Visible victim decontructs myth
7 comments March 29th, 2008
Here's a link to my article in today's Edmonton Journal. The article is a reflection of my (attempted) Easter poem.
Icon of the crucifixion of Christ; of unknown origen.
Posts filed under 'Atonement'
A kind of Easter poem
Add comment March 23rd, 2008
The following poem was written in response to a friend's far more clever poem. (See Holy Hangover comments.) In the likely event that my poem fails, an upcoming article will hopefully give it some crutches.
Osiris, Isis, Horus
shrouded in sacred awe
and swollen footed Oedipus
bearing our hidden flaw
You god's of death and life
phantasmic transformation
upon the canvass of strife
once goats, now exaltation
Yet flung among antiquity
is Jesus' low-brow myth
while crude and poor symbolically
are victims revealed herewith
O Adonis, child eternal
shield us from place and time
since before myth was ritual
but first came our crime
Good Friday and Racism
Add comment March 21st, 2008
The conjunction of Good Friday and the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is appropriate. Racism, like discrimination of all kinds, is a symptom of the soul-sickness that was finally and forever uncovered by Good Friday. This “original sin,” our primal brokenness, has to do with our distorted desire (Girard) and our deeply sensed existential lack (Kierkegaard). A lack we attempt to slake through acquisition and self-elevation (twisted desire). That’s the abstract.
Here’s the personal: Good Friday is not about a vicarious substitution that saves me from a wrathful God. (The only wrath going on in the Easter story is ours.) It’s about a shot to the heart that cracks open my habit of trying to fill my “lack of peace,” my lack of self, by stepping on someone else. And concordantly, it’s about my willingness to be co-opted by any movement, club, church, campaign, crowd, that defines itself on the basis of being not like some other group, and so lifts me, by virtue of my belonging to it, to a status above the fray and field. A status that I cling to through violence, if necessary. Violence of any form that I’ll always have a way of justifying, “redeeming.”
This day, designated by the UN to focus on the problem of racism, I just discovered, marks a horrendous event that took place on March 21, 1960 in Sharpeville, South Africa, where 69 peaceful demonstrators were killed during a protest against apartheid.
Here was a case where societal disintegration–the fomentation inherent in apartheid–was resolved through the identification and killing of a chosen victim, (the group of peaceful protesters). Beyond instilling fear through a show of force it was hoped that the killing would reinforce and re-form the social unanimity and cohesion of the National Party and the white populace. In fact it was the beginning of the end of apartheid.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, the reason this kind of scapegoating no longer works is because of the Easter event. The redemptive violence on Good Friday is of the same order as that of racism. But because of Easter the justifications for racism and discrimination of any form fail. The “victim” is now visible.
And if the victim can no longer be hidden through justification we are without excuse if we refuse to do nothing. And so Good Friday also exposes our refusal to grow, or our acquiescence to immaturity within the shelter of a non-growing group–the same group that also shields us from the knowledge of our immaturity.
Good Friday invites us to grow. The Easter event asks us discard our notion that creation is a completed event in the distant past and instead see creation as an ongoing event in the present where we are continually being called into a great forgiving and creative love.
Palm Sunday at All Saints
Add comment March 17th, 2008
We gathered in the anteroom and were given palm fronds to hold. After a prayer of blessing we formed a line and entered the sanctuary, palm leaves in hand. Once around the sanctuary while singing “Ride on, Ride on in Majesty,” and then to our seats.
In the mean time Jesus had found a place at the front. Judas was in the back and Peter off to one side. Caiaphas and a few chief priests and elders were above us, up in the balcony. And Pilot was up there as well, standing off on his own.
Thus began the narration with the readers adopting their roles…and as well, a part for us, the crowd. We made our way through Matthew’s description of Judas’s sellout to Caiaphas, Jesus’ anguish in the garden, the betrayal of Peter, and the desertion of the disciples.
As a crowd, we found our voices during the trial. In response to Pilate’s question about who to release we said, “Barabbas.” And in reply to Pilate’s, “Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” We all said, “Let him be crucified!”
Of course there was no resemblance to the dusty, sweaty, bloody, event. No one was dressed for the part. And while we tried, “the crowd” was lacking conviction…and yet, in that cavernous sanctuary there was this second, one meteoric moment where I was placed in the swirling fomenting mood of the bloodthirsty crowd, calling, with everybody else, “Crucify him!”
