James is not certainly "easy". His insights are very deep and extremely complex, but I want to warrant by my personal experience with him that his voice is the voice of the theology of the future. This is a man whose teaching must be taken with the deepest seriousness. He is now a bit ahead of his time, but he represents the best theological thinking available today, and the direction, I believe, that all serious theology must take in the future.

Father John-Julian,

I don't mean to put you on the spot, but could you say a little more about why you think Alison is "the voice of the theology of the future," and the ways in which he is ahead of his time.

Jim

Jim,

I would say that:

1) because he takes this outside of theology proper and sets it again in the proper setting, anthropology;

2) that as such, allows a more thorough consideration of the analyses of psychology, sociology, and such and as such if gay exists as a category of being human, we must pay attention to the destruction our present teaching wreaks on gays--and we haven't done a lot of that; when have we examined that perhaps our rara Anglican community is doing harm to gays--in sin?;

3) he recaptures through a Roman Catholic setting the doctrine of the promise of God in Christ to us by faith without works of the law at a time when many are insisting gays must becomes something else (celibate or heterosexual) before God will even love us though every other person is loved while yet a sinner;

4) reemphasizes that salvation is by God's action rather than our action;

5) highlighted the power of the Cross and what it says about us, thus, illuminating dynamics of crucifixion that we would play out.

Just a few.

Jim,

I share John-Julian's appreciation for James Alison's work and am glad for your question.

I first encountered Alison's foundational work, Raising Abel, when Bill Petersen dean at Bexley Hall recommended it as a'theological page turner.' I read it immediately (and have read it twice since) and found it the most coherent, compelling, and viscerally comprehensible treatment of atonement that I've ever seen.

Rather than Jesus' death being some kind of nasty bargain to appease an angry God, James reads the Bible and Tradition saying that God in Jesus lets us vent all our wrath, all our projections and brutal imaginings about righteousness/condemnation/judgment without ever consenting to the system or structure of our wrath. Jesus' death is the end to our structures of sacrifice and gives the lie to 'God's anger' at us, which has been our own anger at ourselves all along. Jesus' death exposes our fearful self-condemnation and our attempts to bring peace to our troubled, violent hearts, by raining our violence down on a scapegoated victim whom we're likely to describe as either perfectly innocent or so guilty as to be less than human.

James makes the groundbreaking work of Rene Girard on violence, scapegoating and sacrifice a recognizable, every-day dynamic, and argues from Bible and Christian theology that God is delivering us from our impulse to sacrifice into the freedom of genuine peace-making.

As telling the story of Jesus and others who have followed him makes the old system evident and ourselves conscious of how 'self-evident,' 'just' and 'holy' we've found it, Gospel, liturgy and theology help us see we have the choice to join Jesus and those who follow him in God's courageous, peaceful work of reconciliation.

Thinking about what I've learned from James's theology reminds me two things at once - first, a half hour I spent holding a hysterically angry six year old who was trying to hit me or hurt himself, a kid who'd been in half a dozen foster homes, who had suffered violence himself, and he was pushing people away as he craved love and relationship with all his heart. I held him until he found some peace in being held, and then quit struggling and hitting, and then we could talk about his suffering and his hopes. Second it reminds me of hearing the great old Civil Rights activist Will Campbell observe that II Corinthians 5:19 was the most radical text in the whole Bible - 'God was in Christ reconciling the world to God's self not holding people's faults against them, and God has entrusted to us the news that they are reconciled.'

Everything else that James has written and all I've heard him say continues the line this line of discovery - God's completed work of reconciliation delivering us from an unceasing round of appeasing sacrifices, and the joy of trusting God and living into the gift of our own lively, forgiven selves day to day.

My initial reaction is that I am disappointed to hear Alison using the work of René Girard to buttress his approach. Alas, Girard's work is less than reliable. Not only is it masculinist but its categories are imbricated in Western metaphysics. Girard offers no empirical evidence to back up his claims about scapegoating.

I see no need for a reinterpretation of "Christian concepts" because that would mean more theology and continuing the fatal assumption that religious language describes reality. Theology proves nothing but can only express approval or disapproval. Those who use it may be able to construct a different reality or realities.

God is no hypothesis but rather a word that some people use in certain contexts.

My "position" is Wittgensteinian. I was very unhappy Alison compared to C. S. Lewis, whose work lacks any sign of evidential support.

