My Core Convictions:

Contents

Part I: First Principles — Theses presented in paragraph format: 1 Evangelical Anthropology as a Necessary Complement to Theology; 2 God is Love; 3 Mimetic Desire and the Two Ways: Love or Resentment; 4 Falling into the Way of Satan; 5 Satan Casting out Satan and Apocalypse (5.4); 6 The Biblical Story as the Story of God Saving Us from Our Violence.

Part II: Nonviolence as the Heart of Jesus’ Faith — An essay that proposes nonviolence as the heart of the Christian faith, featuring the Sermon on the Mount as central teaching that points to the cross; and St. Paul’s reworking of “God’s Wrath” in Romans.

Part III: ‘Nonviolence or Nonexistence’ as the Message of Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet — A follow-up essay that suggests the corollary to a message of nonviolence in terms of the apocalyptic choice to avoid nonexistence, featuring the recent work of N. T. Wright concerning the Historical Jesus; and a overview look at the Book of Revelation.

Part IV: Major Theses for the Life of the Church — As in Part I, theses presented in paragraph format: 1 The Call for Reform; 2 Re-Formation of Faith in the “Faith of Jesus Christ.” 3 Re-Formation of Doctrines (Atonement, Original Sin, Hell, et al.); 4 Reformation of Practice (anti-racism, gays in the church, et al.); 5 Ecumenism, Inter-Religious Relations, and the Perspective of the Victim.

Part I: First Principles

1 My choice for the most succinct summary of the Gospel is the one which opens the First Letter of John: “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in God there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).

1.1 As we shall see, the secondary corollary of “no darkness” is almost more important than the primary pronouncement, “God is light,” because the pull of human idolatry is to project our human darkness onto our gods. Only in Jesus Christ do we receive a full revelation of God such that we can finally embrace “that God is light and in God there is no darkness at all.”

1.2 The full revelation, then, is not only a theological one, but the anthropological revelation is equally urgent. We learn about the nature of human idolatry at the same time that we begin to know who God really is in Jesus Christ. Conversely, who God really is becomes more clear as we learn to see, under the grace of forgiveness, how we human beings project our darkness onto God.

1.3 “Anthropology” proper benefits from scientific methodology, namely, from its gathering of data from a diversity of cultures over time and geography. The first centuries of scientific anthropology, however, have distanced themselves from all religions and cultures, so anthropologists have not fully benefitted from the Christian revelation of anthropology in Jesus Christ.

1.4 Is an interplay between scientific anthropology and biblical revelation even possible or desirable?

1.4.1 If one believes in the incarnation, then it should be possible. For the Christian faith has always striven to maintain that Jesus Christ is both fully human as well as fully divine. In other words, the revelation through him should unveil true humanity at the same time that it reveals true divinity.

1.4.2 And St. John, for one, seems to be aware that the corollary is a revelation of false humanity and false divinity. As one learns to see that God is light, one also begins to see that in God there is no darkness at all. And John immediately turns (see 1 John 1:8-10 below) to the anthropological matter of forgiveness of sin as that which can help human beings begin to walk in the light. There is an implicit biblical anthropology which is pre-scientific, that is to say, prior in time to the moment in history when its anthropological insights might become universalized for all cultures over time and geography.

1.4.3 Perhaps, then, we might turn around the question of  §1.4: Instead of wondering whether biblical revelation is compatible with science, we might press science as to whether it can ultimately be successful in its search for the truth without biblical revelation. Science can never cease being a human endeavor, subject to sin. And so we ask: Is a true scientific anthropology possible without the grace of forgiveness to heal our blindness, to shed light on our darkness? Can we ever have the ability to perceive the truth about ourselves without the grace of forgiveness?

1.4.4 St. John would seem to be raising the same hypotheticals in his corollary to 1 John 1:5:

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. (1 John 1:8-10)

1.5 I submit to the reader that in recent years there has come along a scientific hypothesis for anthropology which is in dialogue with the biblical revelation. That evangelical anthropology is represented in the work of Ren © Girard. All that follows in seeking to present my core convictions is an outgrowth from his work (though any errors are mine alone). 1.6 Girard’s work essentially presents us with a unified theory of human violence. Violence is the “darkness” we project onto our gods. Thus, Girard’s work also offers an hypothesis concerning human idolatry, namely, that idolatry arises to veil humanity’s responsibility for its own violence. A common mistake has been to undertake the matter of idolatry from a theological perspective only. But idolatry is in our nature, not God’s, and so is more properly a matter for anthropology.

