The Girard Reader

Just finished the rather daunting project of trying to understand Rene Girard through the selection of readings in The Girard Reader. Like most deconstructionist and phenomenological writers, Girard's style makes hard work for the reader! I was very pleased to read at least these main parts of the primary source material but in the end others probably explain Girardian thought better than Girard.

The part of the anthropological story that I think is still missing is what new possibilities the death of Christ brings to human society. Most of these readings focus on the way Christ deconstructs and undermines the dynamics of mimetic rivalry and scapegoating, but there is little on what alternative is created in its place. Girard claims that there is a form of mimesis that does not rely on rivalry: that we can copy Christ who copies a God who has no need to be our rival. But I'd like to see that in more detail.

I also find a core claim of Girard's insufficiently substantiated. He claims that our understanding that the victim can be innocent comes from the cross; that it is the influence of Christianity that has allowed modern society to side with the victim. He shows how this is hinted at throughout the Old Testament, and then more fully expressed in the Gospels. But was scapegoating really universal outside this Judeo-Christian tradition? Was there no other civilisation or philosophy in which some other mechanism was used to maintain social cohesion against the force of mimetic rivalry? Was there really no prior example of victims known to be innocent?

Prayer

A friend who is travelling on a similar road to me, away from Evangelicalism towards something that gives the character of God as shown in the words and actions of Jesus more centrality, posed the question of how we now pray. My friend suggested that it is no surprise that the first disciples asked Jesus how they should pray. No doubt they had been taught how to pray before, but Jesus presented them with a new way of viewing God, no longer as just the provider of rain and sun and as creator and judge, but as an intimate father expressed in the story of the two lost sons.

As we move away from treating God as an idol who we expect to fulfil our needs for certainty and satisfaction, how does that change the nature of our conversation with God? As I reflected on my recent prayer practices, there have certainly been changes over the past few years, but none of them fundamentally different.

I have always been fairly Trinitarian in the way I visualise God and consequently how I talk with God. Sometimes I want to complain to the father-image. When I am driving, I often imagine Jesus ("elder brother of my second birth" as George Macdonald calls him) in the passenger seat and we hold a conversation. When I have no idea what to say or how to express my struggle, I open myself to the Holy Spirit, who is the master translator of groans.

As a youngster I was taught a simple pattern of prayer in four stages spelling ACTS: adoration, confession, thanks and supplication. I still find that a useful framework, though I understand it differently.

Instead of adoration I tend to think of acknowledgement: a time when I remind myself of who I take God to be. I affirm that all I see around me finds it's source in God. I remind myself that there is nothing outside God's understanding or interest. God is wild and cannot be contained in any conceptual box, however theologically astute the box-builder might have been!

That leads naturally to some thoughts about who I am in relation to that God, a part of which is a type of confession, though not the sort of confession that's associated with guilt. I have trouble asserting that God is good, or that God will always do what is good for me. At times when it is true, I will admit to God that I feel betrayed. I know there is no point hiding from God and freely admit to feeling lost or confused or lonely.  I re-assert that I nevertheless want to do things that are noble and holy and right and honouring to God. I think about the unhelpful expectations I have held of how life would unfold for me, and how I have misused God to uphold those beliefs.

I thank God for my present reality: for this day, for this view of the sun coming through the clouds, for this body, this mind, this job, this relationship with my family, these friends, this breath.

I do still ask God to do things, and still have an expectation that God is concerned for my concerns and able to act in response to what I ask. I've never been one to claim Biblical promises as though we can force God's hand. But I have an honest conversation with God about my own needs and wishes. I often pray that God would fill the hole left by divorce; that I would not fill that hole with some other substitute. (God hasn't seemed to answer that prayer except to ironically send me Peter Rollins who says that the hole will always be there and that we cannot expect even God to fill it!) But on the other hand I often ask God to help me find a new partner.

A new prayer for me that is now very regular is for God's insight to do away with any self-deception in me.

For many years I followed a weekly cycle of prayers for my wife. I have now turned that into prayers for the family and friends closest to me. On Mondays I pray for their emotions, Tuesday for their use of time and energy, Wed for physical well-being, Thurs for their talents/abilities/studies/career, Fri for their friendships and family relationships, Sat for sexuality and Sunday for spirituality.

Least you start thinking that I must be extremely self-disciplined, I have to add that all the above is a pattern rather than a rule. I do not do all of that each day. It works nicely on the days I drive to Newcastle for work. Often happens incompletely in the five minutes between going to bed and falling asleep.