Gary Paul Gilbert

Gary Paul,

I’ve re-read your note a couple of times, done a bit of browsing to sort out the Wittgenstein reference (and as I see it now context), and I want to offer a reply which is more versed in Girard than Wittgenstein, but addresses, I hope, some of your concerns. You’ve asked big questions, and because I do think James Alison’s theology offers us considerable grace and hope, I wanted to attempt a fullish response to your questions and challenge to him.

Obviously, as a friend and fan of James Alison’s, I’ve found Girard’s insights from his study of (largely Western) literature and mythology powerful. Over and over again he finds violence in the pattern of old and contemporary stories, generally veiled by the way its victims are presented. Girard generalizes the pattern he finds to religion and culture and claims consistent cultural patterns rest on the assumption that God (or ‘justice’ in more contemporary terms) demands appeasement and righting a balance or establishing peace through sacrifice.

So, in patterns he finds in a breadth of literature (fiction and drama both ancient and modern) and myth he finds a rationale (or indictment) of a frequent (he’d say universal) pattern in-group life at every level – a rationale that shapes religion and in politics. You’re right that he doesn’t offer empirical evidence, but a qualitative researchers observation of a pattern in our storytelling he shapes to an hypothesis which he uses to unveil something he claims we see in every day life from in community, whether local or global.

Events I think of that reveal this Girardian pattern of our thirst for sacrifice come to mind. One was our president preaching to national shock and grief from the pulpit of the National Cathedral and offering a restoration of national honor and a deliverance from fear in a call to a global War on Terror, promising that wreaking vengeance on Osama Bin Lad’n would restore our nation and that we needed to stand firm behind president and army to heal our broken spirit. Girard’s description of the pattern we heard then would have led us to anticipate that the solidarity would be short-lived and need renewing in further vengeance. So whether Bin Lad’n was apprehended or not, as solidarity faltered, our leaders would need to find a new threat, to make a new promise, and issue a new call for solidarity pursuing a new scapegoat. That was Saddam Hussein. Will it be Iran next?

Alongside this Girardian take on current events (mine, not quoting Girard) I’d offer the more general, familiar arguments for the necessity of capital punishment, a logic that has proved unwilling on principle to look at statistics about execution’s effectiveness as a deterrent, the racial and economic inequity of what ‘perpetrators’ get executed, and even proofs of troublingly frequent judicial errors and people our executing people that we learned, after the fact, were innocent of the crime for which they died. The logic of sacrifice says, ‘It’s worth spilling even innocent blood to protect the peace; justice much be served.’

I think you are actually with Girard identifying both of these as instances of ‘religious language.’ Girard’s critique of religious, sacrificial language is that it projects our own violence on to ‘god.’ And admittedly there are frequent Christian tellings of Jesus’ crucifixion that shape the passion story that way, the necessary sacrifice, the death and blood that appeased God’s wrath.

What must disappear from those atonement stories, those particular accounts of Christian theology, are the Gospel writers’ efforts to give voice to Jesus on the cross – whether ‘Father forgive them, they know not what they do,’ or ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Whether a reconciling voice imploring a beloved father not to condemn this violent human folly, or a despairing voice whose beloved father cannot be found, neither Matthew nor Luke gives us a Jesus who speaks as if he were paying a price to appease an enraged god.

Reading your Wittgenstein reference as a rank beginner (that is, I only spent an hour or so exploring his work in response to what you wrote) would it make sense in Wittgenstein’s terms to say Girard that here at the foot of the cross, Girard asks us shift language and substitute not a victim standing in for us, but another ‘God’ who does not desire sacrifice but mercy?

Like Girard, I think this is more than a linguistic game. But as I understand the bit of Wittgenstein, I’ve explored, he wouldn’t want us to call it ‘just’ a linguistic game. It has profound, demonstrable human consequences. So whether we believe we’re hearing God correcting of murderous fantasies and offer us life, or whether we substituting language of a merciful God where we’d previously insisted on an avenging god, the shifted story has profound consequences for humanity as we slowly and painfully abandon our belief and actions flowing from our ancient, fearful (but ‘pragmatic’) consent to the demands of our projected wrath (the idol we have called ‘god.’

Whether it’s language game, discovery or revelation what human difference does it make to trust a God who asks us to make peace? How do people change, what freedom do we begin to find when, in God’s name, we reject vengeance on ‘guilty monsters’ (or sacrifice’s effectively equivalent flip side in imagining a divine thirst for an innocent victim’s blood)?