Liturgy, this liturgy, was an iconic entrance into an event where symbol confronted me with the actual.
Letter to a Christian Nation
1 comment February 7th, 2008
For my kick off to Lent I read Sam Harris’, "Letter to a Christian Nation." It’s the new edition released just last month with an afterword–where he reiterates his disdain for moderate religion and gives some thought to the origin of religion…which he was just coming to at the end of the previous edition.
And it’s here, on his ruminations on religion and blood sacrifice, that I want to call Sam up and say, please, please, read Rene Girard …and by the way, it’s okay, he’s not a theologian, he’s an historian, ethnologist, and an anthropologist.
Harris says, "Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere." Well, Girard, has done peerless research in this exact area, but he has done so much more. He has taken his discoveries and worked forward, showing how the expulsion of a victim, and the resultant "peace," enforces both the belief of the guilt of the victim and the victim’s paradoxical power to bring peace. Social unity is restored over the divinized surrogate victim and a ritual of remembrance (more sacrifices, prohibitions, myths) is encoded into the culture. This is how religion got every ancient human culture off the ground.
Of course to Harris the purpose of religion has long past. And in this important but incomplete understanding of religion he is exactly right. Now if only he could take this research he seems to agree with and stay with it a little longer…begin to sit with the theory that scapegoating, sacrifice of the one for the sake of the all, is everywhere transcribed in antiquity as myth, and that scripture itself in this sense, is also mythological (justifies violence), but is finally revelatory. Revelatory in that we are confronted with the fact that scapegoating is still indelibly inscribed in us. Here’s James Alison:
Professor Girard had assumed that the Jewish and Christian sacred texts would show exactly the same thing as all other ancient texts and myths – the threat of collapsing social unity leading to violence and the emergence of a new peace around the cadaver of the victim. To his amazement he found that although they did exactly that – they really are structured around sacralised violence – there was a unique and astonishing difference: the Jewish texts, starting with Cain and Abel – gradually dissociate the divinity from participation in the violence until, in the New Testament, God is entirely set free from participation in our violence – the victim is entirely innocent, and hated without cause – and indeed God is revealed not as the one who expels us, but the One whom we expel, and who allowed himself to be expelled so as to make of his expulsion a revelation of what he is really like, and of what we really, typically do to each other, so that we can begin to learn to get beyond this.
The forms of Religion railed against by Harris are indeed in need of deconstruction. And if God is a capricious God of wrath and blood sacrifice, then I am an atheist. But a move to the logical positivistic philosophy of Harris will not get at the root of violence. In my thinking, the key for this is in being confronted with our ways of vicitmizing and the acquisitive desire that spawns it. This is the revelation found in the gospel, through which we can see our way free of hatred, abuse, torture, and all forms of violence.
Easter-eyes
Add comment May 3rd, 2007
Forgive this foray into what I suppose is a kind of pragmatic theology (perhaps there’s truly no other kind) but I’ve been dipping into the quite remarkable, S. Mark Heim’s, "Saved from Sacrifice." And since it’s still Easter-tide–although the tide is going out–here’s my Heim-inspired Easter thought:
When a Christian tells you, "Jesus died for me," don’t believe that he means it unless he can locate, somewhere in his own social history, his personal involvement with the process that put Jesus to death, and, unless, he can locate others in his life, that, in the same sense, died for him. In other words, others that were victims of his conscious or unconscious involvement in the mechanism of scapegoating.
Only under this light can someone say with seriousness, that "Jesus died for him." Because only in this light do we find our Easter-eyes through which personal transformation is possible. Otherwise the phrase has the redemptive and reconciliatory weight of "I like tea."
Technorati Tags: S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice, Atonement, Christianity, Peace
Sticky Issues and Easter
3 comments April 5th, 2007
I’ve never set out to be controversial. I don’t think it’s in my nature. Not to say I haven’t tasted the desire to be…and have followed-up. But I also know that controversy for it’s own sake is a form of cover.
Still, when something settles in on me on a deep existential level, it necessitates some form of airing.
So here’s the latest airing. (It will be controversial for some, routine for others.)
Technorati Tags: Church, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ted Haggard, Atonement, Christianity, Peace
April Fools and Palm Sunday
3 comments April 2nd, 2007
There’s a certain symmetry about yesterday’s concurrence of Palm Sunday with April Fools. The conjunction offers heightened satire and spice.