All of that is to point out that for me, I approach prayer with something of a different attitude, but largely the same practice.  God is not an idol who we can manipulate by our prayers to give us certainty and satisfaction. And yet "you can throw the whole weight of your anxiety on God for you are God's personal concern." Prayer can be more honest than just repeating doctrinal "truths" in an attempt to cover up our doubts and fears and inadequacies.

The image of God in the re-unification of gender

In The Journey of Desire, John Eldredge paints a very noble picture of gender differences and sexuality (Chapter 8, The Grand Affair).

From Gen 1:27 he infers that gender is the means by which God's image is born by us.

God wanted to show the world something of his [sic] strength. Is he not a great warrior? Has he not perfromed the daring rescue of his beloved? And this is why he gave us the sculpture that is man. Men bear the image of God in the dangerous yet inviting strength. Women, too, bear the image of God, but in a much different way. Is not God a being of great mystery and beauty? Is there not something tender and alluring about the essence of the Divine? And this is why he gave us the sculpture that is woman. [p. 136]

I totally agree that these aspects of masculinity and femininity find their source in God and are intertwinned in the character of God. It may be that God needed to create two genders because the richness of all those characteristics could never be expressed by a single creature.

Eldredge quotes Peter Kreeft as saying "This spiritual intercourse with God is the ecstasy hinted at in all earthly intercourse, physical or spiritual." [p. 135] Seeing sexual intercourse as a metaphor for our union with God is key to what makes sex sacred. This has made me think about a further implication: if God had to separate aspects of God's nature to express them in two genders because they could not be contained within a single gender, then the re-unification of those genders through phsyical and psychological intimacy is an even deeper indication of what God is like. The mutual knowing of each other in sex (in ideal holistic sex anyway) – the intertwining of daring and strength and beauty and allure and mystery – is even closer to the image of God than what any of us contain within our single-gendered self.

My problem with the Eldredege quote above, however, is that any attempt to classify the difference between male and female inevitably over-generalises to the detriment of both portraits. Although there are significant differences in the psychology of being male and female and consequently in the ontological categories of masculinity and femininity, defining those differences always seems to me to be unhelpfully stereotypical. Why should daring rescues not be feminine? Why can't being alluring be masculine?

And why does Eldredge continue to use pronouns that imply that the source of these rich gender differences is male? That undermines the key point he seems to be making.

God didn't tell Eve not to eat the fruit!

Greg Carey writes on the Sojourner's website:

God does not prohibit Eve from eating the fruit. God fills the garden of Eden with trees that bear fruit. Yet God sets apart one tree as forbidden. “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat” (2:16-17, NRSV). God provides this instruction to Adam but not to Eve. She hadn’t yet been created. Eve apparently hears this news from Adam (3:2-3).

How could I have missed that???????

Eve does *not* disobey anything God told her by eating that fruit, though it is clear from her response to the serpant (3:2-3) that Adam had passed on God's words to her.

Carey also observes that at least part of Eve's reason for eating the fruit was that she sought wisdom. And if the personalification of wisdom as feminine in other parts of the Bible (e.g. Proverbs 8) is any indication, that was an admirable outcome!

Technology co-opted in support of moral progress

I have only just started to read Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled and have been challenged already to rethink the role of technology in relation to moral imperatives.

Having read Jacques Ellul, I have largely accepted the thesis that technology imposes on us a drive towards a particular kind of "progress" beyond human control. In many ways we are not the master but the slave of technology. Although Bailie's book is not directly about technology, it nevertheless presents a counter-example to this "technological imperative" view.

In the passage I am referring to, on pp 17-19, Bailie identifies what he takes to be the most significant dynamic in human history: "the gradual awakening of a concern for the plight of victims."

Bailie uses the USA's involvement in Somalia in 1992 as an example of a current crisis of culture about how to understand and respond to violence. There is, he says, "a growing inability to subordinate empathy for victims to more practical political and geopolitical concerns." That is, we were once able to use practical political concerns to justify violence, but that stance is crumbling as people become more empathetic towards victims. This underscores a moral paradox: "that efforts made to fulfill the moral imperative to aid victims ... inevitably produce victims of their own."

Of course, the purpose of Bailie's book is to find a way past that dilemma by unveiling and undermining violence. But within this context he makes a fascinating observation about the role of telecommunications. Some say that what enables this current awakening and empathy for victims is the broadcasting of images of victims. In Somalia it was the images on TV. More recently, with the "Arab Spring", many have claimed that a key role was played by Twitter and other social media.

While Bailie doesn't deny the impact of telecommunications on this cultural change, he claims that what is more significant is "the moral and spiritual impulse to put this technology to work showing the world the face of the victim. ... It is this _determination_, and not the technological instruments it employs, that is the defining impulse at the heart of what we call Western culture and, in fact the true driving force of history in our world."