With Girard, I hear real power of this shift in the ancient story of Abraham abandoning child sacrifice. The patriarch who heard ‘god’ demand the death of his firstborn son (as all his father’s had heard as far back as anyone could remember), hears and trusts a startling new voice of God who tells him
‘NO!’ I don’t desire the child’s death.’
Girard’s theme of the old myth disintegrating as we begin to hear voice of victims is evident in Genesis where there are two victims of this near-sacrifice, Sarah, the bereft, powerless mother, and Isaac, the child viewing the sacrificial altar and asking what is to be slain there.

When I first encountered Girard (and loved this retelling of the Abraham story), I knew the missing piece was evidence that our spiritual forbearers (like my Celtic ancestors, the Aztecs and so many other peoples) practiced human sacrifice. Did worship of Yahweh emerge from a more ancient practice of child sacrifice? Mark S. Smith’s ‘Early History of God, Yahweh and the other Deities in Ancient Israel’ offers archaeological evidence that it did. There is one culture in the founding days of Israel, some tribes persisting in practice of firstborn human sacrifice while neighbors (and cousins) embrace the story of deliverance from slavery and a God who does not want the children’s blood. Girard and his followers find plenty of anguished references to the persistence of child sacrifice in the writings of the ancient prophets of Israel.

Finally I don’t understand your description of Girard as ‘masculinist.’ Women, children, ‘monstrous’ criminals, and captured enemies were (and are) the victims of sacrifice. Girard says we sacrifice is doomed and the possibility (and voice) of a freeing, forgiving God appears when the old storytelling gives the victims their voices back. The sacrificial victim we had always insisted was either a monster or perfect and willing offering (the myth of the spotless child or virgin sacrifice) becomes painfully one just like us when silence is replaced with speech. The stories come unraveled as the ordinary flawed and blessed humanity of the victim is given voice. The same giving of voice breaks the age-old abuse of women and children in patriarchy. Without silences the voices of mother’s and children patriarchy cannot persist. This is the original and painfully graceful listening process - God who overturns the sacrificial system giving us back the shared humanity of every woman, child, and man.

Donald, My main problem with Girard is that instead of stopping at an ethics of nonviolence tout court he then goes on to make Jesus an exception to the rule, implying that nonChristian religions are bad or at least deficient. Antisemitism or at least antijudaism seems a big problem in this approach. Supersessionism, or even just the traces of supersessionism, is dangerous. Girard assume that the Pharisees in the canonical Gospels messed up, which any dialogue with rabbinical Judaism today would call into question. I am drawing on Michael Weingrad's http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0411/is_n1_v45/ai_18338879/pg_15
"Jews : representations of judaism, anti-semitism, and the Holocaust in postmodern French thought - in theory." Weingrad's critique of Girard appears in the third part of the article.

I am allergic to grand theories/narratives. Wittgenstein teaches one to abandon grand theories and look at the surface features of language. One may have rain dances, for example, without committing oneself to a belief that the dance will bring rain. Explanation is not a part of religious language for Wittgenstein. A good introduction to so-called religious skepticism may be found at
http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:RxApDYe-ojEJ:www.meteoritejournal.com/pdfs/2.Wittgensteinian.Fideism.pdf+Wittgenstein+fideism&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=19&gl=us&client=firefox-a

An ethics of nonviolence has no need of a theology of the atonement. Theology idles and does little work because it can't be falsified. What evidence would cause one to say Jesus is not the supreme example of nonviolence? Walking the talk is more important, for me, than talking about ultimate, unprovable reality.

R. M. Hare is an easier introduction to the sort of approach to religion I am drawing on. Hare says that moral language need not describe reality of any sort in order to work. His approach throws out the supernatural, miracles, doctrines, etc. "I have a pain," for example, is not falsifiable but it is nevertheless a meaningful expression of pain. It doesn't describe anything because the speaker doesn't run a test before uttering it. "I have a pain" extends pain behavior.

R. M. Hare's nondescriptivism or prescriptivism drew on a particular strand of Wittgenstein but Wittgenstein himself left many details unclear. The Wikipedia article on R. M. Hare is very good.

Gary

Donald, I forgot to add that Wittgenstein's "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough" is probably the easiest place to look for his basic orientation to religion, his idea that people are expressive or ceremonial animals and that, contra Frazer, religion is not a primitive form of science. For me, Girard sounds too much like Frazer in his desire to come up with a theory about origins.

