Atonement/Christianity/Religion

Jesus: Mysterious Necessity

Posted on by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Len, I am grateful for this comment:

I’m just not at the place where I can say I fully understand what to do with all that sacrificial stuff in the Old Testament (I often want to chuck it all and be a Simone Weil ’ian’) and the Lamb of God stuff in the new Testament. If we don’t include the idea of sacrificial and substitutionary atonement then there is a lot of scriptural material that I need to deal with in a new way.

I have evolved enough to change my statement of faith on my blog to read "Jesus was the fulfillment of some mysterious necessity. "It used to read: "Jesus was the fulfillment of the requirements of God’s law…."

You convinced me that I don’t have to define Jesus as God’s whipping boy, so I moved the atonement stuff to the realm of pure mystery in my thinking. For now I don’t know what else to say about it. Perhaps If I read the book that brought the light to your eyes I too will have the epiphany I am looking for.

Perhaps mystery is still the grand realm where all of our stutterings reside because they begin and end with the incarnation. And how I love your statement: "Jesus was the fulfillment of some mysterious necessity." Mysterious…certainly. Necessary…absolutely.

Here are a some of the books that have inspired and changed me, and have become texts for Grow Mercy: Books by James Alison: Knowing Jesus, Beyond Resentment, On Being Liked, and his thesis–where he deals with all the substitutionary atonement scripture and more–not an easy read but amazing breadth, an amazing book: The Joy of Being Wrong – Original Sin through Easter Eyes. Books by Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, and perhaps the pivotal book, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. And also, Gil Ballie’s accessible and pragmatic and beautifully written, Violence Uncovered.

There are of course others. Traces of the non-sacrifical, (hesitate to call it a movement) can be detected to various degrees, in authors like Merton, Nouwen, and Vanier. I could be wrong here but even evangelical writers like Yancy and Campolo seem to employ a kind of "atonement lite". At least the emphasis, as in all of Brennan Manning’s books for example, are all upon the exemplary love of Jesus. Here the work of Jurgen Moltmann for example, or the "exemplary view", or "Christus Victor" understandings of atonement are evident. These are efforts at reworking the substitutional atonement, while still leaving the language intact.

You’ll be intrigued to know that Girard regards Dostoyevsky as one of the greatest of novelists, and shows how Dostoyevsky, through his own writing over the course of his life, came to a deep understanding of human desire (mimetic desire) and to a non-sacrificial understanding of Christianity.

Again thank you for your comment. I hope in my own peice-meal way, through my own limited experiences, with obvious help from author-friends, that I can shed slivers of light in future posts in how all of scripture points to and supports non-sacrifice and non-violence and non-scapegoating.

The key is to read all things, as far as we are able, through "Easter eyes". I think that, in the end, this is what Simone Weil did. Her life was an amazing self-gift to the working poor, her mind a wealth for theologians, and her refusal to enter the church was, for her time, a Christ-like act…an identification with all people through rendering the Temple/Church exclusionary "laws" (which are by their nature sacrificial) as nul and void.

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Atonement/Christianity

Marcion and Girard

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Thank you "Former-Saul" for your comment:

…The “trying on of new lens” smacks of the “open mindedness” that several modern and historical groups have used for peoples lack of buy in to their choices…as recent as last week when a drug abusing friend of mine told me I wasn’t open minded enough to understand why he does what he does. It seems a popular fallback position for “fringe” ideas. Be fore I turned 40, if you would have asked me what I thought of Christians my response would have been, “not much but I sure wouldn’t wanna be one!”… So when It comes to Copernian shifts, I get it. So it appears to me that your view is simply another Marcionite take on things…ignoring the huge sections of scripture that don’t fit into your present, preconcived lens… …I really would like to understand your position.

There is open-mindedness (bad sense) that is of course anything from a self-justification for errant thinking and bad behaviour, to an evasion of commitment. But there is open-mindedness (good sense) without which we fail to grow or learn or live. My ardent hope is that I lean to the latter. No doubt I have too often been found in the former. I am sincerely indebted to anyone who would steer me right.

God knows I have preconceptions that need pruning and lenses that need squeegeeing. But lenses just the same. If post-modernism has taught us anything it is that we are never without lenses…that we are contingent beings unable to escape our subjectivity. (We were of course foolish to try, as the Enlightenment has shown us.)