It is an extraordinary claim that the determination to undermine or de-legitimise violence by showing the face of the victim is the driving force of history! (Though that needs to be understood in the light of what he means by "history".) But this is also a challenge to my thinking about the relationship between technology and society and faith, because it reasserts what Ellul rejected, namely that deep and positive anthropological change can impose its agenda on technology rather than the reverse. It is not that technology will inevitably be used to expand the power of technology. In this case, a fundamental striving of humanity has been accelerated by co-opting technology to promote the cause of unveiling violence.

Towards a non-defensive faith

In a recent conversation with me, Jim Longley contrasted the Anabaptist approach to theology and ethics to what he labelled the "defensive" approach adopted by much of the church.

My experience of Christianity supports that categorisation. The institutional church, especially the Evangelical variety, and many individuals hold a position that is profoundly defensive. It is a position that assumes we have to constantly protect ourselves from the creeping immorality of society, from doctrinal error, from financial risk, from sin and the resulting guilt, from those who are not "one of us".

I am not referring to a kind of defensiveness that contrasts with offensiveness. There are, of course, parts of the church that promote a triumphalism that declares (against what they admit is evidence to the contrary!) that the battle belongs to the Lord and that victory is assured if only we have the courage (the "faith") to attack. That very offensiveness is rooted in a war metaphor that sees the church circling the wagons to separate ourselves and "defend our way of life" against the infidels.

It's not that kind of military defence that I'm picturing, but rather a stance that holds tightly rather than releasing, that is closed rather than open, confined and isolationist rather than expansive, scared rather than embracing, rigid and controlling rather than freeing.

That is not how Jesus lived. In his relationships with others he was open, inviting, accepting. He took risks, exposed himself, dis-empowered himself, allowed himself to be vulnerable, and actively drew violence against himself.

He did those things from a position of inner confidence. Jesus knew that he had all the power of God and that is why he was able to wrap a towel around himself and wash his friends' feet (John 13:3-5). This is in stark contrast to an apologetic Christianity too scared to speak the truth, and in just as stark a contrast to the the right-wing Christian political agenda that attempts to force Christian moral requirememnts on everyone via legislation.

I invite any readers to help me to understand how this has happened. Why does so much of modern Christianity takes this defensive position?

How does that stance undermine our engagement with the world? (There's the defensive assumption again, right there! As though we were this little enclave of people who feel a need to "engage" (like a gear cog?) with the big bad world around us!)

And how would we act differently if we took on the pattern of Jesus? What if the life of Jesus was normative - the exemplar of being truly human? What if I didn't have to protect my reputation? What if I really accepted that all truth is God's truth and that I didn't need to fear or protect myself against the truth wherever it may be found? What if I allowed myself to act rashly and accepted that I will make mistakes? What if I was vulnerable and allowed myself to be hurt? What if I embraced the people around me regardless of their social or perceived moral status?

Subverting the violent interpretation of Revelation

A traditional Evangelical reading of the book of John's Revelation seems to assume that the violent God of the Old Testament, after being temporarily assuaged by Jesus' death, returns with the big guns to teach evil doers who is really the most powerful. I've never really thought about the violence inherent in that framework, and never wondered whether there could be a non-violent understanding of the book's message.

So coming across Paul Nuechterlein's Nonviolence and the Book of Revelation was an eye-opener that will take some time to ponder.

I absolutely love his comments on Revelation 5:4-7: where John looks up expecting to see the Lion of Judah -- "the hoped-for warrior who devours God's enemies" -- but instead sees the Lamb that was slain. The Lion is never mentioned again and the Lamb becomes the dominant actor, subverting the dominant human hope for divine vengeance.

"The terrifying violence that we so often face in this world is decidedly not God’s violence but the violence of empires under the deception of Satan, the dragon. And God’s defeat of that violence is not one of superior firepower, of simply having more of the same kind of violence to subdue that of the empires. No, God’s defeat of violence is to expose it through the love of the Lamb slain whose self-giving love lets itself be slaughtered by the violence, and the Lamb’s resurrection shows its power of life to be victorious. Disciples of the Lamb follow not in a hope that there would be a different kind of victory someday, a victory in which the Lamb became a Lion and devoured all its enemies. But followers of the Lamb believe that his slaughter and resurrection have already won the victory, such that we wait with endurance and hope, following in the Lamb’s loving nonviolence if we must, until the day when Satan’s violence finally becomes its own defeat, collapsing in on itself."

There is still a lot of violent imagery in Revelation that I think will be difficult to reconcile with Nuechterlein's thesis, but seeing the Girardian subversion of violence implied by this verse inspires me greatly.