Jesus, king-on-a-donkey, riding on a carpet of raggedy cloaks and palm leaves placed by peasants, must have appeared a fatuous spectacle. A great April Fools joke. Jesus the jester. Jesus, like Shakespeare’s Falstaff, an unwitting mocker.
But not so unwitting as to fail to time his entrance with Pilate’s Royal Parade on the other side of the city.
The Imperial Roman parades were always scheduled for Jewish religious celebrations, like Passover. The intention was to dominate and intimidate the common Jewish citizenry.
On this Passover however, Jesus was on the other side of Jerusalem collecting, including, inspiring, and enlivening the crowd. Sitting on a colt, he remained at eye level with the unwashed.
Concerning the gentry, a powerless, uncommonly naive, clown-king. To the oppressed, the occupied, the impoverished, a deliverer that could be identified with.
Technorati Tags: Palm Sunday, April Fools, Christianity
Unpicking Atonement’s Knots
2 comments November 9th, 2006
I remember sitting in my truck, in the parking lot of a Baptist church, reading James Alison’s "On Being Liked," specifically the essay, Unpicking Atonement’s Knots, when the whole penal substitution thing finally collapsed for me and I was set on a path of trying to understand atonement, not as substitution theory, not as satisfaction of a debt, not as appeasement, not even as God’s suicide on our behalf, but as a liturgical undergoing. That is, as God’s occupying the place of victim of our wrath, exposing not God’s, but our victimizing and sacrificial ways.
Now, more than a couple years later, I’m still somewhat off-balance and dizzy from the emancipation, and no doubt the emancipation of my understanding of a semi-peaceable God.
That chapter, Unpicking Atonement’s Knots, to answer a previous question, is a wonderful (and accessible) place to start in understanding God as non-sacrificial. And in seeing the ongoing organic, creative, and lively connection between atonement and Creation as opposed to a more static Creation, Fall, Redemption schema.
(I’ve also listed related books on another post)
Technorati Tags: James Alison, On Being Liked, Atonement, Christianity, Peace, Violence
Girard, Christians, and Violence
2 comments November 7th, 2006
An article in Christianity Today’s 50th Anniversary with the promising title "The Church’s Great Malfunctions," written by Miroslav Volf and colleagues from the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, is a refreshing self-critique of modern Christianity. It’s good, and as I said, refreshing, but it doesn’t go far enough.
The essay begins by conceding that too often, "Christian faith neither mends the world nor helps human beings to thrive. On the contrary, it seems to shatter things into pieces, to choke what’s new and beautiful before it has chance to take root, to trample underfoot what’s good and true."
This was refreshing because the 152 page special edition of CT consulted 114 leaders from 11 ministry spheres about the future of Christian evangelical priorities, and only Volf was this candid. Among all the concern about getting back to scriptural basics, connecting to culture while being counter-cultural, and the repeat warnings about the gay agenda, only Volf’s article, (with the exception of one or two others leaders who drew attention to poverty and AIDS) asks an apt question. That is, why is it that Christians who embrace a peaceable faith have often been so violent?
His answer laid out under three rubrics; a thin faith, an irrelevant faith and an unwillingness to walk the narrow path, was however disappointing. It provided nothing new other than an appeal to renew Christian character. It never reached into the underlying cause that this blog, when given opportunity, will go banging on about. And that is the sacrificial reading of scripture and substitutional atonement theory.
Please, Yale Center for Faith and Culture, you say it takes hard intellectual and spiritual work to learn to understand and live faith authentically. Then don’t ignore the implications of Girardian thought, the most exciting theological thinking since Augustine and the most fruitful anthropological thinking since the arrival of anthropology.
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Any question on violence in reference to Christianity and the gospel must take Girard into account. Is it because entrenched statements of faith rooted in medieval theology are too layered over by time and tradition to be overcome?
As long as we ignore our sacrificial ways, already exposed by Christ, as long as we continue to unconsciously justify them through our uncritical acceptance of a flawed theory of the atonement we remain imprisoned by them. And so we go on acceding to so-called redemptive violence and wonder why we fit a violent culture.
But by excavating our error, by undergoing the all together non-violent way of God which is the peace of Christ, we may then find that symptoms like thin faith etc., lose their grip.
Technorati Tags: Rene Girard, Miroslav Volf, Christianity Today, Yale Center for Faith and Culture, Atonement, Christianity, Peace, Violence
The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