Perhaps then, the better way to approach this "sacrificial" thing is to try to find the story that best fits the story. A kind of search for existential verification. While post-modernity has bequeathed some questionable ideas, this is one of post-modernisms good gifts. Something we humans have always done is tell stories.

Marcion wanted to tell a radically truncated rendition. I may need correction but I recall that Marcion was intent on jettisoning the whole of the Old Testament and anything that he sensed as Semite in the NT. A theology professor I had felt however that Marcion should at least get credit for getting the "Father’s" to quit dragging their feet and round up all the letters and the writings that later became the New Testament canon. So we need at least to thank Marcion for this contribution.

Now then, if Rene Girard inspires theologians to throw fresh light on the "traditional-sacrificial" story making it again the more compelling story, then he has served a Marcionesque purpose. And we all benefit. I am truly open-(minded) to this.

As I’ve said, the story I’ve come to inhabit was not sought by me. I was relatively content with a form of dispensationalism that included without me realizing it, a form of Arianism…that is, God needed to be violent in the past but then Christ came and he was now offering grace from his wrath, although, because he is just, will have to be apocalyptically violent again sometime in the future. Well, my moving away from this story wasn’t because it failed to tell a kind of encompassing story, it was because I was blind-sided by an infinitely better story, a story moreover that read me (crucified me).

In retrospect, the "blind-siding" was a long time coming. My only explanation for this was my decision, nine years ago now, to hang my life on a piece of scripture: "…to know nothing but Christ, and him crucified." This in turn lead me to Merton et al, then to the Benedictines, although there’s nothing "special" about this, except that I then found myself in the company of James Alison and finally Rene Girard. (Are we not always lead to the transcendent through particular humans? There’s a certain beauty about that.)

So I do appreciate your desire to understand "my" position. Although of course it isn’t mine at all. And even Rene Gerard, who has developed the "story" (mimetic desire and it’s theological significance leading to scapegoating-sacrificing) refrains from claiming it as his. As an anthropologist/theologian it is something he himself happened upon in his reading of all the (great) texts. And if there is anything Girard does, it is read texts. Check out this interview with Girard, as a very brief introduction to him and his thought.

Far from ignoring huge sections of scripture, the non-sacrificial reading incorporates all of scripture, bringing back into play all the great doctrines of the faith…from creation, to original sin, to atonement. And it does so not in any mere cerebral way, but in a heart-breaking self-revealing way.

This story, (which is simply the gospel) because it is alive and dynamic, will need many future posts. And in all this, as we tell our stories, there need be no fear or wrath, only love. I thank you for inspiration.

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Christianity/Peace/Politics/Violence

Letter to Michael Coren

Posted on by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Dear Michael Coren,

It’s hard to know how to respond to your recent article in the Toronto Sun, "We should nuke Iran". You’ve received enough vitriole, some would say deserved. But I’m left wondering how to respond as a Christian, to a fellow Christian.

There is something so logical about your reasoning, so compatible with the way the world works, has always worked, that your conclusion to "nuke" Iran is inescapably obvious. And in this reasoning, those who disagree, tagged by you as the "usual suspects", appear as ideologues untethered from the real world. (even, as you say, post-Christian?)

But I don’t doubt that your concern is honourable. You don’t really want anyone to die. Your desire is only that along with the guilty–whose suicidal ways show that they wish their own death in any case–the fewest number of innocent people die. Better for a few innocent Iranians to perish, along with these martyrly types, than for the whole world to pay.

And the logic is compelling. Sacrificing a few innocent lives to get at all the guilty ones in order to stop a greater holocaust makes good sense. And it works…at least for a while. At least until another Iran arises or a coalition of Iran’s. And it works as long as we are willing to become indistinguishable from those elemental forces of anti-Semitism and West-hatred within Iran.

Of course your logic, that is, the logic of sacrificial-violence, has already moved us in that direction.

How is it that we followers of Christ continually use the same reasoning as Caiaphas? How is it we fail to see this as the same tired logic of sacrifice that has its roots in the "deep magic since the dawn of time"? to use a Chronicles of Narnia line. (I know that you are an ardent fan of C.S. Lewis.) This logic or "deep magic" or sacrificial system, was of course what got Christ lynched.

