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Saturday 26 January 2008

Divine dialogues - part 7

Similarly, René Girard suggests that we act on the basis of mimetic desire leading to conflict and violence which we resolve by the expulsion or sacrifice of scapegoats.[1] Girard claims that as a result societies and cultures are originally based on founding murders where this single victim mechanism is in operation. He points to Cain’s murder of Abel as being the Biblical story which reveals this basis to human culture:

“What has happened since the foundation of the world, that is, since the violent foundations of the first culture, is a series of murders like the Crucifixion. These are murders founded on violent contagion, and consequently they are murders occurring because of the collective error regarding the victim, a misunderstanding caused by violent contagion.”[2]

Over time, Girard argues, this mimetic process is disciplined by ritual into sacrificial systems which repeat the founding murder.

In this scenario, after the Fall, God wishes to communicate his love his love to us, these same human beings intent on personal or group survival. As he has given us free will[3], he has to communicate in and through the social and cultural structures which we have now created (i.e. sacrificial systems) but, in order reveal his loving self, in a way that engages in an internal dialogue and critique of these same systems. Accordingly, he gives his chosen people, who have recent and personal experience of being scapegoats and victims, a founding story in which human sacrifice is emphatically rejected in favour of animal sacrifice (Genesis 22. 1-19).

At Mount Sinai the Israelites are then given the chance to become a nation of priests enjoying the kind of intimate, direct relationship with God that Moses has. God wants to draw them as a whole into an intimate relationship with him where they can debate, argue and influence God and where they are not simply obeying an external set of rules but have internalised God’s framework for life and live freely within it (Jeremiah 31: 33 & 34). God sets out for the people his vision of their relationship with him (Exodus 19: 6). They are all to be priests and, therefore, in time will be able to come directly into his presence.

He also provides the tools to make this happen (Exodus 20: 1–17). Limits are what parents set while they are teaching their children how to respond to the situations with which life will confront them. When they have learnt, they no longer need the external limits because they have internalised and can utilise these lessons. An analogy is that of a child learning to cross the road. Parents firstly lay down strict limits on what the child can and cannot do. Then the child is taught how to cross the road in safety. But when the child has learnt how to judge distance and speed then s/he is free to cross the road wherever s/he judges it is safe to do so and is no longer restricted to recognised crossing places.

This developmental process seems to be what God intended for the Law as can be seen in the way that both the writing prophets and Jesus use the Law. What they consistently do is to emphasise the core/the spirit/the fulfilment of the Law, not its external application (see, for example, Amos 5: 21 - 24 and Matthew 5: 17 - 48). Girard gives us a clear example of this occuring in writing about the woman caught in adultery (John 8: 3 – 11):

“The Law of Moses provides for stoning in the case of well-defined offenses. Moreover, because the Law fears false denunciations, to make these more difficult it requires the informants, a minimum of two, to cast the first two stones themselves.

Jesus transcends the Law, but in the Law’s own sense and direction. He does this by appealing to the most humane aspect of the legal prescription, the aspect most foreign to the contagion of violence, which is the obligation of the two accusers to throw the first two stones. The law deprives the accusers of a mimetic model.

Once the first stones are thrown, all the community must join in the stoning. To maintain order in ancient societies, there was sometimes no other means than this mechanism of contagion and mimetic unanimity. The Law resorts to this without hesitation, but as prudently, as parsimoniously as possible. Jesus intends to go beyond the provisions for violence in the Law, being in agreement on this point with many fellow Jews of his time. However, he always acts in the direction and spirit of the biblical revelation and not against it”.[4]

What we see here is a law that in its literal application is structure-legitimating being re-imagined in terms of an essence that embraces pain. This is, therefore, in Brueggemann’s terms, counter-testimony. The people of Israel, at Sinai, are offered the opportunity to live in the counter-testimony and in conversation with God to move beyond the literal and structure-legitimating application to the embrace of pain that is its essence and core. The people, however, refuse this deeper level of relationship with God whilst still promising to obey him (Exodus 20: 18 – 19). They ask that Moses enters into this intimate relationship with God on their behalf and report back.

Instead of the counter-testimony, they choose a structure-legitimating, contractual relationship saying to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die” (Exodus 20: 19). This then becomes the pattern for God’s relationship with the people of Israel throughout the Old Testament. The people relate to God legalistically and through individual mediators (whether prophets, judges or kings) within a relationship that is fundamentally one of gift/grace. This is the tension of the Old Testament. Not that, at base, the relationship between the people and God is not of grace but that the people refuse to follow through on the logic of this and enter into the intimate relationship with God where they can internalise and utilise his pattern for life as a whole people.

[1] See R. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightening (NY: Orbis Books, 2001).
[2] Ibid., pp. 85 & 86.
[3] For human beings to have this freedom requires an ‘epistemic distance’ from God which appears to have been achieved through biological evolution. See J. Hick, Evil and the God of Love, Fontana, 1968. Hick elaborates by saying that, “the reality and presence of God must not be borne in upon men in the coercive way in which their natural environment forces itself upon their attention. The world must be to man, to some extent at least, etsi deus non daretur, ‘as if there were no God’. God must be a hidden deity, veiled by his creation. He must be knowable, but only by a mode of knowledge that involves a free personal response on man’s part, this response consisting in an uncompelled interpretative activity whereby we experience the world as mediating divine presence.” (p. 317).
[4] R. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightening (NY: Orbis Books, 2001), pp. 58 & 59.

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