1.7 The subsequent First Principals seek to put forward an implicit explanation of why the biblical revelation is so focused around violence, with the Cross of Jesus Christ at the center. They seek to answer the question: Why is Christ’s submission to an act of human violence necessary for our salvation?

2 Even more succinct of a theological proclamation is St. John’s simple declaration that “God is love (agape).”

2.1 Love requires at least two things: (1) personal relationships between Lover and Beloved; and (2) personal freedom, because the nature of love is such that it cannot be forced. If the Beloved cannot choose but to return the love, then it is not really love.

2.2 Thus, to say that God is love is already to imply a multiplicity of persons, since love requires personal relationships in freedom. Through the revelation of the Son, Jesus Christ, we have come to know God as a multiplicity of persons, the Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

2.3 Love has its requirements ( §2.1); it also has at least one result: creativity. Love spills over the boundaries of its relationships, creative of further relationships. God the Trinity must also thereby be God the Creator. The universe is the creative result of God as love.

2.4 Since Love requires personal relationships in freedom, then Creation must ultimately issue forth in creatures capable of personal relationships in freedom. Human beings are those creatures created in the “image of God,” capable of a loving relationship with God and with God’s Creation.

2.5 But freedom means that we human beings can also find ourselves living in broken relationship with our Creator. To say that humankind finds itself enslaved in sinful living is to say that we do, in fact, find ourselves estranged from our Creator. Rather than living in loving cooperation with God in the power of the Holy Spirit, we find ourselves living mired in envious rivalry with God, and with Creation, in the power of Satan (much more on Satan below, beginning at  §4.2.4).

3 Desire is a more general and neutral term for the power that either binds persons together in loving cooperation or breaks them apart in envious rivalry.

3.1 Desire is mimetic (imitative, but not necessarily conscious imitation)

in structure(1) such that (1) persons can either come together and cooperate toward the same goal, sharing the same desire, or (2) find themselves as rivals toward the same goal, locked in competition and conflict. Love describes the first potentiality of desire; Envy and hatred, or resentment, the second.

3.1.1 God, as St. John says, is Love; the Father and Son are of one desire through the Holy Spirit. Jesus came to do his Father’s will (e.g., Matt. 26:42).

3.1.2 Human beings, created in the image of God, are capable of living in God’s loving desire. But, since the beginning of our existence, we have continually stumbled into envious rivalry, spoiling our attempts at love. Genesis 3 relates the story of how the serpent, the most beguiling of creatures, mediates envious desire to us so that we find ourselves in rivalry first with God and then with one another. And the situation of constant rivalry is that of constant competition, constant comparisons, and the need to justify oneself vis-a-vis others. As Genesis 3 insightfully shows, we need to place blame on others (Gen. 3:11-13) to aspire to a higher relative standing among creatures.

3.1.3 Even when we might achieve some relative unity of desire with one another, we still fall short of sharing Jesus’ loving desire, which is both for the Creator and for the whole Creation. Our attempts at sharing desire with one another, if they are not rooted in the Creator’s desire through Jesus Christ, will always leave someone out. In fact, as we shall see ( § 4.2.1ff. below), that over-againstness to others who are left out is the principle of unity for human community which always falls short of God’s community (God’s “Kingdom”). The leaving-out becomes an active expulsion which unifies the expellers.

3.2 The worldview of love is that there is an abundance in creation, enough of the common goals/objects of desire to share with others: “‘I tell you, to all those who have, more will be given” (Luke 19:26a)…. The worldview of envy, on the other hand, sees a scarcity in creation, exacerbating the rivalries even more: “but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away” (Luke 19:26b).

4 Created in the image of God, who is a Trinity of persons, human beings are made to be in relationship — “it is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18). But, as we have already seen, relationships can go either the way of love or of envy.

4.1 The way of Love in Jesus Christ, who is the “Second Adam” (Rom. 5:14; 1 Cor. 15:22, 45), is the way of Holy Communion, the way of living together with others in lasting peace — the way of eternal life.