But the "deeper magic from before the dawn of time" is revealed in the resurrection. The sacrificial stone crumbles. Christ exposes us for what we are, sacrificers. Forgives us and asks us to follow in the same non-violent, non-sacrificial way. This is the logic of Christ and it is opposite the world’s logic of "redemptive"-violence.

The gospel is all about ending the bloodshed, all about ending the system of sacrifice, all about ending reciprocal violence and the ongoing exchange of victims. Of course to live in such as way as opposes the sacrificial mechanism may get you killed. Christ knew that. But to live in the realm of Satan’s casting out of Satan only feeds the victimizing machine. And there is no end to its appetite.

As a fellow Christian traveller I would ask you to reconsider your position. I would as well recommend a book by Gil Ballie, who like yourself is one of today’s intelligent and articulate Christian voices. The book is "Violence Uncovered."

May the revolutionary gospel continue to inform and reform and transform all our lives as we try to move ever closer to the heart of Jesus.

Blessings, S Thomas Berg

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Atonement/Christianity/Peace/Violence

Copernican Shift

Posted on by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

Thank you Pastor-friend for this response to my "Resacrilizing" post. Perhaps I deserved it.

The Copernican shift was required not as a mere shift in paradigm but a shift in reality. A Copernican shift was required because the previous view was simply wrong. Thus I would not say that reading the Scriptures through a different lens (non-sacrificial) is the same as geocentric thinking vs. heliocentric thinking. This is to say that a non-sacrificial way of reading the Scriptures is the more enlightened way and ultimately the correct way to read the Scriptures. It is also saying that any reading other than a non-sacrificial way is antiquated and ultimately wrong. Is this what you’re saying by putting it on the same level as a Copernican shift? Is the sacrificial approach is antiquated and have we become more enlightened? Or are you just saying that some have just chosen to read the Scriptures differently??

My use of "Copernican shift" as metaphor is admittedly strong. But I need to hold to it. Now, this is NOT at all to confer enlightenment to the "non-sacrificial side" and antiquity to the "sacrificial side", but instead to highlight my own existential shift in coming to understand what I do regard as the correct way to read the scriptures. (For me, Grow Mercy is all about the arrival of this "existential moment", which I had not anticipated or looked for.)

But I want to avoid using the term enlightened because of its currency in placing value. I didn’t use the term "enlightened", or the term "antiquated" in the "Resacrilizing" post. I ask forgiveness if I left any hint of my "being better" because I hold a non-sacrificial reading. Most Christians (hopefully) would not refer to non-Christian neighbours as Unenlightened and themselves as Enlightened. But at the same time most Christians also view the faith-they-hold-true as worthy of publishing and defending. I see this in the same light.

So no, it’s not a matter of just choosing to read scripture differently. I actually do believe that there is a Copernican-like difference concerning sacrifice and non-sacrifice. There is a Copernican-like difference in sacred-violence or what Walter Wink has called "redemptive violence" and no-violence-at-all. I do believe that Christ’s "sacrifice" was wholly self-giving and God-revealing without any trace of appeasement and transaction. And I believe this in reality and not merely in paradigm or image.

I believe Christ’s exposé of sacrifice was inherently understood and lived out to a great degree in early Christendom. In the first three hundred years of Christendom there is no evidence of Christians taking up arms. I think it can be shown that Christ’s death and resurrection was understood as usurping the power of sacrifice (scapegoating) and violence and that this was evidenced in the almost universal adoption of non-violence. The resacrilizing that came subsequent to Constantine and later formalized by St. Anselm is a doctrine/theory (substitution sacrifice) that we can and in my view must live without.

No question their are Christian pacifists that still hold a conventional "sacrificial" view of the gospel. However, I don’t believe that anyone who holds a non-sacrificial view could be anything but non-violent.

Non-sacrifice is all about a God without violence and wrath. Sacrifice has to do with a god who resorts to occasional violence to straighten things out (redemptive violence). Following this god allows us to canonize our own violence as is evident with Charles Stanley’s sermons on the Iraqi war and Michael Coren’s latest editorial in the Toronto Sun. (I have deep respect for Coren as a Christian journalist but take huge exception with this editorial. I am one of his "usual suspects".)

All this said, I pray that the revolutionary gospel continues to inform and reform and transform all our lives as we try to move ever closer to the heart of Jesus.

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