusably poverty even in the richest countries) and want more still. To imagine less, not to cheer when the economy grows, would requrie a transvaluation of values that would make Nietzsche blanch. Christians, in particular, ought to be receptive to this message since our theological tradition is nearly unanimous in commending frugality, and even downright ascetical lifestyles. It’s hard to imagine an ethos more at odds with the One who told us not to lay up treasure on earth than our modern American prosperity gospel. The irony is that it’s apparently not even making us happy, but like an addict we can’t even admit we have a problem.

  • 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.