4.2 The way of envy is the way of violence, the way of hurting one another and of breaking apart relationships — the way of death. It became the way of the First Adam. When Satan (that is, the serpent of Gen. 3 interpreted as “Satan”) mediated envious desire to the man and woman, the results were: rivalry with God; blaming one another; broken and distorted relationship with each other and the earth; and rapid descent into the way of violence — one son kills the other — all elegantly summed up in one brief story (Genesis 3-4), the basic story of our lives in sin.

4.2.1 The way of violence includes the way of unholy communions, the generative basis of all human community and thus of all human culture.(2)

4.2.2 The way of unholy communions involves a special form of violence, a ‘good’ violence that is sanctioned to keep in check the ‘bad,’ mimetic violence that arises out of rivalrous desire. In modern cultures based on law, this good violence is the sanctioned violence of police and military forces. In more ancient cultures, it is the sacred violence of ritual blood sacrifice. The New Testament witness is that in Jesus Christ we arrive at the end of both Law and Sacrifice — “end” in both of its senses. Christ is the end in that we cease to live according to the previous practices of Law and Sacrifice. Christ is also the end in the sense of the fulfillment of both Law and Sacrifice. Jesus Christ ushers in the way of God’s Culture (“Kingdom”), based on the Law of Love (cf., Rom. 13:8-10; Gal. 5:14; James 2:8) and the way of self-sacrifice (cf., Rom. 12:1; Heb. 9:26).

4.2.3 Behind both of these forms of righteous violence — namely, the cultural order based on law and/or sacrifice — are real collective murders. The unity, or “unholy communion,” of a community is founded on the majority heaping its violence on a few, or the one.

4.2.4 At the heart of such collective violence is the accusation against scapegoats, arising out of both (1) the situation of envious rivalry in which there is a need to blame others and (2) the mimesis of accusation itself. Relative unity is achieved by a mimetic focusing of blame around one person, or a small minority. Compared to the threat of all-against-all mimetic violence, this relative unity based on all-against-one violence is experienced as an awe-inspiring peace — literally “awe-inspiring,” for that awe is the anthropological beginning of human religion and foundation of human culture. But, as we shall see, this is the fundamental mistake of human idolatry: to mistake the satanic for the divine. We mistake the satanic power of an awe-inspiring unanimous accusation as the power of a god who is bringing us together through our obedience. We obey the command of a sacred violence against the accused.

4.3 For focusing accusation is the chief function of Satan, traditionally known as the Accuser. But accusation of ‘sinners’ appears righteous to us, and so we mistake the satanic accusation for a godly one. The unity of the majority — that is, the basis of cultures and societies enduring in the face of mimetic rivalry — is based on the satanic powers and principalities of sanctioned violence against unsanctioned violence. When Satan presents to Jesus all the kingdoms of this world as under his power (Luke 4:5-8; Matt. 4:8-10), Jesus doesn’t disagree with this claim by Satan. Rather, he refuses worshiping Satan’s powers by simply telling Satan that he, too, must worship God.

4.4 For Jesus to bid Satan to worship God implies that Satan is not a god. His prominent role in the Gospels thus begs an anthropological interpretation (the kind of wholistic treatment that Ren © Girard has provided in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning and throughout much of his work).

4.4.1 In the history of Christian theology, if Satan is not given an anthropological interpretation, there have been two erroneous tendencies. The first is to wander into Manichaeism, the worldview that assumes two great forces, one for good and one for evil, a primeval conflict between light and darkness. The second is to lapse into an idolatry of subsuming the darkness of human violence within the godhead. It is to retreat back from St. John’s pinnacle insight that God is Light and in God there is no darkness at all. It is the idolatry from the foundations of our human worlds.

4.4.2 An anthropological interpretation of Satan refuses either Manichaeism or the idolatry of a dark, violent side to the one true God. Evangelical anthropology properly sees the satanic powers as arising out of human inter-relationships around fallen desire and the resulting efforts to control mimetic conflict through scapegoating. Satan is both the instigator of the ‘bad’ violence of mimetic conflict (the serpent as the Tempter), and then the one who restores order through the ‘good’ violence won via unanimous accusation (the Accuser).

More… http://girardianlectionary.net/core_convictions.htm#Part%20III