Explanation is not what religion is about. Augustine could not be mistaken when he invoked God on every page of The Confessions.

The essay may be found in Hacket Press's LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951
Edited by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann
1993 560 pp.
http://www.hackettpublishing.com/detail.php?_d=aUBKX6DZvvPVZVrra3mRWLAY5U93mf2DWZqHYV3q0Z0%3D

A better source for Matt Talbert's "Explanation and Belief: The Wittgensteinians on Religious Skepticism" is
http://www.carleton.ca/philosophy/cusjp/v19/n1/talbert.html

I am posting this to the whole list in case someone else is curious.

Gary

Gary,

Thanks for the helpful Wittgenstein links; they look like a very useful introduction, and I will enjoy pursuing them.

What I've gotten so far from your sketch of Wittgenstein sounds like he insists on what St. Paul, Gregory of Nyssa and his precursors, (and most early and Eastern Christian theologians following Gregory, and those in the Christian West influenced by them) spoke of as the absolute unknowability of God insisting that the path of knowledge/images, kataphatic knowing goes no further than the threshold where knowledge must cease as we enter the divine darkness. I include St. Paul because I think it's what he means saying that ‘gnosis,’ knowledge, ceases and only faith, hope and love endure. The anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing would be a Western and English witness to this theological tradition of the absolute limits of theological reasoning of any kind. To borrow from another tradition, theology is like the finger pointing at the moon...when the moon is in eclipse

As I read James Alison and Rene Girard, they are addressing the point before that unknowing. Their theology matters, I think, because, though knowledge of God must be in 'unknowing' and is finally unspeakable and mystery, people DO try to explain religious experience, and when their explanations take on a life of their own, they become idols, so we are always in danger of 'God' becoming the name for a dangerous, judging absolute; creator threatening s to be the ultimate destroyer.

All too often Christian theology’s explanation of the freedom the first Christians discovered to their surprise in Jesus' death and their knowing/experiencing him alive again among them reduces freedom and grace to a negotiated truce with the brutal and anti-human impulses that our fears produce, and all in the name of ‘god.’ Too many Christians offer themselves and the world a tale of Jesus' death appeasing the wrath an angry father-God would otherwise unleash on us. That chunk of theological language and explanation turns the primal apostolic experience of Jesus into its exact opposite, the habitual human thinking about ingroup and outcasts, the chosen and the rejected.

Is it enough to dismiss that as 'merely theology?' Bad theology has damaging human consequences. Turned inward (as James Alison and the recent documentary film, 'For the Bible Tells me So,' show us) bad theology turns some people on themselves in hatred while others turn it outward as a rationale for homophobia, yes, anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia, and whole the world of ‘god’ being on our side against the enemies to our 'way of life.'

Girard, Alison, and others offering an antidote to this primordial connection between religion and violence, by unveiling theology's and theodicy's longstanding, habitual rationalization of human oppression, and the sacralization of victimizing a few for the sake of something less than real freedom and redemption. Real theology (albeit provisional and short of the ultimate mystery) happens whenever we give the victim a fully human face.

I was fascinated at the anguished conversation in Titusonenine debating whether an 'orthodox' Christian had to acknowledge that Liviu Librescu, the Jewish Virginia Tech professor who died saving a student's life at Virginia Tech, was now in hell. The tension between a theological acknowledgment of the grace and godly generosity of the man's death and their theology brought some to painful acknowledgment of the limits of their theology in mystery. Hearing the story, thinking of the morals and character of self-giving love stopped or gave serious pause to these fellow Christians who believed they 'had to' apply their logic about God's judgment and conditional acceptance of human kind (salvation through faith in Jesus or not at all) to a man whose death was all too similar to Jesus’ death.

Ultimately even good theology and ritual both play out, and we are left on the edge of darkness, grateful for the love that bring us there and speechless awe at what lies beyond. So the work of theology is provisional, undoing the 'theological' projections of our darkest fears and need to control other, humility before the mystery that loves us and invites us to love one another.

As for supersessionism and Girard dismissing or replacing the wisdom of Judaism, as I read and hear the work, Girard sees the sea-change in human consciousness of God clearly present in the Hebrew scriptures (for example the Abraham story as I sketched it above and the Deuternomic code's concern for justice and compassion extending even to slaves and foreigners); finding Girard's antidote to habitual human thinking about God powerful, and believing it has genuine consequences in human action (ranging from how we live friendship and person-to-person love to how we engage in peacemaking), I can join you worrying that the analysis isn't extended broadly enough for to make same discovery and word of God's mercy and non-vengefulness appearing in cultures and religions beyond Judaism and Christianity. Appealing again to St. Paul, I’d expect that if we’re seeing the work of God in delivering us from violence that work will show up one way or another in every religious tradition or practice, struggling against the same dominant need to sacralize violence and scapegoat the other.

Again, I look forward to reading the materials you've offered and seeing how a better understanding of Wittgenstein may offer a different way of seeing this.

Donald, I forgot to include this quote that raises the issue of how and why Wittgestnein says it is impossible to be mistaken in religion. It is from the Notes on Frazer and is commented on by Robert Wesley at
http://www.roangelo.net/logwitt/logwit35.html
As if often the case with Wittgenstein he will say something that sums up a problem but it is left to the disciples to unpack it.

Was Augustine mistaken, then, when he called on God on every page of the Confessions?
Well -- one might say -- if he was not mistaken, then the Buddhist holy-man, or some other, whose religion expresses quite different notions, surely was.
But none of them was making a mistake except where he was putting forward a theory. (p. 1)

Gary Paul Gilbert

Donald, here is a more succinct introduction to Wittgenstein on religion by Duncan Richter, professor of philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute. http://academics.vmi.edu/psy_dr/
His writing as well as his cv (he studied under Dewi Phillips) inspire my confidence. http://academics.vmi.edu/psy_dr/links.htm

Gary

Wittgenstein on Religion
http://academics.vmi.edu/psy_dr/Religion.htm

Wittgenstein seems to have regarded the history of philosophy as a great mistake. It is great in the sense that it has involved a large number of very intelligent and deeply serious people developing some influential, memorable, and even beautiful ideas and ways of thinking about the world. But what they have been trying to do is impossible, so they were bound to fail. Consider modern philosophy. Descartes showed that if you start from scratch and try to employ the method of doubt you get stuck in a circle. Hume showed how limited human reason really is. Kant showed how necessary it is to be able to distinguish between what lies beyond our understanding (noumena) and what lies within it (phenomena). But we cannot understand what lies beyond our understanding, so we cannot understand noumena. Nor can we understand the very concept of noumena or the distinction between noumena and phenomena. So philosophical questions cannot be answered. And a question that cannot, even in principle, be answered is not really a question at all. It is nonsense. This seems to be the implicit message of the Tractatus.

Since we cannot talk about things that transcend our understanding we cannot talk about God. Or the soul or Heaven and Hell, etc. That is, we cannot meaningfully assert propositions about them. Does this mean that religion is all nonsense? Not at all. Religion is not an attempt to assert truths about the world. It is a matter of performing certain rituals, reading certain texts, living by a certain code of ethics, attending certain ceremonies, and so on. Behavior cannot be nonsense. Only assertions can be. So religion is beyond philosophical criticism or defense.

Problems:

1. Is this really all there is to religion? Don't Catholics claim that logic can prove that God exists? Don't some fundamentalists claim that science can prove that humanity was created rather than evolving?

Some Wittgensteinians dismiss such claims as confused or superstitious. But Wittgenstein explicitly said that he was not in the business of putting forward controversial claims, and to dismiss such common religious beliefs as not genuinely religious is surely controversial. Instead, I think, Wittgenstein would want to examine these claims in more detail, paying special attention to how their makers react to apparent proof that they are wrong, that the vast majority of competent logicians and scientists reject their view. Any difference in attitude toward these claims (compared with the attitude toward other claims of a logical or scientific nature) will be brought out. Once all the facts are out, though, Wittgenstein would leave everyone free to label beliefs as they like. Philosophy would not label any belief superstitious, except perhaps paradigmatic cases like the belief that it is bad luck to walk under a ladder.

2. Another criticism is that Wittgenstein is too gentle on religion, that he rules out any rational criticism of religious beliefs.

This criticism just seems wrong. We are of course free to choose to worship or not as we please. But we are also free to criticize. We might even call this criticism 'philosophy'. It just isn't what Wittgenstein calls philosophy, since it involves making controversial claims and could not be proven correct by the methods of, for instance, Kant.